Sensory Activity Quotes

When meditation becomes very deep, breathing becomes slow, steady, and even, and the windows of the senses close to all outward sensations. Next the faculties of the mind quiet down, resting from their usually frantic activity; even the primal emotions of desire, fear, and anger subside. When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta – at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your

Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on the top. This is the typical flow-chart of any government, any corporation, any Army, any bureaucracy, any mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being conscious organisms — the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, drawing inferences from perception, etc. — are in accord with the reality-tunnel of those above them. This is absolutely vital; pack status (and “job security”) depends on it. It is much less important — a luxury that can easily be discarded — that these perceptions be in accord with objective fact.

The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it. The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations.

Awakening is about introducing a child to sensory experiences, including tastes. It doesn't always require the parent's active involvement. It can come from staring at the sky, smelling dinner as it's being prepared, or playing alone on a blanket. It's a way of sharpening the child's senses and preparing him to distinguish between different experiences. It's the first step toward teaching him to be a cultivated adult who knows how to enjoy himself. Awakening is a kind of training for children in how to profiter - to soak up the pleasure and richness of the moment.

The entire aim and endeavor of yoga is to open up the cocoon of the physical body to the larger sensory body where you experience everything as a part of you. Fasting is an extension of this logic: it is a way of nourishing yourself without any active ingestion. It may be done as a detoxification process nowadays, but this is the internal rationale.

Haekel's reasoning is simple: humans are nature, they are part of, and a result of, evolution. Our actions and our thoughts are products of this evolution. Accordingly, when humans come to know something, ultimately it reveals their own nature. Our knowledge -- which has developed in and is subject to the laws of nature -- is in itself nature (and according to Haeckel, nothing more.) The draftsman, his sensory organs, his motor activity, are results of a development with which, in the end, nature merely represents itself.

evocative cues”—basically any sensory input, like a sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch—can activate a traumatic memory.

The worst thing one can do for a hyperactive child is to put him or her in front of a television set. Television activates the child at the same time that it cuts the child (or adult) off from real sensory stimulation and the opportunity for resolution.

As he analyzed the areas that fire in chronic pain, he observed that many of those areas also process thoughts, sensations, images, memories, movements, emotions, and beliefs—when they are not processing pain. That observation explained why, when we are in pain, we can’t concentrate or think well; why we have sensory problems and often can’t tolerate certain sounds or light; why we can’t move more gracefully; and why we can’t control our emotions very well and become irritable and have emotional outbursts. The areas that regulate these activities have been hijacked to process the pain signal.

Attentional amplification of sensory awareness in any sensory medium is achieved by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex that modulate activity of single neurons in sensory brain areas in the absence of any sensory stimulation and significantly increase baseline activity in the corresponding target region.

Our flesh is like silly putty that distorts when it is ignored. We are constantly obliged to actively participate in its formation, or else it will droop of its own weight and plasticity. This incessant formation we cannot stop. We can only make the choice to let it go its own way - directed by genetics, gravity, appetites, habits, the accidentals of our surroundings, and so on - or the choice to let our sensory awareness penetrate its processes, to be personally present in the midst of those processes with the full measure of our subjective, internal observations and responses, and to some degree direct the course of that formation. We do not have the option of remaining passively unchanged, and to believe for a moment in this illusion is to invite distortions and dysfunctions. Like putty, we are either shaping ourselves or we are drooping; like clay, we either keep ourselves moist and malleable or we are drying and hardening. We must do one or the other; we may not passively avoid the issue.

How can two mutually exclusive behaviors—mating and fighting—be mediated by the same population of neurons? Anderson found that the difference hinges on the intensity of the stimulus applied. Weak sensory stimulation, such as foreplay, activates mating, whereas stronger stimulation, such as danger, activates aggression. In 1952 Meyer Schapiro paid

Over time, unique invisibles, perceivable only because of the sensitivity and openness of the sensory gating in that neural network, are able to be heard and, as well, expressed through the activity of that part of the self. This is what Goethe was talking about when he said that Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.

Gain is a parameter in neural network modeling, which influences the probability that a neuron fires at a given activation level. Single cell recordings in non-human primates have shown that the likelihood of a neuron firing, given a constant sensory input, is enhanced when the stimulus dimension that is preferentially processed by the neuron is attended to.11

Empathy is a sensory experience; that is, it activates the sensory part of your nervous system, including the mirror neurons we’ve talked about. Anger, on the other hand, is a motor action—usually a reaction to some perceived hurt or injury by another person. So by taking people out of anger and shifting them into an empathic behavior, the Empathy Jolt moves them from the motor brain to the sensory brain.

The good painter has to paint two principal things, man and the intention of his mind,” he wrote. “The first is easy and the second is difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.”44 He expanded on this concept in a long passage in his notes for his planned treatise on painting: “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure. The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way they can mean nothing else. Movements should announce the motions of the mind.”45 Leonardo’s dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile.

Even so, as an aid to responding quickly, we have reflexes, which means that the central nervous system can intercept a signal and act on it before passing it on to the brain. That’s why if you touch something very undesirable, your hand recoils before your brain knows what’s going on. The spinal cord, in short, is not just a length of impassive cabling carrying messages between the body and the brain but an active and literally decisive part of your sensory apparatus.

He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile.

In other words people who have this gating channel more open can in fact hear things that most of the rest of us cannot. And the more open the channel is, the more they hear. People with very open P50 channels commonly report being “flooded with sound” or hearing “everything at once.” In other words, the unconscious mechanism that filters sound lets more through, so much so that, in some cases, the people exist in a sea of sounds that tend to overwhelm consciousness. This is often complicated by the fact that, commonly, they also have more open N100 channels. N100 (a.k.a. N1) gating channels are those that trigger increased attention and activation of memory. When this channel is also open not only are there more sounds being consciously perceived but conscious attention is directed to each and every one of those sounds. Further, a rapid cross-correlation of new sensory inputs with previous experiences is generated in order to determine subtle meanings and differentiation within them.

And in the seconds to minutes before, those neurons were activated by a thought, a memory, an emotion, or sensory stimuli. And in the hours to days before that behavior occurred, the hormones in your circulation shaped those thoughts, memories, and emotions and altered how sensitive your brain was to particular environmental stimuli. And in the preceding months to years, experience and environment changed how those neurons function, causing some to sprout new connections and become more excitable, and causing the opposite in others.

Unfortunately, most researchers studying gating dynamics in children are, as with “schizophrenia,” focused on “normal” versus “abnormal” gating. And all children are expected to fit into the defined “normal” range of behavior. Sensory gating dynamics outside that culturally determined “norm” are defined as abnormal and researchers note that Individuals with these characteristics have been classified as having sensory processing deficits (SPD). Such behaviors disrupt an individual’s ability to achieve and maintain an optimal range of performance necessary to adapt to challenges in life. The manifestations of SPD may include distraction, impulsiveness, abnormal activity level, disorganization, anxiety, and emotional lability that produce deficient social participation, insufficient self-regulation and inadequate perceived competence.1 Those terms, if you look at them more closely, are exterior, “authority” generated terms; they relate directly to the paradigm in place in those authorities. They really don’t have much to say about the interior experience of the children so labeled.

Scientists think rationalists are mad because the rationalists are dancing to the Music of the Spheres, to which scientists are stone deaf. Scientists are like the blind describing the visible world to the sighted. The vast majority of reality is hidden from the human senses, yet scientists have chosen to consider the observable as the only reality, and everything else as unreal. In fact, the unobservable is true reality, and the observable is a sensory phenomenal, empirical delusion that actively masks non-sensory, noumenal, rational reality.

Different mechanisms underlie short- and long-term memory storage. A single sensory neuron from the siphon skin connects to a motor neuron that innervates the gill. Short-term memory is produced by a single shock to the tail. This activates modulatory neurons (in blue) that cause a functional strengthening of the connections between the sensory and motor neurons. Long-term memory is produced by five repeated shocks to the tail. This activates the modulatory neurons more strongly and leads to the activation of CREB-1 genes and the growth of new synapses.

When repeated shocks and repeated release of serotonin are paired with the firing of the sensory neuron in associative learning, a signal is sent to the nucleus of the sensory neuron. This signal activates a gene, CREB-1, which leads to the growth of new connections between the sensory and motor neuron (fig. 4.5, right) (Bailey and Chen 1983; Kandel 2001). These connections are what enable a memory to persist. So if you remember anything of what you have read here, it will be because your brain is slightly different than it was before you started to read.

in adults the anterior cingulate cortex activates when they see someone hurt. Ditto for the amygdala and insula, especially in instances of intentional harm—there is anger and disgust. PFC regions including the (emotional) vmPFC are on board. Observing physical pain (e.g., a finger being poked with a needle) produces a concrete, vicarious pattern: there is activation of the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a region central to your own pain perception, in parts of the sensory cortex receiving sensation from your own fingers, and in motor neurons that command your own fingers to move.fn3 You clench your fingers.

It is possible, just as it is with the auditory training of musicians, to begin using the feeling sense actively. This will increase neuronal development in the hippocampal and the cardiovascular (heart) system and with practice, over time, increase sensitivity to tiny modulations in that sensory flow. Sensitivity to the tiniest shifts in feeling will develop, just as they do in musicians with sound complexes. And, with experience, the ability to determine the meanings inside those feelings will become a reliable skill. In other words, it becomes possible to immediately know the intent of the dog as soon as it is seen/nonkinesthetically felt.

Nerve signals are not particularly swift. Light travels at 300 million meters per second, while nerve signals move at a decidedly more stately 120 meters a second—about 2.5 million times slower. Still, 120 meters a second is nearly 270 miles an hour, quite fast enough over the space of a human frame to be effectively instantaneous in most circumstances. Even so, as an aid to responding quickly, we have reflexes, which means that the central nervous system can intercept a signal and act on it before passing it on to the brain. That’s why if you touch something very undesirable, your hand recoils before your brain knows what’s going on. The spinal cord, in short, is not just a length of impassive cabling carrying messages between the body and the brain but an active and literally decisive part of your sensory apparatus.

A clearer picture of what is happening in the brain during non-REM sleep,14 during sleepwalking,15 and during confused arousals16 has been achieved through neuroimaging and EEG. It appears that the brain is half awake and half asleep: the cerebellum and brainstem are active, while the cerebrum and cerebral cortex have minimal activity. The pathways involved with control of complex motor behavior and emotion generation are buzzing, while those pathways projecting to the frontal lobe, involved in planning, attention, judgment, emotional face recognition, and emotional regulation are zoned out. Sleepwalkers don’t remember their escapades, nor can they be awakened by noise or shouts, because the parts of the cortex that contribute to sensory processing and the formation of new memories are snoozing, temporarily turned off, disconnected, and not contributing any input to the flow of consciousness.

So, let’s reorient from exterior to interior. “Distraction” then becomes boredom; “impulsiveness” becomes self-generated explorative behavior based on what captures interest; “abnormal activity level” is thus high-energy levels generating multiple task interests; “disorganization” is failure to follow rigid organizational regimens set by others; “anxiety”—well, we all know that one: what the hell kind of world did I get born into?; “emotional lability” is, in fact, a wide range of emotions that are accessed when adults or the exterior culture don’t want them to be. In other words, should you have ever read Mark Twain, what is being described is “Tom Sawyer syndrome,” a once common state of being in many if not most children. The more widely open the sensory gating channels are, the more the child’s behavior alters from what is currently held to be the cultural norm in the West. On average, some

The auditory cortex seems to perform a simple calculation: it uses the recent past to predict the future. As soon as a note or a group of notes repeats, this region concludes that it will continue to do so in the future. This is useful because it keeps us from paying too much attention to boring, predictable signals. Any sound that repeats is squashed at the input side, because its incoming activity is canceled by an accurate prediction. As long as the input sensory signal matches the prediction that the brain generates, the difference is zero, and no error signal gets propagated to higher-level brain regions. Subtracting the prediction shuts down the incoming inputs—but only as long as they are predictable. Any sound that violates our brain’s expectations, on the contrary, is amplified. Thus, the simple circuit of the auditory cortex acts as a filter: it transmits to the higher levels of the cortex only the surprising and unpredictable information which it cannot explain by itself.

in adults the anterior cingulate cortex activates when they see someone hurt. Ditto for the amygdala and insula, especially in instances of intentional harm—there is anger and disgust. PFC regions including the (emotional) vmPFC are on board. Observing physical pain (e.g., a finger being poked with a needle) produces a concrete, vicarious pattern: there is activation of the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a region central to your own pain perception, in parts of the sensory cortex receiving sensation from your own fingers, and in motor neurons that command your own fingers to move.fn3 You clench your fingers. Work by Jean Decety of the University of Chicago shows that when seven-year-olds watch someone in pain, activation is greatest in the more concrete regions—the PAG and the sensory and motor cortices—with PAG activity coupled to the minimal vmPFC activation there is. In older kids the vmPFC is coupled to increasingly activated limbic structures.13 And by adolescence the stronger vmPFC activation is coupled to ToM regions. What’s happening? Empathy is shifting from the concrete world of “Her finger must hurt, I’m suddenly conscious of my own finger” to ToM-ish focusing on the pokee’s emotions and experience.

More Activities to Develop Sensory-Motor Skills Sensory processing is the foundation for fine-motor skills, motor planning, and bilateral coordination. All these skills improve as the child tries the following activities that integrate the sensations. FINE-MOTOR SKILLS Flour Sifting—Spread newspaper on the kitchen floor and provide flour, scoop, and sifter. (A turn handle is easier to manipulate than a squeeze handle, but both develop fine-motor muscles in the hands.) Let the child scoop and sift. Stringing and Lacing—Provide shoelaces, lengths of yarn on plastic needles, or pipe cleaners, and buttons, macaroni, cereal “Os,” beads, spools, paper clips, and jingle bells. Making bracelets and necklaces develops eye-hand coordination, tactile discrimination, and bilateral coordination. Egg Carton Collections—The child may enjoy sorting shells, pinecones, pebbles, nuts, beans, beads, buttons, bottle caps, and other found objects and organizing them in the individual egg compartments. Household Tools—Picking up cereal pieces with tweezers; stretching rubber bands over a box to make a “guitar”; hanging napkins, doll clothes, and paper towels with clothespins; and smashing egg cartons with a mallet are activities that strengthen many skills.

My general philosophy regarding endurance contains four key points: 1. Build a great aerobic base. This essential physical and metabolic foundation helps accomplish several important tasks: it prevents injury and maintains a balanced physical body; it increases fat burning for improved stamina, weight loss, and sustained energy; and it improves overall health in the immune and hormonal systems, the intestines and liver, and throughout the body. 2. Eat well. Specific foods influence the developing aerobic system, especially the foods consumed in the course of a typical day. Overall, diet can significantly influence your body’s physical, chemical, and mental state of fitness and health. 3. Reduce stress. Training and competition, combined with other lifestyle factors, can be stressful and adversely affect performance, cause injuries, and even lead to poor nutrition because they can disrupt the normal digestion and absorption of nutrients. 4. Improve brain function. The brain and entire nervous system control virtually all athletic activity, and a healthier brain produces a better athlete. Improved brain function occurs from eating well, controlling stress, and through sensory stimulation, which includes proper training and optimal breathing.

When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul. Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer. And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals. As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us. ... The genius of the irrational... ... We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does. Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic. But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does. So this makes them want our bodies... Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.

We will not find the enemy.8 Because the enemy does not exist in space, but in time: four thousand years ago. We are about to destroy each other, and the world, because of profound mistakes made in Bronze Age patriarchal ontology—mistakes about the nature of being, about the nature of human being in the world. Evolution itself is a time-process, seemingly a relentlessly linear unfolding. But biology also dreams, and in its dreams and waking visions it outleaps time, as well as space. It experiences prevision, clairvoyance, telepathy, synchronicity. Thus we have what has been called a magical capacity built into our genes. It is built into the physical universe. Synchronicity is a quantum phenomenon. The tachyon is consciousness, which can move faster than light. So, built into our biological-physical selves evolving linearly through time and space, is an authentically magical capacity to move spirally, synchronously, multi-sensorially, simultaneously back and forth, up and down, in and out through all time and space. In our DNA is a genetic memory going back through time to the first cell, and beyond; back through space to the big bang (the cosmic egg), and before that. To evolve then—to save ourselves from species extinction—we can activate our genetic capacity for magic. We can go back in time to our prepatriarchal consciousness of human oneness with the earth. This memory is in our genes, we have lived it, it is ours. This

The motor activities we take for granted—getting out of a chair and walking across a room, picking up a cup and drinking coffee,and so on—require integration of all the muscles and sensory organs working smoothly together to produce coordinated movements that we don't even have to think about. No one has ever explained how the simple code of impulses can do all that. Even more troublesome are the higher processes, such as sight—in which somehow we interpret a constantly changing scene made of innumerable bits of visual data—or the speech patterns, symbol recognition, and grammar of our languages.Heading the list of riddles is the "mind-brain problem" of consciousness, with its recognition, "I am real; I think; I am something special." Then there are abstract thought, memory, personality,creativity, and dreams. The story goes that Otto Loewi had wrestled with the problem of the synapse for a long time without result, when one night he had a dream in which the entire frog-heart experiment was revealed to him. When he awoke, he knew he'd had the dream, but he'd forgotten the details. The next night he had the same dream. This time he remembered the procedure, went to his lab in the morning, did the experiment, and solved the problem. The inspiration that seemed to banish neural electricity forever can't be explained by the theory it supported! How do you convert simple digital messages into these complex phenomena? Latter-day mechanists have simply postulated brain circuitry so intricate that we will probably never figure it out, but some scientists have said there must be other factors.

Making the most of an experience: Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. I have only to turn on the television at random to be assailed with the following messages: “It’s the best a man can get.” “It’s like having an angel by your side.” “Every move is smooth, every word is cool. I never want to lose that feeling.” “You look, they smile. You win, they go home.” What is being sold here? A fantasy of total sensory pleasure, social status, sexual attraction, and the self-image of a winner. As it happens, all these phrases come from the same commercial for razor blades, but living life fully is part of almost any ad campaign. What is left out, however, is the reality of what it actually means to fully experience something. Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion. Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. Emotion brings in the dimension of bonding or tuning in: An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal. Pure physical sensation, social status, sexual attraction, and feeling like a winner are generally superficial, which is why people hunger for them repeatedly. If you spend time with athletes who have won hundreds of games or with sexually active singles who have slept with hundreds of partners, you’ll find out two things very quickly: (1) Numbers don’t count very much. The athlete usually doesn’t feel like a winner deep down; the sexual conqueror doesn’t usually feel deeply attractive or worthy. (2) Each experience brings diminishing returns; the thrill of winning or going to bed becomes less and less exciting and lasts a shorter time. To experience this moment, or any moment, fully means to engage fully. Meeting a stranger can be totally fleeting and meaningless, for example, unless you enter the individual’s world by finding out at least one thing that is meaningful to his or her life and exchange at least one genuine feeling. Tuning in to others is a circular flow: You send yourself out toward people; you receive them as they respond to you. Notice how often you don’t do that. You stand back and insulate yourself, sending out only the most superficial signals and receive little or nothing back. The same circle must be present even when someone else isn’t involved. Consider the way three people might observe the same sunset. The first person is obsessing over a business deal and doesn’t even see the sunset, even though his eyes are registering the photons that fall on their retinas. The second person thinks, “Nice sunset. We haven’t had one in a while.” The third person is an artist who immediately begins a sketch of the scene. The differences among the three are that the first person sent nothing out and received nothing back; the second allowed his awareness to receive the sunset but had no awareness to give back to it—his response was rote; the third person was the only one to complete the circle: He took in the sunset and turned it into a creative response that sent his awareness back out into the world with something to give. If you want to fully experience life, you must close the circle.

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

In order to avoid the deafening of conspecifics, some bats employ a jamming avoidance response, rapidly shifting frequencies or flying silent when foraging near conspecifics. Because jamming is a problem facing any active emission sensory system, it is perhaps not surprising (though no less amazing) that similar jamming avoidance responses are deployed by weakly electric fish. The speed of sound is so fast in water that it makes it difficult for echolocating whales to exploit similar Doppler effects. However, the fact that acoustic emissions propagate much farther and faster in the water medium means that there is less attenuation of ultrasound in water, and thus that echolocation can be used for broader-scale 'visual' sweeping of the undersea environment. These constraints and trade-offs must be resolved by all acoustic ISMs, on Earth and beyond. There are equally universal anatomical and metabolic constraints on the evolvability of echolocation that explain why it is 'harder' to evolve than vision. First, as noted earlier, a powerful sound-production capacity, such as the lungs of tetrapods, is required to produce high-frequency emissions capable of supporting high-resolution acoustic imaging. Second, the costs of echolocation are high, which may limit acoustic imaging to organisms with high-metabolisms, such as mammals and birds. The metabolic rates of bats during echolocation, for instance, are up to five times greater than they are at rest. These costs have been offset in bats through the evolutionarily ingenious coupling of sound emission to wing-beat cycle, which functions as a single unit of biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Sound emission is coupled with the upstroke phase of the wing-beat cycle, coinciding with contraction of abdominal muscles and pressure on the diaphragm. This significantly reduces the price of high-intensity pulse emission, making it nearly costless. It is also why, as any careful crepuscular observer may have noticed, bats spend hardly any time gliding (which is otherwise a more efficient means of flight).

While the visual areas of the brain are active, other areas involved with smell, taste, and touch are largely shut down. Almost all the images and sensations processed by the body are self-generated, originating from the electromagnetic vibrations from our brain stem, not from external stimuli. The body is largely isolated from the outside world. Also, when we dream, we are more or less paralyzed. (Perhaps this paralysis is to prevent us from physically acting out our dreams, which could be disastrous. About 6 percent of people suffer from “sleep paralysis” disorder, in which they wake up from a dream still paralyzed. Often these individuals wake up frightened and believing that there are creatures pinning down their chest, arms, and legs. There are paintings from the Victorian era of women waking up with a terrifying goblin sitting on their chest glaring down at them. Some psychologists believe that sleep paralysis could explain the origin of the alien abduction syndrome.) The hippocampus is active when we dream, suggesting that dreams draw upon our storehouse of memories. The amygdala and anterior cingulate are also active, meaning that dreams can be highly emotional, often involving fear. But more revealing are the areas of the brain that are shut down, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which is the command center of the brain), the orbitofrontal cortex (which can act like a censor or fact-checker), and the temporoparietal region (which processes sensory motor signals and spatial awareness). When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is shut down, we can’t count on the rational, planning center of the brain. Instead, we drift aimlessly in our dreams, with the visual center giving us images without rational control. The orbitofrontal cortex, or the fact-checker, is also inactive. Hence dreams are allowed to blissfully evolve without any constraints from the laws of physics or common sense. And the temporoparietal lobe, which helps coordinate our sense of where we are located using signals from our eyes and inner ear, is also shut down, which may explain our out-of-body experiences while we dream. As we have emphasized, human consciousness mainly represents the brain constantly creating models of the outside world and simulating them into the future. If so, then dreams represent an alternate way in which the future is simulated, one in which the laws of nature and social interactions are temporarily suspended

For millennia, sages have proclaimed how outer beauty reflects inner goodness. While we may no longer openly claim that, beauty-is-good still holds sway unconsciously; attractive people are judged to be more honest, intelligent, and competent; are more likely to be elected or hired, and with higher salaries; are less likely to be convicted of crimes, then getting shorter sentences. Jeez, can’t the brain distinguish beauty from goodness? Not especially. In three different studies, subjects in brain scanners alternated between rating the beauty of something (e.g., faces) or the goodness of some behavior. Both types of assessments activated the same region (the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC); the more beautiful or good, the more OFC activation (and the less insula activation). It’s as if irrelevant emotions about beauty gum up cerebral contemplation of the scales of justice. Which was shown in another study—moral judgments were no longer colored by aesthetics after temporary inhibition of a part of the PFC that funnels information about emotions into the frontal cortex.[*] “Interesting,” the subject is told. “Last week, you sent that other person to prison for life. But just now, when looking at this other person who had done the same thing, you voted for them for Congress—how come?” And the answer isn’t “Murder is definitely bad, but OMG, those eyes are like deep, limpid pools.” Where did the intent behind the decision come from? The fact that the brain hasn’t had enough time yet to evolve separate circuits for evaluating morality and aesthetics.[6] Next, want to make someone more likely to choose to clean their hands? Have them describe something crummy and unethical they’ve done. Afterward, they’re more likely to wash their hands or reach for hand sanitizer than if they’d been recounting something ethically neutral they’d done. Subjects instructed to lie about something rate cleansing (but not noncleansing) products as more desirable than do those instructed to be honest. Another study showed remarkable somatic specificity, where lying orally (via voice mail) increased the desire for mouthwash, while lying by hand (via email) made hand sanitizers more desirable. One neuroimaging study showed that when lying by voice mail boosts preference for mouthwash, a different part of the sensory cortex activates than when lying by email boosts the appeal of hand sanitizers. Neurons believing, literally, that your mouth or hand, respectively, is dirty.

Cannabinoids relax the rules of cortical crowd control, but 300 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide break them completely. This is a clean sweep. This is the Renaissance after the Dark Ages. Dopamine—the fuel of desire—is only one of four major neuro modulators. Each of the neuromodulators fuels brain operations in its own particular way. But all four of them share two properties. First, they get released and used up all over the brain, not at specific locales. Second, each is produced by one specialized organ, a brain part designed to manufacture that one potent chemical (see Figure 3). Instead of watering the flowers one by one, neuromodulator release is like a sprinkler system. That’s why neuromodulators initiate changes that are global, not local. Dopamine fuels attraction, focus, approach, and especially wanting and doing. Norepinephrine fuels perceptual alertness, arousal, excitement, and attention to sensory detail. Acetylcholine energizes all mental operations, consciousness, and thought itself. But the final neuromodulator, serotonin, is more complicated in its action. Serotonin does a lot of different things in a lot of different places, because there are many kinds of serotonin receptors, and they inhabit a great variety of neural nooks, staking out an intricate network. One of serotonin’s most important jobs is to regulate information flow throughout the brain by inhibiting the firing of neurons in many places. And it’s the serotonin system that gets dynamited by LSD. Serotonin dampens, it paces, it soothes. It raises the threshold of neurons to the voltage changes induced by glutamate. Remember glutamate? That’s the main excitatory neurotransmitter that carries information from synapse to synapse throughout the brain. Serotonin cools this excitation, putting off the next axonal burst, making the receptive neuron less sensitive to the messages it receives from other neurons. Slow down! Take it easy! Don’t get carried away by every little molecule of glutamate. Serotonin soothes neurons that might otherwise fire too often, too quickly. If you want to know how it feels to get a serotonin boost, ask a depressive several days into antidepressant therapy. Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, and all their cousins leave more serotonin in the synapses, hanging around, waiting to help out when the brain becomes too active. Which is most of the time if you feel the world is dark and threatening. Extra serotonin makes the thinking process more relaxed—a nice change for depressives, who get a chance to wallow in relative normality.

He refers to the Imagination as an organ of perception. Without it, all the phenomena of religious experience are impossible. It is the means by which we perceive symbols. The Active Imagination guides, anticipates, molds sensory perception; that is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs. In order that Moses may perceive the Burning Bush and hear the Voice calling him “from the right side of the valley”—in short, in order that there may be a theophany—an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed.22

Human imagination, however, involves some quasi-rational activity, for humans are not just moved by imagination’s products, but judge and form opinions about them. Human imagination is what Aristotle calls “deliberative” (bouleutik or logistik): “Imagination in the form of sense exists, as we have said [in De anima III, ii], in other animals, but deliberative imagination only in those which can reason” (De anima, III, xi, 434a 5ff.). Pure sensation is always true, enjoying something of the status which contemporary philosophers accord to what some of them call “raw feels”; but imagination can be false.31 It is therefore a more rationalizing activity than the elementary sensory receptiveness of the common sense.

Those with SPD may:   •       Be overly sensitive to sights, sounds, movement or touch. •       Be under reactive to sights, sounds, movement or touch. •       Be easily distracted. •       Have emotional or social problems. •       May have an activity level that is unusual, i.e. too high or too low. •       May have difficulty making transitions from situation to situation. •       Lack self-control. •       Be clumsy or careless. •       Have difficulty calming down. •       Poor self-concept. •       Delays in speech or language. •       Delays in motor skills.

way, to remain silent. To pay Attention means to pay attention to it all, to engage actively, to use all of our senses, to take in everything around us, including those things that don’t appear when they rightly should. It means asking questions and making sure we get answers. (Before I even go to buy that car or cell phone, I should ask: what are the features I care about most? And then I should be sure that I am paying attention to those features—and not to something else entirely.) It means realizing that the world is three-dimensional and multi-sensory and that, like it or not, we will be influenced by our environment, so our best bet is to take control of that influence by paying attention to everything that surrounds us

emotions develop out of an undifferentiated affective state of excitement in which sensory activities are combined (as in synaesthesia).

Off-line aspects of embodied cognition, in contrast, include any cognitive activities in which sensory and motor resources are brought to bear on mental tasks whose referents are distant in time and space or are altogether imaginary. These include symbolic off-loading, where external resources are used to assist in the mental representation and manipulation of things that are not

brain-friendly training uses the following five general elements to enhance learning: 1. Positive emotional experiences 2. Multi-sensory stimulation and novelty 3. Instructional variety and choices 4. Active participation and collaboration 5. Informal learning environments

Planning. Short-term memory. Attention. At first glance, these three frontal lobe functions can seem like diverse activities that just happen to be packed into the same brain region. But on closer inspection it turns out that they are facets of the same basic phenomenon of 'restraint'. Planning restrains our brains from wandering from a chosen path of activity. Short-term memory retrains sensory cortex from moving on to different imagery. Attention constrains the kind of sensory data admitted to sensory cortex.

If times or ages are mentioned in any activity, please take that as a guideline only. Children will learn the activity as it comes naturally to them. A thirty minute activity may take your child forty minutes. If the suggested age is four, but you have a three year old that can grasp the concepts do not let the recommendations hinder you. This information has not been provided for all activities. This is for a couple of reasons. One being that some of these activities span broader age ranges. The other is that while I find that sometimes it is useful to have an idea of where to start your child, it is better to look at your child in terms of ability and readiness rather than number of years. If times are included, they are meant for assistance in planning your day only. They are not in any way intended to be a marker for your child’s success. The activities have been divided up into the instructional areas of language, mathematics, sensory development and practical life skills. Many of these activities can serve as crossovers, allowing you to introduce multiple concepts at once. Some subjects such as cultural studies or science are included in practical life skills, since at this age that is primarily what those subjects encompass. Where applicable, additional skill areas have been included

14 Ways to Encourage Playfulness

Ice Cube Fun

Mitten on a Bottle

Water Play Games

Where Am I Touching?

Playing with Your Food

Texture Play

In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy, and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt—“perceived.” But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity. We already have many examples of this sort of activity: for example, breathing, digestion, and walking are controlled by autonomously running activity generators in your brain stem and spinal cord. During dream sleep the brain is isolated from its normal input, so internal activation is the only source of cortical stimulation. In the awake state, internal activity is the basis for imagination and hallucinations.

Technology enables frequent, low-stakes testing, an activity that powerfully promotes memory for material. Technology encourages better spacing of study over the time course of the class and helps prevent cramming. Technology facilitates presentation of material in ways that take advantage of learners’ existing knowledge about a topic. Technology facilitates presentation of material via multiple sensory modalities, which, if done in the right ways, can promote comprehension and memory. Technology offers new methods for capturing and holding students’ attention, which is a necessary precursor for memory. Technology supports frequent, varied practice that is a necessary precursor to the development of expertise. Technology offers new avenues to connect students socially and fire them up emotionally. Technology allows us to borrow from the techniques of gaming to promote practice, engagement, and motivation.

To be in a state of pure consciousness or no-mind does not entail the rejection of or complete detachment from ordinary mental or sensory experience. On the contrary, in a unified state of consciousness, awareness remains established in unbounded silence while simultaneously engaged in the boundaries of everyday activity.

Sensations are truly intrinsic, in that they can also be attainedor obtainedin the absence of activation of sensory pathways. During dreaming we feel many different sensations (Zadra et al. 1998), yet none of the things we feel in our dreams comes via the pathways that convey such sensations during the waking state.

The sensory pathways do not execute sensations; they only serve to inform the internal context about the external world; during dream sleep they do not even do this. In both states, sensation is a construct given by the intrinsic activity of the brain, within the momentary internal context given by the thalamocortical system.

Our brain processes incoming sensory input from the bottom up, and if someone has a life with chaotic, uncontrollable, or extreme and prolonged stress, particularly early in life, they're more likely to act before thinking. Their cortex is not as active, and reactivity in the lower areas of the brain becomes more dominant.

When something interesting activates the dopamine system, we snap to attention. If we are able to activate our H&N system by shifting our focus outward, the increased level of attention makes the sensory experience more intense. Imagine walking down a street in a foreign country. Everything is more exciting, even looking at ordinary buildings, trees, and shops. Because we are in a novel situation, sensory inputs are more vivid. That’s a large part of the joy of travel. It works in the opposite direction, too. Experiencing H&N sensory stimulation, especially within a complex environment (sometimes called an enriched environment), makes the dopaminergic cognitive facilities in our brains work better. The most complex environments, those that are most enriched, are usually natural ones.

In retrospect, if our training had been geared to account for Body Alarm Reaction, we would have probably received less physical damage from our attackers. As your mind recognizes a potential threat to your well being, your body will start to react to this stress in a number of ways. One of the first reactions to potential physical harm is the secretion of large amounts of the hormone adrenaline into the bloodstream. Adrenaline is one many hormones that are “dumped” into the body during Body Alarm Reaction.9 Their functions are intended to be biologically protective. Unfortunately, the changes they produce can actually inhibit our ability to physically defend ourselves. The intent of the body’s automatic “call to arms’ is to provide the increases in strength and energy to either fight or run away from the threat. This is sometimes referred to as the “Fight-or-Flight” syndrome. It is a product of our evolution to develop mechanisms that allowed us to survive various physical threats. As the body continues down the path of automatic response the effects of the massive hormone “dump” will manifest itself in several different reactions. There will be an increase in both blood pressure and the heart rate.10 This is designed to increase the blood flow to the brain and the muscles, which will be placed under increased activity levels if you either defend yourself or run away. As blood flow increase to the brain and muscular system, they are the most important to survival at this particular moment, there is a decrease of blood flow to the digestive system, kidneys, liver, and skin. There will be an increase in the respiration rate to assimilate additional oxygen into the system. The increase of blood flow to the brain will induce a higher state of mental alertness and sensory perception. This is with the intent to aid our ability to mentally assess the situation at hand and to decrease our reaction time. It can have some negative effects like tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, and an impaired sense of time. There will be an increase in the level of extra energy in our blood with the higher amounts of cholesterol, fats, and blood sugar. In case we might be injured, our body also raises the level of platelets and blood clotting factors to help prevent hemorrhage. One other reaction, one that has serious implications for the martial artist, is that there will be a general increase in muscular tension. This aspect of Body Alarm Reaction alone has limiting effects on several martial skills. One in particular that we should recognize is that muscular tension equates to reduction of speed. So realistically, if we are in Body Alarm Reaction we can expect to be slower than when we are in a normal relaxed state. We can expect to have reduced ability to defend ourselves due to these automatic responses that are intended to provide assistance, but in actuality can greatly hinder that ability.11

In Silver’s model this injured filter system, which is regulated by the catecholamines, doesn’t screen out irrelevant information and sensory stimuli as efficiently as it should, thereby letting everything that registers at the desk of the reticular activating system arrive in the rooms of the frontal regions of the brain. The individual is bombarded, taking care of ten thousand guests in a hotel built for one thousand, on overload all the time, receiving messages about every minute aspect of his or her experience. It is no wonder, then, that the individual would be distractible or, as Silver would argue, inclined to withdraw from it all and shut the damned hotel down.

In this regard, you can think of each individual slow wave of NREM sleep as a courier, able to carry packets of information between different anatomical brain centers. One benefit of these traveling deep-sleep brainwaves is a file-transfer process. Each night, the long-range brainwaves of deep sleep will move memory packets (recent experiences) from a short-term storage site, which is fragile, to a more permanent, and thus safer, long-term storage location. We therefore consider waking brainwave activity as that principally concerned with the reception of the outside sensory world, while the state of deep NREM slow-wave sleep donates a state of inward reflection—one that fosters information transfer and the distillation of memories. If wakefulness is dominated by reception, and NREM sleep by reflection,

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.

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.

It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits.

Animals under early domestication received shelter, a diet altered by agriculture, and protection from predators through relative confinement. This reduced their sensory needs, facilitating further domestication. As our domesticated animals settled in for a life of reduced activity and stimulation, so did humans. As people provided safer, more sedentary conditions for their livestock, they did the same for themselves. The confinement was mutual. By moving out of nature and settling onto farms, we became in a real sense just another farm animal.

OM CHANTING Various studies have shown that OM chanting deactivates the limbic part of the brain responsible for our basic emotions (fear, pleasure, anger) and our impulses (hunger, sex, dominance and care of offspring). Since the effectiveness of OM chanting is associated with the experience of vibrations around the ears, scientists have suggested that these sensations are transmitted through the auricular branch of the vagus nerve. As the vagus nerve branches off into the inner ear and larynx, controlling the opening and closing of the vocal cords and tone of the sound, it appears that this is stimulated during the vocalization of the O and M sounds. In addition, by performing chanting in exhalation, the vagus nerve is activated in its role as manager of the parasympathetic system. In addition, chanting, by facilitating the lengthening of the exhalation, further amplifies the effect on the parasympathetic system. This is why this practice helps to calm and relax the body and mind. -Find a quiet place to sit comfortably. -A good position is to sit with your legs crossed and your back straight. -Wear comfortable cotton clothes that do not tighten any part of your body. All body channels should be free and comfortable. Place the palm of your right hand (facing upwards) on the palm of your left hand at navel level. Close your eyes for a few minutes and relax your mind and body. Slowly feel the vibrations that occur in every part of your body. When the vibrations become more intense, start breathing deeply. Hold your breath for a second and then slowly exhale. Initially count to 7 as you exhale. This ought to be duplicated thrice. As you exhale the third time, sing "oooooooooo..." Feel the vibrations in your abdomen (and under your chest). After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Breathe in again (slow, deep breaths). As you exhale sing "ooooo..." and feel the vibrations in your chest and neck. After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Inhale again (long, deep breath). As you exhale, sing "mmmmmmmm...". Feel the vibrations in your head and neck. After exhaling, relax for 2 seconds. Inhale again and as you exhale say "oooommmm..." or "aaauuummm...". About 80% of the sound should be "aaauuu..." and 20% should be "mmmm...". Repeat the previous steps 3 times (you can do it up to 9 times). After the Om meditation, relax and concentrate on your regular breathing for about 5 minutes. TIPS -Wearing white clothes and being in a white environment will improve your experience. But the rule of white is not fundamental. -A good place could be a quiet room or a garden with shade. Your eyes, ears or other sensory organs should not be disturbed. -Do not consume alcohol for at least 8-10 hours before meditation. -It would be better not to eat or drink anything for at least 2 hours before meditation. The body's channels should not be blocked in order to achieve maximum results. This applies especially to the digestive system. -The best times for this meditation are early in the morning or late at night. -For beginners, singing "aum" can cause dizziness. It is recommended to proceed slowly and try to learn one step at a time. In this way you will prepare body and mind for the next step. -It is very important to open your eyes slowly when your breathing has stabilized. -If you cannot sit on the floor, you can try sitting on a bed or a chair. The most important thing is to keep your back straight. -Doing this kind of meditation in a group brings more peace and harmony to all members than doing it alone.

The rattlesnake represents the very acme of serpentine sophistication. It has superlative sensing organs that exploit infra-red and chemo-sensory stimuli to enable it to locate its prey. It is armed with one of the most powerful of all venoms with which it can inject its victims with surgical precision. It is long-lived and produces its young fully formed and immediately capable of fending for themselves. But it has one vulnerability, one way in which human beings who see rattlesnakes as a threat to their own dominance are able to attack it. In North America, in the northern part of the rattlesnake’s range, winters can be so severe that a cold-blooded snake cannot remain active. So many species that are common elsewhere in North America do not spread far north. Rattlers are among the few that do. They survive the winter by another special adaptation. They have developed the ability to hibernate. On the prairies of the mid-West and north into Canada, they choose to do so in the burrows of prairie dogs, rodents related to marmots. Elsewhere in the woodlands, they find outcrops of rocks that are riven by deep clefts. But such places are not abundant. As autumn approaches and temperatures fall, great numbers of rattlesnakes set out on long cross-country journeys of many miles following traditional routes to the places where they and their parents before them hibernate each year. Some of these wintering dens may contain a thousand individuals. So those human beings who hate snakes and who, in spite of the rattler’s sophisticated early warning system, believe that they are a constant and lethal threat, are also able, at this season of the year, to massacre rattlesnakes in thousands. As a consequence one of the most advanced and wonderfully sophisticated of all snakes — perhaps of all reptiles — is now, in many parts of the territories it once ruled, in real danger of extinction.

Future motor neurons are located ventrally, and form the ventral roots of the spinal cord. The neurons of the sensory nervous system develop from neural crest cells. The dorso-ventral organization of the spinal cord is produced by Sonic hedgehog protein signals from ventral regions such as the notochord. Sonic hedgehog forms a gradient of activity from ventral to dorsal in the neural tube, and acts as the ventral patterning positional signal. As well as being organized along the dorso-ventral axis, neurons at different positions along the antero-posterior axis of the spinal cord become specified to serve different functions. The antero-posterior specification of neuronal function in the spinal cord was dramatically illustrated some 40 years ago by experiments in which a section of the spinal cord that would normally innervate wing muscles was transplanted from one chick embryo into the region that normally serves the legs of another embryo. Chicks developing from the grafted embryos spontaneously activated both legs together, as though they were trying to flap their wings, rather than activating each leg alternately as if walking. These studies showed that motor neurons generated at a given antero-posterior level in the spinal cord had intrinsic properties characteristic of that position. The spinal cord becomes demarcated into different regions along the antero-posterior axis by combinations of expressed Hox genes. A typical vertebrate limb contains more than 50 muscle groups with which neurons must connect in a precise pattern. Individual neurons express particular combinations of Hox genes, which determine which muscle they will innervate. So all together, expression of genes resulting from dorso-ventral position together with those resulting from antero-posterior position confers a virtually unique identity on functionally distinct sets of neurons in the spinal cord.

Kolb’s experiential learning cycle is a widely used explanation on how effective learning takes place (Kolb, 1983; Zull, 2002). Kolb’s cycle has four stages – namely, the concrete experience stage, reflective observation stage, abstract conceptualisation stage, and active experimentation stage. All four stages play important roles in accomplishing successful and effective learning. Kolb’s theory explains how different parts of the brain function together to affect effective learning; concrete experience is sensed through the sensory cortex; reflective observation is performed using the back integrative cortex; abstract conceptualisation is done using the frontal integrative cortex; and active experimentation is performed using motor cortex (Zull, 2002).

What all this tells us is that perception reflects the active comparison of sensory inputs with internal predictions. And this gives us a way to understand a bigger concept: awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.

A rhyming Nativity narrative. "The donkey who carried Mary to the Nativity calmly focuses on feelings of wonderment surrounding the child’s birth. With huge eyes...the little donkey is utterly adorable. Lines like “a bit of tingle-my-toes. / That’s how the evergreen / smelled to me, / a bit of fresh pine to my nose” offer opportunities for caregivers to extend the reading to sensory activities, though the scent of pine doesn’t seem historically accurate. An uncluttered stable features friendly, curious barn animals that greet baby Jesus along with the three Wise Men. Told in verse, the tale evokes a tender, pleasant mood. ...“I lifted my head / above His hay bed // …and sang of this morning of grace.” Jesus, referred to as “the Baby” and “the Babe,” is tan-skinned, as are his parents. Two of the Wise Men are light-skinned, while one is darker-skinned. A gentle, spare tale, part bedtime story, part Christmas fare. (Picture book. 2-5)" Kirkus Reviews

You are a miracle of consciousness, a heart beating in your beautiful body, enabling you to perceive and receive this stream of sensory information with appreciation and awe. You, too, are pulsing with energy, activated by the very same Elements animating the stars. Pause to consciously acknowledge the wondrous amalgamation you are, a compilation of complex biological systems that motor your movements inside and out, persistently powering your physical and mental processes, keeping you awake and alive, brimming with potential as a being of peace and of love.

Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits.

Human consciousness is characterized by a strong extravert tendency that reaches for objects via the senses. Hence the Yoga masters call for the control of both the mind and the senses, citta-nigraha and indriya-nigraha. Buddhist Yoga speaks of three types of “thirsting” (trishna), or grasping: (1) thirsting for things of the world, (2) thirsting for rebirth, and (3) thirsting for liberation. While thirsting for liberation is preferable over the other two, it still represents a limitation. Therefore it, too, must be overcome. Nirvāna (nonblowing) was originally defined as the nonblowing of the wind of desire—for anything, including the impulse toward liberation. Nirvāna is realized only when every form of grasping is transcended. According to an old Buddhist model, human life unfolds as a play of twelve factors of dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda): Ignorance (avidyā), which gives rise to Volitional activity (samskāra), which can be bodily, vocal, or merely mental and which represents either meritorious or demeritorious karma; this leads to Consciousness (vijnāna), which causes “Name and form” (nāma-rūpa), which stands for what today is called the body-mind as a whole and which gives rise to The “six bases” (shad-āyatana) consisting of the five senses and that part of the mind which processes sensory input; this leads to Contact (sparsha) with sense objects, which gives rise to Feeling (samveda), comprising pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral sensations; this evokes Craving (trishna), or the desire to unite with pleasant or separate from unpleasant experiences, which leads to Grasping (upadāna), which consists in one’s holding onto specific experiences, views, behaviors, or the sense of self as such; this causes “Becoming” (bhava), or a particular state of existence that corresponds to a person’s inner constitution, which leads to Birth (jāti), or the actual incarnation as a specific individual, which brings Ageing and death (jarā-marana). This causal nexus seeks to explain cyclic existence (samsāra) in terms of an individual’s journey from birth to death to rebirth, ad infinitum. This model makes it clear that cyclic existence is not due to any outside agency but the human mind itself. In other words, we are creating our destiny in every moment. Yoga further tells us that samsāra is not inevitable but that we can stop the vicious cycle by modifying our volitional activity and behavior. This good news is fundamental to all forms of Yoga. Greed is a phenomenon of the unregenerate psyche, which is under the spell of the conditioned nexus and has not taken control of its own destiny. Freedom from greed comes with nongrasping (aparigraha), which is based on the recognition that we are inherently complete and need nothing for our perfection.

The so-called perceptual ‘stimulus’ and motor ‘response’ cannot be considered separately, outside the context of their interaction, though Dewey hints that indeed the motor element – normally seen as the response – may be primary. Perception is an active, not a passive process – or better, it is a profoundly interactive process. Movement lies behind, and in, every one of our senses. This idea has gathered further scientific backing in recent years. The Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás has argued, starting from the examination of simple marine invertebrates such as the sea squirt, that the capacity for motion underlies all knowledge: What I must stress here is that the brain’s understanding of anything, whether factual or abstract, arises from our manipulations of the external world, by our moving within the world and thus from our sensory-derived experience of it.230 Similarly neuroscientist György Buzsáki claims that perception is founded on motion and cognition, not motion and cognition founded on perception. He regards activity ‘as not only interwoven with perception but prior to perception, prior both in terms of evolution and in terms of initiating processes within and outside the organism that result in the organism’s perceiving.’231 In relation to the evolutionary claim, he points to some primitive sea animals that are capable only of a rhythmic movement of cilia to bring in nutrients, with no (presumed) perceptual abilities at all.232

Bliss Consciousness may be lived at all times, it is necessary that it should not be lost when the mind comes out of meditation and engages in activity. For this to be possible the mind has to become so intimately familiar with the state of Being that It remains grounded in the mind at all times, through all the mental activity of thinking, discriminating, and deciding, and through all phases of action on the sensory level. For this in turn, it is necessary that the process of gaining Transcendental Consciousness through meditation

We have seen that a toddler needs to be surrounded to build fixed landmarks in his mind; he needs to move, to discover the environment by himself through the five senses, and he needs to do. All other needs of the toddler are always related to the sensory periods and are: Need for direct contact with the mother; Need to feel protected and safe; Need to develop relationships; Need to find stable reference points; Need its biological rhythms to be respected; Need for self-awareness as an individual; Need for freedom and independence; Need for a tailored space; Need for concentration; Need to use hands; Need to experience nature; Need for silence.

What is sensory integration therapy? This form of occupational therapy helps children and adults with SPD (sensory processing disorder) use all their senses together. These are the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Sensory integration therapy is claimed to help people with SPD respond to sensory inputs such as light, sound, touch, and others; and change challenging or repetitive behaviours. Someone in the family may have trouble receiving and responding to information through their senses. This is a condition called sensory processing disorder (SPD). These people are over-sensitive to things in their surroundings. This disorder is commonly identified in children and with conditions like autism spectrum disorder. The exact cause of sensory processing disorder is yet to be identified. However, previous studies have proven that over-sensitivity to light and sound has a strong genetic component. Other studies say that those with sensory processing conditions have abnormal brain activity when exposed simultaneously to light and sound. Treatment for sensory processing disorder in children and adults is called sensory integration therapy. Therapy sessions are play-oriented for children, so they should be fun and playful. This may include the use of swings, slides, and trampolines and may be able to calm an anxious child. In addition, children can make appropriate responses. They can also perform more normally. SPD can also affect adults Someone who struggles with SPD should consider receiving occupational therapy, which has an important role in identifying and treating sensory integration issues. Occupational therapists are health professionals using different therapeutic approaches so that people can do every work they need to do, inside and outside their homes. Through occupational therapy, affected individuals are helped to manage their immediate and long-term sensory symptoms. Sensory integration therapy for adults, especially for people living with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, may use everyday sounds, objects, foods, and other items to rouse their feelings and elicit positive responses. Suppose an adult is experiencing agitation or anxiety. In that case, soothing music can calm them, or smelling a scent familiar to them can help lessen their nervous excitement and encourage relaxation, as these things can stimulate their senses. Seniors with Alzheimer's/Dementia can regain their ability to connect with the world around them. This can help improve their well-being overall and quality of life. What Are The Benefits of Sensory Integration Therapy Sensory integration treatment offers several benefits to people with SPD: * efficient organisation of sensory information. These are the things the brain collects from one's senses - smell, touch, sight, etc. * Active involvement in an exploration of the environment. * Maximised ability to function in recreational and other daily activities. * Improved independence with daily living activities. * Improved performance in the home, school, and community. * self-regulations. Affected individuals get the ability to understand and manage their behaviours and understand their feelings about things that happen around them. * Sensory systems modulation. If you are searching for an occupational therapist to work with for a family with a sensory processing disorder, check out the Mission Walk Therapy & Rehabilitation Centre. The occupational therapy team of Mission Walk uses individualised care plans, along with the most advanced techniques, so that patients can perform games, school tasks, and other day-to-day activities with their best functional skills. Call Mission Walk today for more information or a free consultation on sensory integration therapy. Our customer service staff will be happy to help.

Though many of us experience sensory issues, anxiety, meltdowns, and debilitating mental health symptoms, we push as much of that misery into the private realm as possible. Our elaborate veils of coping mechanisms and camouflaging can create the illusion we don’t need help. Often this comes at the expense of giving up on the areas of life where we might need assistance. We may eschew relationships, drop out of grueling academic programs, avoid working in fields that require networking and socializing, or completely disengage from activities that involve using our bodies, because we feel so detached and uncoordinated in them. Most of us are haunted by the sense there’s something “wrong” or “missing” in our lives—that we’re sacrificing far more of ourselves than other people in order to get by and receiving far less in return.

chapter 37 exercise sucks i blame PE class as the first offender. I really do. At such an early age kids who love to play active games are made to run laps instead. Okay, maybe that isn’t every school, but it was certainly the first time I remember someone divorcing physical activity from fun and creating the demon that is exercise. Then diet culture came along and told us the reason we should be engaging this exercise is primarily to keep our bodies thin and attractive. These things have really wrecked our relationship to joyful body movement. If you are motivated to an activity by body shame, experience the activity as a chorus of unpleasant sensory experiences (pain, boredom, and sweat are my three least favorite things in the world), and then end with no immediate results, why on earth would you like that activity or want to do it ever again?

Children develop strength when they have daily opportunities to activate and use big muscle groups in a variety of ways. For instance, when babies have plenty of time to be on the ground day after day, they build strength simply by interacting with the environment around them. They reach for objects, attempt to kick things, push up for a better view, and roll over for a new perspective. They don’t need to do formal baby exercises that so many parenting forums recommend; simply moving about in a sensory-rich, yet soothing, environment is more than adequate for developing muscles naturally.

If you've suffered an anxiety attack, maybe you've encountered the grounding techniques of the five senses. What's one thing you smell? Tell me two things you hear. There is a mysterious entanglement between our welfare and our capacity to ground ourselves in a particular place. We are meant to be connected to our where, to the sensory experience of it. The simple beholding of place can slow your heart and steady your breath. It is quite the protective force.

There is no such tiny “Cartesian Theater” in the brain; conscious experience is generated by a vastly complex, distributed network that synchronizes and adjusts its activity by the millisecond. As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory information. The experience you have right now is a unique creation of your brain that has transformed data from your body into something closer to a hallucination. To break down this seemingly obvious point that we will deal with very often in this book and that I myself struggle to understand: the existence of our experience is real, but the contents of this experience exist only in your brain. Some philosophers call this “irreducible subjectivity,” which means that no totally objective theory of human experience may be possible. The contents of your experience are not representations of the world, but your experience is part of the world. By altering this process with molecules like psilocybin or LSD we can become aware of different aspects of our perceptions. By perturbing consciousness and observing the consequences, we can gain insight into its normal functioning. This is again not to say that consciousness is not real; there can be no doubt that I am conscious as I write this sentence. However, it is the relationship between consciousness and the external world that is more mysterious than one might assume. It is often supposed that cognition and consciousness result from processing the information from our sensory systems (like vision), and that we use neural computations to process this information. However, following Riccardo Manzotti and others such as the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, I will argue that computations are not natural things that can cause a physical phenomenon like consciousness. When I read academic papers on artificial or machine intelligence, or popular books on the subject, I have not found anyone grappling with these strange “facts” about human consciousness. Either consciousness is not mentioned, or if it is, it is assumed to be a computational problem.

If your long path is short-circuited by stress, and your brain is using the short path instead, you might be so alarmed at the mere thought of a shark that you have a panic attack just thinking about taking a swim in the ocean. All the body’s machinery of FFF then gets engaged by this imaginary threat, just as if you were nose to nose with Jaws. Your gut clenches, your heart races, your breathing becomes fast and shallow, and your focus narrows to the point where you can’t think about anything other than the threat. This takes a huge biological toll on the body. High adrenaline produces dramatic reductions in life span. Stressed people have much more disease and live much shorter lives than unstressed people. Whatever form stress takes—depression, anxiety, or PTSD—correlates with higher rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. The deficits in the life spans of stressed people are measured in decades rather than years. In meditators, the amygdala is quiet. It becomes even quieter with practice. The difference in amygdala activation between the longest-term meditators and their less-experienced peers has been measured. The adepts show 400% less reactivity to stressful events. But even in novices who practice mindfulness for 30 hours over 8 weeks, decreased amygdala activity is found. Other structures within the midbrain or limbic system work together with the hippocampus and amygdala. One of them, the thalamus, is like a relay station. Close to the corpus callosum, it identifies information coming in from the senses like touch, hearing, and taste, and directs it to the consciousness centers of the prefrontal cortex. The thalamus typically becomes more active during meditation, as it works harder to suppress sensory input (like “that buzzing mosquito” or “this chair is too hard”) that pulls us out of Bliss Brain. With the hippocampus regulating emotion, the thalamus regulating sensory input, and the long path in good working order, stress-inducing signals aren’t sent to the amygdala. In turn, all the body’s FFF machinery remains offline. This produces corresponding biological benefits. Heart rhythm is even. Respiration is deep and slow. Digestion is effective. Immunity is high. That’s why so many studies show pervasive health and longevity benefits among meditators.

The insula also gives rise to empathy. People who are more sensitive to emotional cues from others have greater insula activation and score higher on tests of empathy. And the insula lights up during meditation sessions, especially when the meditator is feeling kindness and compassion. As the meditator expands his definition of connection to include other people and eventually the entire universe, he feels one with everything. In the words of a comprehensive meditation review, “the habitual reified dualities between subject and object, self and other, in-group and out-group dissipate.” As he expands the borders of his tent to infinity, massive changes occur in his brain activity. Insula Activation Benefits Increases Decreases Elevated emotional states Anger Motor control Fear Kindness Anxiety Compassion Depression Empathy Addiction Longevity Chronic pain Immunity Happiness Love Sensory enjoyment Introspection Sense of fulfillment Feelings of connectedness Focus Self-awareness As well as mediating our empathy and compassion circuits, the insula has several other functions. It collects information from a far-flung network of receptors inside our body as well as from our skin. It then stimulates feelings such as hunger that then prompt actions such as seeking food. The dark side of this mechanism is that it can stimulate cravings for drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. Addicts show increased insula activation even before consuming their drug of choice. The insula also lights up when we feel pain or even anticipate feeling pain. Meditators are more “in the moment” when it comes to physical pain, releasing it more quickly. They may also experience overwhelming cravings, as we’ll see in Chapter 5. These are positive cravings directing them toward the ecstatic states found in Bliss Brain.

Big bundles of neurons conduct information up through the spinal cord into the brain. Sitting at the top of this conduit is the thalamus. In Chapter 3, I compared the thalamus to a relay station, conducting information from the senses to the prefrontal cortex. During meditation, the thalamus is active, as meditators suppress sensory input that might pull them out of Bliss Brain. Andrew Newberg finds that one of the two lobes of the thalamus is often more active than the other. One interpretation of this activity may be the meditator’s awareness that she is more than her body and that she is connected to nonlocal mind, not just her senses. It’s the thalamus that is telling us what is and isn’t reality, and this is affected by the larger reality in which the meditator is absorbed. In long-term meditators, this asymmetry persists when they open their eyes. As the meditator experiences oneness, the universe will, in Newberg’s words, “be sensed as real. But it will not be a ‘symmetrical’ reality. Instead, it will be perceived ‘asymmetrically,’ meaning that the reality will appear different from one’s normal perception.” The nonlocal universe may be perceived as more real than local sensory reality and, as Newberg observes, “The more frequently a person engages in meditative self-reflection, the more these reality centers [like the thalamus] change.

The gateway to living in the present is sensory activity. It is what keeps you rooted in the present.

To encounter the holy in the ordinary is to find God in the liminal—in spaces where we might subconsciously exclude it, including the sensory moments that are often illegibly spiritual.

The root of all evil is misunderstanding the nature of self and other by actively ignoring the interdependence of self and other. Evil comes from turning away from the vivid world of creation, where the self can never remain separate from other beings. It is a denial of the ever-changing flux of sensory experience. Evil is a turning away from life. The full realization of refraining from evil comes with waking up to the teaching of interdependence.

If you feel that you can strengthen your vibes on your own without any support, you’re kidding yourself. Empaths and intuitives especially need supportive people to help us remain true to ourselves. We can easily get lost in other people’s energy and become drained, overwhelmed, and confused. I encourage you to actively seek out your soul supporters (those other six-sensory people who are listening to their spirit) as part of your effort to strengthen your inner channel. Find people you can connect with, who will listen to you, respect your vibes, and keep them safe and protected from negative judgment, including your own—in other words, your team. These people do exist, and you need to connect with and invite them into your life as fast as possible. Intuitive people are most comfortable with kindred spirits—we don’t do as well alone. As I like to say, even Jesus Christ picked 12 helpers before he went to work.

Neurotypical brains engage in sensory adaptation and habituation: the longer they are in the presence of a sound, smell, texture, or visual cue, the more their brain learns to ignore it, and allow it to fade into the background. Their neurons become less likely to be activated by a cue the longer they are around it. The exact opposite is true for Autistic people: the longer we are around a stimulus, the more it bothers us.