on learning to be slow
I was doing my routine reading of “on this day” entries when itt made me realise how recent it was that I learned how to run: I started running regularly sometime in…
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my messy brain
seeing my brain in new light & trying to work with it instead of against it
the emptiness of information overload
Sometimes I think about times in my younger days, when I could spend hours reading a book or listening to music on my walkman (remember these things?). Now I can barely get…
At the time, I had read The Relaxation Response
At the time, I had read The Relaxation Response, Herbert Benson’s first book written in the seventies, in which he attributed meditation’s power to an alteration of the nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic pathways. But with my knowledge of the bodywide psychosomatic network, I was beginning to think of disease-related stress in terms of an information overload, a condition in which the mind-body network is so taxed by unprocessed sensory input in the form of suppressed trauma or undigested emotions that it has become bogged down and cannot flow freely, sometimes even working against itself, at cross-purposes.
The superior colliculus in the midbrain
The superior colliculus in the midbrain, another nodal point of neuropeptide receptors, controls the muscles that direct the eyeball, and affects which images are permitted to fall on the retina and hence to be seen.
Emotions are constantly regulating what we experience as “reality”
Emotions are constantly regulating what we experience as “reality.” The decision about what sensory information travels to your brain and what gets filtered out depends on what signals the receptors are receiving from the peptides. There is a plethora of elegant neurophysiological data suggesting that the nervous system is not capable of taking in everything, but can only scan the outer world for material that it is prepared to find by virtue of its wiring hookups, its own internal patterns, and its past experience.
In order for the brain not to be overwhelmed by the constant deluge of sensory input
There is no objective reality! In order for the brain not to be overwhelmed by the constant deluge of sensory input, some sort of filtering system must enable us to pay attention to what our bodymind deems the most important pieces of information and to ignore the others.
Think of the brain as a machine
Think of the brain as a machine for not merely filtering and storing this sensory input, but for associating it with other events or stimuli occurring simultaneously at any synapse or receptor along the way—that is, learning.
environmental deprivation could shrink the brain
environmental deprivation could shrink the brain...In examining cats raised with one eye sewn shut, they found that the visual cortex was significantly smaller.