Does Pain Help Our Cells Communicate?

In the mind body connection, pain helps our cells communicate with our brain.

Has your body ever hurt and ached for what seems like no reason at all? Have you gotten up in the morning and exclaimed "my body hurts, I must have slept wrong"? Have you ever considered your job to be a pain in the neck while you are suffering through neck stiffness? While I could go on and on with examples, this hopefully helps you begin to (read more)

Patient Back From Vegetative State - Neuroscience News

After 15 years in a vegetative state, a procedure of brain stimulation brought the patient back.  I am shocked not only at this procedure, but also the ramifications of what that means for the person.  Just think about what 15 years ago was like and imagine the patient waking up in today's world.

While the patient is not fully recovered, the results build hope that what they have learned in this situation will bring hope for others.  It may also help us find breakthroughs that will take us into improved levels of care and recovery.

You can read the full article on the website page in the Scientific American.

Stress Set Point In The Emergency Danger Zone

This is the continuation in a series on allostatic load.  In part 3, we discussed being disconnected from allostatic load and stress. 

If you haven't seen Part 3, go there first.

In Part 4, we will be discussing the stress set point in the emergency danger zone.

So what can you do if your set point has entered the emergency danger zone?

The first thing is to recognize it.  You can't keep running from the body and the mind.  You can't keep pushing your body past its limits.  You can't keep running from your past even if it is so horrible and painful to see.  Okay, you can keep running, but sooner or later, it will take you down to your knees and trust me, it gets much harder to come back.  I speak from experience on this.

In the early stages of recovering your set point and reducing allostatic load, you may need to take drastic measures for your own survival.  This may include medications and life saving procedures, but you must be careful that these do not become a crutch that is misinterpreted and misrepresented as healing.  It is far too easy to do this in your mind.  If you stay in this mode, it will not go easy for you in the physical side of your mind and body.

Support and stress reduction activities can be helpful, but they will only take you so far if you ignore what else is going on underneath.  Yoga, QiGong, and other movement activities can also help, but again, you need to go to the root cause.  It requires traveling into the pain and difficulty, not just treating the surface.

Even massage and bodywork of different flavors can help you to begin the process of balancing out and resetting the set point of your life.  Keep in mind though, these things can become the healing crutch rather than the healing.  They may often be good for you, but they can become a routine that keeps you at arms length from that which is raising the alarms within your body.

The best thing you can do to help reduce the allostatic load is by going in and learning to connect with your body.  Through the felt-sense, breathwork, and movement connected together with someone who is trained, you can begin to feel your body deep within.  You can begin to go into the outer edges of what is comfortable, thereby training your mind and body to increase your resilience and take back the power of what is draining your life.

This is not just a mind exercise.  It needs to happen at the cellular level to bring about true change in a body.  If you don't engage the body and nervous system at a cellular level, you're just putting a band-aid on a gushing wound, hoping it will stop the bleeding.

Sometimes this process is not easy in the beginning, but it is like an Olympic athlete training for the Olympics.  They don't start out on day one being able to run 25 miles.  They work their way up to it and often through the process, there is muscle discomfort and pain.  If they keep training and allowing for recovering, their muscles and body will be ready to do more and to take on more.

The same goes for healing your life and dropping the allostatic load you are under.  This is not pie-in-the-sky thinking.  It has been proven many times over with those that know how to take someone in and guide them through the process of waking up.  The important point though is that you have to go through the process to wake up and stop disconnecting from your life.  Anything short of that pushes the set point further and further toward the danger zone, past the point of no return.

The process I've gone through with Dr. Paul Canali of Evolutionary Healing Institute in Miami is called Unified Therapy.  In this process, he draws on the core truths of many modalities and then applies them at the right time.  He constantly keeps the person engaged through the process and keeps them feeling in their body.  When you are feeling in the body, you are in control, but when you have disconnected and are not feeling, that is when you're heading for the cliff.

It sounds so simple and yet complex to go through this, but I know for a fact that many people, including myself, have dropped the allostatic load in their lives.  It isn't just a one time moment of healing.  As you go through the process you learn to become more aware --  and the more aware you become, the more life shifts so that you can adapt better to stress, heal your life, and keep yourself from maladaptive problem solving.

Make sure you check out the next part in this 5 part series.  

 Part 5 is "The Best Part Of Dealing With Stress"

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Disconnected From Allostatic Load & Stress

This is the continuation in a series on allostatic load.  In part 2, we discussed if you don't deal with stress, it will deal with you.

If you haven't seen Part 2, go there first.

In Part 3, we will be discussing being disconnected from allostatic load and stress.

At first, we find some over the counter meds to take that disconnect us a little more from what is going on.  Our body is trying to get our attention with the pain or physical issue we are experiencing, but we ignore it.  We've got no time for it.  There are work deadlines to meet, travel and meetings to take place, kids to take care of, bills to pay and so on and so forth.  There are a million reasons we come up with, and we say that tomorrow we will take a few hours and stop to rest.  Tomorrow comes and goes, but we keep pushing on so that we can get caught up.  Unfortunately we never catch up.

The body tires to hang on.  It tries hard not to adjust the set point of allostatic load, but it has no choice.  We keep pushing and pushing.  The body continues to degrade and wear down.  Our mind becomes more disconnected to what reality is and our perception becomes our new reality.

We then turn to doctors and their procedures, demanding they find the label for the condition we have.  We demand that the doctor cure us and we ignore and fail to listen to what the doctor is trying to tell us.  Often, doctors and other health practitioners don't have a good handle on how to deal with allostatic load, so in frustration and despair in between seeing many patients, they give us a prescription and a diagnosis.

We get our prescription filled and we exclaim to our friends, this label is what we have.  Our friends show sympathy and gasp at the difficulty we face.  We feel supported, and we temporarily feel like we've found help and we'll get better.  The prescription, of course, reinforces that it is best to disconnect from reality, and it reinforces what our perception is, even if it is misguided.

The body however has still not won.  It has tried to get our attention and tell us that our set point is way out of the range of normal.  It begs us to take a good hard look at our life, but we're too busy for that.  We've got too much to do.  There is just no time for self evaluation and besides, doing something like that is for those new age people, not for serious people.  That's what we tell ourselves and that's what we make ourselves believe, but there is no truth to it.

Our body continues to stay on alert because we've never allowed it to come to any other conclusion.  We've revved up the motor and kept it in neutral.  Our allostatic load continues to increase into further degradation of the mind and body, taking us dangerously close to the point of no return.  We continue to ignore it, knowing that we've got the diagnosis and prescription.  What else do we need, we ask ourselves amusingly.  There is nothing.  We've got this, we exclaim.

We interject some happy memes and positive thoughts.  We say some extra prayers.  We project to the world around us that all is okay and we're managing this.  To be strong is what this life requires us to be, we are taught.  We can't show weakness.  We must show we're strong and in control.  Again, we are feeding ourselves a false perception in life, not the reality that actually exists.

At some point, our body will get our attention.  It may be pain that is so great we can not take it any longer.  It may be some physical ailment that demands emergency care.  It may be anxiety and depression that disorients our life to the point of not being sure which way is up or down.  If we continue to ignore it, our body and our mind will keep throwing up the flares in the hope that we listen.

Picture it like a spring getting wound up more and more, tighter and tighter.  At some point, there is no more winding left.  The only thing remaining is that the spring has to unwind.  It has so much kinetic energy locked in waiting to bombard its way out.

When you get to this point, the only hope is that you'll not be past the point of no return.  Unfortunately with the health issues we are facing today, it is more common for people to push allostatic load to the outer edge of possible limits.

Most doctor visits are related to stress and studies have been done to prove that.  Doctors know it, but patients demand they help feed the disconnect between reality and perception.

There is so much more that interconnects with allostatic load, and while I'm trying to simplify it into something that's easy to understand, I know that it is more complex than this.  Yet, I know it can be as simple as what I describe.  I've been there.  I've pushed my own body past its limits and you can read more about that in my book, Hope and Possibility Through Trauma.

Make sure you check out the next part in this 5 part series.  

 Part 4 is "Stress Setpoint In The Emergency Danger Zone"

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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If You Don't Deal With Stress

This is the continuation of a series on allostatic load.  In part 1, there are notes from a video discussion with Dr. Donald Bosch of the Headington Institute on allostatic load.  He does a very good job of explaining what allostatic load and allostasis are.

I really enjoy how he explains allostatic load.

If you have not seen Part 1, go there first.

I have always said that if you don't deal with stress, stress will deal with you.  We all will probably shake our heads and agree, but that's about as far as we take it.  We don't fully understand and comprehend what that means.  We are disconnected from what it means, in many ways.  However, I keep attempting to write about this so others can begin to understand it more.  I realize it is a complex subject that tends to sail right by, but it is important.

I speak from my own experience and that of what I have learned from Dr. Paul Canali of Evolutionary Healing Institute.  He understands this far better than I do , but I have experienced it firsthand in many ways.

Trauma can be simple everyday stuff...

In the video from part 1, Dr. Bosch talks about the set point and how the further we veer out of allostatic load, the further this set point gets moved.  It does not have to be trauma or child abuse or war or other means to cause this set point to shift.  It can be as simple as office work stress, caring for others, or just dealing with life when you were not taught great skills in adapting to stress that comes along.

We all like to think that we've got life by the horns and we are in control.  We all like to think that if we have a beer or a glass of wine that we've relaxed and the stress has all vanished.  We all like to think that if we manage to squeeze in a day off here and there or maybe a few days for a vacation once every couple of years that we're in charge of the stress in our life.  "We're handling it" is what we tell ourselves.

Daily buildup of stress is as harmful...

However, this could not be further from the truth.  The daily build up of stress is just as harmful as if we encountered some traumatic event in our life.  If we don't discharge that, it finds a home in our mind and body.  It moves the set point just a little further away from homeostasis.  Our body ends up staying in that constant state of alertness ready to handle what is bombarding us in life.  We have ended up pushing our allostatic load to the point where it is getting so far into the danger zone that turning back gets more difficult with each passing moment.

It happens before you know it.  It takes place in the blink of an eye.  It is not like you wake up one day and go, wow - I've pushed my set point way too far.  Okay, it can happen that way but more often than not, it goes unnoticed.  It goes undetected until something in our life happens that tries to wake us up.

In the meantime, we maybe experience things like headaches and muscle pains.  Sometimes we find out in a routine doctor visit that our blood pressure is high or our pulse rate stays at a constant high rate instead of dropping down into rest and repair mode.

We may experience fatigue, sleeplessness and nervous stomachs, acid reflux or other conditions.  Chronic health issues may set in and begin to become more pronounced.  We may encounter all kinds of health conditions as issues progress.

In worst case situations, we may go into Conversion Disorder like I did or experience health situations that are life and death.  It varies by person and it depends upon so many factors.  I'm not trying to say that there are not other underlying factors in the exhibition of illness and pain, but I am saying that allostatic load is the cart pushing the horse over the cliff.

Make sure you check out the next part in this 5 part series.  

 Part 3 is "Disconnected From Allostatic Load & Stress"

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Allostatic Load with Dr Don Bosch

In this video, Dr. Don Bosch talks about Allostatic Load and Allostasis.  He is the Senior Advisor and Director of Risk Environment Psychology at the Headington, Institute.

For more information, visit their website at  www.headington-institute.org

This is part 1 of a 5 part series where we will be discussing Allostatic Load and what I've learned in my own life.  I have gone through work with Dr. Paul Canali called Unified Therapy that has helped me deal with Allostatic Load.

Notes From The Video

• Allostasis is achieving stability in the midst of change.
• Researchers helpful on Allostasis 
• Bruce McEwen - Rockefeller University
• Teresa Seeman - UCLA
•  Allostasis is closely related to Homeostasis
• Homeostasis keeps our body within very narrow limits that allows us to survive.
• Body Temperature Example:  If our body is too hot, we sweat to cool down.  If our body is too cold, blood gets pulled back into our vital organs to keep us functioning.  The set point of our body temperature does not change.  If it varies too much, we are in serious danger.
• Allostasis is similar to homeostasis
• It is our response to some challenge outside or inside ourselves.
• Our response is a way to get us ready to handle the challenge.
• With allostasis we can respond and the set point can change over time.
• When the set point changes, it becomes allostatic load.
• Dangerous for us in the long run.
• Flight or fight response initiated by the amygdala
•  Danger is sensed and the amygdala initiates a major response in the brain and body to prepare for the action.
• Things like blood pressure and heart rate increase to get blood into our muscles to be ready for action.
• Breathing increases to get more oxygen into our cells and body.
• The immune system goes into emergency mode to flood our body with proinflamatory substances which enable us to respond to infection or injury immediately.
• Blood sugar, insulin and cholesterol all go up in the bloodstream to provide us energy to respond
• Enables us to survive the flight or fight and even chronic stress
• Problem is when it does not turn off and we get stuck in this state of allostatic load.
• When we are stuck in allostatic load
• We are not aware of it.
• You may be cold and freezing to death but in allostatic load, you don't necessarily know you are there.
• This is where the risk lies.
•  It is very easy for us to get into allostatic load, no matter what your job is or where you are or what situations you may be experiencing life.
• We need to find a way to turn it off.
• We need to find a way to be aware of it.
• Resiliency is anything that helps us turn allostatic load off
• Things that help us manage allostatic load
• Social Support
• Physical Exercise
• Sense of meaning and purpose
• Allostatic load in the long run is dangerous

Make sure you check out the next part in this 5 part series.  

 Part 2 is "If You Don't Deal With Stress"

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Trauma and Reactive Responses

I had posted an earlier blog entry on this topic and a reader asked me to clarify this.  So, I thought I would explain more what I think this quote means from the book by Daniel Siegel, Parenting From The Inside Out.

I'm stating this from my own knowledge and what I see in it, not as a professional may view it.  I just wanted to be clear on that point.

See Blog post on Reactive Response 10/26/09

When we go through experiences in life, whether it is trauma and child abuse, or just difficult situations, our life becomes filtered and framed from those experiences.  They become a big part of who we are.  They shape how we view life and the world around us.  They become how we see everything.

Through healing, your focus is on reclaiming those moments and bringing back who you truly are deep inside.  Often, this is buried as a result of the trauma or experience without the individual even recognizing it is buried.  Each traumatic experience cements over our true self, and until we start to chip away at what is buried beneath the layers, what we have become on the outside is who we are in that moment.

Stuck in reactive responses...

As a result, we're stuck in these reactive responses.  I see reactive responses as how we deal with situations based upon the self that has been altered because of the traumatic experience.  It is automatic and happens in the subconscious mind, most likely as a way to survive in that moment of horror.

When a situation gets too difficult to deal with, the brain goes into protect and survive mode so that we can keep functioning.  Its goal in my view is to keep us alive and functioning at all costs.  So, if it has to bury something deep within our mind, it will do it.

Our choices after those horrendous moments, though, are colored and filtered and judged based upon what we know or we think we know up to this point in life.  It is reactive in that rather than dealing with the current situation as many might do, we're dealing with it as a result of our past experience.

We rob ourselves of so much...

If we continue down the path of reactive response, we rob ourselves of so much.  However, I believe that no matter what we've been through in life, all humans tend to be reactive based upon their life to that point.  We truly see things in the way we were taught or shown, or what we observed.  It provides the foundation and basis for our current and future moments.

For me, if I hear the loud bass thump sound coming from a car or a source around me, it immediately makes me want to silence that sound or person in any way I can.  It is a reactive response because it draws upon a very horrible moment in my childhood where I couldn't stop the screams of my kittens being killed.  It is an automatic response that has shaped me into who I am in this moment.

I'm not saying I can't change this reactive response in myself.  I have really worked on it and am doing much better, but nevertheless it is still how I respond.

Now, I can focus on saying that I will train my mind to react differently.  Unfortunately when these moments such as the example I described show up, the response has already happened before I can consciously think about doing anything different.

I go deep into healing work...

Instead, I go deep into the body part of healing work, and work to allow that horror of that trauma to come forward and out.  It happens little by little, piece by piece.  I do not believe it is something that you can truly heal in the blink of an eye.  When it is that difficult of a past experience, it takes time for the mind and neural pathways to release and rewrite.

With reactive responses, our choices now become measured on past experiences, whether we want to always acknowledge this or not.  If each one of us looked deep within, I think we would all see that - but with horrible experiences and trauma, none of these things are easy to observe.  The fear, anxiety and despair come up rapidly when we try to expose them.

Learning to deal with reactive responses is not about desensitizing you to what happened.  I think that only buries things further.  It may possibly be helpful in the immediate short term, but if you don't work to dive deep into the cellular memories of this through bodywork such as Unified Therapy, you're only masking the situation.

We all react to current events based upon our past.  It is in awareness, growth and consciousness that we come to more fully know who we are from the deepest levels within our mind and our BODY.  What the mind stores, so does the body.  What the body stores, so does the mind.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

---

How Pain Is Felt In The Brain

Join Jim Fazio as he discusses "how pain is felt in the brain" with Dr. Paul Canali of Evolutionary Healing Institute.  This is part of an ongoing series of interviews Jim did with Dr. Paul Canali on chronic pain, PTSD, Healing Trauma and Unified Therapy.

Neuroscience In The News On Aug 15

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted an article about how past experiences shape who we are.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning August 15, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from August 8, 2016

Past Experience Shapes Us

Even though we don't want to believe it most of the time, what happened in the past does affect who we are today.  In the latest research article discussed on MindBodyThoughts.com, Behar Gholipour of the Huffington Post wrote, The Things You Don't Remember Shape Who You Are. There are so many things that we often don't remember and it always amazes me how they impact our every moment of every day.  We can run from them, hide from them, and try to ignore them, but they are still running as tapes in our minds, bodies, and tissues.

In our early years, it sets us up for what happens later in life.  We all have experiences that impact us one way or another and some of us have more difficult experiences which really brings this front and center.  To read more of the details of the study, please look at the following article, The Things You Don't Remember Shape You Who You Are as I have discussed on Mind Body Thoughts.com  [click to read more]

Neuroscience In The News On Aug 8

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted an article about hypnotherapy and the brain.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning August 8, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from August 1, 2016

Building Memory In The Brain

I really enjoy reading and learning about how the brain forms memories.  It is fascinating to me since I have struggled after Conversion Disorder to regain my memory.  In addition, there are many traumatic memories that resurface from time to time and take me down.  Learning about building memory in the brain, helps me to understand myself more.  At the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto along with the University of Toronto and Sanford University, the research they are doing is just beginning to scratch the surface.  To read more of the details of the study, please look at the following article, How The Brain Builds Memory Chains as I have discussed on Mind Body Thoughts.com  [click to read more]

Neuroscience In The News On Aug 1

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted an article about hypnotherapy and the brain.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning August 1, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from July 25, 2016

Hypnotherapy And The Brain

Our brain is a wonderful thing, but when we understand how it connects to our body, it can really help us heal physically in life and conquer things we thought were too great.  This article discusses some current research that helps provide credibility to hypnotherapy through a study at Stanford University.  I have also included some of my experiences being hypnotized and how beneficial that has been to my life.  To read more of the details of the study, please look at the following article, Hypnotherapy And The Brain [click to read more]

Neuroscience In The News On July 25

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted an article about the multi-sensory process in the brain for merging senses.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning July 25, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from July 18, 2016

Multi-sensory Process In The Brain

It is often hard to detect all that happens in our brain during the course of a day, let alone a minute.  New research studies being done on how the brain processes multi-sensory input will shed new light on areas we can barely dream of in our lifetime.  The brain takes in so much sensory input such as sound and visual stimuli and somehow the brain knows what to put together and what doesn't belong together.  It does this with such speed an accuracy.  Fortunately researchers at Bielefeld University are coming to understand how this happens and the role it could play with Autism, robotics, and artificial perception.  To read more of the details of the study, please look at the following article, Merging Of Senses In The Brain [click to read more]

Neuroscience In The News On July 11

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted an article about the brain and multitasking.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning July 11, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from July 4, 2016

The Brain and Multitasking

While we all want to believe that multitasking is great for all and makes us out to be a super hero in our jobs, there is research suggesting that this is anything but positive for us.  The more we do, especially challenging tasks and projects at the same time, the more detrimental and stressful it is to our body and our brain.  Stress builds up and when stress builds up, there is no real creativity or problem solving going on.  It exhausts the brain and the body in the process.  The following link takes you to more information and the source on the brain and multitasking.  [click to read more]

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A Culture Of Learning Tedx Talk

Andre Vermeulen gave a Tedx talk in Johannesburg, South Africa.  It is a very good video about his subject of learning, but also meanders through some excellent mind body concepts. I'll discuss a couple of these, but to get the full affect, check out the video link below.  It is important information.

As Andre discusses, learning is about gaining information, then applying it so that there are behavioral changes.  Information without applying it means nothing.  We have to do something with it and that means applying it to our life.

In the speaker's view, to remain competitive, we have to develop competence to out think, out learn, and our create our competition.  For me, I think for us to grow as an individual, we need to out think, out learn, and out create our former self.  If we don't, we aren't growing as a human.

Most Powerful Form Of Learning...

The most powerful learning form is through the example shown to us.  The power of our parents and family and society upon the learning by an infant or a child is unmatched by any university or program available.  Those mirror neurons help us learn what we need to learn, but they can also hold us back by locking us into a way of thinking, rather than continuous learning.

He stated in the video that learning is a biochemical process.  The brain works electro-chemically.  It produces 20 to 25 watts of electricity from the food we eat, the water we consume and the oxygen we breathe.  There are many other things that impact the electricity we produce from our brain and body. 


Our brain and body generates and conducts electricity also known as energy.  People feel your energy without you saying a word.  They can tell your energy by the presence that comes before you as you walk into a room.  Some of us individuals sense this far more than others, but most likely you can tell an angry person verses a happy person as they walk into the room without them saying a word.

We all impact the world every day...

Our energy influences other people.  What we put out into the world, impacts everyone around us and everyone around them.  We are all connected whether we want to accept that or not.  If you're tearing others down, you're not only tearing the entire world down, but yourself in the process.

We are all impacting the world around us, but if you really want to help the world, becoming aware of what you put out is a good start.  It isn't the other people out there that have the problems that impact you.  It is what you put into the world.

We can impact the world by radiating positivity, constructiveness, love, acceptance, goodness and kindness.  Our energy field influences every other person's energy field.  The energy we choose to radiate at this moment is what we should be concerned with in our life.  It is what does the most harm or good in the world.


Check out the video of the Tedx talk because it is a very good one to hear.

Note:  I have shared some of the thoughts I heard in this video with my own thoughts.  I do not represent this speaker and he does not represent me.  Please just listen to his video with an open mind and challenge yourself.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Neuroscience In The News On June 13

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted articles about the signaling network of the brain, making and breaking a habit in the brain, and Trauma and Neuroscience learning.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning June 13, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from June 6, 2016

Signaling Network Of The Brain

Researchers have taken an important step toward deciphering the brain's complex neuroelectric communication system that could underlie sleep disorders and conditions such as Alzheimer's, epilepsy and schizophrenia.

The complex communication network connects groups of neurons that can be identified and studied by imaging the brain while a person rests using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Because the brain's resting state is not biased by any particular task, the approach provides a way to study its "intrinsic functional organization," said Zhongming Liu, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.

"Data related to blood flow are different from the language used by the neurons themselves," said Liu, whose research is also affiliated with the Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience. "The neurons use electrical signals to talk to each other, and these electrical signals happen much faster than blood flow. So we are translating those slow blood-flow signals into the fast signals the neurons use."

Article Link:

• Research yielding insights into brain's signaling network
• Source:  www.purdue.edu
• Zhongming Liu, Perdue University

(click image to read article)

Making And Breaking A Habit

Not all habits are bad. Some are even necessary. It's a good thing, for example, that we can find our way home on "autopilot" or wash our hands without having to ponder every step. But inability to switch from acting habitually to acting in a deliberate way can underlie addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders.

The study is published in Neuron and was led by Christina Gremel, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California San Diego, who began the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health.

The study provides the strongest evidence to date, Gremel said, that the brain's circuits for habitual and goal-directed action compete for control -- in the orbitofrontal cortex, a decision-making area of the brain -- and that neurochemicals called endocannabinoids allow for habit to take over, by acting as a sort of brake on the goal-directed circuit.

Article Link:

• How the brain makes, and breaks, a habit
• Source:  www.sciencedaily.com
• Christina Gremel, University of California San Diego

(click image to read article)

Trauma and Neuroscience Learning

“We have a reasonable understanding of the negative spectrum of emotions like fear and stress responses, but we don’t know much about the positive side. What regulates joy? Where is our sense of resilience? Optimism?” Vaidya asks. “And all of these are clearly regulated by our brain.” Her lab at TIFR is one of the few in India to explore these complex questions.

Vaidya finds it fascinating how we all develop such unique circuitry, and, consequently, such different ways of responding to trauma despite sharing an identical neurological architecture. “It’s like this,” she explains. “In the beginning, an architect designs all the flats in a building identically. But after people start living in them, the homes will look extremely different because they bring in their own personal flavour. Similarly, genetically, our brains are designed on a blueprint, we all have prefrontal cortex in the same place, and yet in the micro details we vary.”

A study from her lab showed proof of this. “We showed that when you have traumatic events happen in the early window of life you actually show ageing-related effects two years down the road. The ability of the hippocampus [a part of the brain] to make new neurons drops abnormally in trauma. This tells us that if there is a traumatic early event, you may not see effects right away but there are effects down the road waiting for you.”

Article Link:

• It’s Time to Get Cerebral About Trauma – a Neuroscientist Leads the Way
• Source:  thewire.in
• Vidita Vaidya, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai 

(click image to read article)

Neuroscience In The News On May 23

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted articles about Neuroscience and pattern completion in the brain, how the brain remembers bad experiences and one activity that may engage your brain more than any other.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning May 23, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from May 16, 2016

Neuroscience and Pattern Completion

Recently, scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) discovered a new learning rule for a specific type of excitatory synaptic connection in the hippocampus. These synapses are located in the so-called CA3 region of the hippocampus, which plays a critical role for storage and recall of spatial information in the brain. One of its hallmark properties is that memory recall can even be triggered by incomplete cues. This enables the network to complete neuronal activity patterns, a phenomenon termed pattern completion.

Article Link:

• Neuroscientists discover new learning rule for pattern completion
• Source:  www.eurekalert.org
• Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Peter Jonas and Team

Remembering Bad Experiences

Bad experiences can cause people to strongly remember the negative content itself but only weakly remember the surrounding context, and a new UCL study funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust has revealed how this happens in the brain. The study, published in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, has important implications for understanding conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

"When we presented people with negative content alongside neutral content, the brain areas involved in storing the negative content were more active while those involved in storing the surrounding context were less active," explains lead author Dr James Bisby (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). "When we experience a new event, we not only store the contents of the event in memory, such as the people we met, but we also form associations with the context in which the event took place.

Article Link:

• Why bad experiences are remembered out of context
• Source:  medicalxpress.com
• Professor Neil Burgess, Director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

Brain Activated Most By This Activity

Your brain fires for every reason imaginable — walking, talking, remembering what you went into that room for, even doing nothing at all.

But neuroscientists think one activity might activate your brain more than any other, and you do it every day: eating!

Dr. Gordon Shepherd, a neuroscientist at Yale, coined the term "neurogastronomy" in 2006 to describe how the brain creates flavors that make eating food pleasurable.

"Flavor engages more of the brain in relation to how it determines what we eat than almost any other behavior. "But in the case of flavor ... you're engaging not only all of the sensory systems in the brain (vision, taste, smell, and even hearing) ... [but also] emotion, memory, language in describing to ourselves and to others the flavor, the motivations to eat. It's virtually the entire brain."

Article Link:

• One activity may engage your brain more than any other
• Source:  www.techinsider.io
• Author:  Rebecca Harrington

Neuroscience In The News On May 16

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted articles about free will and the brain, identifying your brain print, and Neuroscience and visual stereotyping.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning May 16, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from May 9, 2016

Free Will And The Brain

In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did.

In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.

Article Link:

• What Neuroscience Says About Free Will
• Source:  blogs.scientificamerican.com
• Author:  Adam Bear

Identify Your Brain Print

The team, headed by Dr. Sarah Laszlo of the Binghamton University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of images designed to elicit unique responses from person to person.

The scientists found that participants’ brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer’s ‘brainprint’ with 100% accuracy.

Article Link:

• Neuroscientists Can Identify You By Your Brainprint With 100% Accuracy
• Source:  www.sci-news.com
• Dr. Sarah Laszlo, Binghamton University

Neuroscience and Visual Stereotyping

The stereotypes we hold can influence our brain's visual system, prompting us to see others' faces in ways that conform to these stereotypes, neuroscientists at New York University have found.

"Our findings provide evidence that the stereotypes we hold can systematically alter the brain's visual representation of a face, distorting what we see to be more in line with our biased expectations," explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Article Link:

• Neuroscientists find evidence for visual stereotyping
• Source:  www.ScienceDaily.com
• Ryan Stolier, New York University

Neuroscience In The News On May 9

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted articles about everyone's brain being different, what is attention, and the discovery of a new protein in nerve growth.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning May 9, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from May 2, 2016

Everyone's Brain Is Different

Everyone's brain is different. Until recently neuroscience has tended to gloss this over by averaging results from many brain scans in trying to elicit general truths about how the organ works. But in a major development within the field researchers have begun documenting how brain activity differs between individuals. Such differences had been largely thought of as transient and uninteresting but studies are starting to show that they are innate properties of people's brains, and that knowing them better might ultimately help treat neurological disorders.

The latest study, published April 8 in Science, found that the brain activity of individuals who were just biding their time in a brain scanner contained enough information to predict how their brains would function during a range of ordinary activities.

Article Link:

• New Evidence Points To Personal Brain Signatures
• Source:  www.scientificamerican.com
• Ido Tavor and Saad Jbabdi, University Of Oxford

What Is Attention?

Neuroscientists from Tübingen and Okasaki (Japan) have uncovered a mechanism that might clarify the meaning of "attention." This often non-quantifiable term is supposed to describe how strongly we react to a visual stimulus.  For several decades, "attention" was thought to be a barely definable state of certain brain regions.

Following up on these observations, Hafed and his team arrived at a hypothesis: what if the rhythm and direction of microsaccades directly trigger attentional capture and IOR?

Article Link:

• What Is Attention?
• Source:  www.laboratoryequipment.com
• Dr. Ziad Hafed, Centre for Integrative Neuroscience

New Protein In Nerve Growth

In the first research to be published on this protein's role in the nervous system, Benjamin Harrison, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anatomical Sciences and Neurobiology and lead author of the article, and his colleagues show that CD2AP, an adaptor protein, orchestrates a complex arrangement of other proteins that controls the branching of nerve axons, the tendrils reaching out from the nerve cell to connect to other nerve cells, skin and organs. This nerve growth occurs in uninjured nerve cells as they extend their reach and create new connections.

Article Link:

• A New Player Revealed In Nerve Growth Process
• Source:  www.ScienceDaily.com
• Benjamin Harrison, Ph.D., University Of Louisville

Neuroscience In The News On May 2

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted articles about the brain anatomy and sensation seeking behavior, how the brain responds to reading and wisdom being measured and influenced by heart rate variability.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning May 2, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from April 25, 2016

Sensation Seeking Behavior Linked To Brain Anatomy

This study builds on well-established links between impulsivity, sensation-seeking, and substance abuse. Prior research indicates genes play a role in these behaviors. Other studies conclude substance use can affect brain anatomy and function over time. Scientists don't know the extent to which brain abnormalities, present prior to drug-taking, contribute to the likelihood that a person will develop a substance abuse disorder.

The strongest links occurred in brain areas related to the ability to regulate emotions and behaviour, the anterior cingulate and middle frontal gyrus. Changes in those brain structures also correlated with participants' self-reported tendency to act on impulse and with heightened use of alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine.

Article Link:

• Research Links Sensation Seeking Behavior To Brain Anatomy
• Source:  www.scicasts.com
• Avram Holmes, Psychologist at Yale University

The Brain And Reading

Neuroscientists at UC Davis have come up with a way to observe brain activity during natural reading. It’s the first time researchers have been able to study the brain while reading actual texts, instead of individual words, and it’s already helping settle some ideas about just how we read.

Until now, neuroscientists have only measured brain activity as a volunteer fixes his or her attention on individual words. The signals of brain activity from functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, last for several seconds — too slow to keep up with natural reading, which processes several words a second.

Article Link:

• How Do Our Brains Respond To Reading
• Source:  www.laboratoryequipment.com
• John Henderson, Professor Of Psychology, UC Davis Center

Wisdom Influenced By The Heart

While many individuals believe such aspects are solely driven by cognitive functioning, the team notes that some behavioral scientists have suggested the heart may also play a role in wisdom.

Participants were required to take part in a series of tasks, including a social reasoning task and an attributional judgement task. As part of these tasks, subjects were required to offer their opinion on social issues they felt strongly about, from both a first- and third-person perspective.

The participants' resting heart rates were measured during each task using an electrocardiogram (ECG).

Article Link:

• Wisdom Influenced By Heart Rate Variability
• Source:  www.medicalnewstoday.com
• Professor Igor Grossman, University Of Waterloo, Canada