Grow your own Clean Air

3 plants- that would grow all the fresh air you need.

areca palm - 4 shoulder high plants per person - wipe the leaves - grow in water - take them outside every 3 months

mother-in-law's tongue - a good bedroom plant- converts CO2 into O2 at night - 6-8 waist high per person

money plant - hydroponics grown - removes formaldahydes and chemicals - and I've also heard that they remove nicotene and are good if we have a smoker in the house. These are also good in the bedroom.

In the Amazon, all these plants are HUGE, which is why I am posting it on this blog...shades of the jungle. According to Kamal, you could be sealed in your home with these plants and your blood oxygen levels would go UP!

Blind Learn to see with their Tongue

experimental technology
shades of Star Trek!
and cudos to our ever plastic brain! It can learn and adapt-constantly

Oxytocin - the feel good stuff

In simplistic terms: Oxytocin is a brain chemical, a hormone. It makes us feel good. It plays a role in all of our human social stuff, like bonding, trust, maternal instincts, sex but more the foreplay, cuddling, touching, and the more of it we do, the more oxytocin is produced. Call it the love chemical.

The more oxytocin produced, the more sensitive our cell receptors become to it. So it's a positive feedback cycle, unlike dopamine. Dopamine receptors become less sensitive which is why we need 'more' to get the 'same' affect. With oxytocin-the more we give the more we get. Sound familiar? I've heard that somewhere...now where was it...the BIBLE!

The "give to receive" motto could very well be a biblical formula for balancing our BRAIN CHEMISTRY.

Oxytocin is made in the hypothalamus, and stored in the pituitary. Some is in the amygdala and trusting behavior is influenced by these receptors-but only if the amygdala is CALM and not freaking out slamming down on the red alert button. Oxytocin also calms another panic alert. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that starts to freak us out with adrenalin and cortisol.

Oxytocin, even though it's secreted from a brain area (pituitary) it can't enter back into the brain that way. It has to enter back via circulation through the body and back via behavior change. Interesting eh? We get it by 'giving it away', again, a biblical mandate. The oxytocin has to go out into 'the world' of the body, have an effect, and via that effect, we get it back.

Give to receive.

They've found oxytocin receptors in the heart too...in rats. Why would God put oxytocin receptors in the heart of a rat and NOT in our hearts? Doesn't make sense does it? Let's take a big leap and say that the more oxytocin we secrete by giving, the bigger our heart gets because the more loving we become. The more loving we are to others, the more we get back. it's a whole biochemical loop.

BTW-fatty foods stimulate oxytocin release. To this Mr. Science, I want to say DUH! :)
WE know it can feel good to eat. We know we are substituting food for love. But now girls and boys-we can tell you that it is aboslutely BIOCHEMICALLY true.

MDMA-ecstasy-stimulates the release of oxytocin. Now THAT'S interesting!

Related articles:
brain scans and brain chemicals

BETTER WITH AGE

We slowly lose brain function over the course of time, but we adjust to it…it’s called aging. It's inevitable...

But wait! Is that the truth, or is it a medical myth? What do you think?

It’s a myth. And you need to bust it if you have it. We need to update our beliefs!

Science used to say that when we lost brain cells they were gone, and that aging just meant the brain was naturally losing brain cells through attrition and there was nothing we could do about it, and that was why our memory got worse. It was the pat explanation.

How sad!

That didn’t make sense to me because the rest of the body regenerates. WHY would God set up this wonderful self-generating system and NOT have that system extend to the brain? Doesn’t make sense, especially since the brain is so important. It would be like creating a car that can repair everything on itself except the engine. Oops. Forgot that part?

So, I figured that we just hadn’t discovered that it could yet, and I was right!

First science said “Oh look! Rat brains can make new brain cells. But not humans.” That made me frown. Come on. God would give a regenerating program to a rat brain and NOT to us? What sort of great cosmic joke is that? Give science enough time though, and it will come up with new conclusions.

Remember-it's only true until it's not true.

Now science says “Hey! Guess what! The brain is constantly making new brain cells, and if we don’t use them they are trimmed off”. Ah now, that’s a bit different isn’t it? The brain makes new cells in one area, and they migrate to other areas on an as needed basis. It’s like this factory that is continually turning out blank slates that can be used anywhere. Thousands of new brain cells are made daily which means you can be constantly expanding and growing your knowledge and abilities. These cells seem to play a big role in deepening our associative memory that is based on comparative experience, and many if not most of these cells are used in the Hippocampus, which is our memory base.

So what's the new belief? Your brain and it's memory capacity CAN, in fact, be getting BETTER WITH AGE, not worse. Ah!

Now this isn’t new information, so why aren't we all operating off it? It was in the 1990s that science made this earth shattering observation! Scientific American published that both Swiss and American neuroscientists had made the same discovery-that human brains are constantly making new brain cells. Even old brains.

If “use it or lose it” works for muscles, why not for the brain? That makes sense! What a great system! What the body is doing in one area, it does again in another. Stem cells work the same way in that they are little blank slates that the body can use anywhere, and what we know about the body is that the same system is replicated over and over everywhere. If the body/mind is doing something in one place it may also do the same ‘system’ or technique somewhere else. Pattern recognition could play a much larger role in decoding the human potential than I think is happening.

What keeps these cells alive? Challenge. Intellectual challenge my friends! Learn something new every day - now there's a challenge! Maybe our brains are just fine, we just aren't in school anymore, we are bored at our jobs that have become routine and our brains are churning out all these new cells that have no new job so they are sloughed off?

Save your brain-learn something new!

Superbrain Yoga

Super Brain Yoga take a look! I couldn't find anything on www.cbs2.com, which she mentions at the end.
But I'm persistent.

super brain yoga website
And there's a book on amazon.

Jeff Hawkins-brain technology

Jeff Hawkins wanted to study the brain and ended up in computers. Menlo Park, CA, he has a neuroscience institute that studies the cortex, and memory storage now.

Note: his talk-2003. We DO have intelligent cars now, we do have GPS systems that learn. What he was talking about...it's here!

Part 3 Potentiation, Memory and the Theta Rhythm

Theta is REM sleep, and it's an awake alert and open state. If you have good teachers in school, students will access a theta state and will learn. They are attentive, alert and open and most importantly they feel safe. What we DO know is that the brain does NOT go to theta when it is scared or in hyper alert. When we are afraid, the amygdala kicks into action.

Unfortunately, one of the things that causes our hyperalert danger sentinel, the amygdala, (gatekeeper for the hippocampus), to fire, is UNSAFE. If the classroom is deemed unsafe by the child, the hippocampus begins to respond and potentiate the wrong information. This means a child can go through an entire day of school and not recall anything except who got in trouble, and go through an entire year with a teacher that scares them, and they won't really have learned anything.

But! 50 years later that adult can still tell me minute details about that teacher from their elementary school days, the mean one, the scary one, the one that terrified them in some way. THAT information is retained in complete detail, and you can be sure that anyone that reminds their internal sentinel of that teacher, set of alarms. It doesn't always make sense to the adult, but it makes perfect sense to the amygdala-which has no sense of linear time.

The brain was online, it was just told to focus on the wrong thing. Right for survival. Wrong for learning.

Part 2 Theta and the Brain

The Theta brainwave is a process that quiets the mind.

Our waking brain state, is beta. Alpha is that daydreamy state, that is slower and more relaxed. Closing your eyes will begin to put your brain into alpha, so if you feel overwhelmed, taking a mini break and closing your eyes...helps.

A theta rhythm, though, is an EEG brainwave pattern that is even slower, and it's observed in the hippocampus in rodent experients. Hippocampus is the brain area that has to do with memory, what to pay attention to, what to really pay attention to, what gets shuffled back to long term memory, or more specifically UP to the neocortex...or really around to the neocortex...oh let me add a picture...

Hippocampus is that green piece...see it? Now this is not a rodent brain-it's a human brain. It's funny that we've studied the hippocampus in rodents in terms of theta but we don't want to 'scientifically' say it's the same for humans...wonder why?

You can hit a theta state with any repeating action or sound. Running, swimming, walking will put you into a type 1 thetawave. Drumming, rattling and sacred trance dance will also put you into a theta state. A theta rhythm is a very regular oscillating wave that synchronizes the brain.

Isn't it interesting that the hippocampus, that area that has a significant role in learning and memory, is so positively affected by accessing a theta rhythm?

Part 1 Potentiation, Memory and a Theta Rhythm

The scientific speculation is that a theta rhythm modulates long term "potentiation". Potentiation is the process that the brain uses to differentiate between what's important to remember, and what's not as important, what gets our attention, and what doesn't, or what we need to learn and what we can forget about. Potentiation is when it goes round and round...the more times it cirulates, the more we remember it.

Think of it like your computer. Information comes in, if it's interesting enough it gets up on clipboard, and if it gets potentiated, it goes to long term memory, but it needs to circulate for awhile first inorder to get potentiated. If something else comes in that says it's important or novel, if it gets the attention, the hippocampus might drop the other bit so the next bit can get put on clipboard. Sometimes the brain is overactive in one area, like paying attention to lots of things, but it misses actually getting it into long term memory so you can re-remember it. Oops. Gone. It drops it. Just like the computer will. Now what was that?

Here's an example from my life, just yesterday. My husband has gone to the store to pick something up for dinner. I am walking through the house and BLING, I realize he needs to pick up something else. Quick better call him so he can grab it. It's important! Where's my phone? I start to look for the phone because it's not in my pocket, where it usually is. Where did I put the phone? I go into the other room to find it, call him, and as I walk back...

I can't remember what I wanted to call him about. Dang. I walk into the kitchen. I open the fridge. I look all around. I am looking for some sort of memory clue...but I got nuthin. I tell him, sorry honey, can't remember what it was.
Gone. What just happened was my hippocampus dropped it off my mental "clipboard" when-"where's the phone"-came in.

My hippocampus was now entertained by new, more novel information that came in saying "MORE IMPORTANT". It got prioritized to the front of the line. My brain had not POTENTIATED the earlier important thing so I could hold onto it a bit longer, but efficiently dropped it. Make way for the new!

What the hippocampus needed was another go around because the longer the information had circulated, the more it would be retained. The old adage REPEAT REPEAT REPEAT, is true, but the new information booted it out too fast. When my brain was interested in the new, the older new was dropped.


When we learn to hold a theta rhythm, we learn more, and we learn deeper. We remember more. It's true-it balances the brain. And i-LEAP® balances the brain by tracking and relieving hidden stress within the brain circuitry.

I took a moment, slowed down. I closed my eyes, I accessed theta, and I oxygenated my brain. All things that naturally and easily help us to remember more. BINGO! The lightbulb went on. Literally-we needed lightbulbs. I called him back and all was well.

While a theta rhythm entrains the whole brain, it is speculated that the theta rhythm originates in the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is involved with our memory circuits. When we are relaxed, we learn more, we remember more. When we feel safe in the classroom, we learn more, we remember more. Find out if your child considers his classroom safe.





If you want more on the brain you might like:
sleep deprivation and loss of brain function

The Sleepy Brain

I remember watching a study that compared driving after drinking to driving when sleep deprived. Turned out that it was MORE dangerous to drive when fatigued, than to drive drunk.

In fact, the first accident I was ever involved in was with a man who fell asleep at the wheel and slammed into my new car. He had just started working a night job, and was on his way home and fell asleep behind the wheel. I had just started a new job and had to be there at 6am. He nodded off. I honked. He hit me. The impact woke him up. Wrong place at the wrong time, although to be honest, it was ok. There was a line of school kids waiting for the bus behind me. Could have been worse than crunching my car. Much worse.

In the Journal of Neuroscience (May 21), Duke NUS graduate med students in Singapore showed what happens to the visual perceptions of someone that is fighting to stay awake while driving all night. We lose the ability to make sense of what we are seeing.

The brain starts to pulse on and pulse off. Think of it like an energy-saving system. It's trying to conserve energy, and function without the resources. It's doing the best it can. The back up plan is start to shut down what might not be as important. The image above of the blurry stuff makes sense in terms of what we know about vision. The amygdala, your safety sentinel, makes 'rough images' in an attempt to quickly sort for danger. The amygdala then, is allowing the frontal lobes to rest as much as it can, and says "it's ok honey, we'll take over for awhile". Of course, it can only do as much as it can do. It's not visual, it's 'rough visual'. The frontal lobe processing need the most fuel and are the first to suffer if there is a lack of sleep, good nutrition, oxygen.

So, when we are sleep deprived, we don't see as well, we don't process as well, we make stupid choices, we take more risks. Think of all the high risk jobs people do at night-gives you pause doesn't it? Air traffic controllers, pilots, doctors, nurses, police to name a few. Truck drivers.

Lack of sleep can cause break downs in the immune system. It can cause weight gain because of the added stress. It can contribute to cognitive breakdown and emotional breakdowns. Get your sleep!




References:
Lapsing during Sleep Deprivation Is Associated with Distributed Changes in Brain Activation

Can a lack of Sleep Cause Psychiatric Disorders? / Scientific American

Sleep Deprivation Elevates Expectation of Gains and Attenuates Response to Losses Following Risky Decisions

Sleep Deprivation and Loss of Brain Integration

The brain is a sensitive organ. It needs the right nutrition, it needs oxygen, and hydration. It needs aminos and fats. But sleep also affects the brain, or lack of it, and another way that we can lose brain integration is via sleep deprivation.

Below is an excerpt from a research article posted on DANA on sleep and the ability to make sound decisions.

"The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), located at the front of the brain behind the eyes, reacts to the mistake and thereby helps us alter our behavior, according to Geoffrey Schoenbaum, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

"The OFC enables us to recognize when things don’t go as we expected,” Schoenbaum said. “Damage to the OFC results in deficits in what we call reversal learning—the ability to go back and reconsider a decision based on the outcome. The OFC is well-known for its role in good judgment, for allowing us to use what we think we know about likely outcomes to guide decision making, but the OFC also enables us to recognize and learn from things that don’t go as we expected. "Changes in the OFC may be involved in the addict's compulsive seeking of drugs (or their addiction) behavior."

Lack of sleep compromises decision making. Vinod Venkatraman and his colleagues at Duke University and National University of Singapore demonstrated that sleep-deprived gamblers are more inclined to make high-risk bets, apparently because they overestimate their chances of winning.

The researchers scanned the brains of 28 young adults (with a mean age of 22.3 years) who were playing a gambling game that involved various risk strategies. They repeated the scans after the subjects had gone for 24 hours without sleep. The participants no longer embraced a strategy of avoiding losses; instead they went for big gains despite the threat of big losses.

Brain scans showed that when the subjects were sleep-deprived, they displayed less activation in the insular cortex, a region associated with negative moods and emotions. Gains produced greater activation in the striatum, which contains many receptors for dopamine, the neurotransmitter released abundantly after taking cocaine or other recreational drugs.

“Sleep deprivation promotes risk-seeking behavior by increasing neural responses to anticipated gains in regions associated with reward processes, particularly the ventral striatum and ventral medial prefrontal cortex,” Venkatraman said. “It also diminishes sensitivity to losses.”

Click to read full article on DANA

Thich Nhat Hanh - Walking Meditation

"We all have a war inside us. What do you regret for yourself?
If you are to come to see this, you must address your fear, your hatred"

This is moving and profound. How do we go through something like the Vietnam war, and still come to peace inside us? We all have a war inside. That's what PTSD is, but that's what we call 'survival switching', then becomes now, and the hippocampus cycles it through again, and reenergizes the circuitry, and the brain sheaths the circuits in myelin...again and again.

We are still struggling in our county with the affects our war within, of our own journey back to peace.

"Diffuse the bombs inside us" he says. Ah. So true.

Watch his walking meditation-it is not a walk to get to a place, and yet it is, for the place is inside.
It is a place of peace within.
And then bringing elements of peace to your daily life.

Why have we come so far from peace inside? Our children are born within the constant noise and movement of our modern lives are overwhelmed. Are we teaching our children peace inside? Do we know how to have peace inside-or are we moving towards even more constant sound and bombardment of our senses?

I'm curious if you have 51 minutes to let yourself watch this gentle message? Let me know if your life has time for 51 minutes?

Coincidentally, last night I wrote about the hippocampus and PTSD, and how high the estimates are for returning soldiers. And I was curious about VIetnam and where we were now with them? I wrote about the hippocampus and brain integration and allowing us to come to peace within.

"Every day when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand new hours to live."

The DVD is called "The Places That Scare You" and is available on Amazon.com

Are Humans Unique? Really?

Michael Gazzaniga, neural scientist, wrote "The Ethical Brain", about his investigation into the human mind and how we develop abilities that separate us from animals.

His new book, "Human, The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique" delves into more. For an excerpt from the book Click Here

Humans lie. No surprise there. Animals lie too, but mostly for survival.
Humans lie socially.
And humans lie to themselves. Self deception. One of the conclusions they discovered:

"Those with a greater sense of moral responsibility did not show signs of greater moral integrity; they actually showed signs of greater hypocrisy!" Doesn't bode well for the higher developed species does it?

Chronic Stress Disrupts the Brain

Chronic Stress Disrupts the Brain’s Ability to Shift Attention
February 10, 2009

"Ordinary chronic stress can impair our ability to shift attention flexibly, according to a recent study of stressed-out medical students. The study found that stress achieves this temporary remodeling of the brain by reducing the connectivity of an attention-regulating area of the prefrontal cortex.

“It’s reassuring that this attention-shifting deficit seems to go away after stress is reduced, but such deficits are similar to what we see in a number of stress-related psychiatric disorders, so we need to know more about it,” says the study’s first author, Conor Liston, a neuroscientist and a psychiatry resident at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. The study was released Jan. 12 on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science Web site.

“This study is the first to show how this common behavioral experience in people may relate to weaker brain network connections,” says Amy Arnsten, a neuroscientist at Yale University who has done work in this area. “Importantly, the effects of stress were fully reversible, similar to those seen in animals.”

The article goes on to say:

"This loss of flexibility is a symptom of anxiety disorders and depression; people with these disorders typically find it hard to shift their focus away from fearful or otherwise negative thoughts. Evidence suggests that drug addiction, too, empowers limbic craving activity and at the same time weakens the inhibitory influence of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Stress is known to play a role in all of these conditions. Although the mechanisms by which it boosts some regions and impairs others are not yet clear, Arnsten and colleagues have shown in animal experiments that, for example, stressful conditions can raise levels of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine in prefrontal regions. These raised levels in turn may alter the sensitivity of the neurons in those regions, effectively reducing their influence over behavior.

Whether chronic-stress-induced changes in prefrontal neurotransmitter levels eventually lead to actual dendritic shrinkage remains to be seen. “This is still a new area that we don’t know much about,” says Liston. “But the ultimate goal is to design targeted interventions aimed at exploiting the finding that a stress effect like this is reversible.”

To read the full Article from "The Dana Foundation" Click here

Monday Shamanic class begins at the U

Monday evening we begin a new shamanic class through the U.

There are just a few openings left! We will be doing drumming journeys every week, learning to connect to the energies of the planet. You'll journey to meet your totem animals, your guides. You will begin to build your shamanic alter space, called a 'mesa' that is a sacred union between you and you that forms a bridge between the worlds.

We will create a sacred space and you will begin to learn to navigate in and out of magical places...and have fun! I had a couple come one series. Older and very sweet both of them. She talked, he didn't much. The first night when we went to journey, instead of laying on the floor and relaxing, he crossed his arms over his chest and sat in a chair. He didn't close his eyes. He watched me as I guided the rest, lights lowered, into that under world.

Afterwards they shared their journeys, one by one, sweet, gentle, funny. When it was his turn I asked him why he decided not to go? It was ok, but I was curious. He said "Well I'm not going into that EVIL place!" and he looked challengingly at me as if it had been a test.

I realized I had forgotten how we are, we civilized people. I smiled.

I said, "You know, they are a simple people. When indigenous cultures say they are going into the under world, they mean it. Into the under..." and I pointed down

"world. Vs here in the middle world, and" I pointed up "to the upper world." I paused.

"That's all. They really mean, we are journeying into the belly of the mother, back to the beginning, into the earth from where we came. They don't have a concept of hell like we do. They don't have a map of anything fearful there. There are just lost children, fractured soul parts that when they got scared, went back to the mother until the time when we are able to go down and bring them home."

"That's it. They just quite literally mean 'under world. under here. And for them, we are surrounded by helpers, guides and assistance. It's a friendly place. I think you'll like it."

He happily journeyed every week after that...sometimes we only need a little coaxing to come out from behind limiting beliefs that no longer serve us. I think there's enough fear without creating more, don't you?

Levitating-oops

No, this isn't real. But here is one that is! :) He doesn't levitate that I can see, but what he CAN do is pretty amazing. No indigestion here!

Theta Realms

Brainwave journeys-deep meditation

VIbration and Matter

This is how I think crop circles are made-but that's my opinion. This is sand in a shallow metal tray.

Reiki

Lovely video on Reiki Jin Kei Do- of compassion and wisdom

It is not only a healing method, but a way of being in the world. Reiki is the achknowledgment of a great flow of energy, and a greater alignment with the light.