Mri Brain Quotes

Human beings don’t deal well with rejection. Back when our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, being ostracized from a tribe was akin to a death sentence. For that reason, rejection is experienced by human beings as being incredibly painful. Studies using functional MRI have shown the same areas of the brain become activated both during rejection and during real physical pain.

For that reason, rejection is experienced by human beings as being incredibly painful. Studies using functional MRI have shown the same areas of the brain become activated both during rejection and during real physical pain.

When you put a kid who had experienced adversity in an MRI machine, you could see measurable changes to the brain structures.

Just like we need food and water, humans need each other. A brain study revealed that when placed in an MRI, a patient's reward center lit up when another person sat in the room. Neurons fire when talk to someone, think about someone, and they go haywire when we hold someone's hand. Our brains and bodies are actually programmed to seek each other out and connect. So then why do so many people prefer being alone? Why do we often run for the hills when we feel the slightest connection? Why we do we feel compelled to fight what we're hardwired to do? Maybe it's because when we find someone or something to hold on to, that feeling becomes like air. And we're terrified we're going to lose it. And trust me, you can get pretty good at the alone thing. But most things are better when they're shared with someone else.

Once you get the hang of it, the practice can create just enough space in your head so that when you get angry or annoyed, you are less likely to take the bait and act on it. There’s even science to back this up—an explosion of new research, complete with colorful MRI scans, demonstrating that meditation can essentially rewire your brain.

Like the invention of the telescope, the introduction of MRI machines and a variety of advanced brain scans

In an fMRI brain-scan experiment, researchers at Princeton University found that neural resonance disappears when people communicate poorly. The researchers could predict how well people were communicating by observing how much their brains were aligned. And they discovered that people who paid the most attention—good listeners—could actually anticipate what the speaker was about to say before he said it.

In response to an article in the New York times that claimed from an fMRI study that 'a mother's impulse to love and protect her child appears to be hard-wired into her brain' one neuro-curmudgeon put out a plea to 'take experience and learning seriously. Just because you see a response [in the brain] — you don't get to claim it's hard-wired.

Using MRI scans, scientists can now read thoughts circulating in our brains. Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer.

(The research on the development of the first MRI scanners was performed by the British company EMI, financed in large part from their profits on Beatles records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” might well have been titled “I Want to Scan Your Brain.”)

You can see the proof in an MRI scan of someone presented with political opinions that conflict with her own. The brain scans of a person shown statements that oppose her political stance show that the highest areas of the cortex, the portions responsible for providing rational thought, get less blood until another statement is presented that confirms her beliefs. Your brain literally begins to shut down when you feel your ideology is threatened. Try it yourself. Watch a pundit you hate for fifteen minutes. Resist the urge to change the channel. Don’t complain to the person next to you. Don’t get online and rant. Try to let it go. You will find this is excruciatingly difficult.

Neuroscientists have determined the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with decision making and cost-benefit assessments. If MRI brain scans had been performed on my friends and me one summer’s night when we were fifteen, they would have revealed a dark spot indicating a complete absence of activity in this region of our brains.

The MRI shows a mass in your brain, which is causing your symptoms.” Silence. “Do you want to see the MRI?” “Yes.

different parts of the brain as it thinks. By tracing the path taken by our thoughts, MRI scans have shed new light into the nature of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, and a host of other mental diseases.

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.

Months later, I learned that what happened that first day at restorative yoga hadn’t been entirely spiritual—I hadn’t just found the exact spot on the astral plane to tap into my sacred core. Instead, my instructor’s techniques happened to be the perfect mechanism to turn down my DMN. The default mode network is so-called because if you put people in an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in our brain that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego. So if you’re stuck in a machine for an hour, where does your mind go? If you’re like most people, you’ll ruminate on the past or plan your future. You might think about your relationships, upcoming errands, your zits. And scientists have found that some people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or C-PTSD have overactive DMNs. Which makes sense. The DMN is the seat of responsibility and insecurity. It can be a punishing force when it over-ruminates and gets caught in a toxic loop of obsession and self-doubt. The DMN can be silenced significantly by antidepressants or hallucinogenic substances. But the most efficient cure for an overactive DMN is mindfulness. Here’s how it works: In order for the DMN to start whirring, it needs resources to fuel its internal focus. If you’re intently focused on something external—like, say, filling out a difficult math worksheet—the brain simply doesn’t have the resources to focus internally and externally at the same time. So if you’re triggered, you can short-circuit an overactive DMN by cutting off its power source—shifting all of your brain’s energy to external stimuli instead.

Using MRI scans, we have since looked deep into the brains of participants to see where those memories are being retrieved from before sleep relative to after sleep. It turns out that those information packets were being recalled from very different geographical locations within the brain at the two different times.

I once asked a neuroscientist, “What’s the difference between consciousness and dreaming?” “Very little,” he told me. “In fact,” he said, “if you look at an MRI, at the actual brain processes that are happening when you are dreaming and when you are awake, they look almost identical. Only a practiced neuroscientist can tell the difference.” What

The impulse to form group identities and favor in-group members has a neurological basis. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have scanned people’s brains while conducting experiments similar to the one just described. Their findings, as one writer puts it, suggest that: “group identification is both innate and almost immediate.

From countless studies of MRI scans of healthy adolescents and twentysomethings, we now know that the frontal lobe does not finish wiring up until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty. What this means is that, in our twenties, the quick, hot, impulsive, pleasure-seeking, emotional brain is ready to go, while the slow, cool, rational, forward-thinking frontal lobe is still a work in progress.

When arbitrary groups were created (such as by flipping a coin) immediately before the subject entered the MRI machine, and the hand being pricked was labeled as belonging to the same arbitrary group as the participant, even though the group hadn’t even existed just moments earlier, the participant’s brain still showed a larger spike.28 We just don’t feel as much empathy for those we see as “other.” The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism.

Antidepressants fail to outperform placebos in up to half of clinical trials. Armed with fMRI technology, brain scientists now understand that assuming we are born with chemical imbalances is putting the chicken before the egg—trauma changes the structure and chemical and hormonal responses of our brains. In many cases, we can’t just pump opposing chemicals into our brains with the assumption that things will change. We have to treat the underlying, original cause: the trauma.

Research shows that practices like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state. In fact, functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans confirm this,23 showing tangible evidence that consistent consciousness practices actually thicken the prefrontal lobes, the area where our conscious awareness actually lives. Other forms of compassion-based meditation (or just closing your eyes and thinking about someone you love) help strengthen an area called the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. All of this work helps to rewire our brain, disrupt our default thought patterns, and wake us up out of our subconscious-driven autopilot. From this foundation of consciousness we can then begin to witness the conditioned patterns in our thoughts, beliefs, and relationships. This honest self awareness shows us our pathway towards change and ultimately healing.

The brain, you see, is not a computer, despite oft-repeated claims to the contrary. The brain is a living thing, much more like an overgrown garden than an orderly filing cabinet. And mind-wandering through your own garden of thoughts, memories, feelings, and desires is a sure way to discover your inner creative self. Science backs this up. Mind wandering is directly linked to enhanced creativity. The more your mind wanders, the greater the connections seen between far-flung areas of the brain on MRI exams. Daydreamers are not only more creative, they’ve even been shown to be smarter on certain tests,

This preference was vividly demonstrated in a recent fMRI study in which researchers showed seventeen Americans and seventeen Japanese pictures of men in dominance poses (arms crossed, muscles bulging, legs planted squarely on the ground) and subordinate positions (shoulders bent, hands interlocked protectively over groin, legs squeezed together tight). They found that the dominant pictures activated pleasure centers in the American brains, while the submissive pictures did the same for the Japanese. From a Western perspective, it can be hard to see what’s so attractive about submitting to the will of others. But what looks to a Westerner like subordination can seem like basic politeness to many Asians.

Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information—the bad news—more memorable than positive information—or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala—the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: “Why did my boss say that? Why doesn’t my boss like me?” Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed.

Eventually, though, my mind begins to quiet. I can feel everything slow down. I lose track of the chimes. I don’t know how many are left, and I don’t care. I focus now on a very modern kind of image: a picture of my own brain, like an fMRI, with thoughts flashing across it in angry red. As my mind slows, the red fades, and as my concentration increases, my brain begins to glow faintly white. Another unbidden thought; another trace of red that recedes like an afterimage. If it goes really well, the glow continues, and I feel the sort of exhilaration that comes when hard effort is paying off—when you reach the end of the steep trail, stand at a peak, and can see miles in every direction. But some part of me is careful not to enjoy it too much or too consciously. If I focus on it, it disappears. To sustain it, I have to just be present with it. Whether

The fact that early languages, no matter how many there are, utilize the same streams implies that the brain doesn't have a native language. The brain can only reflect the fact that a set of neural circuits was built and activated for a certain period of time. Nor does the brain care if those neural circuits map onto things that the rest of the world calls languages or dialects. It really cares only about what activates those circuits. Thus, the brain patters that typify language use across skill levels can be mapped. Brain imaging technology monitors the intensity of oxygen use around the brain - higher oxygen use represents higher energy use by cells burning glucose. The deeply engrained language circuits will create dim MRI images, because they are working efficiently, requiring less glucose overall. More recently acquired languages, as well as those used less frequently, would make neural circuits shine more brightly, because they require more brain cells, thus more glucose.

Adults can distinguish race from very minimal clues. Stanford researchers showed subjects just the front slices of plain, black profiles—the face from forehead to chin, without the hair. Subjects could tell the race of the profile (80 percent of the time) more often than they could tell the sex (70 percent), or the age within 10 years (68 percent). Race is commonly equated with skin color, but all the profiles were black. It is obviously important for adults to tell the sexes apart, but they were even better at telling races apart. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to determine that what is called the fusiform region of the brain may be associated with the other-race effect. The fusiform region is involved in expert appraisal. In a bird-watcher’s brain, for example, the region lights up at the sight of a bird. All people have considerable expertise in recognizing human faces, but MRI scans show greater fusiform activity—expert appraisal activity—when they are looking at faces of their own race.

Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate.

MRI testing again shows what may be the underlying brain mechanism. The amygdalae are two small lobes in the brain associated with fear, arousal, and emotions. When they are active, it is thought to be a sign of vigilance, meaning that the brain is wary and wants more information. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that when subjects looked at photographs of faces—half were white, half were black—MRI scans found high amygdala activity. This was considered to be a normal reaction to unfamiliar faces. When the subjects looked at the photographs a second time the faces were more familiar; only the other-race faces continued to provoke high amygdala activity. This was true for both blacks and whites, suggesting that encounters with people of different races keep the brain at a higher level of watchfulness. Amygdalae notice race even when a person does not. William A. Cunningham of Ohio State University showed white subjects pictures of faces for only 30 milliseconds—not long enough for the subjects to be conscious of them—but black faces triggered greater amygdala activity than white faces. When he showed faces for a half a second—long enough for people to notice race—he found that black faces prompted greater activity in the pre-frontal areas, a part of the brain associated with detecting internal conflicts and controlling conscious behavior. This suggested the subjects were trying to suppress certain feelings about blacks. Steven Neuberg of Arizona State University attributes instinctive bias to evolution during our hunter-gatherer past. “By nature, people are group-living animals—a strategy that enhances individual survival and leads to what we might call a ‘tribal psychology’, ” he says. “It was adaptive for our ancestors to be attuned to those outside the group who posed threats such as to physical security, health or economic resources.

Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum. One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust. Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated. The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.

To test these ideas, Dr. Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal recruited a group of fifteen Carmelite nuns who agreed to put their heads into an MRI machine. To qualify for the experiment, all of them must “have had an experience of intense union with God.” Originally, Dr. Beauregard had hoped that the nuns would have a mystical communion with God, which could then be recorded by an MRI scan. However, being shoved into an MRI machine, where you are surrounded by tons of magnetic coils of wire and high-tech equipment, is not an ideal setting for a religious epiphany. The best they could do was to evoke memories of previous religious experiences. “God cannot be summoned at will,” explained one of the nuns. The final result was mixed and inconclusive, but several regions of the brain clearly lit up during this experiment: •  The caudate nucleus, which is involved with learning and possibly falling in love. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling the unconditional love of God?) •  The insula, which monitors body sensations and social emotions. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling close to the other nuns as they were reaching out to God?) •  The parietal lobe, which helps process spatial awareness. (Perhaps the nuns felt they were in the physical presence of God?) Dr. Beauregard had to admit that so many areas of the brain were activated, with so many different possible interpretations, that he could not say for sure whether hyperreligiosity could be induced. However, it was clear to him that the nuns’ religious feelings were reflected in their brain scans. But did this experiment shake the nuns’ belief in God? No. In fact, the nuns concluded that God placed this “radio” in the brain so that we could communicate with Him. Their conclusion was that God created humans to have this ability, so the brain has a divine antenna given to us by God so that we can feel His presence. David Biello concludes, “Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them.” Dr. Beauregard concluded, “If you are an atheist and you live a certain kind of experience, you will relate it to the magnificence of the universe. If you are a Christian, you will associate it with God. Who knows. Perhaps they are the same thing.” Similarly, Dr. Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford University and an outspoken atheist, was once placed in the God helmet to see if his religious beliefs would change. They did not. So in conclusion, although hyperreligiosity may be induced via temporal lobe epilepsy and even magnetic fields, there is no convincing evidence that magnetic fields can alter one’s religious views.

As the subject watches the movies, the MRI machine creates a 3-D image of the blood flow within the brain. The MRI image looks like a vast collection of thirty thousand dots, or voxels. Each voxel represents a pinpoint of neural energy, and the color of the dot corresponds to the intensity of the signal and blood flow. Red dots represent points of large neural activity, while blue dots represent points of less activity. (The final image looks very much like thousands of Christmas lights in the shape of the brain. Immediately you can see that the brain is concentrating most of its mental energy in the visual cortex, which is located at the back of the brain, while watching these videos.) Gallant’s MRI machine is so powerful it can identify two to three hundred distinct regions of the brain and, on average, can take snapshots that have one hundred dots per region of the brain. (One goal for future generations of MRI technology is to provide an even sharper resolution by increasing the number of dots per region of the brain.) At first, this 3-D collection of colored dots looks like gibberish. But after years of research, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues have developed a mathematical formula that begins to find relationships between certain features of a picture (edges, textures, intensity, etc.) and the MRI voxels. For example, if you look at a boundary, you’ll notice it’s a region separating lighter and darker areas, and hence the edge generates a certain pattern of voxels. By having subject after subject view such a large library of movie clips, this mathematical formula is refined, allowing the computer to analyze how all sorts of images are converted into MRI voxels. Eventually the scientists were able to ascertain a direct correlation between certain MRI patterns of voxels and features within each picture. At this point, the subject is then shown another movie trailer. The computer analyzes the voxels generated during this viewing and re-creates a rough approximation of the original image. (The computer selects images from one hundred movie clips that most closely resemble the one that the subject just saw and then merges images to create a close approximation.) In this way, the computer is able to create a fuzzy video of the visual imagery going through your mind. Dr. Gallant’s mathematical formula is so versatile that it can take a collection of MRI voxels and convert it into a picture, or it can do the reverse, taking a picture and then converting it to MRI voxels. I had a chance to view the video created by Dr. Gallant’s group, and it was very impressive. Watching it was like viewing a movie with faces, animals, street scenes, and buildings through dark glasses. Although you could not see the details within each face or animal, you could clearly identify the kind of object you were seeing. Not only can this program decode what you are looking at, it can also decode imaginary images circulating in your head.

Recently, brain scans of schizophrenics taken while they were having auditory hallucinations have helped explain this ancient disorder. For example, when we silently talk to ourselves, certain parts of the brain light up on an MRI scan, especially in the temporal lobe (such as in Wernicke’s area). When a schizophrenic hears voices, the very same areas of the brain light up. The brain works hard to construct a consistent narrative, so schizophrenics try to make sense of these unauthorized voices, believing they originate from strange sources, such as Martians secretly beaming thoughts into their brains. Dr. Michael Sweeney of Ohio State writes, “Neurons wired for the sensation of sound fire on their own, like gas-soaked rags igniting spontaneously in a hot, dark garage. In the absence of sights and sounds in the surrounding environment, the schizophrenic’s brain creates a powerful illusion of reality.” Notably, these voices seem to be coming from a third party, who often gives the subject commands, which are mostly mundane but sometimes violent. Meanwhile, the simulation centers in the prefrontal cortex seem to be on automatic pilot, so in a way it’s as though the consciousness of a schizophrenic is running the same sort of simulations we all do, except they’re done without his permission. The person is literally talking to himself without his knowledge. HALLUCINATIONS The mind constantly generates hallucinations of its own, but for the most part they are easily controlled. We see images that don’t exist or hear spurious sounds, for example, so the anterior cingulate cortex is vital to distinguish the real from the manufactured. This part of the brain helps us distinguish between stimuli that are external and those that are internally generated by the mind itself. However, in schizophrenics, it is believed that this system is damaged, so that the person cannot distinguish real from imaginary voices. (The anterior cingulate cortex is vital because it lies in a strategic place, between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The link between these two areas is one of the most important in the brain, since one area governs rational thinking, and the other emotions.) Hallucinations, to some extent, can be created on demand. Hallucinations occur naturally if you place someone in a pitch-black room, an isolation chamber, or a creepy environment with strange noises. These are examples of “our eyes playing tricks on us.” Actually, the brain is tricking itself, internally creating false images, trying to make sense of the world and identify threats. This effect is called “pareidolia.” Every time we look at clouds in the sky, we see images of animals, people, or our favorite cartoon characters. We have no choice. It is hardwired into our brains. In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy.

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment.1 Although we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are. I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.2 Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made.3 More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.4 These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it. The distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

For all brain tumors, definitive diagnosis can only be made by surgery with pathological examination of tissue. MRI or CT scans or other images may suggest the tumor type, but they are not definitive.

People sometimes ask what it’s like to be a surgeon who works with the living human brain each day. I think sometimes it’s like being Harry Potter—a wizard who has at his command such wonderful technologies as an MRI machine that lets us image the tissue as we remove the tumor, or a global positioning system that lets us navigate through the brain, or an operating microscope that magnifies objects forty times and lets us do very precise surgery. More often, however, it’s like Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings, trying to fulfill a quest against an unknown evil, surrounded by friends and working teams and helped by a little magic. You often feel vulnerable and frightened, despite a brave exterior.

Shortly after Carhart-Harris published his results in a 2012 paper in PNAS (“Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin”*), Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale* who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin’s looked remarkably alike. The transcendence of self reported by expert meditators showed up on fMRIs as a quieting of the default mode network. It appears that when activity in the default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes, and the usual boundaries we experience between self and world, subject and object, all melt away.

When Ruth looked at the scans of her normal subjects, she found activation of DSN regions that previous researchers had described. I like to call this the Mohawk of self-awareness, the midline structures of the brain, starting out right above our eyes, running through the center of the brain all the way to the back. All these midline structures are involved in our sense of self. The largest bright region at the back of the brain is the posterior cingulate, which gives us a physical sense of where we are—our internal GPS. It is strongly connected to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the watchtower I discussed in chapter 4. (This connection doesn’t show up on the scan because the fMRI can’t measure it.) It is also connected with brain areas that register sensations coming from the rest of the body: the insula, which relays messages from the viscera to the emotional centers; the parietal lobes, which integrate sensory information; and the anterior cingulate, which coordinates emotions and thinking.

In 2010 I underwent a series of MRI scans at the University of Utah. One finding was particularly gratifying. Remember that when I pointed out the size difference in my ventricles to the researchers after my first MRI, back in 1987, they told me that some asymmetry in the brain was to be expected? Well, the University of Utah study showed that my left ventricle is 57 percent longer than my right. That’s huge. In the control subjects, the difference between left and right was only 15 percent.

And recent fMRI research has begun to produce evidence that inflammation of the body can have a direct causal effect on the human brain and mood.

In 1968, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott conducted a famous experiment with her students in the days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She divided the class by eye color. The brown-eyed children were told they were better. They were the “in-group.” The blue-eyed children were told they were less than the brown-eyed children—hence becoming the “out-group.” Suddenly, former classmates who had once played happily side by side were taunting and torturing one another on the playground. Lest we assign greater morality to the “out-group,” the blue-eyed children were just as quick to attack the brown-eyed children once the roles were reversed.6 Since Elliott’s experiment, researchers have conducted thousands of studies to understand the in-group/out-group response. Now, with fMRI scans, these researchers can actually see which parts of our brains fire up when perceiving a member of an out-group. In a phenomenon called the out-group homogeneity effect, we are more likely to see members of our groups as unique and individually motivated—and more likely to see a member of the out-group as the same as everyone else in that group. When we encounter this out-group member, our amygdala—the part of our brain that processes anger and fear—is more likely to become active. The more we perceive this person outside our group as a threat, the more willing we are to treat them badly.

The notion that electromagnetic energy exists as discrete packets of energy rather than a continuous stream became the foundation on which physicists erected what is inarguably the most successful (and strangest) theory in the history of science. The laws of quantum physics not only replicate all the successes of the classical theory they supplanted (that is, a quantum calculation produces an answer at least as accurate as a classical one in problems ranging from the fall of an apple to the flight of a spaceship). They also succeed where the laws of classical physics fail. It is quantum physics, not classical physics, that explains the burning of stars, accounts for the structure of elementary particles, predicts the order of elements in the periodic table, and describes the physics of the newborn universe. Although devised to explain atomic and electromagnetic phenomena, quantum physics has “yielded a deep understanding of chemistry and the solid state,” noted the physicist Daniel Greenberger, a leading quantum theorist: quantum physics spawned quantum technologies, including transistors, lasers, semiconductors, light-emitting diodes, scans, PET scans, and MRI machines.

I have to go now, Nae. I’ll be back later to do something to your hair because that shit looks a mess. You know the doctors thought they were going to have to go inside your damn brain, but luckily, the MRI told them everything they needed to know. Your new nickname was going to be Patchy Nae,” she laughed.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), or tractography, is an in vivo MRI technology that uses water diffusion in brain tissue to visualize in stunning detail the brain's three-dimensional white matter anatomy. DTI is made possible by characterizing water diffusion in tissues by means of a mathematical tool called a tensor, based on matrix algebra: (1) a 3 x 3 matrix, called a diffusion tensor, is used to characterize the three-dimensional properties of water molecule diffusion; (2) from each diffusion tensor, the three pairs of eigenvalues and eigenvectors are calculated using matrix diagonalization; and (3) the eigenvector that corresponds to the largest eigenvalue is selected as the primary eigenvector. A 'streamline' algorithm then creates "tracts" by connecting adjacent voxels if their directional bias is above some treshold level. Does the orientation of the primary eigenvector coincide with that of the actual axon fibers in most white matter tracts ? Takahashi et al. (2011), for example, have demonstrated that radial organization of the subplate revealed via tractography directly correlates with its radial cellular organization, and G. Xu et al. (2014) were able to determine that transient radial coherence of white matter in the developing fetus reflected a composite of radial glial fibers, penetrating blood vessels, and radial axons.

ON THE morning of April 6, 2007, I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On my way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep. In the wake of my collapse, I found myself going from doctor to doctor, from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion. There wasn’t, but doctors’ waiting rooms, it turns out, were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living.

Unable to resist the scent of hot dogs, she padded up to the top of the steps, but once there, she balked at climbing onto the patient table. Of course, I could have picked her up and put her there, but it was important to remain faithful to our ethical principle of self-determination. Callie had to do it of her own free will. The MR techs started laughing. How could we do an MRI if the subject wouldn’t even get on the table?

case. They appeared to be the front legs of a calf starting just above the ankle joint. In the actual MRI, the dogs would be scanned in a sphinx position. Their heads would be upright, supported by a chin rest, and their front paws would be sticking straight forward. Andrew

Also, I’ll want to scan your brain using the ultra-high-resolution MRI at our main facility. I need to confirm Kelvin’s data as to the final positioning of your implants.

The oxymoronic term blindsight may seem bizarre, but it accurately describes these individuals’ Shakespearean condition: to see, but not to see. A lesion in the primary visual cortex should make a person blind, and it does deprive such patients of their conscious vision—they assure you that they cannot see anything in a specific part of the visual field (which corresponds precisely to the destroyed area of cortex), and they behave as if they were blind. Incredibly enough, however, when an experimenter shows them objects or flashes of light, they accurately point to them. 10 In a zombielike manner, they unconsciously guide their hand to locations that they do not see—blindsight indeed. Which intact anatomical pathways support unconscious vision in blindsight patients? Clearly, in these patients, some visual information still makes it through from the retina to the hand, bypassing the lesion that makes them blind. Because the entry point into the patients’ visual cortex had been destroyed, the researchers initially suspected that their unconscious behavior arose entirely from subcortical circuits. A key suspect was the superior colliculus, a nucleus in the midbrain that specializes in the cross-registration of vision, eye movements, and other spatial responses. Indeed, the first functional MRI study of blindsight demonstrated that unseen targets triggered a strong activation in the superior colliculus. 11 But that study also contained evidence that the unseen stimuli evoked activations in the cortex—and sure enough, later research confirmed that invisible stimuli could still activate both the thalamus and higher-level visual areas of the cortex, somehow bypassing the damaged primary visual area. 12 Clearly, the brain circuits that take part in our unconscious inner zombie and that guide our eye and hand movements include much more than just old subcortical routes.

leave people vulnerable to mental illness later in life. Recent studies have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), or brain scans, to discover specific changes in certain areas of what’s called the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who have experienced abuse.

Studies of fMRI scans show significant differences in brain activity between fast and slow readers. Fast readers exhibit lower activation in regions of the brain associated with speech, suggesting higher speeds correlate to fewer phonological processes like vocalization

There are famous studies that position two functional MRI images of the brain side by side: one on heroin, for example, and one on sugar. They claim that because the pleasure centers of the brain light up in both images, both substances act on the brain similarly. What they do not include is how the brain lights up while walking outside on the first beautiful spring day, falling in love, or having an orgasm. One of the cornerstones of addiction is a drive to acquire the desired substance in any form.

For instance, brain scans using fMRI technology have shown that people who are more mindful are less reactive to scary or threatening images, as measured by amygdala activation (the reptilian part of our brain responsible for the fight-or-flight response).

McKenzie gave the MRI her best border collie stare. Despite the susurrations of the cryogen pump, McKenzie soon realized that the magnet was not alive and could not be herded.

Recent functional MRI studies in adolescents have shown that addiction to cocaine and meth alters connectivity patterns between the brain’s two hemispheres as well as other important regions that use dopamine as a transmitter. What is interesting about the MRI studies of Internet addicts is that they are similar in pattern.

According to the ‘Language Institute Regina Coeli’ ‘Learning a language allows parts of your brain to grow’ By using MRI technology, scientists have collected evidence to prove that parts of the brain actually grow when a person studies a language intensively over a longer period of time. ‘Multilingualism keeps Alzheimer’s at bay

The Happiest Man in The World The French interpreter for the 14th Dalai Lama, former academic and dedicated meditator Matthieu Ricard, came into the spotlight in the field of neural science after being named “the happiest man in the world”. Naturally, there are many other men and women who demonstrate such equanimity, but the studies on his brain uncovered truly astonishing results. MRI scans showed that Matthieu Ricard and other serious long-term meditators (with more than 10,000 hours of practice each) were mentally, emotionally and spiritually fulfilled and displayed an abundance of positive emotions and equanimity in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain. When talking about his mindfulness training, Matthieu Ricard said with humility that: “Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time”.

Interesting,” Stu said, looking up at him. “Beautiful girl, adores you, and you shut her down. You have a brain tumor?” “Maybe,” Rick said, looking away. “That’s one thing I haven’t had yet.” “I know the leg hurts, but your lips don’t.” “Why don’t you mind your own business?” “This is a little town here, this ward. It’s impossible to mind your own business. And you’re FUBAR, man.” “Well, we knew that,” Rick said, smiling meanly. “No reason for me to fuck her up, too.” “From what I heard, just minding my own business in this little town of ours, you already fucked her up, and now you’re cutting her loose. We need to get you a new MRI on your head—you definitely have a brain tumor.” “Leave it alone.” “Maybe you don’t get this yet, but people care about you. They come running all the way from the States when you’re hurt. And you’re going to walk back into that homeplace of yours, looking just like you looked before you left until you take your pants off. Everything’s going to work just fine. But you’re too lame to see that right now. You working on pissing everyone off till they hate you? You could just be happy you have this much going for you. How about that?” Rick glared at him. “No, Stu. I can’t just be happy.

Multiple fMRI studies have shown that a localized area of the brain—the ventral medial prefrontal cortex—will show increased activity when we have thoughts and mental images about ourselves.

a 2007 study attempted to measure if price had any influence on the taste of wine.10 The researchers had study participants sample wine while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. As the fMRI machine scanned the blood flow in the various regions of their brains, the tasters were informed of the cost of each wine sampled. The sample started with a $5 wine and progressed to a $90 bottle. Interestingly, as the price of the wine increased, so did the participants’ enjoyment of the wine. Not only did they say they enjoyed the wine more but their brain corroborated their feelings, showing higher spikes in the regions associated with pleasure. Little did the study participants realize that they were tasting the same wine each time.

A half century after Nidetch’s Mallomar binges, scientists had developed a technology that could see cravings erupting, like solar flares, inside the human brain. In early 2008, a research team at the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging at the University of Oregon measured just such a craving in a nineteen-year-old college student we will call Debbie. Debbie had her head inside a very large, very expensive round magnet called an MRI scanner when an image of a chocolate milk shake was flashed before her eyes for two seconds. As soon as Debbie saw it, certain parts of her brain became “activated,” which is to say they drew in lots of blood as millions of neurons were fired. These regions—the left medial orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and three other small, curly pockets of gray matter—are all associated with “motivation.” And the functional MRI (fMRI) showed them glowing a bright yellowy orange, like coals in a hot fire, indicating those parts of her brain were churning through quite a lot of blood. She was experiencing “incentive salience,” the scientific term for a Frankenstein craving, or a heightened state of “wanting.” Debbie got what she wanted.

The MRI, a device used to look inside the brain, showed that people with chronic depression have a smaller hippocampus and a thinner right cortex. The hippocampus is responsible for memory, and the right cortex is responsible for our mood.

In 2011, Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroscience at University College London, used MRI scanners to track neural activity in the brains of volunteers as they looked at works of art on small screens. Zeki discovered the exact place, he announced, from which all aesthetic reactions flow—a pea-sized lobe located behind the eyes. Beauty, to be unpoetic but precise, is in the medial orbital-frontal cortex of the beholder.

Grouping the participants by the number of blocks they reported walking each week, the team studied participants’ initial physical assessments and then followed up with MRI scans nine years later. Four years after that, the team tested the participants for cognitive impairment and dementia. The results were impressive. Those who’d walked regularly—about six to nine miles a week—had significantly more grey matter in the frontal, occipital, and hippocampal regions than those who walked less. Checking in thirteen years after participants’ initial assessments, Erickson’s team found that those who’d logged six to nine miles a week were far less likely to be cognitively impaired than those who walked the least.

Figure 2.2 Number of connections over 25 years across brain areas. This process — neural exuberance followed by pruning of connections — makes the human brain highly adaptable to any environment. Is the infant born in an urban or an agricultural society? Is it the year 2012 or 1012? It doesn’t really matter. The brain of a child born in New York City or in Nome, Alaska, is similar at birth. During the next two decades of life, the process of neural exuberance followed by pruning sculpts a brain that can meet the demands, and thrive in its environment. Brain differences at the “tails” of the distribution As with any natural process there is a range of functioning, with most individuals in the middle and a small percentage of individuals being far above and far below the mean. While the general pattern of increasing and decreasing brain connections is seen in all children, important differences are reported in children whose abilities are above or below those of the average population. To investigate children above the normal range, Shaw used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to follow brain structure in 307 children over 17 years. Children with average IQs reached a peak of cortical thickness (and therefore number of neural connections) around age 10, and then pruning began and continued to age 18. Children with above-average IQs had a different pattern: a brief pruning period around age 7 followed by increasing connections again to age 13. Then pruning ensued more vigorously and finished around age 18. There were also differences in brain structure. At age 18, those with above-average IQs had higher levels of neural connections in the frontal areas, which are responsible for short-term memory, attention, sense of self, planning, and decision-making — the higher brain functions. At the other end of the spectrum, individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, compared to normal children, lose 3% more connections each year from age 10 to 18. Symptoms of schizophrenia emerge in the late teens, when the cortical layer becomes too thin to support coherent functioning. A thinner cortical layer as a young adult — about 20% less than the average — could account for the fragmented mental world of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Who is in control? Neural exuberance — increasing and decreasing connections — is genetically controlled, but the child’s experiences affect which connections are pruned and which remain. Circuits that a child uses are strengthened. So a youngster who learns to play the piano or to speak Italian is setting up brain circuits that support those activities — she will find it easier to learn another instrument or language. ​Warning to parents: This doesn’t mean you should inundate your toddler with Italian, violin, martial arts, and tennis lessons. Young children learn best when following their natural tendencies and curiosity. Children learn through play. Undue stress and pressure inhibits the brain’s natural ability to learn.

Here’s a research study that shows just how differently teens’ brains function: In a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) study, teenagers and adults were presented pictures of people who looked scared or anxious. The adults recognized the fear in the faces but placed the experiences in a larger context, so it didn’t affect them personally. The opposite was true of the teens: they did not report that the faces were fearful, but they became emotionally involved and reported more fear and anxiety themselves. In teens, the parts of the brain that process gut reactions and primitive emotions — the amygdala and insula — were active. But in adults, the frontal lobes were activated as well. In other words, the teenagers’ brains responded emotionally. They felt upset but their brains did not identify the source of those feelings. The adults’ brains added reason to that response. Remember this when your teen gets upset “for no reason.” He may not be able to say why he’s feeling that way, but his feelings are still valid. He doesn’t have the connections between his rational brain and his emotional brain that would allow him to explain it. Logic doesn’t help because the teen’s brain cannot follow abstract logic. They are doing the best they can with the brain connections they have. This is especially true if your teen is a boy. As we see later, girls have more connections between their emotional and executive centers. Astrocytes: Functional and structural support Astrocytes are another class of glial cells. They are star-shaped, hence their name, and provide structural and functional support for the neuron. Astrocytes form the matrix that keeps neurons in place. But they are more than inert bricks in a passive wall. Rather, they function more like the mother who ensures her children have brushed their teeth, are wearing their coats in winter, and are eating good meals. An astrocyte is pictured in Figure 3.3. Astrocytes sit between blood vessels and neurons and breakdown glucose from the capillaries into lactic acid, which the mitochondria of the neurons use for energy. As a wise mother, they do not break down all of the glycogen they receive from the blood, but create a reserve for times when the metabolic need of neurons are especially high.

And just to complicate matters, autistic people seem to get visual cues mixed up with aural cues. Normally when a person is listening, the visual cortex gets turned down. But a 2012 fMRI study found that when autistics were listening to sound cues, their visual cortices remained more active than neurotypicals’. If that’s the case, then even while they’re straining to process aural cues, they’re being distracted and confused by visual cues.

In a neurotypical brain, when the TPN is turned on and you’re on task, the DMN is turned off. But in the ADHD brain, the fMRI shows that when the TPN is turned on, the DMN is turned on as well, trying to muscle its way in and pull you into its grasp, thereby distracting you. In ADHD, therefore, the DMN competes with the TPN, which in most people it does not do.

This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task.

This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task. This remarkable feature of the brain appears to be the physiological basis for the possibility of transforming our minds. By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work. It is also the basis for the idea that inner transformation begins with learning (new input) and involves the discipline of gradually replacing our “negative conditioning” (corresponding with our present characteristic nerve cell activation patterns) with “positive conditioning” (forming new neural circuits). Thus, the idea of training the mind for happiness becomes a very real possibility.

first group of subjects—the “targets”—entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects—the “trainees”—in real time.

Positron emission tomography (PET) and, later, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) enabled scientists to visualize how different parts of the brain are activated when people are engaged in certain tasks or when they remember events from the past. For the first time we could watch the brain as it processed memories, sensations, and emotions and begin to map the circuits of mind and consciousness.

Do you wonder whether we’re living in a dystopian future when Gopi Kallayil, a chief evangelist at Google, refers to our smartphones as our “seventy-ninth organ”? Is it even scarier now that MRI scans have revealed that the gray matter in a phone addict’s brain physically changes shape and size similar to a drug user’s brain? Personally, if I’m going to have a phone, I’d rather have it as a tool than as a brain-altering appendage.

As described by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of empirically based psychological intervention that focuses on mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of focusing on the present to remove oneself from feeling consumed by the emotion experienced in the moment. To properly observe yourself, begin by noticing where in your body you experience emotion. For example, think about a time when you felt really sad. You may have felt despair in your chest, or a sense of hollowness in your stomach. If you were angry, you may have felt a burning sensation in your arms. This occurs within everyone, in different variations. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University traced emotional responses in the brain to different activity signatures in the body through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. If someone recalled a painful or traumatic memory, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex became less active, and their “reptilian brain” was activated. The former areas of the brain are responsible for conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and higher functions such as sensory perception. The latter is responsible for fight-or-flight responses. This means that the bodily responses caused by your emotions provide an opportunity for you to be mindful of them. Your emotions create sensations in your body that reflect your mind. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist who studies gene expression in relation to environmental factors, released a study on epigenetics that sheds light on this matter. It revealed that an individual’s body cannot heal when it is in its sympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system, informally known as the fight-or-flight state, is triggered by certain emotional responses. This means that when we are consumed by emotion, an effective solution cannot be found until we shift our mind into reflecting on our emotions.

As described by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of empirically based psychological intervention that focuses on mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of focusing on the present to remove oneself from feeling consumed by the emotion experienced in the moment. To properly observe yourself, begin by noticing where in your body you experience emotion. For example, think about a time when you felt really sad. You may have felt despair in your chest, or a sense of hollowness in your stomach. If you were angry, you may have felt a burning sensation in your arms. This occurs within everyone, in different variations. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University traced emotional responses in the brain to different activity signatures in the body through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. If someone recalled a painful or traumatic memory, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex became less active, and their “reptilian brain” was activated. The former areas of the brain are responsible for conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and higher functions such as sensory perception. The latter is responsible for fight-or-flight responses. This means that the bodily responses caused by your emotions provide an opportunity for you to be mindful of them. Your emotions create sensations in your body that reflect your mind. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist who studies gene expression in relation to environmental factors, released a study on epigenetics that sheds light on this matter. It revealed that an individual’s body cannot heal when it is in its sympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system, informally known as the fight-or-flight state, is triggered by certain emotional responses. This means that when we are consumed by emotion, an effective solution cannot be found until we shift our mind into reflecting on our emotions. Let’s take a moment and test this theory together. Try to focus on what you’re feeling and where, and this will ground you in the present moment. By focusing on how you are responding, you essentially remove yourself from being consumed by your emotions in that moment. This brings you back into your sensory perception and moves the response in your brain back into the cortex and neocortex. This transition helps bring you back into a more logical state where emotions are not controlling your reactions.

Flegr told me he himself had just completed a study on the same topic that exploited brain-imaging technology not available in Jírovec’s day. When we were seated again in his office, he handed me a copy of the newly published paper. Only forty-four people with schizophrenia participated in the trial, but small as it was, there was nothing ambiguous about the results. Based on MRI scans, twelve of them had missing gray matter in parts of their cerebral cortex—a puzzling but not uncommon feature of the disease—and they alone had the parasite. I shot him a raised-eyebrow look that said Yikes! and he replied, “Jiří had the same response.

The journaling helps because your brain stores trauma, unfinished actions, and powerful memories in areas that can trigger strong emotions and subconscious stress responses. Often these unresolved events can trigger anxiety for no apparent reason. When you convert your feelings into words, it prompts a neurologic change. MRI scans have proven that the act of speaking or writing about feelings that are top of mind can move stored experiences away from the emotional reptilian parts of the brain, where they continually recirculate up to the rational parts of the brain, where they begin to dissipate. This effect can be invoked any time you convert ideas into words, regardless of whether you are speaking, writing, or typing and regardless of any feedback you receive.

The default mode network is so called because if you put people into an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in their brains that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego.

A coaching session can be compared to the creative process of freestyle rap. Neuroscientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders scanned the brains of twelve professional rappers with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The scientists discovered that although the brain’s executive functions were active at the start and end of a song, during freestyle, the parts of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, critiquing, and editing were deactivated. In this context, the researchers explained that the rappers were “freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control,” so sudden insights could easily emerge.1 In other words, the rappers used the executive functions of their cognitive brains as they started rapping to deliberately set the intention of the composition up front. Once they had a sense of where they were going, they switched off their inner critic and analyzer. This allowed for more activity in the inner brain, where the eruption of new ideas—creativity—takes place. As they moved to closing out the song, their cognitive brains came back online to provide a consciously designed ending to the composition.

Research shows that practices like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state. In fact, functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans confirm this,23 showing tangible evidence that consistent consciousness practices actually thicken the prefrontal lobes, the area where our conscious awareness actually lives.

According to Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, functional MRI (fMRI) studies reveal that when we’re reading a story, our brain activity isn’t that of an observer, but of a participant.

was exploring something called Decoded Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback. A first group of subjects—the “targets”—entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects—the “trainees”—in real time. AI monitored the neural activity and sent auditory and visual cues to steer the trainees toward the targets’ prerecorded neural states. In this way, the trainees learned to approximate the patterns of excitation in the targets’ brains, and, remarkably, began to report having similar emotions. The technique dated back to 2011, and it claimed some impressive early results. Teams in Boston and Japan taught trainees to solve visual puzzles faster, simply by training them on the visual cortex patterns of targets who’d learned the puzzles by trial and error. Other experimenters recorded the visual fields of target subjects exposed to the color red. Trainees who learned, through feedback, to approximate that same neural activity reported seeing red in their mind’s eye. Since those days, the field had shifted from visual learning to emotional conditioning. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. Marty Currier worked on clinical applications. But he was also pursuing

Regions of the brain differ in how tightly function is linked to particular cells. For cognitive tasks, f MRI tests on different people, or on the same people at different times, often show that particular functions are performed by groups of neurons but that the locations change; thus, the neurons engaged in cognitive tasks tend to be scattered across the brain.41 Differences in the fidelity of neurons to par- ticular tasks depend on function; the activity of particular neurons varies more for cognitive functions than for more ancestral functions such as vision and olfaction.42 Thus, neurons, like ants, switch tasks or functions, and interactions among groups of neurons regulate their activity.

Talk about Them It shouldn’t be surprising that the thing people most like talking about is themselves. If you’ve ever gotten dating advice or corporate networking advice, it’s probably started with something along the lines of, “Ask them about themselves.” Not only does this make sense, but neuroscience tells us that it’s true. The average person spends 60 percent of their conversations talking about themselves, and the reason for this is simple—it makes them feel good! Remember how we discussed that when someone hears their own name, an MRI will show parts of their brain lighting up? When people talk about themselves, some of the same areas of the brain tend to light up. In addition, areas of the brain associated with feelings of reward are activated as well. These are the same areas of the brain that respond during sex, when ingesting cocaine, and when eating high-sugar foods. In other words, talking about yourself is practically an addiction. And by asking people to talk about themselves, you are feeding their addiction. Makes sense that someone will like you when you do that, right? So, whether you’re on a date, networking at a business event, or trying to build rapport with someone at the negotiating table, asking the other person about themselves is a great way to strengthen the relationship.

When these ancient parts of your brain are active or rehearsing the next disaster using the DMN, they effortlessly hijack your attention. You try to meditate and repetitive negative thinking takes over. In the cage match between Caveman Brain and Bliss Brain, Caveman Brain always wins. Survival is a more important need than happiness or self-actualization. You can’t self-actualize if you’re dead. In 2015 the US National Institutes of Health estimated that less than 10% of the US population meditates. One of the primary reasons for this is that meditation is hard. Most people who start a meditation program drop out. GETTING THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS When writing my first best-selling book, The Genie in Your Genes, I experimented with many schools of stress reduction and meditation. Heart coherence. Mindfulness. EFT tapping. Neurofeedback. Hypnosis. One day I had a Big Idea: What happens when you combine them all? I began playing with a routine that did just that. Here’s what I came up with: First, you tap on acupressure points to relieve stress. Second, you close your eyes and relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth. This sends a signal to your vagus nerve, which wanders all over your body, connecting all the major organ systems. It’s the key signaling component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs relaxation. 4.8. The vagus nerve connects with all the major organ systems of your body. Third, you imagine the volume of space inside your body, particularly between your eyes. This automatically generates big alpha in your brain, moving you toward the Awakened Mind. Fourth, you slow your breathing down to 6 seconds per inbreath and 6 seconds per outbreath. This puts you into heart coherence. Fifth, you imagine your breath coming in and going out from your heart area, and you picture a sphere of energy in your heart. Sixth, you send a beam of heart energy to a person or place that makes you feel wonderful. This puts you into deep coherence. After enjoying the connection for a while, you send compassion to everyone and everything in the universe. Feeling universal compassion produces the major brain changes seen in fMRI scans of longtime meditators. As we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 8, compassion moves the needle like nothing else. At this point, most people drop into Bliss Brain automatically. They’re in a combination of alpha, heart coherence, and parasympathetic dominance. They haven’t been asked to still their minds, sit cross-legged, follow a guru, or believe in a deity. They’ve just followed a sequence of simple physical steps. After a few minutes of universal compassion, you again focus your beam on a single person or place. You then gently disengage and draw the energy beam back into your own heart. Seventh, you direct your beam of compassion to a part of your body that is suffering or in pain. You end the meditation by returning your attention to the here and now.

MRI scans of the brain show that meditation, a mental practice of focusing the nonphysical mind, changes your physical brain over time by decreasing the size of brain areas that react to stress.

Human beings don’t deal well with rejection. Back when our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, being ostracized from a tribe was akin to a death sentence. For that reason, rejection is experienced by human beings as being incredibly painful. Studies using functional MRI have shown the same areas of the brain become activated both during rejection and during real physical pain. Some

My neurological doctor thought I had a brain tumor before I self-diagnosed and treated for ‘Magee's Disease’. He sent me through CT and MRI brain scanners looking for it. I later discovered I had ‘Altitude Hypersensitivity' and I was very reactive to altitudes above 1,000 feet, bringing on severe altitude sickness symptoms that were affecting the brain. I had been breathing oxygen, nitrogen, helium, carbon dioxide and mercury polluted air at high altitude during a decade of working in professional astronomy.

Studies using functional MRI have shown the same areas of the brain become activated both during rejection and during real physical pain.

recent MRI scanning studies have found that there are individual parts of the brain that are up to 30 percent more active during REM sleep than when we are awake!

except fMRI maps the activity of the brain’s different structures by detecting the blood flow that waxes and wanes, just slightly, as that activity varies. In this way fMRI offers three-dimensional pictures of the working brain, inside and out, mapping, to a resolution of about a millimeter, the level of activity throughout the organ.

had just accomplished, we controlled the visual channel by the hand signals we gave, and we controlled smell and taste by giving either peas or hot dogs. Outputs are also easy to understand, especially if we consider movement as the main output of the brain. The earliest fMRI experiments had human subjects lying in the MRI and tapping their fingers for periods of thirty seconds. When the subjects tapped their fingers, activity in the part of the brain that controlled the hand was plainly visible. The central sulcus is a groove in the human brain that runs almost vertically down the outside of each hemisphere. Everything behind the central sulcus is broadly concerned with inputs and everything in front with outputs. It is a defining landmark that divides the frontal lobe in front of the groove from the parietal lobe behind. The frontal bank of the central sulcus, it’s important to note, contains the neurons that control movement of all the parts of the body. Toward the bottom of this groove, above the ear, we find neurons that control the hand and mouth, and as we move up toward the crown of the head, we find neurons that control the legs. The neurons found along the sulcus control the opposite side of the body. When you move your right hand, a portion of the left central sulcus will become active, and this can be seen easily with fMRI. In contrast, the neurons behind the central sulcus respond when the corresponding parts of the body are touched. These are the primary sensory neurons. As you move farther toward the back of the head, the functions of the neurons become multimodal, meaning they integrate the inputs from many senses. At the very back of the head, we find the primary visual area, which receives inputs from the eyes. Another obvious landmark of the human brain is the protuberance along the sides of the brain, just above the ear. This is the temporal lobe. Sitting directly next to the ear, parts of the temporal lobe are concerned with hearing. Other parts of the temporal lobe, along the inner crease next to the rest of the brain, contain structures critical for memory. With the dog brain, the first thing you notice is that, apart from being smaller, it has a lot fewer folds. The massive amount of folding in the human brain is the solution that evolved to cram more brain into a small space. If you could flatten out the brain, you would find that all the neurons are contained in a thin sheet just a few millimeters thick.

The bruise would fade. The cut would heal. Every bone in her body was intact. With the help of an MRI, the doctors had searched her brain for hidden damage and found none. But that machine could not, of course, search her mind.

The subjects were each placed in a functional MRI scanner and shown the same set of fourteen video clips (including a sentimental music video, a bit of slapstick comedy, a political debate), and the blood flow to various brain regions was individually measured as they viewed

In experiments using MRI scans, Westen has demonstrated that persons with partisan preferences believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts. Not only that, they unconsciously congratulate themselves—the reward centers of their brains light up—when they reject new information that does not square with their predetermined views.

Why Women Are Wonderful Listeners In general, women are excellent listeners already. When a woman communicates, according to MRI scans, fully seven centers of her brain are involved. In men, it is only two. Men often listen halfheartedly to women, especially if the television is on. That’s because men can only process one sensory input at a time. They cannot, for example, both watch television and listen to someone else speaking, which women can do much more easily.

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around. Half of the participants were “pathological gamblers”—people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino— while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors. Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity. “We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in non-pathological gamblers. “But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.” Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses—which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit, the one that says I should quit before it gets worse.

Rejection piggybacks on physical pain pathways in the brain. MRI studies show that the same areas of the brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain. This is why rejection hurts so much (neurologically speaking). In fact our brains respond so similarly to rejection and physical pain that Tylenol reduces the emotional pain rejection elicits. In a study testing the hypothesis that rejection mimics physical pain, researchers gave some participants acetaminophen (Tylenol) before asking them to recall a painful rejection experience. The people who received Tylenol reported significantly less emotional pain than subjects who took a sugar pill.1 Strange