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You Really Are What You Know
jd writes "There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people's, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn't simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they're quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly."
To navigate a city looks like it was planned by throwing spaghetti at a wall and calling it a map.
Okay. Now I *really* feel sorry for Windows programmers/admins :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Great... I wasted my space in my head on Star Trek...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
" Even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much"
How is it that this is still passed around as fact. This idea is incredibly outdated.
Really? I watched several Republican Primary Debates, and I have to disagree with you...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If you have trained extensively in one area how long would it take to switch to something else?
Deleted
This is good news for you then, since it means that it's never too late to forget all that junk.
Despite all the papers written, tests, experiments etc, the truth is, people know and understand very little about the human brain.
My before and after MRI's show shrinking of several parts of my brain after I learned a lot about scotch!
Anyone who meditates effectively for any length of time can attest to the fact that the brain can change quite dramatically as a result of what you do with it. Things that I did not even know were possible have happened to me as a result of it, and not in a subtle way, either.
I think most of us know some nice, normal kid who has gone off to basic training and come back a different person. It's not just the steroids they inject them with either - military training has been perfected over the centuries to achieve this end.
Usually the change isn't temporary - I'd like to see a study of retired London cabbies; I bet they're good with navigation into old age.
Really? I watched several Republican Primary Debates, and I have to disagree with you...
Yes, you are the perfect example of someone whose thinking is stuck in the '60s. Good work!
An older article talked about the science of expertise.
Your brain will rewire itself if used at a repetitive task.
He still has a century on the people he's insulting, champ.
I have memorised a significant collection of porn sites over the years for "research". What happened to my brain?
How is it that this is still passed around as fact. This idea is incredibly outdated.
- it's because adult brains aren't supposed to change much.
You can't handle the truth.
The question is: How is the Brain of the people that study the Brain?
Related with the title, not the content of the article, probably there is very little of what is "you" that wasnt what you know or what you lived. Someone else that looked essentially like me (to not have different experiences based on looks) living exactly what i lived would probably think like me.
Well, neural plasticity does slow down considerably after early adulthood. I imagine you're responding to the theory that plasticity simply halted after childhood, which has been disproven many times. Neuroscience is a complex field that ties Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Neurology etc together. It's hard to make any lasting broad statements about the brain and how it works.
Wonder what before/after images of view a substantial amount of pr0n would reveal, besides over-development of the preferred wrist?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Absolutely. There's a recent study, done at Mass Gen, that shows adults who practice mindfulness medication, such as tai chi, benefit from measurable physical changes to their brain in as little as 8 weeks of 20min/day meditation. Even older adults. And these changes occur to the regions of the brain that are associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and dealing with stress.
I teach Chinese martial arts, including tai chi chuan, and love to point this out to my students.
By the way, tai chi is really good for tech types like programmers. It's fun and the martial arts aspects are extremely cool. You also get to use swords (long swords (jian) and broadswords (dao)) as well as staffs and spears. Tai chi also puts lead in your pencil, if you catch my drift.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Great... I wasted my space in my head on Star Trek...
Obligatory XKC... er, I mean "Married to the Sea".
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Maps and boundries were created when beer met felt tipped markers. Look and see !!!
I am pretty sure Humans do not have the equivalent of software that works on generic brain hardware. Skills come about by the brain being hard wired to do certain tasks and this has been known for a long time.
The real question here is why do cabby's still have to go though such a intensive training regiment when you could just install a GPS.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Tai chi also puts lead in your pencil, if you catch my drift.
Ah! Nod nod, wink wink! And ink in your pen? Nod nod, wink wink.
I bet Tai Chi would even put butter on my pretzel! Nod nod wink wink.
see how a moderator's brains don't change? Hard to teach the old dogs new tricks.
You can't handle the truth.
Isn't that what dreams are? That is, while you sleep, you brain breaks down synapses covering information/skills you don't use, and builds synapses to cover new information/skills you are using, and during that renovating synapses get fired, resulting in dreams. No?
Here's a link to the press release from Massachusetts General Hospital about the study I referred to above.
And shame on you for not taking my word for it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"... or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world)."
I don't know that rote memorization plays that big a part in it, rather I think it's more learning by doing thing. I would dare say that it's impossible to memorize a map of London without actually doing some driving and combining that map knowledge with other visuals such as landmarks, familiar sounds, etc.
I also think that alertness - not necessarily to the task of memorization, at least in the beginning of any learning stage, plays a part in it. When you're driving AND learning your way through streets, map knowledge is only one part of it. If you're alert, you're relying on other senses too.
I thought you just said you watched Republican Primate Debates... it must be getting late on this side of the Atlantic...
--frank[at]unternet.org
When I was in university taking CS, I took a number of Psych courses (liberal arts university). They taught quite a bit about neural plasticity (the brain changes to its environment/conditions), so be careful what you read, be careful what you think, because you are changing your brain. They had demos of people who lost balance due to inner ear damage, and how they used a mild electrical stimulus on the tongue (taste and balance are neighbors in the brain), to 're-wire' a persons brain to balance. A lady had suffered an accident several years before, was bed ridden, threw up if she ate too much, and her world was usually spinning (as if she was falling), due to the inner ear damage, but was otherwise normal. She came into the lab. Mild electrode/sensor on tongue, she stood up. They turned it on. Immediately the 'noise' in her ears went away, for the first time in 6 years. She could stand on her own to feet without holding onto something (again first time in 6 years). They kept it going for about 30 minutes. It lasted 4 hours after they stopped it. She begged them to return the next day. They insisted. The next day it lasted about 6 hours. Rinse, repeat. After 2 more weeks, she didn't need to go back at all for 3 months, and after the next time in the lab, they determined that 'she had her life back'. The brain re-wires itself on a moment by moment basis. Who you talk to, what you do, where you eat, what friends you have, where you work, holiday, drink, how you drive, school, your brain is a product of that.
This is old news and has been known by Neuroscience for a long time now...neurons move closer to other neurons based on how often certain movements and memories / thoughts are used so of course the makeup of your brain is going to be dependent on what you know and do on a consistent basis. There is nothing new about this discovery.
..... this is a really already know among memory athletes and is also told about in books about memory palaces!
one of them in a review where it is mentioned in:
http://www.forward.com/articles/136210/
I would advice a lot of people here to actualy (buy?) read that book! It is a nice start off!
Nudge, you mean, I think.
They deteriorate. That's change.
is Neuroscience? Pretty much it's all new. How do you feel about that?
--
These types of results have dubious statistical significance. I await the Journal of Irreproducible Results article.
I can just feel my head getting bigger.
No, the other one.
Have gnu, will travel.
Especially 4 Geeks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HofoK_QQxGc
He himself said that he had to struggle to a degree that he found hard to believe in the years he was at the patent office. and working on his theory.
Same thing with Hawking. He was a bright student, but not exceptional. Then he got ALS. He himself has said that the net effect of his disease has been to make his life immensely richer and he doubted that he would have achieved what he achieved if it had not happened.
Lots of anecdotal evidence of people coming back from strokes which left them paralyzed and unable to speak after very very much effort. Could that really all be the migration of functions to undamaged parts of the brain?
All thought is subtended by some biochemical process. It's not that surprising that along with changes located in the synapses and the density of the interconnectedness between neurons there are gross morphological ones in the form of either head count or size of neurons, or both.
You know if you've ever spent every day for years studying hard that you're in a place that other people just aren't, and problem solving- not to say specific problems- that seemed hard to you now seems like a walk in the park.
You also know that if you leave that behind and later look back at your work, it's shocking and depressing to see what you had once been capable of.
What does the song say?
When you're up, looks like a longs ways down..
When you're down, looks like a long way up...
It's all the same thing..No new tale to tell...
Mindfulness medication, such as tai chi? Am I to guess this is only legal in California and when prescribed by a registered physician?
The article is about f**ing meditation, not tai chi chuan.
Dummy, half of tai chi is meditation. Anybody who studies tai chi seriously spends as much time in various mindfulness meditations as he does in movement.
The standing meditation, usually in the horse posture, is the quintessential mindfulness meditation, and mindfulness meditation is exactly the kind of meditation that this study showed to have physical effects on the brain.
Yang Lu Chan said that when you look at the tai chi symbol, aka the "yin/yang" symbol, the light half represents the movements of the tai chi form, pushing hands, and weapons forms. The dark half of the symbol represents the tai chi meditation. Together, the represent balance. Together, they represent the whole - the Tao.
Anyone who does tai chi and does not practice meditation daily is not really practicing tai chi.
Now, in the words of the great 12th century master, Zhang San Feng, "Go fuck yourself".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Did I say "medication"? Aw geez, it's been a long day. It was our first snow here in Chicago, and my early flight this morning was really taxing.
I'm ready for bed now. Sorry about the "medication". Apparently, the salutary effect of mindfulness meditation on the human brain has not done quite enough for me yet.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Oh, that wouldn't be the 60's. That would be '58 Close though.
For every kid who wants to be a cabbie when he grows up, there's a bunch of grown-ups telling him, "Whale, aint you spacial
Very spacial indeed. It takes a very spacial person to successfully manage spatial problems.
Not really. The idea has a bunch of minor exceptions but good evidence that the adult brain can routinely significantly remodel itself is pretty new.
You are absolutely right, particularly as high-res MRI is extremely new and very limited. Almost all studies rely on either external observations or gross structural change that can be seen on the cheaper and commonplace MRIs, and of those it is exceedingly difficult to draw any sensible conclusion because of the sheer number of variables and the difficulty of knowing what is a cause and what is an effect - especially when you've a multitude of feedback loops that can turn one into the other.
Tests are also exceedingly hard to design well. The so-called "Mozart Effect" turned out to have an element of truth (listening to music you enjoy and listen to for a particular purpose will typically have that same effect any time you listen to it, even when it's not for that purpose) but not the effect that the original experimenters claimed (Mozart's music has no special properties beyond the one of being composed by Mozart).
IMHO, the best that can be said is that objective experimental data is more trustworthy than subjective experimental data, that multiple experiments to establish what is cause, what is effect and what is independent is absolutely essential, that science isn't about proving as much as falsifying, and that many groups should conduct overlapping but different experiments to eliminate error by flawed design. In this particular case, the first was done, the second can obviously go on forever but has been done to an extent, the third's a bit harder without analyzing the methods in depth, and the fourth hasn't happened but should.
For the plasticity, yes it's been known that plasticity doesn't stop after childhood, but this isn't simply the occasional neural connection forming, we're talking 14-20% growth in the hippocampus in adults. That's a hell of a lot. Yes, it's an area where neurogenesis happens, but that's... ...a lot. This third study in the series appears to have been aiming to determine if (a) there was growth and not just a lot of X-Men mutants becoming cabbies, and (b) that the growth was a function of the learning and not the experience after.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The study is interesting - I'm a bit bothered by the fact that the only information I can find is just rewordings of the press release, which states that there was "thickening" of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration (it later says they found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus plus decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala). The amounts are never mentioned, beyond it being observable (so it's a gross structural change and not a minor one - the hospital involved doesn't have an MRI powerful enough to see fine detail).
I'm convinced they've measured something, I'm willing to accept that they may have seen what they think they've seen, but I'm not willing to accept that their study proves anything more than a probable correlation, especially as the correlating was done via questionnaires (subjective data) rather than an objective measurement of brain response, participants reported meditation time (subjective data) rather than it being objectively measured, the statistical probability of getting the result by chance is higher than most disciplines would accept due to there being a small sample (the five sigma test applied in hard sciences requires that something could arise by chance 0.0000573303% of the time - here they didn't express their confidence limits at all which usually means they tested at the 5% level), the experiment contained many activities (so you can't isolate what had the effect) and no controls were in place to test similar but non-meditative techniques.
In short, I'd consider what you've linked to to be a superb piece of evidence that activity alters the gross structure, and evidence that follow-up research studying the relationship between mental exercise and neurological structure is needed, but in and of itself, it does not show what activity causes what structural change.
So, no, I would have to say that this study did not show mindful meditation had a physical effect on the brain, but it DID show that it is possible that it did. However, without the additional tests, you can't possibly tell whether it was the meditation, the mindfulness of it, some combination of factors in one of the other activities in the meditating group, or whether any relaxation technique would have worked in the same way. I have respect for Tai Chi, but there have been Buddhist Masters that have achieved Enlightenment by staring at a wall for 7 years. There wasn't even any paint drying. No way was that "mindful" and it certainly had no physical component, but it clearly had a major impact on the brain. Indeed, Zen Master Dogan (I truly recommend you look at the Shobogenzo if meditation and philosophy are your thing) argued that method, philosophy and specifics of practice were all immaterial, that those were essentially window-dressing, that a very few, very tiny core concepts were what mattered and the rest just gave it some form you could make use of but the rest otherwise doesn't matter at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No, he has Parkinson's.
Exactly, especially on the scale we're talking here (14-20% growth of the hippocampus). That's major remodeling. Most tests prior to the popularization of MRI would have been subjective simply because patients don't generally like doctors to saw their brains open. Even with MRI becoming widely available, it's not cheap - particularly at adequate resolution - and it's time-intensive, which limits the projects that can use it. The methodology can also be a bit slipshod at times and the popular practice of not actually doing original work but merely doing analysis on a compilation of previous studies means that errors in methods can be magnified.
It doesn't help that in 2009, 33.7% of scientists who responded admitted questionable practices with almost 2% admitting outright fraud and falsification of results. That's a lot, especially as the majority of those carrying out fraud are unlikely to have admitted it. That means that one-off, unrepeated studies should not be trusted over a third of the time merely for scientific malpractice. That's ignoring misinterpreted results, errors in the experiment, errors resulting from the statistical nature of science, or any other such innocent factor. The innocent reasons are significant enough that nobody should trust unrepeated/unrepeatable experiments, the malpractice wallops the number of studies needed and the rigour of those studies right up. Which means even where there appears to be good evidence of brain redesign, you have to be a lot more wary until there's solid confirmation from others.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Most of us knew one or two of those people in college/university. They look at a whiteboard full of difficult content, note it down once without ornamentation, never rewrite their notes, maybe read through the night before an exam and then regurgitate the lot perfectly. They get called brilliant. We tell ourselves that it's not the same skill necessarily as inspired creative problem solving though they usually seem to be good at that too, so maybe they are brilliant.
I was friends with and studied alongside one of these creatures (he became a Rhodes scholar) so I observed his techniques. I became a straight A student myself that year partly from that. He had honed his learning skills, intentionally or not, all of his life. He had genuine interest in the material (except Comp Sci which he hated while getting A++ grades), and was ambitious, competitive and extremely motivated, even when appearing to be half asleep. He was a good classical pianist (correlates with high IQ) and basketball player (so was fit), and never wasted time. No mindless boozing or bonging, it was wholesome-vomitus Christian Youth Group for him once per week. He could solve problems or find where to go for a solution when no-one else could. When an exam required answering three out of five questions perfectly for a 100% score, he would answer all five in the time it took me to answer three. In short, he was a rare talent and knew everything. When a key reference work was unavailable in English, he read both volumes in French. I later met students who also had so-called "photographic memories" but none were as sharp as him. To add insult to injury, he was handsome.
By observing him I learned some very important things. (1) He had no fear of apparent complexity. Most people's brains freak when presented with a dense page of abstruse symbols. Something inside says "It's too hard" and "I hate this" and "I can't understand" - and they can't and they don't. I tried to relax while looking at complex material so I could get to the meaning instead of the fear. If I didn't get it then I'd ask questions and work it through it later. Even when this only half works your grades go up hugely and you start to enjoy it. (2) He could do working in his head, jumping ahead two lines in a proof. This skill is hard to cultivate. (3) He worked damn hard, really hard, but highly efficiently, reading through things but never re-writing. I admit I had to re-write things, that was the only way I was sure I knew the work. I think with enough practice and cleaner living I might have got this skill eventually though.
That's quite enough, if you also consider the (casual) human trials that have been going on for a millennium, involving billions of participants.
I know I'm the one who took the bait, but it's interesting that the standard for us can only be a series of studies, published in English, for any evidence. One does not need studies to understand that if you practice the piano, you will improve at playing the piano, or if you train you will get better.
I do this to myself too often. Probably because I was an academic for so many years. I try to make a case instead of simply letting the tradition speak for itself. I've still got a lot to learn.
I don't know what Enlightenment is. I started practicing tai chi years ago after chemotherapy ripped my body to shreds, including a startling reduction in cognition and balance because of the neurotoxic effects of the chemo. I was just hoping to gain back a little bit of function, I didn't expect to find the treasures I did and I certainly never expected to get good enough to teach several of the internal Chinese martial arts (hsing i, baguazhang). But understand, I have enormous respect for Zen meditation. I just really enjoy moving around.
And like Cheng Man-ch'ing said, if I'm ever meditating alongside Shobogenzo monk, and we happen to be attacked by a bandit, I'll be able to defend myself and the monk without breaking my meditation. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
I absolutely believe that. Although, in the case I described above, it certainly would matter to the bandit.
Hey, jd, thank you for correcting me so gently and with obvious kindness. My hot head is often my shame. You did what my teacher, Hsu Fun Yuen does, he teaches by example. Really, thank you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Firstly, a study with 16 participants is interesting, and can generate hypotheses, but nothing more than that.
Secondly, it seems the controls were simply non-intervention. How do we know whether it was meditation, relaxation or simply learning something new that had that effect if it is not controlled for? The senior author even says:"This study demonstrates that [...] people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing." It does no such thing, they haven't controlled for it!
Thirdly, I particularly like the part of "Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. ". Ah, yes, we didn't find any effect, but if we had just kept on longer, I'm sure we would have! A beautiful example of special pleading. Do the test for longer and see if there is a difference, until then we can only state that we haven't seen an effect yet.
Really, they have a center for mindfulness, and they produce this kind of bullshit? Talk about cargo cult science.
Of course, none of this says anything bad about tai chi, which I am sure is fun and relaxing, and relaxation is something most people could do with more of.
That's quite enough, if you also consider the (casual) human trials that have been going on for a millennium, involving billions of participants. [...] it's interesting that the standard for us can only be a series of studies, published in English, for any evidence.
The plural of anecdote is not evidence. The whole point of science is that we have learned the hard way that we are very adept at fooling ourselves, so we need to make absolutely sure that that is not what we are doing. In essence, that is all science is: A toolbox of techniques that let us examine something without falling into the traps our own minds set out for us. There is nothing wrong with meditating if that makes you feel better (at the very least, mediation is relaxing, and who couldn't use some more of that?), but if you want to know whether it does more than make you feel good, you need to be very careful not to fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. (with apologies to Richard Feynmann).
As an ex-academic, I'm very sympathetic to this idea. I've been involved for the past year in a project to get the hundreds of studies, including double-blind, that have been done in China, Taiwan, and Japan translated into English. At the same time, history is anecdotal. Decade-long studies are very hard to do and (naturally) take a long time. It would be foolish to ignore the evidence that we have in front of us because it is informal or empirical.
Be careful not to have too narrow a view of evidence. "Evidence" means one thing to a scientist and another to a historian (and another to an engineer).
And don't forget that Isaac Newton was an alchemist, who applied the same rigor to his alchemy that he did to his physics. And the meaning of "alchemy" is not what most people think.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As an ex-academic, I'm very sympathetic to this idea. I've been involved for the past year in a project to get the hundreds of studies, including double-blind, that have been done in China, Taiwan, and Japan translated into English.
It is a travesty that non-english articles are not used more. So much work is being replicated simply because people doesn't take the effort to read Japanese or German. That being said, the quality of research from China have been found lacking in quite a lot of cases, to a higher degree than the same can be said about research from western countries or Japan, so a certain reservation is to be expected. This is particularly true for research aobut subjects originating in the East. For example, the proportion of Chinese studies about acupuncture with postive findings is much higher than the same proportion for studies done in the West. This is pretty damning when the state of the best evidence we have is that acupuncture doesn't work.
It would be foolish to ignore the evidence that we have in front of us because it is informal or empirical.
I'm not saying we should disregard it, but it isn't useful for much more than generating the hypothesis we should test. It simply doesn't have the controls we need to make sure it holds water. After all, bloodletting has a much longer documented history than meditation, so if we use history as a guide, we should perform that in our hospitals.
And don't forget that Isaac Newton was an alchemist, who applied the same rigor to his alchemy that he did to his physics..
He was perfectly scientific about what he published about alchemy: He couldn't reproduce the findings of others, so he didn't publish anything. I don't really see the relevance?
Or, it could be that China has better acupuncturists. But I agree.
Why should we test? What do you believe is the purpose of testing hypotheses when it comes to an art? It seems much more about the anal nature of the West that believes nothing is of value unless its validated by double-blind studies, and that such a standard should be applied to philosophy. At the same time, we have thousands of commenters right here at Slashdot who call themselves "Libertarians" and believe we should live in a more "libertarian" way despite the fact that there has never in human history been a society that has been successful using such principles. We devalue intuition, when humans are uniquely intuitive creatures.
If we're talking about a drug that someone's going to sell to cure a disease, by all means it should not go forward without thorough testing. If we're talking about an integrative practice that engages the interaction of body and mind, encompassing the higher functions of the mind (sense of beauty, balance) with the lower function of the body (breathing, stepping, pushing and pulling) what do you believe a test is going to do for you?
Yet, it's something that can be proven in a direct, person to person way. Give me three months and a relatively open mind and your blood pressure will normalize to about the extent of a first-line hypertension drug. If you're overweight, you'll lose weight despite never breaking a sweat. You'll sleep better and have a better mood. More energy. It's never failed. And for you, sFurbo, because you have replied to me without the anger or aggression of pop skeptics, I will teach you for free.
The best part is that it works whether or not you "believe in it". Oh, and you'll also be more able to defend yourself.
I know this the same way I know that if I practice the piano, I will play the piano better than if I do not, despite never having read a study about such published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Are you joking? Newton published quite a bit of his alchemical research. There are two major collections of his extensive work on the topic, one done by the National Science Foundation which I believe is called "The Chymistry of Isaac Newton" and another published by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Board, which is called "The Newton Project" and contains his experimental alchemical notebooks. I'm pretty sure you can find both collections online. You've got to be careful though, because some of that stuff is in various codes and is allusory because of Newton's reasonable fear of persecution by the Church.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not a problem. You'll probably have noticed I can be a bit short with people from time to time, but you'll also have noticed that often those people aren't interested in discussion or understanding but hostility. Nothing wrong with whacking bandits over the head with a big stick. However, people like yourself are interested in understanding and there's everything wrong with whacking people like you over the head with a big stick.
The concept of "Enlightenment" is poorly defined, but ultimately seems to be a permanent shift in the way the brain functions. The structural changes accumulate over time, producing some change in your ability to function, but you appear to eventually reach some sort of tipping point where the function changes dramatically and over a very short time. It's like the dramatic shifts you can get in a chaotic system, when the system leaps from one strange attractor to another. Indeed, that may well be what it is, as Buddhist texts do say that Enlightenment can occur at almost any time under almost any condition. You don't practice X amount and then become Enlightened, it's much less predictable than that.
As to what the change is, that's also poorly defined but appears to be a permanent, unstoppable state that is akin to meditation but may actually be a lot deeper than that. Experts in the field of neurology have not, in my opinion, studied meditation or Enlightenment nearly enough to be able to say. The image I've picked up over time is that meditating is akin to a software algorithm for noise reduction and Enlightenment is akin to starting with error-free, noise-free senses in the first place.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Leeches turn out to be extremely useful for very specific classes of localized problem, which is basically a form of semi-controlled bloodletting, and those are sometimes used in Western hospitals. What we've done is used history to identify what works and what doesn't ("evidence-based medicine"), which seems to be a very good way to utilize history's lessons.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For me, the distinction between the arts and science is a non-starter. I firmly believe in the Neo-Classical notion that they're merely two sides of one coin and that it is the coin that is important and not the side. Thus, all arts may be tested (or enhanced) by science and all sciences may be advanced through the arts. I disagree with Neo-Classicists on some details, especially the idea of there being a few "elect" cultures, but holistic approaches to understanding seem better than deconstructional understanding.
(In fact, because of the complexity of the interactions between different subjects, I'm not convinced it is possible to understand anything substantial without having some grounding in essentially everything. Inter-disciplinary interactions are an oft-neglected field in our modern, segmented society, but it's where the interesting stuff is.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's terrific. Just so you know, I intend to use that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Feel free.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe this is the first time it's been tested academically, but I recall just this test (before and after MRIs) being done on drivers learning the "Knowledge" (the training London cabbies must complete before becoming a cabbie) as part of a documentary produced several years ago... Hardly news.
Hippocampus is special. It has stem cells to form new brain cells, probably temporarily in order to consolidate memory. It may shrink during stress and depression and then grow again later. This is quite unique in the brain, and one should not generalize about the rest of the brain from this special case.
I knew I should have used burning women at the stake as an example in stead. They haven't found a way that helps against epidemics, have they? ;-)
Well, we have used history to guide which experiments to do, and the experiments to tell us what works and what doesn't. So that is close to what I suggested above.
You should be modded through the roof. Doubt it'll happen though. I'm used to seeing self-promoting quacks getting publicity while rational responses flounder in obscurity, but I used to expect better than that from slashdot.