Mindframe

For adults, the benefits of meditation are no mystery. As the Mayo Clinic notes , meditating has a whole host of upsides, from lowered stress to increased self-awareness to reduced negative emotions to a spark of extra creativity and intelligence.   Even the United States Marines—not a community known for their love of New Age-y practices— have begun using meditation training to help boost decisiveness and clear-headedness in times of conflict. But while you make an effort to incorporate more guided relaxation techniques into your daily routine, don’t forget about the children in your life, writes Alice G Walton in Forbes . Whether a kid needs some help calming down before things reach tantrum territory, or strategies for not getting so stressed about homework and tests, studies are increasingly showing that meditation can be an important aid at any age. While we still have less overall data about the benefits of meditation on the developing brain, David Gelles of T...

  Can’t get into meditation? It might be time to pick up a coloring book. That’s not meant to sound dismissive; it’s actual advice. Adult coloring books arrived on the market in a big way circa 2012, and as CNN reports , it’s now a full-blown trend, for some very interesting reasons. It’s not art therapy in the traditional sense—filling in pre-drawn shapes isn’t quite the same as a freeform painting exercise, for instance—but coloring demonstrates similar benefits all the same. Research from the American Art Therapy Association shows adults who crack open a coloring book report feeling less stress, more confidence, and an increased sense of serenity. Recent research by psychologist Dr Nicola Holt and her team at the University of the West of England backs this up. In one experiment, 47 freshman undergrads read a chapter on study skills and colored a mandala. They took psychological tests at the start and following each activity. After just 20 minutes of coloring, the st...

What happens to the brain during meditation? When researcher Wendy Hasenkamp was at Emory University, she and her team ran experiments on focused meditation aided by the fMRI[1]. In the end, the researchers came to recognize a distinct pattern among their subjects, a four-phase process involving four distinct brain areas. When subjects entered the fMRI scanner, they were told to focus on the sensation of their own breathing. The subject’s insula (related to a person's focus, or lack thereof) would default towards mind wandering. When that happened and the subject became aware of the fact that they were no longer concentrating on their breathing, they were instructed to press a button. When the subjects tried to refocus on their breathing, their salience network would take over. This is the part of the brain that registers sudden attention shifts, alerting you to nearby distractions. Your salience network might be more aptly named your distraction network, and for many of u...

Listening to music is one of the most compelling human experiences. Music taps deeply into our sense of feeling, often highlighting and perhaps even giving a voice to our emotions. For this reason, it’s no surprise that in Holhe Fels cave in the hills of west Ulm Germany, archeologists discovered an ancient flute that carbon dates to 35,000 years ago. What’s kind of surprising is that it’s made of a vulture bone. What’s very surprising is that it’s tuned to the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale is the set of notes virtually every song you know is built on. Everything from German Baroque to ragtime to West African music to to jazz to Sami joik singing to polka to third-wave Canadian psychobilly, and even that earworm that was in your head all of yesterday, the one you finally managed to shake a few minutes ago. Fundamentally, music is just a set of vibrations operating at a frequency level (measured in Hz or cycles per second) detectable to human ears, which our brains t...

When was the last time you had a three-foot tamping rod blow through your prefrontal cortex, taking with it about a half teacupful of brain matter? If your name is Phineas Gage, it was 164 years and 53 days ago, and it happened at 4:30 in the afternoon while you were setting explosives for the Burlington railroad in Vermont. Miraculously, in defiance of Victorian medical science and common sense, Gage lived. His personality, however, was forever altered. This is one of the most cited neuroscience cases out there because it tells us a few key things about the nature of the prefrontal cortex, that processing center in your skull just above your eyebrows. The prefrontal cortex does a lot of cool stuff. It is, among other things, home to your willpower. Neuroscientists frequently say we have one brain and two minds. By this they mean we have a processing center for emotions, the part of the brain that reaches for the glazed donut, and another mind, the part of the brain that reminds...