Word: thalamus
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...yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it's your parietal lobe - a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input - that may have the most transporting effect. (Read "Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs...
Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators - those with 15 years of practice or more - appear to have thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus - a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. "It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with," Newberg says, "and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further...
...never supposed to manage anything like it again. And all of it is a result of the growing therapeutic science of deep-brain stimulation (DBS). Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic inserted a pair of fine wires into the mugging victim's brain last year, threading them down to the thalamus, a deep, intact structure that could, in theory, jump- start the surviving circuits in the damaged cerebral cortex above. Very low current was sent through the wires, stimulating the thalamus, which indeed awakened the higher brain...
...several players. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other scanning technologies have allowed researchers to peer deeper than ever into the OCD-tossed brain. In addition to the amygdala, there are three other anatomical hot spots involved in the disorder: the orbital frontal cortex, the caudate nucleus and the thalamus--the first two seated high in the brain, the third lying deeper within...
...other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer...