Neuroscience of Mindfulness: Sugar, Drugs, & Dopamine
Let’s imagine that you were to give up sugary sweets for a month like I recently did as part of a requirement for a nutrition class. The first few days might be relatively easy...
Mindfulness, MD
The Second Arrow: Thoughts that Kill
Siddhartha Gautama, or simply the Buddha as he would later be known, lived in eastern India somewhere around 400 BCE. The Buddha, meaning, “awakened one,” spoke of a Middle Way, or halfway point, between...
Take a Deep Breath: The Physiology of Slow Deep Breathing
Take a slow, deep breath. “I am large, I contain multitudes.” ~ Walt Whitman The physiological mechanisms that make up a single breath could fill an entire book. And yet, for an event that...
Animal Consciousness: Can Animals Think?
Dig, dig, dig, bite! Dig, dig, dig, bite! Like an inmate who chips away at the same square foot of floorboard day after day with the hope of tunneling to freedom, Otis returns to...
The Opposite Game: A Practical Exercise to Alleviate Troublesome Thoughts
Modern man favors the book to the garden. The modern mind prefers intellectual discourse to mechanical practice. Instead of putting a philosophical tenet into action, we too often choose to simply intellectualize the doctrine....
Risk Perception: From Ebola to Airplanes
As our therapy session came to a close, I handed General Public (or “the General” as he liked to be called) a claim receipt for submission to his insurance company. The receipt listed the...
The Newtonian Consciousness
To understand the nature of a city we must study its occupants. In much the same way, today I wish to explore the mind by studying its constituent parts. Until now, my articles have...
The Neuroscience of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
My own diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) precludes my impartiality in writing a scientific article on this particular disorder. Rather than attempt to claim objectivity, I will embrace my subjective bias. I have found...
The Neuroscience of Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety is a native language to all humans. Let’s imagine anxiety as a 100-floor skyscraper with a metaphorical elevator capable of containing the entire world’s population (sorry if you’re claustrophobic or afraid of heights)....
Neuroscience of Mindfulness: How Do We Know What We Know
“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.” ~ Confucius We have thus far examined The Neuroscience of Mindfulness & Anxiety and The Default Mode Network, Meditation,...
![MRI by Nevit Dilmen / [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL]](/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/brain-color-e1406157479540-520x245.jpg)
Neuroscience of Mindfulness: Default Mode Network, Meditation, & Mindfulness
“Ipsa scientia potestas est.” ~ Sir Francis Bacon Translated as, “Knowledge itself is power,” this quote by Sir Francis Bacon appeared in his 1597 essay, Meditationes Sacrae (“Sacred Meditations”). Bacon has been credited as...
![MRI by Nevit Dilmen / [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL]](/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/brain-color-e1406157479540-160x160.jpg)
