#THE PARIETAL CORTEX FROM 'SELF REFLECTED'

[jeffreyrobertpalinjr]

Since "will" is ""self agency", "whatever enables "said one" to "decide or determine"", & "whatever enables ""solely "said one's"" making a happening happen""", "according to Science, what enables, not just a feeling/sense of, but one's actual own "self agency""?

The concept of “self-agency” — the ability to decide or determine and act in the world — is a complex phenomenon studied across disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. According to scientific research, the following factors contribute to actual self-agency, not just the feeling or sense of it:

1. Neural Mechanisms and Brain Regions

• Prefrontal Cortex: Plays a critical role in decision-making, planning, and intentional action. This area integrates information to evaluate options and make choices.

• Supplementary Motor Area (SMA): Involved in initiating voluntary movements and linking intentions to actions.

• Parietal Cortex: Processes sensory input and creates a sense of ownership over actions. It helps distinguish self-generated movements from external forces.

• Basal Ganglia: Supports goal-directed actions by regulating motor control and action selection.

2. Internal Predictive Models

• The brain generates forward models that predict the sensory outcomes of one’s actions. This mechanism helps distinguish self-caused actions from externally caused events.

• When predictions align with outcomes, the brain attributes the action to the self, reinforcing actual agency.

3. Attention and Awareness

• Conscious attention to decisions and actions strengthens agency. Self-agency involves being aware of one’s intentions and recognizing one’s influence on outcomes.

4. Executive Control and Cognitive Processes

• Cognitive control processes, like inhibition and working memory, allow individuals to choose actions over impulses, aligning behavior with goals and values.

• Reflective metacognition lets individuals evaluate and adjust their actions to stay aligned with intentions.

5. Interoception and Sense of Ownership

• Interoception (awareness of internal bodily states) helps integrate physical sensations into the self-concept, contributing to a sense of agency over bodily actions.

• The integration of sensory and motor signals provides feedback confirming ownership of actions.

6. Learning and Adaptation

• Neuroplasticity allows the brain to learn and adapt based on past experiences, improving one’s ability to exercise agency over time.

• Reinforcement learning mechanisms help align actions with desired outcomes by reinforcing successful behaviors.

7. Autonomy-Supportive Environments

• External factors, such as environments that encourage autonomy and reduce coercion, enhance self-agency. This includes freedom to choose and pursue one’s goals without unnecessary constraints.

8. Integrated Self-Concept

• A cohesive understanding of oneself, including personal goals, values, and identity, grounds the sense of agency. Actions feel self-determined when aligned with this integrated self-concept.

Science suggests that true self-agency emerges from the interplay of neural processes, cognitive functions, and environmental influences. It is not a single mechanism but a dynamic and holistic phenomenon.

[iohnmcmullen]

Hypothetical Neuroanatomy Vernacular

Mapping the brain and renaming its crucial areas, such as each gyrus, with the names of cathedrals and basilicas from the Catholic religion is an imaginative way to reframe neuroscience with cultural and architectural references. Here's how this could look conceptually:

Frontal Lobe: Precentral Gyrus (Motor Cortex): St. Peter's Basilica (Vatican City) – This gyrus is essential for voluntary motor movements, much like how St. Peter's is a central figure in the Vatican, symbolizing leadership. Superior Frontal Gyrus: Notre-Dame Cathedral (Paris, France) – Known for cognitive functions like self-awareness, similar to the iconic and reflective grandeur of Notre-Dame. Middle Frontal Gyrus: St. Paul's Cathedral (London, UK) – Associated with complex thinking and decision-making, just as St. Paul's is a historic site for public discourse and debate. Inferior Frontal Gyrus: Sagrada Família (Barcelona, Spain) – Tied to language processing and creativity, which aligns with the artistic and unique design of Sagrada Família.

Parietal Lobe: Postcentral Gyrus (Somatosensory Cortex): Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) – This area processes sensory information, akin to the pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, symbolizing a gathering of experiences. Superior Parietal Lobule: Cologne Cathedral (Germany) – Involved in spatial orientation and perception, reminiscent of Cologne's towering structure, which dominates the city's skyline. Inferior Parietal Lobule: Duomo di Milano (Milan Cathedral) (Italy) – Functions in integrating sensory information, paralleling the complex and intricate design of Milan Cathedral. Temporal Lobe: Superior Temporal Gyrus: Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (Washington, D.C., USA) – Important for auditory processing, like how this basilica represents a hub of sound, liturgy, and music. Middle Temporal Gyrus: St. Mark's Basilica (Venice, Italy) – Plays a role in semantic memory, just as St. Mark's is central to the cultural and historical memory of Venice. Inferior Temporal Gyrus: Basilica of Guadalupe (Mexico City, Mexico) – Related to visual processing, echoing the iconic image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an important visual symbol in Catholicism.

Occipital Lobe: Cuneus: Chartres Cathedral (France) – Involved in basic visual processing, akin to Chartres’ famous stained glass, symbolizing the transmission of light and vision. Lingual Gyrus: Basilica di San Francesco (Assisi) (Italy) – Tied to visual recognition, similar to the frescoes of Assisi, which convey visual narratives and stories.

Limbic System: Cingulate Gyrus: Cathedral of Brasília (Brazil) – Associated with emotion and behavior regulation, comparable to the modern and innovative design of Brasília's cathedral, symbolizing new directions and forms of expression. Parahippocampal Gyrus: Basilica of the Sacred Heart (Montmartre, Paris) – Involved in memory encoding, like how the basilica's hilltop location provides a panoramic memory of Paris. Hippocampus: St. Stephen's Cathedral (Vienna, Austria) – Essential for memory and learning, much like St. Stephen’s serves as a historical and cultural repository. Insula: Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence) (Italy) – Involved in emotional processing and bodily awareness, much like the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, which is an architectural marvel inspiring awe and emotional response.

Cerebellum: Westminster Cathedral (London, UK) – Known for motor coordination and balance, comparable to Westminster's architectural balance and historical significance.

Brainstem: Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano (Rome) (Italy) – A vital structure for life support functions, just as San Giovanni in Laterano is one of the most ancient and essential basilicas in Catholicism, serving as the ecclesiastical seat of the Pope.

Corpus Callosum: Cathedral of Seville (Spain) – Facilitates communication between brain hemispheres, similar to Seville's cathedral, which bridges Gothic, Renaissance, and Moorish architectural styles.

This thematic naming not only assigns each area of the brain a cultural landmark but also allows for a creative representation of their function and significance, blending neuroscience with art, history, and spirituality.

[blueiscoool]

THE PARIETAL CORTEX FROM 'SELF REFLECTED' DR. GREG DUNN AND DR. BRIAN EDWARDS

22K gilded reflective microetching, a "preliminary experiment" for plate #9 of the larger work. Framed. 201⁄2 x 28in. (52 x 71cm.).

[yogaadvise]

Here`s What Happens To Your Brain When You Do Yoga

Have you ever questioned why precisely you really feel so excellent after doing yoga exercise? The impacts of yoga exercise on your mind are really pretty complex. There have been hundreds of research studies done revealing what takes place to your mind chemistry when you're under stress and anxiety as well as what takes place when you minimize that anxiety with yoga exercise. As a matter of fact, Yogis have actually been proclaiming these benefits for centuries, yet Western medication is now stepping up to the plate and providing real clinical proof to back up the claims.

And while everyone knows yoga is relaxing, the benefits really go means past stress alleviation - people that practice yoga are able to turn on various parts of their nerves, create different sorts of cells in their mind, and established off a chain reaction of chemicals that uplift your mood.

This Is Your Brain On Stress

The term 'stress' is used quite casually in modern-day society. No person blinks an eye if you talk regarding being stressed by your commute or the needs of work and also domesticity. The influence of anxiety on your body is a severe concern. Luckily, yoga exercise, breathwork, and reflection are scientifically proven to resolve chronic stress.

Believe it or not, the stress hormonal agent cortisol can really kill your mind cells! According to an article by Be Brain Fit, cortisol triggers an excess of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate, which is an unattached oxygen particle, develops cost-free radicals which can punch holes in mind cells triggering them to pass away. Also, many individuals have heard that totally free radicals are what is accountable for causing as well as spreading out cancer cells in your body. Furthermore, when you're stressed out you damage the electric signals in your mind that assistance you process emotions and also bear in mind points (like where you parked and when that due date is!)

Practicing Yoga Exercise Reduces Cortisol

One enormous advantage to practicing yoga exercise is that it significantly lowers the hormonal agent cortisol in your mind. Cortisol just appears in the body when you're stressed out, and also it lights up the component of the brain called the amygdala. This is the part of your brain that controls are afraid. It additionally diminishes the pre-frontal cortex, which manages self-discipline as well as technique. When you're worried out, you're extra most likely to make bad decisions that are rooted in fear.

But, when you practice yoga, cortisol degrees promptly drop and your tension levels will certainly lower in turn. Stress and anxiety as well as mental disorder frequently work together, and in 2005 German researchers carried out a research where they found participants with diagnosed psychological illnesses 'really felt much less stress and less exhaustion after three months of routine yoga classes.' Don't believe you have to commit to doing a complete three months prior to you see any distinctions. In that very same research study, the scientists tested the individuals saliva after simply one yoga course as well as found they already had decreased degrees of the anxiety hormonal agent in their system.

Feel-Good Chemicals Increase

The excellent information is that in enhancement to decreasing cortisol, yoga exercise additionally offers every one of those tasty feel-good chemicals in your brain a substantial boost. Yoga exercise is actually considered an efficient all-natural treatment for anxiety due to the fact that of just how much it increases your brain's GABA levels. GABA is brief for a natural chemical called gamma-aminobutryic acid, or else referred to as you're mind's preferred means of activating relaxation. Anxiousness transpires when the neurons in your mind are swiftly firing yet GABA can aid you calm down naturally.

And while it's real that any type of kind of exercise can aid you de-stress and launch anxiety, a 2010 research by the Journal of Option and Complementary Medication found that doing yoga in fact launches even more GABA than strolling. In the same research study, they additionally located that yoga is medically extra calming than reading or other settings of relaxation. The secret might be the different components that are typically incorporated into a yoga exercise session - consisting of breathwork, reflection, and also mindful movement.

Doing Yoga Exercise Makes Your Mind Grow

One of one of the most interesting research studies that's been done on a yogi's brain was conducted by the National Facility for Corresponding and also Natural medicine by scientists Chantal Villemure and also Catherine Bushnell. The scientists utilized MRI scans to map individual's brains before and after they did yoga. The regular done by the individuals was what's common in a Western yoga class. They did 70% of the class focused on physical asana, 20% in meditation, and also 10% in breathwork.

They uncovered that the individuals' brains really grew in dimension with more hrs of method weekly. The development happened in areas like the hippocampus as well as somatosensory cortex. The hippocampus is the component of your mind in charge of regulating tension and anxiousness and also the somatosensory cortex is accountable for a mental map of your body.

Other components of your brain that develop more from practicing yoga are the superior parietal cortex, aesthetic cortex, precuneus cortex, as well as posterior cingulate cortex. These parts of the brain manage your focus, emphasis, and sense of self. That indicates it's a terrific task to do if you're uneasy regarding your body or have a whole lot of brain fog. As well as it may be a good reality to bring up if you're trying to convince your manager to fund your yoga classes!

Gray Matter Density Changes

Most individuals go their whole lives without thinking of the different components of their mind's makeup. Recent researches regarding the impacts of yoga on your mind have actually shed a load of light on means you can improve your brain feature. One really fascinating truth was brought up at Massachusetts General Hospital when Harvard scientists observed the effects of conscious meditation.

If you have actually ever before practiced mindful meditation, you're most likely not stunned that the method in fact altered the density of participants minds. The cells development was concentrated in a component of the central anxious system referred to as grey matter. This component of the brain controls every one of your understandings, such as sight, hearing, as well as memory. The research study carried out verified that you can really feel the effects of those modifications within eight weeks of conscious reflection method. Extremely, lots of conscious reflection programs can be discovered online for free! It's believed that those that participate in the reflection practice are measurable much more self-aware and also compassionate.

More Cortical Foldable In Your Brain

In this post for Bustle, author Gina M. Florio describes cortisol folding as a phenomenon that takes place in the analytical cortex area of your mind when you do yoga. The process, otherwise called gyrification, raises your capacity to process info. Simply put, cortical folding helps you remain alert and make much better decisions. It may also balance out age-related thinning of your brain cells, as well as help you create your desires into substantial mental revelations.

You Obtain Smarter As Memory Improves

It might sounds a little rude, but individuals that do yoga exercise are in fact smarter! Doing yoga is proven to increase your brain feature - according to this short article by Actual Simple, 'a brief, 20-minute Hatha yoga exercise session might boost focus and information retention.' Researchers at the College of Illinois showed this after comparing 2 emphasis teams - one that did yoga exercise and another that did aerobic workout. Those that did yoga had the ability to focus their mental sources much better as well as refine the information they were finding out at a faster price. Yet once more, it's presumed that this results from the activity of syncing your body's breath and also movement and also following the workout with a bout of meditation.

Your Parasympathetic Nerve System Is Activated

If all of this study isn't outstanding enough, consider the relatively fundamental fact that doing yoga exercise really changes your brain from being in fight-or-flight mode to a genuine loosened up state. This counter state is often described as the 'rest-and-digest' mode. Anxiety, injury, panic, anxiety, stress and anxiety, as well as any other sensation that makes you feel like you remain in threat turn on the fight-or-flight state (or else understood as the considerate worried system). When you exercise yoga, the body launches it's hold on that way of being as well as switches right into an extra kicked back state (the parasympathetic nerve system). When you remain in the rest-and-digest state, your brain is the initial component of your body to relax.

Then, a whole chain of events removes in your body. According to this write-up, yoga exercise flushes blood to your endocrine glands, digestion system, lymphatic system, and on top of all that your heart rate reduces and also your high blood pressure decreases. Furthermore, those that practice yoga exercise consistently have the ability to manage this procedure on as well as off the mat with more simplicity. According to this research stated by NBC Information and also Elite Daily, the results of practicing yoga add to a feeling of being tranquil yet sharp, which means your everyday technique can aid you unwind yet remain awake! So whether you're dealing with a genuine mental disorder that influences the chemical structure of your brain, or wish to launch from the anxieties of daily life, yoga exercise has been scientifically shown to help change your brain.

[margdarsanme]

NCERT Class 11 Psychology Chapter 3 The Bases of Human Behaviour

NCERT Solutions for Class 11 Psychology Chapter 3 The Bases of Human Behaviour

NCERT TEXTBOOK QUESTIONS SOLVED

Question 1. How does the evolutionary perspective explain the biological basis of behaviour?Answer:

Evolution refers to gradual and orderly biological changes that result in a species from their pre-existing forms in response to their changing adaptation demands of their environment.

Physiological and biological changes that take place as a result of evolutionary processes are so slow that they become visible after hundreds of generations.

Three important features of modem human beings include:

A trigger and developed brain with increased capacity for cognitive behaviours (like perception, memory, thinking, reasoning, etc).

Ability to walk upright on two legs and

Free hands with a workable opposing thumb.

The environmental demands had to biological and behavioral changes over a long period of time. In the human brain, the earliest to the most recent structures in the process of evolution are: Limbic system, brain stem and cerebellum are the oldest; and cerebral cortex is the latest developed.

Question 2.Describe how neurons transmit information.Answer:  Neuron is the basic unit of our nervous system. Neurons are specialized cells which convert various forms of stimuli into electrical impulses. They receive information from sense organs or from adjacent neurons, carry them to the central nervous system and bring motor information from the central nervous system to motor organs. Neurons transmit information with the help of dendrites, soma, axon and terminal buttons by converting stimuli into electrical impulses. This is done by the following method:  Dendrites —> soma —> axon —> terminal buttons

Dendrites receive the informing neural impulses from adjacent neurons or directly from sense organs.

The nerve impulse is then passed on the main body of the neuron i.e. soma.

From soma the impulse is passed on to the axon.

The axon transmits the information/impulse along its length to terminal buttons.

 The terminal buttons transmit the information to another neuron, gland or muscle.

Question 3. Name the four lobes of the cerebral cortex. What functions do they perform?Answer : Four lobes of the cerebral cortex are:(1) Frontal lobe (3) Temporal lobe(2) Parietal lobe (4) Occipital lobeFunctions of these four lobes are following:

Frontal lobe:

Frontal lobe is mainly concerned with cognitive functions, such as attention,thinking, memory, learning, and reasoning.

It also exerts inhibitory effects on autonomic and emotional responses.

Parietal lobe: The Parietal lobe is mainly concerned with cutaneous sensations and their coordination with visual and auditory sensations.

Temporal lobe:

Temporal lobe is primarily concerned with the processing of auditory information.

Memory for symbolic sounds and words resides here.

Understanding of speech and written languages depends on this lobe.

Occipital lobe:

Occipital lobe is mainly concerned with visual information.

It is believed that interpretation of visual impulses, memory for visual stimuli and colour visual orientation is performed by this lobe.

Question 4. Name the various endocrine glands and the hormones secreted by them. How does the endocrine system affect our behaviour?Answer: Name and functions of the endocrine glands are following:

The chemical substances secreted from the endocrine are known as HORMONES. These hormones influence the functions of the body and the course of its development and in the growth of personality.

Endocrine glands also control and regulate the individual’s behaviour, for instance, when there is extra-supply of sugar in the blood-stream, certain ductless glands secrete insulin which reduces the sugar level in the blood to normal state.

Endocrine glands play role in co-ordinating the body activities. Like in sudden , fear or danger, secretion from the endocrine system is mixed with blood which brings widely diverse activities to help us face this situation.

The different endocrine glands work intimately to maintain equilibrium and coordinate body functions. For instance, if one gland is secreting more than optimum, the other gland may secrete a hormone to reduce the excess hormone and maintain equilibrium.

Question 5. How does the autonomic nervous system help us in dealing with an emergency situation?Answer:  The autonomic nervous system helps in dealing with emergency situations with the help of its two divisions : Sympathetic division and Parasympathetic division.

Sympathetic division deals with emergencies when the action must be quick and powerful, such as in situations of fight or flight. During this period, the digestion stops, blood flows from internal organs to the muscles and breathing rate, oxygen.supply, etc. increases.

Parasympathetic division is mainly concerned with the conservation of energy. It monitors the routine functions of the internal system of the body. When the emergency is over the sympathetic activation calms down the individual to a normal condition. As a result, all body functions like breathing rate, oxygen supply, etc. return to their normal level.

Question 6.Explain the meaning of culture and describe its important features.Answer: 

Culture: Culture refers to widely shared customs, believes, values, norms, institutions and other products of a community that are transmitted socially across generation.

Culture refers to “the man-made part of the environment.”

It comprises diverse products of the behaviour of many people, including ourselves. These products can be material objects (e.g. tools, sculptures), ideas (e.g. categories, norms) or social institutions (e.g. family, school).

Culture may be defined as a shared way of life of a group of socially interacting people and is transmitted from generation through socialization and related processes.

Important features of culture are following:

Culture includes behavioural products of others who preceded us. It indicates both substantial and abstract particulars that have prior existence in one form or another.

It contains values that will be expressed and a language in which to express them.

Culture characterized by sharing reflects presence and experience of cultural attributes psychologically.

Cultural involves transmission of learned behaviour from one generation to the other within a community.

Question 7. Do you agree with the statement that ‘biology plays an enabling role, while specific aspects of behaviour are related to cultural factors’? Give reasons in support of your answer.Answer:  No doubt those biological factors do play enabling in determinants human behaviour. Biological factors basically set the limits but our behaviour is more complex then the behaviour of animal.

Major reason for the complexity is the role of culture to regulate human behaviour.

We can explain the concept with the help of two example hunger is a basic need of human beings as well as of animals but the way this need is gratified by human beings is extremely complex.

Different people in different cultures eat different things in a different manner e.g. directly with hand or with the help of spoons, forks and knives.

Sexual behaviour can be taken as another example sex is a physiological need. The structure and functioning is determinant by biological mechanism but it expression is different in different culture.

At the human level, we find evidence for a dual inheritance theory. Biological inheritance takes place through genes, while cultural inheritance takes place through memes.

The former takes place in a “top-down” manner (i.e. from parents to children)., while the latter many also take place in a “bottom-up” manner (i.e. from children to parents). Dual inheritance theory also shows that although biological and cultural forces may involve different processes, they work as parallel forces, and interact with each other in offering explanation of an individuals behaviour.

Question 8. Describe the main agents of socialisation.Answer:  Socialization is a process of social learning through which a child acquires the norms, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours that are acceptable in his/her culture.Main agents of socialization are following:

Parents:

Parents have the most direct and significant impact on children’s development.

Parents encourage certain behaviours by rewarding them verbally (e.g. praising).

They also discourage certain behaviours through non-approving behaviours.

The conditions of life in which parents live (poverty, illness, job stress, nature of family) also influence the styles they adopt in socializing children.

 School:

In schools children learn not only cognitive skills (e.g. reading, writing, doing mathematics) but also many social skills (e.g. way of behaving with elders and age mates, accepting roles, fulfilling responsibilities).

Several other positive qualities such as self-initiative, self-control responsibility, and creativity are encouraged in schools.

 Peer-Groups:

Friendship provides children not only with a good opportunity to be in company of others, but also for organizing various activities (e.g. play) collectively with the member of their own age.

Qualities like sharing, trust, mutual understanding, role acceptance and fulfillment develop on interaction with peers.

Development of self-identity is greatly facilitated by the peer groups.

 Media-Influences:

The exposure to violence on television enhances aggressive behaviour among children.

In recent years media has also acquired the property of a socializing agent therefore children learn about many things from newspapers, television, books and cinema.

Question 9. How can we distinguish between enculturation and socialisation ? Explain.Answer:  Enculturation refers to all learning that takes place without direct, deliberate teaching.

It refers to all learning that occurs in human life because of its availability in our socio-cultural context.

Observation is the key element of enculturation

The contents are culturally shaped by our preceding generations. A major part of our behaviour is the product of enculturation.

Socialisation is a process by which individuals acquire knowledge, skills and dispositions, which enable them to participate as effective members of groups and society.

It is a process that continues over the entire life-span, and through which one learns and develops ways of effective functioning at any stage of development. Socialisation forms the basis of social and cultural transmission from one generation to the next.

Question 10. What is meant by acculturation? Is acculturation a smooth process? Discuss.Answer:  Acculturation refers to cultural and psychological changes resulting from contact with . other cultures. Contact may be direct (e.g. when one moves and settles in a new culture) or indirect (e.g. through media or other means). It may be voluntary (e.g. when one goes abroad for higher studies, training, job, or trade) or involuntary (e.g. through colonial experience, invasion, political refuge).

Changes due to acculturation may be examined at subjective and objective levels.

At the subjective level, changes are often reflected in people’s attitude towards change. They are referred to as acculturation attitudes.

At the subjective level, changes are often reflected in people’s day to day behaviours and activities. These are referred to as acculturation strategies.

Question 11. Discuss the acculturative strategies adopted by individuals during the course of acculturation.Answer:  The following four acculturative strategies have been derived:

Integration: It refers to an attitude in which there is an interest in both, maintaining one’s original culture and identity, while staying in daily interaction with other cultural groups.

Assimilation: It refers to an attitude, which people do not wish to maintain their cultural identity, and they move to become an integral part of the other culture.

Separation: It refers to an attitude in which people seem to place a value on holding on to their original culture, and wish to avoid interaction with other cultural groups.

Marginalization: It refers to an attitude in which there is little possibility or interest or interest in one’s cultural maintenance, and little interest in having relations with other cultural groups.

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[aedraeatingdisordercentre]

Negative body image

Negative Body Image and eating disorders

We all have a body-image. Beginning at birth, body image develops as we experience life, incorporating the messages of our personal experiences and of the culture, (through adverts, movies, the internet) into the picture that forms in our mind’s eye. Ideally, this inner self-image is going to be mostly positive; I say 'mostly' because I've yet to come across someone with a 100% positive body image, as everyone seems to find some fault with the way they look, but the ideal would clearly be a good balance of seeing the good and accepting the not-so-good. Body image isn’t a uni dimensional construct. It’s actually made up of four aspects:

Perceptual body image: how you see your body

Affective body image: how you feel about your body

Cognitive body image: how you think about your body

Behavioural body image: the way you behave as a result of your perceptual, affective, and cognitive body image (NEDC, 2017) 

Body image concerns are beginning at an increasingly young age and  often endure throughout life. By age 6, girls especially start to express concerns about their own weight or shape, and 40-60% of elementary school girls (ages 6-12) are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat.(1) . Furthermore, over one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviours such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives (2).

BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS

Researchers are increasingly finding a biological basis for negative and distorted body image within eating disorders. A team led by Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at University College London,  identified that the parietal cortex generates the body image. Disruption of this region's normal functioning could play an important role in conditions such as anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder.Other research has found that different sub-types of eating disorders, with their cognitive differences, may be related to the activation of different parts of the brain;  with the amygdala being significantly activated in AN-R (restrictive anorexia) patients, AN-BP (anorexia binge-purge) patients, and healthy women, and The prefrontal cortex (PFC) was significantly activated in AN-BP patients and healthy women, but not in AN-R and BN (bulimia nervosa) patients. Brain activation pattern differences between the various EDs may underlie cognitive differences with respect to distorted body image, and therefore might reflect a general failure to represent and evaluate one's own body in a realistic fashion (3)

CRITICAL SELF-TALK AND POOR BODY-IMAGE

The biological explanations for the existence of this dysfunctional scheme for self-evaluation within so many people with eating disorders, doesn't mean the issues can't be addressed. We can tackle poor body image at several levels, not least the constant flow of self-critical thinking that ensures negative self-image becomes entrenched enough to be central to our actions, relationships and approach to life and cause everything we say, do and think to become distorted by the lens of this belief about ourselves. People with eating disorders, as well as survivors of trauma, tend to fix their attention on these distorted perceptions of themselves. In an attempt to avoid these ' felt' connections they may numb feelings and sensations to stifle overwhelming emotions, and engage in punitive and negative thoughts and self talk regarding their perceptions of themselves (4)Because of the deep interconnectness of our body with our thoughts, attitudes and feelings, the body and mind cannot be treated independently of one another (5)

STARTING TO HEAL POOR BODY IMAGE

Developing or increasing our capacity to resolve  damaging body-image issues must include examining what underlies the negative perceptions and feelings. Exploring the impact of your self-perception  has to  include an emphasis on living “in” rather then controlling the body.All too commonly those of us with EDs see ourselves as failures, disappointments and burdens to their families and loved ones. There is, more often than not, a voice stuck on a continual loop repeating that we're worthless and possibly even telling us that nobody would care if we weren't around.These emotions are felt and experienced in the body, (with me it was always like a cold weight in my chest) ; it can be a knot in the stomach that can make you feel heavy, weighed down and hopeless that things will ever feel different. Nothing ever feels quite real, and no accomplishment (getting the 'right' job, or the  'best' qualifications or whatever) will feel quite enough.

THERAPY FOR  POOR BODY-IMAGE

In order to begin working on poor body image psycho-education , experiential therapy and therapy informed by psychodynamic counselling can help work on enhancing your strengths (we do all have them!) and begin to re-balance our body image so that negative thoughts are no longer dominant. We can learn to identify how our self-perception takes form and exists in our body, and how we express this through our body language. This sort of therapy involves helping understand how we see ourselves, and, importantly, how we believe or perceive that others see us. In order to properly understand and challenge how our body- image impacts our lives we must explore and develop strategies to resolve these damaging body-image issues.When you feel you are turning towards disordered patterns as a response to stress, anxiety or other feelings of being overwhelmed, therapy can help you learn to use these feelings or distortions as a warning that you are having a conflict; this can be an important way to identify what feels wrong, so you can choose to take positive, healthy action and avoid lapses in your eating disorder recovery.

The use of Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) as one of several types of expressive therapy can help address poor body-image.Using carefully monitored movements and breathing techniques, DMT can help you to develop body awareness and tolerance. 

Expressive movement techniques are developed by the therapist to embody understanding of emerging issues and this movement work is processed on a body level as well as a cognitive level. Using  journals or worksheets to externalise insights on body image can create a useful resource to establish 'mini-goals': from this you can create action plans on body image issues. Feedback from your therapist or coach provides further direction and support, along with a framework for guidelines for further exploration of body image issues

We may use an eating disorder (once it has been triggered and become established) to make us feel less anxious and more in control . It can quite successfully move the focus away from the things that we don't want to address or feel, like the effects of our poor body-image. Self-compassion work, and therapies such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)  can help us find ways to acknowledge, accept and learn how to express our feelings. A 2011 Harvard study found that mindfulness techniques, especially meditation, helped create measurable differences on sense of self.

TIPS TO START WORKING ON  YOUR BODY IMAGE TODAY

1. QUESTION WHAT THE MEDIA IS TELLING YOU

Always question what you're being sold by adverts on TV, magazines, the internet. The diet industry is massive, generating approx $68.2 billion a year globally, and continues to grow by exploiting and manipulating poor body-image and low self-esteem. These messages are constant and unrelenting, telling us we have to buy their products and their programmes to get 'bikini ready' or  banish that cellulite' , " bounce back after baby" or "fight for those six back abs"; we're always being told we should regard some foods as 'bad' or 'naughty' , trying to convince us that there's one version of beauty, an acceptable template we should spend our lives trying to fit. This, of course, is bullshit. It constantly reinforces the nonsense that thin=good and larger bodied=bad. Our worth is not defined by our weight, the size of our jeans or the shape of our body. We cannot tell the health of a person by the way that they look. The goal has to be to know your value and worth and nurture yourself so you have the energy and vitality to enjoy your life to its fullest.

2. EXPLORE YOUR BELIEFS AND VALUES

Take time to dig down and explore your own thought patterns and beliefs. It might help to keep a thought log during your day and find a therapist, coach or trusted friend you can explore these with. Where did your beliefs come from? What purpose have they served for you? Is there validity and truth to them or are they beliefs that you are able to challenge and unpack?

 3. GO THROUGH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

Begin unfollowing accounts that make you feel bad about yourself, like you need to change who you are or like you’re not doing enough . Social media can be a great thing and it can also be dangerous, for example, higher levels of Instagram use has been linked to significantly increased symptoms of orthorexia. Setting firm boundaries for yourself such as who you follow and how much time you spend on it can help keep it a positive tool (there are some great apps that can help with this)

4. OFFER YOUR BODY RESPECT

Self-love may seem a long way off, but you can practise respecting it and taking care of it. Respecting your body means appreciating it for all of the great things it does for you. Respecting it also looks like listening to and trusting your body's messages and needs. Focusing on what your body can DO over how your body looks can help begin this process.

5.  CHOOSE KINDNESS

In the simplest terms, be kind. Begin noticing the negative things you are thinking to yourself and substitute it with something kind and compassionate. A great exercise to practice is 'the criticiser, the criticised and the compassionate observer'. When you have a negative thought say it out loud. This is the criticiser. Next follow it up with the person being criticised. Begin to challenge those negative beliefs out loud. Lastly, practice speaking from a place of compassion. Saying it out loud can begin to put things into perspective and offer you a chance to really challenge your thoughts.Negative body image will never heal by changing what our body looks like. It needs to be really tackled where it starts, on the inside. The process is challenging and can take a long-time, but it can be transformational.

References

(1) Smolak, 2011

(2) Neumark- Sztainer, 2005

(3)  Brain activation during the perception of distorted body images in eating disorders.

Miyake Y1, Okamoto Y, Onoda K, Kurosaki M, Shirao N, Okamoto Y, Yamawaki S. .

(4) Kleinman, 2009

(5) Ressler & Kleinman, 2012

[sexgenderneuropsych-blog]

Intrinsic networks and own body perception in transsexual people

“In FtM, higher "self" ratings for bodies morphed towards the sex of their gender identity were associated with greater connectivity of the anterior cingulate within the DMN, during long viewing times. In controls, higher ratings for bodies morphed towards their gender assigned at birth were associated with right insula connectivity within the salience network, during short viewing times. Within visual networks FtM showed weaker connectivity in occipital and temporal regions. Results suggest disconnectivity within networks involved in own body perception in the context of self in GD. Moreover, perception of bodies in relation to self may be reflective rather than reflexive, as a function of mesial prefrontal processes.” (Feusner et al., 2017). 

Research findings from Feusner et al. (2017) suggest that there are neurobiological associations with the self-perception of individuals with gender dysphoria. The research studied individuals who identified specifically as female-to-male (FtM) transgender and compared certain neurobiological processes related to their own body perception and self-reflection (default mode network/DMN and salience network, along with visual networks) to those of the cisgender female and male control groups (Feusner et al., 2017). 

Data collected states that the FtM individuals self-related to body images matching their gender identity and this was congruent with connectivity in the DMN - known to be involved in self-referential processing (Feusner et al., 2017). Male and female control groups display the opposite connectivity patterns, and self-relate to their male or female body image and not that of the opposite sex, which suggests that the brain connectivity structures of FtM individuals is not the same as that of an average cisgender, heterosexual male or female (Feusner et al., 2017). 

FtM individuals showed weaker connectivity in visual networks. Perceiving the body as “self” requires the function of a complex network along the posterior axis which includes a body-detection network (parieto-occipital) and self-body identification network (fronto-parietal) in which the FtM individuals showed said weaker connection, evident during long viewing duration (Feusner et al., 2017). This suggests that the processes of FtM and transgender individuals tends to be reflective of the self, whereas cisgender peoples’ processes would be reflexive and automatic, due to the fact that the difference in data is present during long viewing times which allow for the brain to process more fully what the eyes are viewing and making it less of an immediate reflexive process (Feusner et al., 2017). 

In control groups, the perception of their morphed body (to the opposite anatomical sex) as self covaried with the right insular cortex within the salience network - during short viewings - which was not the case with FtM individuals (Feusner et al., 2017). This process is more reflexive than that of the DMN, which suggests lesser participation of these networks for a number of possible reasons, likely that the systems differ within trans individuals compared to cisgender individuals (Feusner et al., 2017). 

These findings suggest that the neurobiology of transgender individuals differs from that of cisgender individuals, specifically in networks related to self-body perception and body-detection (Feusner et al., 2017). This could represent a neurobiological correlate of transsexualism and strengthens evidence of measurable biological patterns associated with it (Feusner et al., 2017). Though further research is necessary to confirm more information, this research is very important to the understanding of the brain functions transgender people. 

DOI:10.1007/s11682-016-

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Meditation Connects Your Mind and Body Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola I believe meditation practice can be an important part of health and well-being. Meditation not only is a powerful means of relaxing, but also useful for addressing anxiety, managing pain, preventing disease and relieving stress. Meditation Reduces Your Risk of Heart Disease and More There is growing evidence demonstrating your mind and body are intricately connected, and wide acceptance that whatever is going on in your mind has some bearing on your physical health. Brain imaging has shown meditation alters your brain in beneficial ways, and scientists have identified thousands of genes that appear to be directly influenced by your subjective mental state. The mind-body connection is real, and what you think does affect your health. In fact, research1 suggests a persistent negative state of mind is a risk factor for heart disease. Conversely, happiness, optimism, life satisfaction and other positive psychological states are associated with a lower risk of heart disease. The study authors said:2 “[The] findings suggest that positive psychological well-being protects consistently against cardiovascular disease, independently of traditional risk factors and ill-being. Specifically, optimism is most robustly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular events.” While some people appear to be born with a sunnier disposition than others, meditation has been shown to boost optimism and help regulate mood. Meditative practices have also been shown to help optimize your LDL cholesterol and lower your:3 Blood pressure Cortisol Heart rate Such findings are consistent with a downregulation of your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic nervous system, both of which are overactivated by stress. Stress is also a well-known risk factor for heart disease, making meditation all the more important. In addition to promoting heart health, meditation:4,5 Boosts emotional health and well-being Encourages self-awareness Helps fight addictions Improves sleep Increases feelings of compassion and kindness Lengthens attention span Lessens anxiety and depression Manages pain Promotes concentration and memory Reduces stress Your Brain Benefits From Meditation Meditation can be considered a form of “mental exercise” for your brain. The goal is to continually draw your attention to your breath to the exclusion of everything else. Whenever your mind wanders, you seek to gently bring it back to your breath. According to Forbes.com, meditation helps us connect with and leverage our minds:6 “Through meditation, we get better acquainted with the behavior of our minds, and we enhance our ability to regulate our experience of our environment, rather than letting our environment dictate how we experience life. With recent neuroscientific findings, meditation as a practice has been shown to literally rewire brain circuits that boost both mind and body health. These benefits of meditation have surfaced alongside the revelation that the brain can be deeply transformed through experience — a quality known as ‘neuroplasticity.’” Indeed, neuroplasticity allows the nerve cells in your brain to adjust to new situations and changes in their environment. The short-term effects of meditation include enhancing attention, inhibiting inflammation, lowering blood pressure and reducing stress. Long-term meditation benefits, reaped over time with consistent practice, include enhanced empathy and kindness, greater emotional resilience and increased gray matter in brain regions related to memory and emotional processing. As noted in one of the largest studies7 to date on meditation and the human brain, different types of meditation produce different changes to your brain. Neuroscience researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences conducted a meditation program through which 300 participants were examined with respect to three different types of meditation, for three months each. Brain scans performed after each three-month program showed more gray matter in regions of the brain involved in each type of meditation, as compared to scans from the control group. The focal point for each type of meditation and the brain changes elicited were as follows:8,9 Type of Meditation Meditation Focused On Brain Region Showing Increased Gray Matter ATTENTION (MINDFULNESS) Mindful attention to breath and body Prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes, both of which are linked to attention control COMPASSION Emotional connections established through loving-kindness meditations and partner-based problem-sharing sessions Limbic system, which processes emotions, and anterior insula, which assists in bringing emotions into conscious awareness COGNITIVE SKILLS Thinking about issues from different perspectives through both partner activities and individual meditation Regions involved in theory of mind, which helps attribute thoughts, desires and intentions to others as a means of predicting or explaining their actions The study authors suggested additional research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of meditation training for individuals suffering from social-cognition deficits, such as those related to autism or psychopathy. Other areas of potential future work include meditation-related training to increase cooperation and well-being in corporate settings and social intelligence in children. About the current outcomes, the study authors stated:10 “[O]ur findings of structural plasticity in healthy adults in faculties relevant to social intelligence and social interactions suggest that the type of mental training matters. Depending on whether participants’ daily [meditation] practice focused on cultivating socio-emotional capacities (compassion and prosocial motivation) or socio-cognitive skills (putting oneself into the shoes of another person), gray matter increased selectively in areas supporting these functions. Our findings suggest a potential biological basis for how mindfulness and different aspects of social intelligence could be nurtured.” Reduce and Manage Stress With Meditation Stress is one of the biggest challenges facing U.S. adults, with many reporting the negative impact stress has on their mental and physical health. The American Psychological Association’s 2015 Stress in America survey revealed a sizable portion of adults do not feel they are doing enough to manage their stress.11 Nearly half of Americans said they engage in stress-management activities just a few times a month or less, while 18 percent said they never do. Nearly 40 percent reported overeating or eating unhealthy foods as a result of stress, while 46 percent said they lie awake at night due to high stress levels. Given the extent of stress and its far-reaching effects, meditation is a simple technique you can practice anytime, anywhere to alleviate stress. If you are not sure where to begin, gratitude can be a great focal point for lower stress. Simply reflecting on things for which you can be thankful (versus what is irritating or lacking) can do wonders to energize your mood and ratchet down your stress levels. One type of meditation easily applied to virtually any activity is called "mindfulness,” which involves paying attention to the moment you're in right now. Rather than letting your mind wander, you actively choose to live in the current moment, while letting distracting thoughts pass through your mind without getting caught up in them. You can incorporate mindfulness into virtually any aspect of your day — eating, doing household chores, driving or working — simply by reining in your mind and paying attention to the sensations you are experiencing in the present moment. In a 2017 study,12 70 adults with generalized anxiety disorder who completed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class fared better when facing stressful situations than those who were trained in stress-management techniques alone. In the MBSR class, participants learned elements of mindfulness meditation, including paying attention to the present moment, as well as gentle yoga and body scan meditation. The MBSR group reported meditation helps reduce stress. Notably, their physical measures of stress were also lower, including the stress hormone ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) and proinflammatory cytokines, which are markers of inflammation. Essential Oils Are a Wonderful Accompaniment to Meditation Essential oils can enhance your meditation experience by promoting relaxation, peacefulness and mental clarity. If you have trouble calming your mind when meditating, try incorporating essential oils, which have even been shown to help attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). You can use essential oils during meditation by: Diffusing oils into the air: When essential oils are diffused into the air through an essential oil diffuser, they help stimulate your senses and promote relaxation during meditation. Applying oils directly to your skin: Apply essential oils to pulse points and the bottoms of your feet, or your wrists for self-directed inhalation as you meditate. You can also apply a drop or two of essential oil to any bodily area that becomes a distraction during meditation. When you inhale the fragrance of an essential oil, the aroma penetrates your bloodstream via your lungs. This is thought to be one of the mechanisms by which aromatherapy exerts its physiological effects. The fragrance affects your brain’s limbic system, which controls both memories and emotions. While it would be difficult to state all of their benefits for meditation, essential oils have shown particular promise in alleviating stress, boosting your energy, enhancing your sleep, improving your memory, reducing nausea and pain and stabilizing your mood. Many essential oils have antibacterial, antifungal and/or antiviral qualities and, unlike antibiotics, they do not promote resistance.13 Essential oils are a great way to enhance your meditation experience, and you will receive maximum benefits if you use 100 percent pure, therapeutic-grade essential oils derived from the highest quality ingredients. Bergamot, lavender, lemon, peppermint, pine, vetiver and ylang ylang have been shown to be effective in reducing stress, while clary sage, lavender, orange, Roman chamomile and sandalwood are a few of the oils used to soothe anxiety.14 Seven Tips for Leveraging Your Mind-Body Connection According to The Chopra Center, those who practice mind-body medicine recognize the interconnection of all things — your mind, body and surrounding environment. As such, every breath puts you in harmony, or sets you at odds, with whatever is going on in and around you. That said, health is best defined as a state of optimal well-being, wholeness and vitality, not simply the absence of disease. About the mind-body connection, the editors at Chopra.com suggest:15 “Since the body and mind are inextricably connected, every time [you] have a thought, [you] set off a cascade of cellular reactions in [y]our nervous system that influence all the molecules in [y]our body. [Yo]ur cells are constantly observing [y]our thoughts and being changed by them … [You] have amazing potential to heal and transform [yourself] through [y]our thoughts, perceptions, and choices. The body is a magnificent network of intelligence, capable of far more than current medical science can explain.” The following tips will help you maintain a healthy balance of dialogue between your mind and your body. When your thoughts and physical nature are in harmony, you are more likely to listen to your body, treat it well and make choices that support your well-being. To cultivate your personal mind-body connection, each day you may want to:16 1. Take time to quiet your mind and meditate. Research led by a team from Massachusetts General Hospital17 found that as little as eight weeks of meditation induced not only calmness, but also produced positive brain changes. Areas of the brain affected by meditation included those responsible for empathy, memory and stress regulation. 2. Eat a healthy diet. Eating a diet filled with organic fruits and vegetables, plenty of healthy fats and moderate amounts of grass fed meat is vital to nourishing your body and fueling your mind. Be sure to eat mindfully and chew your food well. 3. Engage in daily exercise and non-exercise movement. Exercise not only benefits your body, but also energizes your mind and promotes emotional well-being. Whatever you choose, be sure your program includes a range of activities such as core training, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), stretching and weight training. 4. Get adequate sleep. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of getting sufficient, high-quality sleep every night. Most adults need about eight hours of sleep for proper brain and immune function. In addition, adequate sleep enables you to better handle stressful situations. 5. Release toxic emotions. If you make a habit of harboring unprocessed feelings such as anger, disappointment and hurt, you may be unknowingly infecting yourself with toxic emotions that drag down your mind and body. The Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a great tool to release emotional toxins. EFT has been shown to be especially helpful in soothing anxiety. 6. Cultivate loving relationships. A strong social support network is vital to your mental and physical health. Loneliness has been shown to be more hazardous to your health than obesity or smoking. If your network of friends is small, consider volunteering. 7. Enjoy laughter. Some suggest laughter is the best medicine, and scientific research supports the belief that laughter boosts your immune system and curbs the production of stress hormones. If you haven’t laughed in a while, the laughing baby in the video below is just what this doctor recommends to lighten your mood.

[mindcoolness]

This One Word Makes Your Self-Talk More Effective for Emotion Regulation

New Post has been published on http://www.mindcoolness.com/blog/self-talk-emotion-regulation/

This One Word Makes Your Self-Talk More Effective for Emotion Regulation

Are you aware of your internal monologue? How familiar are you with the sound of your inner voice? Is it a friendly voice? In the practical part of Willpower Condensed, I wrote:

When you feel like succumbing to temptation, fear, or laziness, ask yourself: What advice would you give to your best friend? (p. 43)

Whenever you engage in mental self-talk, see yourself as a good friend and consider what kind of motivation would benefit your progress. (p. 78)

Do you talk to yourself like a friend when you engage in self-judgment (“I am such an imbecile”), self-doubt (“I cannot do this”), or self-motivation (“I will go tell her she’s cute”)? You can control adverse or useless emotions better if you see them from a friend’s outside perspective.

But how do you talk to a friend anyway? You probably call him by his name. This makes whatever you say next more impactful. Now you, you have a name too, right? What is your name? Tell me, tell yourself, and use it to make your self-talk tremendously effective! This works particularly well for emotion regulation because addressing yourself by your name lets you see your emotions with the rational detachment of a friend.

[T]here is a tight coupling between using proper names, and thinking about others—a coupling that is so tight that we expected using one’s name to refer to the self would virtually automatically lead people to think about the self similarly to how they think about someone else. (Moser et al., 2017)

Personally, I talk to myself in the third person when I use the reappraisal strategy to control my emotions. I do not think, “I won’t get angry at this guy; he’s in a bad place right now, so I shouldn’t take his comment personally.” Instead, I say my name, “Dom, don’t get angry at this guy; he’s in a bad place right now, so Dom, listen, don’t take his comment personally.”

I do the same to resist the temptation to have a cold beer when I am already close to my daily 50-gram carb limit. I could ask myself, “Do I really need carbs and alcohol right now?” But this would invoke subjective feelings. So instead, I use my name, “Dom, do you really need carbs and alcohol right now?” This makes the answer obvious; and I order some herbal tea instead.

Yet there is more to self-name-calling than my powerful personal experience. There is science to it! In two studies, Moser et al. (2017) found that third-person self-talk is an effective and relatively effortless form of emotional self-control:

Study 1. While people were looking at aversive images, they reflected on their emotions using either first-person (“I am feeling X”) or third-person (“[Name] is feeling X”) self-talk. Those who addressed themselves by their name were less emotionally reactive, measured as LPP* using electroencephalography (EEG), than those who used “I” to think about their emotions. At the same time, self-talk did not affect executive control, measured as SPN** using EEG, indicating that participants did not use willpower to control their emotions.

Study 2. People recalled a painful personal memory using either first-person (“I remember back when I…”) or third-person (“[Name] remembers back when he…”) self-talk. Those who addressed themselves by their name were less emotionally reactive, measured as self-reported affect as well as brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala*** using functional imaging (fMRI), than those who used “I” to think about their past. At the same time, self-talk did not affect executive control, measured as brain activity in fronto-parietal regions using fMRI, indicating that participants did not use willpower to control their emotions.

These findings suggest that using your name for self-talk during emotional events helps you to control your emotions effortlessly, without having to exert cognitive control, without having to use willpower. Talking to yourself in the third person automatically detaches you a bit psychologically from the situation. Therefore, next time you want to talk yourself out of an emotional episode and into a state of mindcoolness, be a good friend and call yourself by your name!

* The LPP (late positive potential) is a reliable electrophysiological index of emotional reactivity and closely coupled with subjective ratings (e.g., feeling good vs. bad) as well as physiological markers (e.g., blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in the amygdala) of arousal.

** The SPN (stimulus-preceding negativity) is a slow negative wave in frontal brain regions and a robust electrophysiological index of cognitive control processes (of willpower if you will).

*** I must note that self-talk did not significantly modulate the amygdala in this study, likely due to its memory-based paradigm for eliciting emotions.

The Study

Moser JS, Dougherty A, Mattson WI, Katz B, Moran TP, Guevarra D, Shablack H, Ayduk O, Jonides J, Berman MG, Kross E (2017). Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI. Scientific Reports 7(4519), doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-04047-3.

Further Reading

Willpower Condensed: Master Self-Discipline to Do Your True Will

8 Reasons Why People Regulate Their Emotions

Is Suppressing Emotions Bad For You? (Jocko Willink Vs. Science)

To Control Your Emotions, Understand and Label Them (Affect Labeling)

To Control Your Emotions, Control Your Attention

The negative self-talk of a depressed person. Words you should not even have in your vocabulary.

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10 ways that running changes your mind and brain

By Christian Jarrett

“One 60-minute run can add 7 hours to your life” claimed The Times last week. The story was based on a new review in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that concluded that runners live, on average, three years longer than non-runners and that running will do more for your longevity than any other form of exercise. But there’s more to running than its health-enhancing effects. Research published in recent years has shown that donning your trainers and pounding the hills or pavements changes your brain and mind in some intriguing ways, from increasing connectivity between key functional hubs, to helping you regulate your emotions. The precise effects sometimes vary according to whether you engage in intense sprints or long distance running. Here, to coincide with a new feature article in The Psychologist – “Minds run free” – we provide a handy digest of the ways that running changes your mind and brain.

Running changes your brain wiring David Raichlen and his colleagues scanned the brains of young, competitive distance runners and controls while they rested in a scanner with their eyes open for six minutes. As reported in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the runners showed greater connectivity between the so-called frontal parietal network and other neural regions involved in working memory and self-control, which the researchers interpreted as likely due to the cognitive demands of running and the runners’ increased aerobic fitness. The runners also showed greater “anti-correlation” between their default mode network (the DMN, which sparks into life when we’re resting) and a series of regions involved in motor control and sensation – the researchers said this could indicate that when on the move, the runners are likely to be very cognitively engaged, with their DMN suppressed.

Intense sprints seem to boost your executive function For a study published last year in Preventive Medicine Reports, researchers asked young volunteers (average age 12) to complete several 10-second sprints for ten minutes and then take some cognitive tests. The participants acted as their own controls and on another day (either before or after the sprint day) they completed the same mental tests after 10 minutes of rest. The participants’ performance on the Stroop Test – a long-established measure of mental control or what psychologists call “executive function” – seemed to be enhanced immediately after the sprints and 45 minutes afterwards, as compared with after resting. There were no effects of the sprints on visual-spatial memory performance or basic mental speed (as judged by the Digit Symbol Substitution test). Based on their finding of an apparent benefit of sprints on executive function, Simon Cooper and his colleagues said there was a case for including more opportunities for intense exercise in the school day.

Seven weeks of interval running training can boost your cognitive flexibility For three times per week for seven weeks, a small group of young dinghy sailors spent 45 minutes per session, rising to 90 minutes at the end of the programme, engaged in interval training: running fast for between 200 to 1000m, interspersed with periods of rest. The researchers tested their volunteers’ cognitive function before the training period and afterwards, and compared the outcomes with a control group of young dinghy sailors who just continued their active lifestyle as usual. Writing in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Tomas Venckunas and his colleagues reported that the running group didn’t just get fitter and better at running, but also showed superior gains in their cognitive flexibility: that is, they were better at adapting to rapid switches in task instructions in a keypress task on a computer.

Ridiculously extreme long-distance running shrinks your brain (but it grows back) In 2009, 67 endurance athletes ran nearly 3,000 miles over 64 days, without a single day’s rest, to complete the TransEurope-FootRace ultramarathon. For a paper in BMC Medicine, a team of researchers led by Wolfgang Freund scanned the brains of a sample of these runners before the race, during and eight months afterwards. During the race, the runners’ brains shrunk, in terms of grey matter volume, by about six per cent, an amount that the researchers described as “substantial” considering that normal aging is associated with volume loss of around 0.2 per cent per year. However, at the final scan, the runners’ brains had recovered to their pre-race volume. In a follow-up study in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, the same research team pinpointed the running-related grey matter loss to four key areas, including parts of: temporoparietal cortex, occipitotemporal cortex, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex, and caudate nucleus. Although highly speculative, they noted the overlap of these areas with the Default Mode Network and suggested the observed cell loss in these regions may reflect the combination of the metabolic demands of running combined with a prolonged lack of use of the DMN, the brain’s resting-state network.

The “runners’ high” may be linked to changes in brain chemicals Completing a run can leave you feeling euphoric and several studies suggest this could be down to changes to the brain’s chemical messengers. For instance, a 2008 study in Cerebral Cortex used PET neuroimaging to show that a two-hour run led to enhanced opioid binding across several areas of the brain, as compared with before the run, and that this was associated with subjective feelings of euphoria. This supports the idea that running triggers the increased released of endorphins in the brain – a kind of natural high. A more recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology pointed to the importance of other neurotransmitters: the researchers found that an intense treadmill run, but not a walk, was associated with increased circulation of endocannabinoids – endogenous brain chemicals that bind to the same receptors in the brain as cannabis.

Running may quieten your mind Anecdotally, many runners also say that going for a jog has a calming effect, helping their brains dial back on usual levels of worry and rumination. A study published last year in Experimental Brain Research appeared to provide some partial scientific support for this idea. Petra Wollseiffen and her colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the surface electrical activity of the brains of 11 ultramarathoners several times during a six hour run. Running was associated with reductions in activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, and for the first hour, runners also reported feeling more relaxed and an increased sense of “flow”. However, the levels of decreased brain activity and subjective feelings of flow didn’t correlate so it would be an oversimplification to say that this research shows that running helps you to relax by switching off your brain.

Running increases the growth of new neurons (at least in mice) It was the received wisdom through most of the last century that adults can’t grow new neurons – a process called neurogenesis. It’s now known that this isn’t true: in fact, new neurons continue to grow through life in specific areas of the brain. Interest has turned to the function of these news neurons and ways to encourage their growth. To date, much of the research is on rats and mice, in whom a recurring finding is that running seems to encourage neurogenesis. Take a seminal paper published in Nature in 1999. Fred Gage and his team reported that mice who had the opportunity to choose to run in a spinning wheel exhibited twice the amount of neurogenesis in a part of the hippocampus (a brain region involved in memory and learning), as compared with mice who had no choice but to swim or others who had to complete a water maze. More recent animal research suggests that it is particularly long-distance running, as opposed to interval-style training (short bursts of running) that may increase neurogenesis, perhaps through release of what’s known as “brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)”, a chemical that encourages cell growth.

A short jog may help you regulate your emotions For a 2015 study in Cognition and Emotion, Emily Bernstein and Richard McNally asked volunteers to jog or stretch for 30 minutes and then they showed them a sad clip from the film The Champ. Participants who said they usually struggled to handle negative emotion were more intensely affected by the sad clip, just as you’d expect, but crucially this was less so if they had completed the jog (but not the stretching). The researchers said: “… a bout of moderate aerobic exercise appears to have helped those participants potentially more vulnerable to problematic affective dysregulation to be less susceptible to the impact or lingering effects of the stressor”.

Intense sprints may boost your ability to learn Bernward Winter and his colleagues tested participants’ ability to learn new made-up words for objects after either two intense sprints of three-minutes length, after 40 minutes of gentle running, or after resting. Participants were able to learn 20 per cent faster after the sprints compared with the other conditions, and they showed superior memory retention when tested again a week later. Writing in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the researchers said the blood measures they took suggested that the participants’ enhanced learning performance after sprints may have been associated with increased levels of dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine and BDNF. “This [finding] is pertinent to the organization of learning-supportive environments, e.g., in schools (intense exercise during the breaks),” the researchers said.

Running a marathon seems to wipe your memory of the pain Let’s not romanticise long-distance running. As Daniel Engber observed at Slate last year,  “a vast, disturbing literature has now accumulated on the ill effects of running marathons”, particularly all the pain, including chaffing, blisters and cramps. One way that repeat marathon runners seem to cope is that the satisfaction of completing a run gradually wipes their memories for the pain they went through. Researchers demonstrated this for a study published in Memory: they asked marathon runners to report their pain and emotions directly after completing a marathon and then caught up with them again six months later, to ask them to recall their earlier post-marathon pain. The runners tended to have forgotten just how much pain they’d been in, and this was especially true if they’d been on an emotional high at the end of the marathon.

–Want to read more about the psychology of running? Check out this month’s cover feature at The Psychologist about psychologists who run and whether their experiences match the data: Minds run free.

–Image via Giphy.com

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oUkCOg

[rtawngs20815]

10 ways that running changes your mind and brain

By Christian Jarrett

“One 60-minute run can add 7 hours to your life” claimed The Times last week. The story was based on a new review in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that concluded that runners live, on average, three years longer than non-runners and that running will do more for your longevity than any other form of exercise. But there’s more to running than its health-enhancing effects. Research published in recent years has shown that donning your trainers and pounding the hills or pavements changes your brain and mind in some intriguing ways, from increasing connectivity between key functional hubs, to helping you regulate your emotions. The precise effects sometimes vary according to whether you engage in intense sprints or long distance running. Here, to coincide with a new feature article in The Psychologist – “Minds run free” – we provide a handy digest of the ways that running changes your mind and brain.

Running changes your brain wiring David Raichlen and his colleagues scanned the brains of young, competitive distance runners and controls while they rested in a scanner with their eyes open for six minutes. As reported in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the runners showed greater connectivity between the so-called frontal parietal network and other neural regions involved in working memory and self-control, which the researchers interpreted as likely due to the cognitive demands of running and the runners’ increased aerobic fitness. The runners also showed greater “anti-correlation” between their default mode network (the DMN, which sparks into life when we’re resting) and a series of regions involved in motor control and sensation – the researchers said this could indicate that when on the move, the runners are likely to be very cognitively engaged, with their DMN suppressed.

Intense sprints seem to boost your executive function For a study published last year in Preventive Medicine Reports, researchers asked young volunteers (average age 12) to complete several 10-second sprints for ten minutes and then take some cognitive tests. The participants acted as their own controls and on another day (either before or after the sprint day) they completed the same mental tests after 10 minutes of rest. The participants’ performance on the Stroop Test – a long-established measure of mental control or what psychologists call “executive function” – seemed to be enhanced immediately after the sprints and 45 minutes afterwards, as compared with after resting. There were no effects of the sprints on visual-spatial memory performance or basic mental speed (as judged by the Digit Symbol Substitution test). Based on their finding of an apparent benefit of sprints on executive function, Simon Cooper and his colleagues said there was a case for including more opportunities for intense exercise in the school day.

Seven weeks of interval running training can boost your cognitive flexibility For three times per week for seven weeks, a small group of young dinghy sailors spent 45 minutes per session, rising to 90 minutes at the end of the programme, engaged in interval training: running fast for between 200 to 1000m, interspersed with periods of rest. The researchers tested their volunteers’ cognitive function before the training period and afterwards, and compared the outcomes with a control group of young dinghy sailors who just continued their active lifestyle as usual. Writing in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Tomas Venckunas and his colleagues reported that the running group didn’t just get fitter and better at running, but also showed superior gains in their cognitive flexibility: that is, they were better at adapting to rapid switches in task instructions in a keypress task on a computer.

Ridiculously extreme long-distance running shrinks your brain (but it grows back) In 2009, 67 endurance athletes ran nearly 3,000 miles over 64 days, without a single day’s rest, to complete the TransEurope-FootRace ultramarathon. For a paper in BMC Medicine, a team of researchers led by Wolfgang Freund scanned the brains of a sample of these runners before the race, during and eight months afterwards. During the race, the runners’ brains shrunk, in terms of grey matter volume, by about six per cent, an amount that the researchers described as “substantial” considering that normal aging is associated with volume loss of around 0.2 per cent per year. However, at the final scan, the runners’ brains had recovered to their pre-race volume. In a follow-up study in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, the same research team pinpointed the running-related grey matter loss to four key areas, including parts of: temporoparietal cortex, occipitotemporal cortex, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex, and caudate nucleus. Although highly speculative, they noted the overlap of these areas with the Default Mode Network and suggested the observed cell loss in these regions may reflect the combination of the metabolic demands of running combined with a prolonged lack of use of the DMN, the brain’s resting-state network.

The “runners’ high” may be linked to changes in brain chemicals Completing a run can leave you feeling euphoric and several studies suggest this could be down to changes to the brain’s chemical messengers. For instance, a 2008 study in Cerebral Cortex used PET neuroimaging to show that a two-hour run led to enhanced opioid binding across several areas of the brain, as compared with before the run, and that this was associated with subjective feelings of euphoria. This supports the idea that running triggers the increased released of endorphins in the brain – a kind of natural high. A more recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology pointed to the importance of other neurotransmitters: the researchers found that an intense treadmill run, but not a walk, was associated with increased circulation of endocannabinoids – endogenous brain chemicals that bind to the same receptors in the brain as cannabis.

Running may quieten your mind Anecdotally, many runners also say that going for a jog has a calming effect, helping their brains dial back on usual levels of worry and rumination. A study published last year in Experimental Brain Research appeared to provide some partial scientific support for this idea. Petra Wollseiffen and her colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the surface electrical activity of the brains of 11 ultramarathoners several times during a six hour run. Running was associated with reductions in activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, and for the first hour, runners also reported feeling more relaxed and an increased sense of “flow”. However, the levels of decreased brain activity and subjective feelings of flow didn’t correlate so it would be an oversimplification to say that this research shows that running helps you to relax by switching off your brain.

Running increases the growth of new neurons (at least in mice) It was the received wisdom through most of the last century that adults can’t grow new neurons – a process called neurogenesis. It’s now known that this isn’t true: in fact, new neurons continue to grow through life in specific areas of the brain. Interest has turned to the function of these news neurons and ways to encourage their growth. To date, much of the research is on rats and mice, in whom a recurring finding is that running seems to encourage neurogenesis. Take a seminal paper published in Nature in 1999. Fred Gage and his team reported that mice who had the opportunity to choose to run in a spinning wheel exhibited twice the amount of neurogenesis in a part of the hippocampus (a brain region involved in memory and learning), as compared with mice who had no choice but to swim or others who had to complete a water maze. More recent animal research suggests that it is particularly long-distance running, as opposed to interval-style training (short bursts of running) that may increase neurogenesis, perhaps through release of what’s known as “brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)”, a chemical that encourages cell growth.

A short jog may help you regulate your emotions For a 2015 study in Cognition and Emotion, Emily Bernstein and Richard McNally asked volunteers to jog or stretch for 30 minutes and then they showed them a sad clip from the film The Champ. Participants who said they usually struggled to handle negative emotion were more intensely affected by the sad clip, just as you’d expect, but crucially this was less so if they had completed the jog (but not the stretching). The researchers said: “… a bout of moderate aerobic exercise appears to have helped those participants potentially more vulnerable to problematic affective dysregulation to be less susceptible to the impact or lingering effects of the stressor”.

Intense sprints may boost your ability to learn Bernward Winter and his colleagues tested participants’ ability to learn new made-up words for objects after either two intense sprints of three-minutes length, after 40 minutes of gentle running, or after resting. Participants were able to learn 20 per cent faster after the sprints compared with the other conditions, and they showed superior memory retention when tested again a week later. Writing in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the researchers said the blood measures they took suggested that the participants’ enhanced learning performance after sprints may have been associated with increased levels of dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine and BDNF. “This [finding] is pertinent to the organization of learning-supportive environments, e.g., in schools (intense exercise during the breaks),” the researchers said.

Running a marathon seems to wipe your memory of the pain Let’s not romanticise long-distance running. As Daniel Engber observed at Slate last year,  “a vast, disturbing literature has now accumulated on the ill effects of running marathons”, particularly all the pain, including chaffing, blisters and cramps. One way that repeat marathon runners seem to cope is that the satisfaction of completing a run gradually wipes their memories for the pain they went through. Researchers demonstrated this for a study published in Memory: they asked marathon runners to report their pain and emotions directly after completing a marathon and then caught up with them again six months later, to ask them to recall their earlier post-marathon pain. The runners tended to have forgotten just how much pain they’d been in, and this was especially true if they’d been on an emotional high at the end of the marathon.

–Want to read more about the psychology of running? Check out this month’s cover feature at The Psychologist about psychologists who run and whether their experiences match the data: Minds run free.

–Image via Giphy.com

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oUkCOg

[repwincoml4a0a5]

10 ways that running changes your mind and brain

By Christian Jarrett

“One 60-minute run can add 7 hours to your life” claimed The Times last week. The story was based on a new review in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that concluded that runners live, on average, three years longer than non-runners and that running will do more for your longevity than any other form of exercise. But there’s more to running than its health-enhancing effects. Research published in recent years has shown that donning your trainers and pounding the hills or pavements changes your brain and mind in some intriguing ways, from increasing connectivity between key functional hubs, to helping you regulate your emotions. The precise effects sometimes vary according to whether you engage in intense sprints or long distance running. Here, to coincide with a new feature article in The Psychologist – “Minds run free” – we provide a handy digest of the ways that running changes your mind and brain.

Running changes your brain wiring David Raichlen and his colleagues scanned the brains of young, competitive distance runners and controls while they rested in a scanner with their eyes open for six minutes. As reported in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the runners showed greater connectivity between the so-called frontal parietal network and other neural regions involved in working memory and self-control, which the researchers interpreted as likely due to the cognitive demands of running and the runners’ increased aerobic fitness. The runners also showed greater “anti-correlation” between their default mode network (the DMN, which sparks into life when we’re resting) and a series of regions involved in motor control and sensation – the researchers said this could indicate that when on the move, the runners are likely to be very cognitively engaged, with their DMN suppressed.

Intense sprints seem to boost your executive function For a study published last year in Preventive Medicine Reports, researchers asked young volunteers (average age 12) to complete several 10-second sprints for ten minutes and then take some cognitive tests. The participants acted as their own controls and on another day (either before or after the sprint day) they completed the same mental tests after 10 minutes of rest. The participants’ performance on the Stroop Test – a long-established measure of mental control or what psychologists call “executive function” – seemed to be enhanced immediately after the sprints and 45 minutes afterwards, as compared with after resting. There were no effects of the sprints on visual-spatial memory performance or basic mental speed (as judged by the Digit Symbol Substitution test). Based on their finding of an apparent benefit of sprints on executive function, Simon Cooper and his colleagues said there was a case for including more opportunities for intense exercise in the school day.

Seven weeks of interval running training can boost your cognitive flexibility For three times per week for seven weeks, a small group of young dinghy sailors spent 45 minutes per session, rising to 90 minutes at the end of the programme, engaged in interval training: running fast for between 200 to 1000m, interspersed with periods of rest. The researchers tested their volunteers’ cognitive function before the training period and afterwards, and compared the outcomes with a control group of young dinghy sailors who just continued their active lifestyle as usual. Writing in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Tomas Venckunas and his colleagues reported that the running group didn’t just get fitter and better at running, but also showed superior gains in their cognitive flexibility: that is, they were better at adapting to rapid switches in task instructions in a keypress task on a computer.

Ridiculously extreme long-distance running shrinks your brain (but it grows back) In 2009, 67 endurance athletes ran nearly 3,000 miles over 64 days, without a single day’s rest, to complete the TransEurope-FootRace ultramarathon. For a paper in BMC Medicine, a team of researchers led by Wolfgang Freund scanned the brains of a sample of these runners before the race, during and eight months afterwards. During the race, the runners’ brains shrunk, in terms of grey matter volume, by about six per cent, an amount that the researchers described as “substantial” considering that normal aging is associated with volume loss of around 0.2 per cent per year. However, at the final scan, the runners’ brains had recovered to their pre-race volume. In a follow-up study in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, the same research team pinpointed the running-related grey matter loss to four key areas, including parts of: temporoparietal cortex, occipitotemporal cortex, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex, and caudate nucleus. Although highly speculative, they noted the overlap of these areas with the Default Mode Network and suggested the observed cell loss in these regions may reflect the combination of the metabolic demands of running combined with a prolonged lack of use of the DMN, the brain’s resting-state network.

The “runners’ high” may be linked to changes in brain chemicals Completing a run can leave you feeling euphoric and several studies suggest this could be down to changes to the brain’s chemical messengers. For instance, a 2008 study in Cerebral Cortex used PET neuroimaging to show that a two-hour run led to enhanced opioid binding across several areas of the brain, as compared with before the run, and that this was associated with subjective feelings of euphoria. This supports the idea that running triggers the increased released of endorphins in the brain – a kind of natural high. A more recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology pointed to the importance of other neurotransmitters: the researchers found that an intense treadmill run, but not a walk, was associated with increased circulation of endocannabinoids – endogenous brain chemicals that bind to the same receptors in the brain as cannabis.

Running may quieten your mind Anecdotally, many runners also say that going for a jog has a calming effect, helping their brains dial back on usual levels of worry and rumination. A study published last year in Experimental Brain Research appeared to provide some partial scientific support for this idea. Petra Wollseiffen and her colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the surface electrical activity of the brains of 11 ultramarathoners several times during a six hour run. Running was associated with reductions in activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, and for the first hour, runners also reported feeling more relaxed and an increased sense of “flow”. However, the levels of decreased brain activity and subjective feelings of flow didn’t correlate so it would be an oversimplification to say that this research shows that running helps you to relax by switching off your brain.

Running increases the growth of new neurons (at least in mice) It was the received wisdom through most of the last century that adults can’t grow new neurons – a process called neurogenesis. It’s now known that this isn’t true: in fact, new neurons continue to grow through life in specific areas of the brain. Interest has turned to the function of these news neurons and ways to encourage their growth. To date, much of the research is on rats and mice, in whom a recurring finding is that running seems to encourage neurogenesis. Take a seminal paper published in Nature in 1999. Fred Gage and his team reported that mice who had the opportunity to choose to run in a spinning wheel exhibited twice the amount of neurogenesis in a part of the hippocampus (a brain region involved in memory and learning), as compared with mice who had no choice but to swim or others who had to complete a water maze. More recent animal research suggests that it is particularly long-distance running, as opposed to interval-style training (short bursts of running) that may increase neurogenesis, perhaps through release of what’s known as “brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)”, a chemical that encourages cell growth.

A short jog may help you regulate your emotions For a 2015 study in Cognition and Emotion, Emily Bernstein and Richard McNally asked volunteers to jog or stretch for 30 minutes and then they showed them a sad clip from the film The Champ. Participants who said they usually struggled to handle negative emotion were more intensely affected by the sad clip, just as you’d expect, but crucially this was less so if they had completed the jog (but not the stretching). The researchers said: “… a bout of moderate aerobic exercise appears to have helped those participants potentially more vulnerable to problematic affective dysregulation to be less susceptible to the impact or lingering effects of the stressor”.

Intense sprints may boost your ability to learn Bernward Winter and his colleagues tested participants’ ability to learn new made-up words for objects after either two intense sprints of three-minutes length, after 40 minutes of gentle running, or after resting. Participants were able to learn 20 per cent faster after the sprints compared with the other conditions, and they showed superior memory retention when tested again a week later. Writing in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the researchers said the blood measures they took suggested that the participants’ enhanced learning performance after sprints may have been associated with increased levels of dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine and BDNF. “This [finding] is pertinent to the organization of learning-supportive environments, e.g., in schools (intense exercise during the breaks),” the researchers said.

Running a marathon seems to wipe your memory of the pain Let’s not romanticise long-distance running. As Daniel Engber observed at Slate last year,  “a vast, disturbing literature has now accumulated on the ill effects of running marathons”, particularly all the pain, including chaffing, blisters and cramps. One way that repeat marathon runners seem to cope is that the satisfaction of completing a run gradually wipes their memories for the pain they went through. Researchers demonstrated this for a study published in Memory: they asked marathon runners to report their pain and emotions directly after completing a marathon and then caught up with them again six months later, to ask them to recall their earlier post-marathon pain. The runners tended to have forgotten just how much pain they’d been in, and this was especially true if they’d been on an emotional high at the end of the marathon.

–Want to read more about the psychology of running? Check out this month’s cover feature at The Psychologist about psychologists who run and whether their experiences match the data: Minds run free.

–Image via Giphy.com

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oUkCOg

[pat78701]

10 ways that running changes your mind and brain

By Christian Jarrett

“One 60-minute run can add 7 hours to your life” claimed The Times last week. The story was based on a new review in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that concluded that runners live, on average, three years longer than non-runners and that running will do more for your longevity than any other form of exercise. But there’s more to running than its health-enhancing effects. Research published in recent years has shown that donning your trainers and pounding the hills or pavements changes your brain and mind in some intriguing ways, from increasing connectivity between key functional hubs, to helping you regulate your emotions. The precise effects sometimes vary according to whether you engage in intense sprints or long distance running. Here, to coincide with a new feature article in The Psychologist – “Minds run free” – we provide a handy digest of the ways that running changes your mind and brain.

Running changes your brain wiring David Raichlen and his colleagues scanned the brains of young, competitive distance runners and controls while they rested in a scanner with their eyes open for six minutes. As reported in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the runners showed greater connectivity between the so-called frontal parietal network and other neural regions involved in working memory and self-control, which the researchers interpreted as likely due to the cognitive demands of running and the runners’ increased aerobic fitness. The runners also showed greater “anti-correlation” between their default mode network (the DMN, which sparks into life when we’re resting) and a series of regions involved in motor control and sensation – the researchers said this could indicate that when on the move, the runners are likely to be very cognitively engaged, with their DMN suppressed.

Intense sprints seem to boost your executive function For a study published last year in Preventive Medicine Reports, researchers asked young volunteers (average age 12) to complete several 10-second sprints for ten minutes and then take some cognitive tests. The participants acted as their own controls and on another day (either before or after the sprint day) they completed the same mental tests after 10 minutes of rest. The participants’ performance on the Stroop Test – a long-established measure of mental control or what psychologists call “executive function” – seemed to be enhanced immediately after the sprints and 45 minutes afterwards, as compared with after resting. There were no effects of the sprints on visual-spatial memory performance or basic mental speed (as judged by the Digit Symbol Substitution test). Based on their finding of an apparent benefit of sprints on executive function, Simon Cooper and his colleagues said there was a case for including more opportunities for intense exercise in the school day.

Seven weeks of interval running training can boost your cognitive flexibility For three times per week for seven weeks, a small group of young dinghy sailors spent 45 minutes per session, rising to 90 minutes at the end of the programme, engaged in interval training: running fast for between 200 to 1000m, interspersed with periods of rest. The researchers tested their volunteers’ cognitive function before the training period and afterwards, and compared the outcomes with a control group of young dinghy sailors who just continued their active lifestyle as usual. Writing in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Tomas Venckunas and his colleagues reported that the running group didn’t just get fitter and better at running, but also showed superior gains in their cognitive flexibility: that is, they were better at adapting to rapid switches in task instructions in a keypress task on a computer.

Ridiculously extreme long-distance running shrinks your brain (but it grows back) In 2009, 67 endurance athletes ran nearly 3,000 miles over 64 days, without a single day’s rest, to complete the TransEurope-FootRace ultramarathon. For a paper in BMC Medicine, a team of researchers led by Wolfgang Freund scanned the brains of a sample of these runners before the race, during and eight months afterwards. During the race, the runners’ brains shrunk, in terms of grey matter volume, by about six per cent, an amount that the researchers described as “substantial” considering that normal aging is associated with volume loss of around 0.2 per cent per year. However, at the final scan, the runners’ brains had recovered to their pre-race volume. In a follow-up study in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, the same research team pinpointed the running-related grey matter loss to four key areas, including parts of: temporoparietal cortex, occipitotemporal cortex, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex, and caudate nucleus. Although highly speculative, they noted the overlap of these areas with the Default Mode Network and suggested the observed cell loss in these regions may reflect the combination of the metabolic demands of running combined with a prolonged lack of use of the DMN, the brain’s resting-state network.

The “runners’ high” may be linked to changes in brain chemicals Completing a run can leave you feeling euphoric and several studies suggest this could be down to changes to the brain’s chemical messengers. For instance, a 2008 study in Cerebral Cortex used PET neuroimaging to show that a two-hour run led to enhanced opioid binding across several areas of the brain, as compared with before the run, and that this was associated with subjective feelings of euphoria. This supports the idea that running triggers the increased released of endorphins in the brain – a kind of natural high. A more recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology pointed to the importance of other neurotransmitters: the researchers found that an intense treadmill run, but not a walk, was associated with increased circulation of endocannabinoids – endogenous brain chemicals that bind to the same receptors in the brain as cannabis.

Running may quieten your mind Anecdotally, many runners also say that going for a jog has a calming effect, helping their brains dial back on usual levels of worry and rumination. A study published last year in Experimental Brain Research appeared to provide some partial scientific support for this idea. Petra Wollseiffen and her colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the surface electrical activity of the brains of 11 ultramarathoners several times during a six hour run. Running was associated with reductions in activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, and for the first hour, runners also reported feeling more relaxed and an increased sense of “flow”. However, the levels of decreased brain activity and subjective feelings of flow didn’t correlate so it would be an oversimplification to say that this research shows that running helps you to relax by switching off your brain.

Running increases the growth of new neurons (at least in mice) It was the received wisdom through most of the last century that adults can’t grow new neurons – a process called neurogenesis. It’s now known that this isn’t true: in fact, new neurons continue to grow through life in specific areas of the brain. Interest has turned to the function of these news neurons and ways to encourage their growth. To date, much of the research is on rats and mice, in whom a recurring finding is that running seems to encourage neurogenesis. Take a seminal paper published in Nature in 1999. Fred Gage and his team reported that mice who had the opportunity to choose to run in a spinning wheel exhibited twice the amount of neurogenesis in a part of the hippocampus (a brain region involved in memory and learning), as compared with mice who had no choice but to swim or others who had to complete a water maze. More recent animal research suggests that it is particularly long-distance running, as opposed to interval-style training (short bursts of running) that may increase neurogenesis, perhaps through release of what’s known as “brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)”, a chemical that encourages cell growth.

A short jog may help you regulate your emotions For a 2015 study in Cognition and Emotion, Emily Bernstein and Richard McNally asked volunteers to jog or stretch for 30 minutes and then they showed them a sad clip from the film The Champ. Participants who said they usually struggled to handle negative emotion were more intensely affected by the sad clip, just as you’d expect, but crucially this was less so if they had completed the jog (but not the stretching). The researchers said: “… a bout of moderate aerobic exercise appears to have helped those participants potentially more vulnerable to problematic affective dysregulation to be less susceptible to the impact or lingering effects of the stressor”.

Intense sprints may boost your ability to learn Bernward Winter and his colleagues tested participants’ ability to learn new made-up words for objects after either two intense sprints of three-minutes length, after 40 minutes of gentle running, or after resting. Participants were able to learn 20 per cent faster after the sprints compared with the other conditions, and they showed superior memory retention when tested again a week later. Writing in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the researchers said the blood measures they took suggested that the participants’ enhanced learning performance after sprints may have been associated with increased levels of dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine and BDNF. “This [finding] is pertinent to the organization of learning-supportive environments, e.g., in schools (intense exercise during the breaks),” the researchers said.

Running a marathon seems to wipe your memory of the pain Let’s not romanticise long-distance running. As Daniel Engber observed at Slate last year,  “a vast, disturbing literature has now accumulated on the ill effects of running marathons”, particularly all the pain, including chaffing, blisters and cramps. One way that repeat marathon runners seem to cope is that the satisfaction of completing a run gradually wipes their memories for the pain they went through. Researchers demonstrated this for a study published in Memory: they asked marathon runners to report their pain and emotions directly after completing a marathon and then caught up with them again six months later, to ask them to recall their earlier post-marathon pain. The runners tended to have forgotten just how much pain they’d been in, and this was especially true if they’d been on an emotional high at the end of the marathon.

–Want to read more about the psychology of running? Check out this month’s cover feature at The Psychologist about psychologists who run and whether their experiences match the data: Minds run free.

–Image via Giphy.com

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oUkCOg

[vidovicart]

An Intricate Cross-Section of the Brain Depicted With Thousands of Layers of Gold Leaf

Self Reflected, 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The entire Self Reflected microetching under violet and white light. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Taking nearly two years to complete, artist and neuroscientist Dr. Greg Dunn, along with his collaborator Dr. Brian Edwards, have mapped the neurons in the brain for a series of images titled Self Reflected. Produced through a technique they call reflective microetching, the two cross-disciplinary artists track the neural choreography in the mind, creating brilliant images that glow with a metallic luminescence.

The works depict a thin slice of the human brain at 22x the normal scale, each created through a combination of hand drawing, neuroscientific data, algorithmic simulation of neural circuitry, photolithography, strategic lighting design, and 1,750 sheets of 22k gold leaf.

“My work is neonaturalist, art based on natural forms and influenced by scientific advancements that allows us to perceive the universe beyond human senses,” explains Dunn in his artist statement. “Neonaturalism harmonizes unfamiliar scientific imagery and techniques with an experimental artistic scaffolding.”

The first Self Reflected is on permanent view at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA. Fine art prints and microetchings can be purchased on Dunn’s website. You can watch the work twinkle as it engages with a light source in the short video below. (via My Modern Met)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The brainstem and cerebellum, regions that control basic body and motor functions. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The thalamus and basal ganglia, sorting senses, initiating movement, and making decisions. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected, 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The entire Self Reflected microetching under white light. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The visual cortex, the region located at the back of the brain that processes visual information.

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. Raw colorized microetching data from the reticular formation.

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The pons, a region involved in movement and implicated in consciousness. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The parietal gyrus where movement and vision are integrated. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The motor and parietal cortex, regions involved in movement and sensation, respectively. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The midbrain, an area that carries out diverse functions in reward, eye movement, hearing, attention, and movement. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The laminar structure of the cerebellum, a region involved in movement and proprioception (calculating where your body is in space).

[agosnesrerose]

An Intricate Cross-Section of the Brain Depicted With Thousands of Layers of Gold Leaf

Self Reflected, 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The entire Self Reflected microetching under violet and white light. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Taking nearly two years to complete, artist and neuroscientist Dr. Greg Dunn, along with his collaborator Dr. Brian Edwards, have mapped the neurons in the brain for a series of images titled Self Reflected. Produced through a technique they call reflective microetching, the two cross-disciplinary artists track the neural choreography in the mind, creating brilliant images that glow with a metallic luminescence.

The works depict a thin slice of the human brain at 22x the normal scale, each created through a combination of hand drawing, neuroscientific data, algorithmic simulation of neural circuitry, photolithography, strategic lighting design, and 1,750 sheets of 22k gold leaf.

“My work is neonaturalist, art based on natural forms and influenced by scientific advancements that allows us to perceive the universe beyond human senses,” explains Dunn in his artist statement. “Neonaturalism harmonizes unfamiliar scientific imagery and techniques with an experimental artistic scaffolding.”

The first Self Reflected is on permanent view at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA. Fine art prints and microetchings can be purchased on Dunn’s website. You can watch the work twinkle as it engages with a light source in the short video below. (via My Modern Met)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The brainstem and cerebellum, regions that control basic body and motor functions. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The thalamus and basal ganglia, sorting senses, initiating movement, and making decisions. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected, 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The entire Self Reflected microetching under white light. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The visual cortex, the region located at the back of the brain that processes visual information.

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. Raw colorized microetching data from the reticular formation.

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The pons, a region involved in movement and implicated in consciousness. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The parietal gyrus where movement and vision are integrated. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The motor and parietal cortex, regions involved in movement and sensation, respectively. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The midbrain, an area that carries out diverse functions in reward, eye movement, hearing, attention, and movement. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The laminar structure of the cerebellum, a region involved in movement and proprioception (calculating where your body is in space).

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An Intricate Cross-Section of the Brain Depicted With Thousands of Layers of Gold Leaf

Self Reflected, 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The entire Self Reflected microetching under violet and white light. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Taking nearly two years to complete, artist and neuroscientist Dr. Greg Dunn, along with his collaborator Dr. Brian Edwards, have mapped the neurons in the brain for a series of images titled Self Reflected. Produced through a technique they call reflective microetching, the two cross-disciplinary artists track the neural choreography in the mind, creating brilliant images that glow with a metallic luminescence.

The works depict a thin slice of the human brain at 22x the normal scale, each created through a combination of hand drawing, neuroscientific data, algorithmic simulation of neural circuitry, photolithography, strategic lighting design, and 1,750 sheets of 22k gold leaf.

“My work is neonaturalist, art based on natural forms and influenced by scientific advancements that allows us to perceive the universe beyond human senses,” explains Dunn in his artist statement. “Neonaturalism harmonizes unfamiliar scientific imagery and techniques with an experimental artistic scaffolding.”

The first Self Reflected is on permanent view at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA. Fine art prints and microetchings can be purchased on Dunn’s website. You can watch the work twinkle as it engages with a light source in the short video below. (via My Modern Met)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The brainstem and cerebellum, regions that control basic body and motor functions. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The thalamus and basal ganglia, sorting senses, initiating movement, and making decisions. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected, 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The entire Self Reflected microetching under white light. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The visual cortex, the region located at the back of the brain that processes visual information.

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. Raw colorized microetching data from the reticular formation.

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The pons, a region involved in movement and implicated in consciousness. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The parietal gyrus where movement and vision are integrated. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The motor and parietal cortex, regions involved in movement and sensation, respectively. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The midbrain, an area that carries out diverse functions in reward, eye movement, hearing, attention, and movement. (photo by Greg Dunn and Will Drinker)

Self Reflected (detail), 22K gilded microetching, 96″ X 130″, 2014-2016, Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards. The laminar structure of the cerebellum, a region involved in movement and proprioception (calculating where your body is in space).

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