Neuroscience and global contemplative traditions both affirm the powerful health benefits of being present and living in the fullness of the here and now. Learn how you can experience greater joy, genuine happiness, and a positive outlook on life by "Being the NOW, Living in the WOW!" Learn more in the latest podcast with Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show.
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Happy Learning!
Dr. Jay Kumar
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"How you choose to breathe determines how you choose to heal, to be, and live!" Learn what medical research affirmingly shows that shifting something as simple as your breath can transform your brain, heal your body, and create genuine happiness. Learn more in the latest podcast with Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show.
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"How you choose to breathe determines how you choose to heal, to be, and live!" Learn what medical research affirmingly shows that shifting something as simple as your breath can transform your brain, heal your body, and create genuine happiness. Learn more in the latest podcast with Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show.
Catch all podcasts on my BLOG.
Dr. Jay Kumar
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Neuroscience now shows that your brain, just like muscles in your body, is something you can strengthen and improve with practice and training. In fact, more medical research suggests that cultivating the qualities of compassion, empathy, and acceptance in your life can lead to a Healthy Brain, a Healthy Body, and Healthy You! Learn more in the latest podcast with Dr. Jay Kumar on The Doug Stephan Good Day Show. Catch all podcasts on my BLOG.
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Above all, humans are social animals extraordinaire. In fact, the biological drive to feel connected and part of something greater is literally wired into your brain! Hear Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show discuss "Love, Empathy, & the Brain" and how the basic human need to love, be loved, and to belong is crucial for your health and wellness!
Have a great day!
Dr. Jay Kumar
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In case you mIssed the latest podcast of Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show, we continue our Olympic theme on "Neuroscience & Sports." Learn how you can harness the power of your brain for optimal health and peak performance.
Remember, "Before you can achieve it, you first have to visualize and believe it!" Read more online at http://conta.cc/RaLtyA
Here's to Your Health & Happiness,
Dr. Jay Kumar
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Michael Phelps just broke the record for most decorated Olympic athlete in sport’s history! You might be surprised to learn that it’s not just his physical strength, but his brain that actually might be the most important tool that helped him in his world record performances at the 2012 London Olympic Games. Every four years the world’s best athletes from every corner of the globe come together to the Summer Olympics for the love of sport and to GO FOR THE GOLD! In 1896, the first Modern Olympic Games were founded by Pierre de Coubertin on the ideals that "respect, fair balance, pursuit of excellence, joy in effort, and balance between mind, body and will as the most essential Olympic values!" Coubertin’s intention was to take an entirely holistic approach to sports for all athletes to cultivate the body, mind, and soul. I wonder how pleasantly surprised he'd be knowing just how true his vision exists in sports today, as more athletes actively train their mind and brain equally as their body. As a big fan of the Olympic games and as someone who studies the brain and human cognition, what equally fascinates me is understanding what happens between the ears of an Olympic athlete, like Phelps, that makes him an Olympic legend! It's the reason why Dr. John Milton, a neuroscientist at Claremont Colleges in California says, “Brawn plays a part, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that.” Let's explore exactly why that is by looking at what's happening inside Michael Phelps' brain just before he dives off the block and wins gold.
“If You Can Envision It, You Can Achieve It!”
Seconds before the starting buzzer and Phelps' body hits the surface of the water, an area in his brain known as the pre-motor cortex actually begins to fire before the muscles in his body begin to engage for the race. Neuroscientists have only very recently learned that the premotor cortex actually has nothing to do with any actual motor coordination or physical signal for your body. It turns out, this fascinating area of your brain merely helps your body envision and prepare for something it is about to accomplish, like swimming, preparing to give a big speech, tackling an important issue in life, taking an exam, or perhaps merely sticking to your exercise and diet goals.
In a recent article published in the journal Science, research into the premotor cortex reveals that this area of the brain is what accounts for us planning and strategizing in order to accomplish a goal. The reason why Olympic athletes and other highly motivated people appear to be more capable of winning a race or accomplishing a long-sought after goal is that they've trained their premotor cortex to visualize themselves performing the task in their brain well before any actual physical action occurs. It is as if their brain is already doing the action well before the body even moves a muscle! It is perhaps this cognitive visualization that gives athletes, CEOs, presidents, and other highly motivated people a considerable advantage when it comes to facing a challenge.
So even if you're not planning to be the next Michael Phelps, there is one thing that you share with him and everyone else in your ability to achieve your personal best in life—BRANPOWER! All the studies in neuroscience now indicate that the brain, like the body, is a muscle that you can strengthen and harness to your advantage in order to accomplish your goals in life. So how exactly can you use the premotor cortex to work for you? The answer is in a phrase that I often say to clients and to my students: “If you can envision it, you can achieve it!” Whether you want to call it “creative imagery,” “cognitive visualization, ” or “muscle memory,” neuroscience now validates the long-held believe that in order to accomplish a task, your chances of success are much greater if you can visualize it first in your mind!
How The Russians Did It
In their book Peak Performance, Mental Training Techniques of the World's Greatest Athletes, authors Garfield and Bennett cite a remarkable study. Back in the days of the old Soviet Union when athletes trained for the 1980 Olympics, sports coaches and medical researchers banded together to conduct an experiment to quantify just how cognitive visualization and mental training enhance physical performance. The Soviet study divided athletes into four groups:
Group 1 doing 100% physical training.
Group 2 doing 75% physical training and 25% mental training (visualization).
Group 3 doing equal amounts of 50% physical and mental training.
Group 4 doing 75% mental and 25% physical training.
The results may surprise you! It turns out the fourth group that only did 25% physical training and 75% mental training outperformed and showed the greatest athletic improvement among all groups. Furthermore, the Soviet coaches and doctors concluded that engaging the brain in mental training and creative visualization techniques in conjunction with physical training enhanced:
• Overall confidence of the athletes due to visualizing themselves winning their events prior to competition.
• Ability to remain focused and alert by eliminating mental distractions during training sessions.
How to Build a Better Brain
The great news is that if you have a healthy brain you can practice cognitive visualization, activate your premotor cortex, and drastically improve your ability to achieve peak performance in your daily life. Whether breaking the record in the 400m freestyle, preparing for an important business meeting, or merely manifesting your intention for greater health and happiness, the same principles apply. What to do:
1) Breathe and Relax. Sitting in a comfortable position and closing your eyes, begin to focus and observe your breathing. Taking slow deep breaths in and out through the nose and through the diaphragm (deep-belly breathing) will help your brain go into a relaxed brain-wave state.
2) Once your body, mind, and thoughts become relaxed, begin to visualize an upcoming event that you wish to go in your favor. Perhaps, it might be a big exam at school, a stressful meeting with your boss, or a challenging conversation you need to have with a friend. Whatever the situation, visualize yourself accomplishing the task with genuine determination and motivation.
3) Now as you continue to visualize the scene in your mind, feel the emotional quality of joy, accomplishment, or gratitude that accompanies the successful achievement of your performance.
4) Hold that thought in your mind and experience as if it is already happening in your body.
Please don’t get discouraged if you find the exercise difficult to do the first time around. Remember, like with any muscle in the body trained during physical performance, the brain equally requires discipline and perseverance. The good news is that the neurons in your brain wire together much more quickly than it does for the muscles to develop in your body! So even if you’re not planning to be the next Michael Phelps, you can achieve your personal best and GO FOR GOLD knowing that the first and most important step toward accomplishing your goals in life begin in your brain! (Full article on premotor cortex and Michael Phelps here)
Dr. Jay Kumar
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The big news about Obama "coming out" in support for same-sex marriage was the exciting hot topic with Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show as we explored "Your Brain, Sex, and Relationships". Hope you enjoy this podcast as you learn what neuroscience has to say about human sexuality and the universal drive to be in relationships.
Awake and Enjoy!
Dr. Jay Kumar
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Brain Waves and the Power of Attention
Neuropsychology now believes that the human brain allows us to process two distinct types of attention. The first is a “voluntary or direct” attention that enables us to focus our thoughts and neural energy to tasks that require our direct concentration, e.g. writing this article, watching a movie, or reading a book. The other type is an “involuntary or indirect” attention that our brain does with little or no effort, e.g. watching a sunset, meditating, having a casual conversation, or dancing.
Additionally, there are corresponding brain waves associated with these two types of attention. When our brains are engaged in voluntary, direct attention requiring focused concentration, beta waves tend to be predominant. On the contrary, our brains produce alpha waves when we experience involuntary, indirect attention requiring no fixed awareness. The two other brain waves, theta and delta, are predominant during sleep with theta waves occurring in deep-sleep and delta waves during REM dream-sleep.
While having our brain in beta-wave state is important, as it helps us to focus on daily tasks, unfortunately, many of us live a typical life with our brains disproportionately in the stressful beta-wave state and barely enough time in the healing and regenerative alpha-wave state. Unlike theta and delta waves that occur predominantly in sleep, the healing and regenerative properties of alpha waves are produced only when we are conscious and awake.
In our current technologically driven world, we are on average bombarded with 4,000 bits of information/second and about 700 ads a day. The brain is overwhelmed with all this sensory data, as it requires our attention to be in “voluntary or direct” mode and our brains to reside in the constantly stressful beta-waves for the majority of our day while awake. Rarely, do we take the time in our waking state for the brain to go into the calming, soothing alpha-waves and into “involuntary and indirect” attention.
Mind-Body Connection
In the growing medical field of psycho-neuro-immunology (PNI), there appears to be a correlation between the various brain waves with our health and wellbeing. When our brains are highly amped up in focused direct attention for long hours at a time, we live our day predominantly in a beta-wave state accompanied with the release of cortisol, the stress-hormone that eventually may lead to chronic anxiety, illness and disease. The good news is that involuntary, indirect attention produces the alpha-waves that produce beta-endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin, neurotransmitters that enable us to become relaxed, calm, and centered when we’re in stress throughout our day. This evolutionary mechanism wired into our neurology is known as the relaxation response. This built-in relaxation response suggests that our brains and nervous systems enable us to experience a state of calm and relaxation in moments of stress and anxiety.
Natrue as Healer
So can you guess what’s one of the easiest ways for us to enhance the alpha-waves of calm and centeredness and to stimulate our natural relaxation response? The answer, of course, is NATURE! Another emerging field of study, known as ecopsychology, advocates that even though the human brain is currently shaped for our modern and technologically-driven environment, its original function was to interact with and respond to the natural world in which it evolved over the millennia. In essence, the human brain is literally “hard-wired” to BE IN NATURE, as being in nature is natural for the brain.
According to this field of study, human beings have an instinctual biological need to connect with nature, something known as the biophilic instinct, a concept advanced by the Harvard biologist Edward Wilson. The idea is that humans and the human brain evolved over millennia as beings deeply enmeshed with and inexorably linked to the intricacies of nature. Wilson describes biophilia as the "innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes." Even though our human brain has recently adapted to an environment of technology and sensory stimulation, we each still have this affinity for nature ingrained in our genotype and in our neurobiology. This evolutionary connection to nature activates in the part of the brain known as the insula, the area that governs our internal feelings and sensations. So when we dance, do yoga meditate, focus on our breath, swim, run, or are in nature we begin to connect to the internal terrain of our body. The insula gauges how we’re feeling and what we’re experiencing within our body and mind in the present moment.
Relaxation Response
This ability to tap into the relaxation response through nature appears also to have a tremendous impact on our health and wellbeing. Scientific studies have already begun and continue to demonstrate the powerful healing aspects of nature. Dr. Ulrich published one of the earliest studies in 1984 Science, in which he noticed that patients who were recovering from surgery healed more quickly and required less pain medication when placed in hospital rooms that had views of nature, versus patients placed in rooms facing brick walls. Ulrich conjectured that this acceleration in healing was perhaps a result of the brain connecting to nature. It appears that when we are immersed in nature, our brains go automatically into the involuntary, indirect attention-mode that is connected with the healing alpha-wave brain state. Research suggests that even a short walk in the park during your lunch break, touching a tree on your walk to the office, or literally “stopping to smell the roses” once in a while is beneficial, as it is an evolutionary trait that our brains evolved to do. Furthermore, even passive contact with nature such as viewing an open pasture in your car or hearing the sound of birds chirping from your window can have the same powerful benefits as an actual immersion in nature.
When the brain’s alpha and beta waves are equally in balance throughout our waking day, we experience psycho-physiological coherence, a deep and profound state of integration of the body, mind, and brain. The longer we can produce coherence, the stronger our immune system, our health, and wellbeing. Being in nature, again, is one of the easiest and most effective ways to cultivate this balance of the brain waves and to switch into our involuntary, calm mode of attention. So it appears that science is beginning to validate that nature truly has a profound calming and soothing effect on the mind and our neurobiology. So what better time than spring to get out in nature and experience its healing power! As the poet Thoreau beautifully states, “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”
Have a joyous and beautiful spring as you continue Living Your Light®
Dr. Jay Kumar
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