Neuroplasticity and Reptilian brain.
I’ll keep this simple, and leave the links to fill in the detail on neuroplasticity.
Reptilian brain is our primitive brain that governs and dominates our response to situations by fight-or-flight-or-inertia. An animal will either attack-run-or-remain motionless. These are the classical three poisons of desire-aversion-ignorance that govern this universe: attraction-repulsion-inertia. Neuroplasticity is the refinement to that reptilian response. Through certain activities – none more so than the non-activity of meditation – this refinement takes place.
Have you noticed in conversations, how, when a something comes up which is not understood or to our liking, the subject is changed and we transfer the conversation? In our mind, we can mentally walk along roads we know and have actually travelled, but when it come to unexperienced territory, we turn round and come back. Our neural pathways have not fired and wired at those places.
Have you noticed how people relive the same experiences? Have you noticed how politicians, and officials use identical phrases year in and year out, most of them meaningless ‘Barnum statements’?
If experience is not expanded, intelligence stays stagnant…stays reptilian! I sometimes wonder if this ‘stagnation’ is done on purpose, through the media!
Our brain’s neural pathways are not all connected,
and so we understand some things and not others.
This brain conveys sensory information to the mind.
Our mind then translates this information.
Essence sits and notes.
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Essence already knows what the mind is thinking.
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Through expanding experience and intelligent practices,
we fire and wire our neural pathways, joining up our brain.
This allows more information to flow,
therefore permitting more understanding to occur.
Essence already knows what the mind is thinking.
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If essence is caught up in the reptilian brain,
it forgets its true nature.
In the stillness of meditation
the brain fires up, allowing clarity to naturally arise.
Instead of darting to and fro looking for distractions,
the mind is at peace, and has clarity.
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The Mind expresses Essence’s clarity.
That is loving compassion,
as it has transcended its reptilian fear.
Of course, it still has enough to
get out of the way of an oncoming truck!
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Every year there is conference by the Mind and Life Institute (www.mindandlife.org) and the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (www.dalailama.com) where scientists and Buddhist get together to discuss these matters.
This videos shows scientist and Tibetan monk working on this subject.
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This is from http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-nine-april/self-directed-neuroplasticity/
One of the enduring changes in the brain of those who routinely meditate is that the brain becomes thicker. In other words, those who routinely meditate build synapses, synaptic networks, and layers of capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that bring metabolic supplies such as glucose or oxygen to busy regions), which an MRI shows is measurably thicker in two major regions of the brain. One is in the pre-frontal cortex, located right behind the forehead. It’s involved in the executive control of attention – of deliberately paying attention to something. This change makes sense because that’s what you’re doing when you meditate or engage in a contemplative activity. The second brain area that gets bigger is a very important part called the insula. The insula tracks both the interior state of the body and the feelings of other people, which is fundamental to empathy. So, people who routinely tune into their own bodies – through some kind of mindfulness practice – make their insula thicker, which helps them become more self-aware and empathic. This is a good illustration of neuroplasticity, which is the idea that as the mind changes, the brain changes, or as Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb put it,neurons that fire together wire together….
The second suggestion is to relax. In modern life, we chronically activate our stress response, our fight-or-flight system, which is related to the sympathetic nervous system. We did evolve to handle bursts of stress, but not chronic stress, and it’s hard to be mindful when we’re stressed out because stress activates the skittery, monkey-mind tendencies in the brain. To calm that monkey-brain as it scans for tigers in the environment, so to speak, it’s important to calm down sympathetic arousal, and the way to do that is to activate the parasympathetic wing of the nervous system. This is the rest-and-digest part of the autonomic nervous system, the part that keeps us on an even keel. A great way to activate the parasympathetic system is through our exhalations, because the parasympathetic system handles exhaling. As few as three to ten long exhalations will light up the parasympathetic circuits and calm down sympathetic arousal. Similarly, because the parasympathetic system handles digestion, relaxing the tongue or the lips also helps to light up this system.
It’s a good illustration of self-directed neuroplasticity. This practice reliably stimulates the neural substrates of mindful attention, and over time, stimulating the neural substrates of mindful attention will naturally strengthen them, because neurons that fire together wire together. We can use this knowledge to build up the neural substrates of compassion, self-esteem, resilience, spiritual insight, and deep concentration. Pretty great, isn’t it?
Simple animation:
Most important of all this shows we are not fixed entities. However because we react out of habit, we re-enforce our fixed neural pathways, thereby fixing our karmic imprint in the mind, And , that’s why we get stuck in the MUD!
BUDDHA IN THE MUD is a blog - a living book based on the Dzogchen teachings. Our teacher is life, and life is karma. We are all Buddhas in the mud of concepts. 