Yoga and the Brain

What I love about Yoga is that it is a Science. Science is all about experimentation, testing and retesting theories and working with models. When I practice, my yoga mat becomes a laboratory and my mind and body the experiment. This week I am fascinated by the inner workings of the mind and more specifically the brain. I have read several articles this week that state quite convincingly that the brain is the source of all our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual experiences. These articles propose that because everything is in our brain, an outside ‘God’ might not exist. However in my opinion if everything is in our brain and everything we experience comes from there, then how lucky and magnificent are we as humans to have such a palette of creative colour at our disposal. We create the very stars we wish upon in the night sky. To me this is the essence of Tantra, which says that everything we experience is divine. We are one with everything right now and right here; it’s just that we have forgotten this, or are unable to see the whole picture.

My teacher Alan Finger shares in his classes that in daily life we operate from a limited perspective. If we view life from this limited perspective our experiences will be limited. If we learn to look at life from the big picture then everything is radiantly alive and full of joy and possibility. Yogic Science gives us methods and models for seeing the big picture while giving us practical tools to help us to expand our limited view. What’s really cool is that modern Science is discovering what the yogis have been telling us all along – that the mystery of us is not so mysterious after all. The answer is in our brains if we care to look.

One fascinating article entitled ‘Tracing the Synapses of Spirituality’ By Shankar Vedantam, a Washington Post Staff Writer, asks; “What creates that transcendental feeling of being one with the universe? It could be the decreased activity in the brain's parietal lobe, which helps regulate the sense of self and physical orientation, research suggests. How does religion prompt divine feelings of love and compassion? Possibly because of changes in the frontal lobe, caused by heightened concentration during meditation. Why do many people have a profound sense that religion has changed their lives? Perhaps because spiritual practices activate the temporal lobe, which weights experiences with personal significance.”

This prompts me to reflect on my understanding of yoga philosophy and the theory that everything is Brahman – Divine intelligence. Out of that intelligence there is a split, which we call Shiva and Shakti (Shiva being consciousness and Shakti being energy). Science suggests that we have Brahman in the brain and that our left and right brains gives us the sense of duality. What we don't know is how we go from the experience of being one to the experience of being two.

In yoga we say that Maya (illusion) enables us to experience the one as two. The word Maya literally means ‘to measure out’. We create a sense of distance between things so that we can see ourselves as separate from them. Out of this sense of separation comes the illusion of time and space which leads to the need for memory so we can see things as having a past, present and future. This then gives us the sense that we are born and that we die. But why does all this happen in the first place? What drives the split?

In yoga we call it Iccha Shakti (pure desire). As human beings, desire moves us to change and grow and learn. Desire is manifested in our inherent nature. As babies we desire the nipple for sustenance, and our desire grows to include desire for relationships, creative expression, love, truth and the longing to know who we are. This journey of desire manifests in an individual and is determined by the specific make up of their brain. Our DNA is uniquely encoded and influenced by the brains of others. Science and Yoga suggests that our set patterns can be changed, by altering our own chemistry through certain practices and experiences. The yogis used words like Karma to describe our set genetic coding and dharma to describe the experience of interacting with other brains in a controlled environment of our own making. The dance of the two in Tantra is called Lila.

And what am I trying to say here anyway? If it’s all in my brain and I am the creator of my universe and I have everything I need at my disposal, why practice at all? For me it's the desire to remember on a daily basis who I am, and simply for the sheer joy of experimentation.

Read on if your brain wants some fascinating food!!

The Brain and Meditation

In an article by Adithya K. on “The Brain and Meditation” he states that:

“The brain is essential to human life, and when the brain dies, the entire physical body dies with it. Even in deep sleep the brain is active and aware, and able to direct functions as and when necessary. For example, the brain may create a fearful dream to wake you up if your body is threatened by danger, such as a lack of oxygen due to a difficulty in breathing. The central function of the human brain is awareness. Awareness is required to know things like boundaries, size, limits, identifications, and the sense of self and the sense of the other. Awareness itself has no intrinsic size, boundary limits, or any other attributes of its own. Awareness is required to know all attributes, but awareness itself can be nothing but just plain awareness. That is the pure awareness of meditation.

The sense of time, the beginning and the end, the birth and the death, requires memory. Awareness always precedes memory. Awareness serves as the background and base for memory, but memory cannot have any trace of the beginning or end of awareness. This makes awareness feel eternal no matter what the reality.

We experience everything in our brain: sound, vision, smell, taste, touch, temperature, pleasure, pain, reason, and emotion. Everything we feel and see are signals presented inside the brain, from neuron to neuron, in a web of billions of brain cells. When you look at images of distant stars and galaxies, those pictures are formed inside us, not outside of us. When you realign your focus on the background of consciousness during meditation, you clearly see that all outside images are really inside images.
Scientists now understand through functional magnetic resonance imaging scans (fMRI scans) that the part of the brain, which gives us, a sense of location in time and space is less active during intense meditation. With no sense of location, consciousness loses its boundaries and subjectively feels infinite and timeless. The body may seem to completely disappear, leaving only pure consciousness in its place. That is death of the 'I.' During deep dreamless sleep, the same dissolution of the 'I' happens, but there is no consciousness to experience it.

The feeling of clutter we often feel inside ourselves is the brain working too hard, thinking too many thoughts. The pragmatic working brain requires concentration on the utilitarian tasks of life. In meditation, peace and relaxation rule, and the brain doing nothing expands its sense of being into the whole universe. Only the core, essential life saving functions of the brain continue during the deepest meditation.

Stress is the brain’s attempt to drive the body from one situation to another desired situation through the pathway of time. Thus, if you end desire, the acceptance of *what is* brings an end to stress and creates the sensation of eternal timelessness. When the brain uproots its self-created need to do work, there is total relaxation and peace. Finally, the brain is at ease and resting in its essential being.

The sensation *I am body* is itself an effort of the brain. Brain is our intimate personal reality, not the body. The brain is able to conjure up the idea of the body by repeated practice and focus. The brain can easily convince itself of being anything it wants. After all, there is no one else inside you to question it. The brain is the one that says “I am this!,” as well as being the final arbitrator of its own validity.

Some may focus on a flower and convince themselves that they have experienced "flower consciousness." Others go further and convince themselves that they are a great saviour, saint, or a heroic world leader. Given enough focus and practice, the brain can convince itself of anything, because the brain is the final judge and jury of our perception of reality. Thus, we all live in different brain worlds of our own creation. When those brain worlds collide, conflict and wars arise.

The feeling of solidity of the body is generated by the brain constantly sending and receiving signals to and from different organs. The more frequent and stronger the signals, the more solid the body feels. Mediation is a way to relax the brain and quiet down its constant communication with the body and reduce the frequency of thoughts. As the brain relaxes and creates less activity and noise, the feeling *I am the body* starts to dissolve.”

Is our Wiring is Predetermined?
The following article suggests that the brain determines who we are and how we behave and that our upbringing and experiences are like layers on a pre -existing cake. In yoga we would call this the play of our karma- the seeds or tendencies that have been planted in us with our dharma- the events that are destined to come towards us for us to work out our karma

Is Chemistry Destiny?
(Article in the International Herald Tribune, 19.09.2007, by David Brooks)

Louanne Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the founder of the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco. She has written a breezy – maybe too breezy – summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women: ‘The Female Brain’.

All human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the 8th week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).

By the time they are 3 months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.

Later, girls are much more likely to use sentences that begin with “let’s” while playing: Let’s do this or Let’s do that. They are more likely to take turns. Brizendine argues that of course culture and environment powerfully shape behaviour, but brain structure and chemistry incline girls to pursue certain goals: “To forge connections, to create community, and to organize and orchestrate a girl’s world so that she’s at the centre of it.”

During adolescence, the female brain is washed in estrogen. Female teenagers, in general, experience an intense desire for social connection, which releases near-orgasmic rushes of oxytocin in the brain. They are, on average, more sensitive to stress (by age 15, girls are twice as likely to suffer from depression). The male brain, meanwhile, is producing 10 times more testosterone then the female brain, meaning the male sex drive is, on average, much greater.

Brizendine then destribes waves of hormonal activity as women age. Female brains vary with the seasons of life much more than male brains. During menopause, for example, estrogen levels drop. Personalities can change as some women derive less pleasure from nurturing and more from independence. Women initiate 65 percent of divorces after age 50.

These sorts of sex differences were once highly controversial, and not fit for polite conversation. And some feminists still argue that talking about biological differences between the sexes is akin to talking about biological differences between the races. But Brizandine’s feminist bona fide are unquestionable. And in my mostly liberal urban circle – and among this book’s reviewers – almost everybody takes big biological differences as a matter of course.

Without too much debate or even awareness, there has been a gigantic shift in how people think human behaviour is formed.

Consider all the theories put forward to explain personality. Freud argued that early family experiences relating to defecation and genital stimulation created unconscious states that influenced behaviour through life. In the 1950s, the common view was that humans begin as nearly blank slates and that behaviour is learned through stimulus and response. Over the ages, thinkers have argued that humans are divided between passion and reason, or between the angelic and the demonic.

But now the prevailing view is that brain patterns were established during the millenniums when humans were hunters and gatherers, and we live with the consequences. Now, it is generally believed, our behaviour is powerfully influenced by genes and hormones. Our temperaments are shaped by whether we happened to be born with the right mix of chemicals.

Consciousness has come to be seen as this relatively weak driver, riding atop an organ, the brain, it scarcely understands. When we read that males voles (a small rodent) with longer vasopressin genes are more likely to remain monogamous, it seems plausible that so fundamental a quality could be tied to some discrete bit of biology.

This shift in how we see human behaviour is bound to have huge effects. Freudianism encouraged people to think about destroying inhibitions. This new understanding both validates ancient stereotypes about the sexes, and fuzzes up moral judgments about human responsibility (biology inclines individuals toward certain virtues and vices).

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

Our brains are designed to be social !
The following excerpt is by Daniel Coleman from his book “Social Intelligence” In it he shares that what we think and feel affects those around us and that social interaction keeps our brains young. After reading this I understood why meditating and learning together brings about such profound transformations.

Our brains are designed to be social, says bestselling science writer
Daniel Goleman—and they catch emotions the same way we catch colds

Have you ever wondered why a stranger’s smile can transform your entire day? Why your eyes mist up when you see someone crying, and the sight of a yawn can leave you exhausted? Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., has wondered, too

For the first time in history, thanks to recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, experts are able to observe brain activity while we’re in the act of feeling—and their findings have been astonishing. Once believed to be lumps of lonely grey matter cogitating between our
ears, our brains turn out to be more like inter looped, Wi-Fi octopi with invisible tentacles slithering in all directions, at every moment, constantly picking up messages we’re not aware of and prompting reactions—including illnesses—in ways never before understood.

“The brain itself is social—that’s the most exciting finding,” Goleman explains during lunch at a restaurant near his home in Massachusetts. “One person’s inner state affects and drives the other person. We’re forming brain-to-brain bridges—a two-way
traffic system—all the time. We actually catch each other’s emotions like a cold.”

The more important the relationship, the more potent such “contagion” will be. A stranger’s putdown may roll off your back, while the same zinger from your boss is devastating. “If we’re in toxic relationships with people who are constantly putting
us down, this has actual physical consequences,” Goleman says. Stress produces a harmful chemical called cortisol, which interferes with certain immune cell functions. Positive interactions prompt the body to secrete oxytocin (the same chemical released during lovemaking), boosting the immune system and decreasing stress
hormones. As a doting grandparent himself (with author-therapist wife Tara Bennett-Goleman), the author often feels this felicitous rush. “I was just with my two-year-old granddaughter,” he says. “This girl is like a vitamin for me. Being with her actually feels like a kind of elixir. The most important people in our lives can be our biological allies.”

The notion of relationships as pharmaceutical is a new concept. “My mother is 96,” Goleman goes on. “She was a professor of sociology whose husband—my father—died many years ago, leaving her with a big house. After retiring at 65, she decided to let graduate students live there for free. She’s since had a long succession of housemates. When she was 90, a couple from Taiwan had a baby while they were living there. The child regarded her as Grandma and lived there till the age of two. During that time, I swore I could see my mother getting younger. It was stunning.” But not, he adds,
completely surprising. “This was the living arrangement we were designed for remember? For most of human history there were extended families where the elderly lived in the same household as the babies. Many older people have the time and nurturing energy that kids crave— and vice versa. If I were designing assisted-living facilities, I’d
put daycare centers in them and allow residents to volunteer. Institutions are cheating children,” he says. “And we older people need it, too.”

Positive interactions can boost the immune system. Young or old, people can affect our personalities. Though each of us has a distinctive temperament and a “set point of happiness” modulating our general mood, science has now confirmed that these
tendencies are not locked in. Anger-prone people, for example, can “infect” themselves with calmness by spending time with mellower individuals, absorbing less-aggressive behavior and thereby sharpening social intelligence.

A key to understanding this process is something called mirror neurons: “neurons whose only job is to recognize a smile and make you smile in return,” says Goleman (the same goes for frowning another reactions). This is why, when you’re smiling, the whole world
does indeed seem to smile with you. It also explains the Michelangelo phenomenon, in which long-term partners come to resemble each other through facial-muscle mimicry and “empathic resonance.” If you’ve ever seen a group with a case of the giggles, you’ve
witnessed mirror neurons at play. Such mirroring takes place in the realm of ideas, too, which is why sweeping cultural ideals and prejudices can spread through populations with viral speed.

This phenomenon gets to the heart of why social intelligence matters most: its impact on suffering and creating a less crazy world. It is critical, Goleman believes, that we stop treating people as objects or as functionaries who are there to give us something. This can
range from barking at telephone operators to the sort of old-shoe treatment that long-term partners often use in relating to each other (talking at, rather than to, each other). We need, he says, a richer human connection.

Unfortunately, what he calls the “inexorable technocreep” of contemporary culture threatens such meaningful connection. Presciently remarking on the TV set in 1963, poet T.S. Eliot noted that this techno-shredder of the social fabric “permits millions of
people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.” We can only imagine what the dour writer would have made of Internet dating. And as Goleman points out, this “constant digital connectivity” can deaden us to the people around us. Social intelligence, he says, means putting down your BlackBerry, actually paying full attention—showing people that they’re being experienced—which is basically what each of us wants more than anything. Scientists agree that such connection—or lack of it—will
determine our survival as a species: “Empathy,” writes Goleman, “is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty.”

And our social brains are wired for kindness, despite the gore you may see on the nightly news. “It’s an aberration to be cruel,” says Goleman. Primitive tribes learned that strength lay in numbers, and that their chances of surviving a brutal environment increased
exponentially through helping their neighbors (as opposed to, say, chopping their heads off). Even young children are wired for compassion. One study in Goleman’s book found that infants cry when they see or hear another baby crying, but rarely when they hear
recordings of their own distress. In another study, monkeys starved themselves after realizing that when they took food, a shock was delivered to their cage mate.

Perhaps the most inspiring piece of the social-intelligence puzzle is neuroplasticity: the discovery that our brains never stop evolving. “Stem cells manufacture 10,000 brain cells every day till youdie,” says Goleman. “Social interaction helps neurogenesis. The
brain rises to the occasion the more you challenge it.

Tracing the Synapses of Spirituality
A look at the nature of religion and spirituality and its origins in our brain!
By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer
June 17th, 2001 — In Philadelphia, a researcher discovers areas of the brain that are activated during meditation. At two other universities in San Diego and North Carolina, doctors study how epilepsy and certain hallucinogenic drugs can produce religious epiphanies. And in Canada, a neuroscientist fits people with magnetized helmets that produce "spiritual" experiences for the secular.

The work is part of a broad new effort by scientists around the world to better understand religious experiences, measure them, and even reproduce them. Using powerful brain imaging technology, researchers are exploring what mystics call nirvana, and what Christians describe as a state of grace. Scientists are asking whether spirituality can be explained in terms of neural networks, neurotransmitters and brain chemistry.

What creates that transcendental feeling of being one with the universe? It could be the decreased activity in the brain's parietal lobe, which helps regulate the sense of self and physical orientation, research suggests. How does religion prompt divine feelings of love and compassion? Possibly because of changes in the frontal lobe, caused by heightened concentration during meditation. Why do many people have a profound sense that religion has changed their lives? Perhaps because spiritual practices activate the temporal lobe, which weights experiences with personal significance.

"The brain is set up in such a way as to have spiritual experiences and religious experiences," said Andrew Newberg, a Philadelphia scientist who authored the book "Why God Won't Go Away." "Unless there is a fundamental change in the brain, religion and spirituality will be here for a very long time. The brain is predisposed to having those experiences and that is why so many people believe in God."

The research may represent the bravest frontier of brain research. But depending on your religious beliefs, it may also be the last straw. For while Newberg and other scientists say they are trying to bridge the gap between science and religion, many believers are offended by the notion that God is a creation of the human brain, rather than the other way around.

"It reinforces atheistic assumptions and makes religion appear useless," said Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. "If you can explain religious experience purely as a brain phenomenon, you don't need the assumption of the existence of God."

Some scientists readily say the research proves there is no such thing as God. But many others argue that they are religious themselves, and that they are simply trying to understand how our minds produce a sense of spirituality.

Newberg, who was catapulted to center stage of the neuroscience-religion debate by his book and some recent experiments he conducted at the University of Pennsylvania with co-researcher Eugene D'Aquili, says he has a sense of his own spirituality, though he declined to say whether he believed in God because any answer would prompt people to question his agenda. "I'm really not trying to use science to prove that God exists or disprove God exists," he said.

Newberg's experiment consisted of taking brain scans of Tibetan Buddhist meditators as they sat immersed in contemplation. After giving them time to sink into a deep meditative trance, he injected them with a radioactive dye. Patterns of the dye's residues in the brain were later converted into images.

Newberg found that certain areas of the brain were altered during deep meditation. Predictably, these included areas in the front of the brain that are involved in concentration. But Newberg also found decreased activity in the parietal lobe, one of the parts of the brain that helps orient a person in three-dimensional space.

"When people have spiritual experiences they feel they become one with the universe and lose their sense of self," he said. "We think that may be because of what is happening in that area – if you block that area you lose that boundary between the self and the rest of the world. In doing so you ultimately wind up in a universal state."

Across the country, at the University of California in San Diego, other neuroscientists are studying why religious experiences seem to accompany epileptic seizures in some patients. At Duke University, psychiatrist Roy Mathew is studying hallucinogenic drugs that can produce mystical experiences and have long been used in certain religious traditions.

Could the flash of wisdom that came over Siddhartha Gautama – the Buddha – have been nothing more than his parietal lobe quieting down? Could the voices that Moses and Mohammed heard on remote mountain tops have been just a bunch of firing neurons – an illusion? Could Jesus's conversations with God have been a mental delusion?

Newberg won't go so far, but other proponents of the new brain science do. Michael Persinger, a professor of neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, has been conducting experiments that fit a set of magnets to a helmet-like device. Persinger runs what amounts to a weak electromagnetic signal around the skulls of volunteers.

Four in five people, he said, report a "mystical experience, the feeling that there is a sentient being or entity standing behind or near" them. Some weep, some feel God has touched them, others become frightened and talk of demons and evil spirits.

"That's in the laboratory," said Persinger. "They know they are in the laboratory. Can you imagine what would happen if that happened late at night in a pew or mosque or synagogue?"

His research, said Persinger, showed that "religion is a property of the brain, only the brain and has little to do with what's out there."

Those who believe the new science disproves the existence of God say they are holding up a mirror to society about the destructive power of religion. They say that religious wars, fanaticism and intolerance spring from dogmatic beliefs that particular gods and faiths are unique, rather than facets of universal brain chemistry.

"It's irrational and dangerous when you see how religiosity affects us," said Matthew Alper, author of "The God Part of the Brain," a book about the neuroscience of belief. "During times of prosperity, we are contented. During times of depression, we go to war. When there isn't enough food to go around, we break into our spiritual tribes and use our gods as justification to kill one another."

While Persinger and Alper count themselves as atheists, many scientists studying the neurology of belief consider themselves deeply spiritual.

James Austin, a neurologist, began practicing Zen meditation during a visit to Japan. After years of practice, he found himself having to re-evaluate what his professional background had taught him.

"It was decided for me by the experiences I had while meditating," said Austin, author of the book "Zen and the Brain" and now a philosophy scholar at the University of Idaho. "Some of them were quickenings, one was a major internal absorption – an intense hyper-awareness, empty endless space that was blacker than black and soundless and vacant of any sense of my physical bodily self. I felt deep bliss. I realized that nothing in my training or experience had prepared me to help me understand what was going on in my brain. It was a wake-up call for a neurologist."

Austin's spirituality doesn't involve a belief in God – it is more in line with practices associated with some streams of Hinduism and Buddhism. Both emphasize the importance of meditation and its power to make an individual loving and compassionate – most Buddhists are disinterested in whether God exists.

But theologians say such practices don't describe most people's religiousness in either eastern or western traditions.

"When these people talk of religious experience, they are talking of a meditative experience," said John Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown University. "But religion is more than that. It involves commitments and suffering and struggle – it's not all meditative bliss. It also involves moments when you feel abandoned by God."

"Religion is visiting widows and orphans," he said. "It is symbolism and myth and story and much richer things. They have isolated one small aspect of religious experience and they are identifying that with the whole of religion."

Belief and faith, argue believers, are larger than the sum of their brain parts: "The brain is the hardware through which religion is experienced," said Daniel Batson, a University of Kansas psychologist who studies the effect of religion on people. "To say the brain produces religion is like saying a piano produces music."

At the Fuller Theological Seminary's school of psychology, Warren Brown, a cognitive neuropsychologist, said, "Sitting where I'm sitting and dealing with experts in theology and Christian religious practice, I just look at what these people know about religiousness and think they are not very sophisticated. They are sophisticated neuroscientists, but they are not scholars in the area of what is involved in various forms of religiousness."

At the heart of the critique of the new brain research is what one theologian at St. Louis University called the "nothing-butism" of some scientists – the notion that all phenomena could be understood by reducing them to basic units that could be measured.

"A kiss," said Michael McClymond, "is more than a mutually agreed-upon exchange of saliva, breath and germs."

And finally, say believers, if God existed and created the universe, wouldn't it make sense that he would install machinery in our brains that would make it possible to have mystical experiences?

"Neuroscientists are taking the viewpoints of physicists of the last century that everything is matter," said Mathew, the Duke psychiatrist. "I am open to the possibility that there is more to this than what meets the eye. I don't believe in the omnipotence of science or that we have a foolproof explanation."