She was the Nepalese child goddess who broke with centuries of custom and travelled overseas, only for her family to learn she was being stripped of her title for that breach of etiquette. For three anxious weeks, her family negotiated with authorities, insisting she had done nothing wrong. And that effort has finally paid off. In a noisy and colourful return to
In a recent study by researchers at a UCLA neuroscience institute wanted to investigate the imprint of culture on the so-called mirror neuron network. Mirror neurons fire when an individual performs an action, but they also fire when someone watches another individual perform that same action. Neuroscientists believe this "mirroring" is the neural mechanism by which we can read the minds of other people and empathize with them.
When it comes to the influence of culture, they found that indeed, the mirror neuron network responds differently depending on whether we are looking at someone who shares our culture, or someone who doesn't.
Based on the research so far, it appears that neural systems supporting memory, empathy and general cognition encode information differently depending on who's giving the information -- a member of one's own cultural group, or a member of an out-group, and that ethnic in-group membership and a culturally learned motor repertoire more strongly influence the brain's responses to observed actions, specifically actions used in social communication.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070718002115.htmTo acquire knowledge it is not enough to travel hastily through a
country. Observation demands eyes, and the power of directing them
towards the object we desire to know. There are plenty of people
who learn no more from their travels than from their books, because
they do not know how to think; because in reading their mind is
at least under the guidance of the author, and in their travels
they do not know how to see for themselves.
-- Rousseau, Emile
"Everything exists only because it has a purpose. The moment that purpose has been accomplished, everything disappears and existence is manifested as self-existing Self."(LiveScience.com)
Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thought and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”
When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.
“These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health,” said David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist who led the second part of the study, which will be detailed in Psychosomatic Medicine.
"I am infinite and so are you and so is everyone, my friend. But there is a veil, there is a veil. Do you follow me? You can see only a infinitesimal part of me. Just like when a man stands on the seashore and looks out over the great ocean, he sees only a fraction of that vast ocean. Similarly, everyone can see only a small part of me. The whole cosmos is but an infinitesimal part of the real man, but how can a man see the whole cosmos?" (Yogi Ramsuratkumar 1918-2001)
By Craig Zammit
That's our samsara blog, this is our nirvana blog.
