Neuroscience of Awakening: Buddhist Brain

Asangoham, April 29, 2023; Eds., Wisdom Quarterly

The Neuroscience of Awakening: Your Brain on Buddhism

(Asangoham) Our brains have the amazing ability to change themselves. This is called neuroplasticity.

[The brain is not the mind. Mind is near the heart]

Our brains are not fixed structures. Rather, they are dynamic systems that are constantly changing and evolving in response to the environment.

In fact, research done in the last decade has shown that the brain is much more malleable and responsive to change than previously thought.

Neuroplasticity can occur at different levels of the brain, from the level of individual neurons to the level of entire brain regions.

One of the primary features of neuroplasticity is that it is activity-dependent. This means that the changes in the brain are driven by experiences and activities.

For example, if a person engages in a particular activity repeatedly, such as learning to play a musical instrument or practicing a new language, the brain will adapt to these experiences and develop new neural connections that support these activities.

Neuroplasticity also has important implications for understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain. If the brain can change and adapt in response to experiences, this means that our minds also can change and adapt.

But what do we mean when we say “mind”? What is a mind? The mind is nothing but thoughts. There is no mind without thoughts.

• [There is. Mind knows. Thought is the attempt to symbolize conceptualizations. According to the Abhidharma and verifiable personal experience, there were all these things before the brain. They exist independently.]

Therefore, because of the neuroplasticity of brains, we can radically change our thought patterns, or our minds. We can change our thought patterns to have happier or more beneficial minds.

But even more than this. We can also develop the capacity to slow or even stop thought completely by the activity of focusing attention on the emptiness or empty silence between thoughts.

Many religious and mystical traditions, including many schools of Buddhism, teach that it is this capacity to rest in the emptiness between thought that ultimately reveals the very nature of reality, and the reality of who we truly are.

#buddhism #neuroscience #awakening #buddha #spirituality

Script: Matt Mackane. Edit: Medo. Voiceover: Andrea Giordani. Music: Epidemic Music x Original. 

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Brain's potential explained by big new idea

(LiveScience.com) Different species and individuals have limits as to what they can learn. For instance, you can't teach your dog to read. But what sets these boundaries? According to a new hypothesis, components of an organism's brain cortex may help determine how well that organism, be it dog, monkey or human, learns and improves its cognitive skills.

The cortex is your brain's outer layer, the exterior part you can see if you look at a picture of the whole organ. The new idea posits that small sets of neuronal cells in the cortex, called cortical modules, determine our "cognitive plasticity," that is, our capacity to learn new ways of thinking, or improve upon old ones.

"What [constrains] an individual organisms' ability to learn cognitive skills is essentially the diversity and number of [cortical] modules they have," said Eduardo Mercado III, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. "So, if you think about it like a set of Legos, if you have more Legos, you can build a wider variety of things."

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Gender differences in Brain wiring

Neuron with branching brain cell connections (Image: iStockphoto)

Male/Female Brains Wired Differently, Small Study Suggests

DiscoverMagazine.com

A small study has found that the brains of men and women are wired differently in a region that is related to speech, memory, and hearing. Researchers studied the brain tissue from four men and four women who were all having a small portion of their brains excised as a treatment for epilepsy. They found that in the brain region called the temporal neocortex, men have a higher density of synapses, which are the connection points between brain cells.

For many years, scientists have searched for structural variations between men’s and women’s brains to explain psychological studies showing that, overall, the sexes think and act differently. Past studies found differences in brain mass and neuron density, but “they were hyped and untrustworthy,” [neuroscientist Edward] Jones says. This study is meticulously detailed, he notes. It is the first to show gender differences on such a fine scale — at the synapse [Science News].

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science [subscription required], was careful not to draw conclusions about what this structural difference might mean for brain function, and said that the higher number of synapses in men’s temporal neocortex did not indicate any overall advantage in intelligence. Study co-author Javier De Filipe said that the difference in synapses was “very consistent” and surprising, though he stressed that in other regions of the brain women may have more connections. Other work said that the anterior commissure, which connects several regions of the frontal and temporal lobes, is 12 per cent larger in women than in men, for example [Telegraph].

Some experts even suggested that the smaller number of synapses in the temporal neocortex of women might actually be an asset. “We know that the temporal cortex is involved in language processing, and that women and girls have a slight behavioral advantage in this area,” said [neuroscientist] James Booth…. “In this case ‘less may be more.’ In other words, fewer synapses to other regions may represent increasing specialization of the temporal cortex for language processing in females, and this may be related to their overall better performance on language tasks” [Bloomberg].