Body's decline starts with brain

How fast you can throw a ball or run or swerve a steering wheel depends on how speedily brain cells fire off commands to muscles. Fast firing depends on good insulation for your brain's wiring. Now new research by neurologists at UCLA suggests that in middle age, even healthy people begin to lose some of that insulation in a motor-control part of the brain, at the same rate that their speed subtly slows. The research points to another reason to stay physically and mentally active: An active, exercised brain may detect fraying insulation quicker and signal for repair cells to get to work.

http://tinyurl.com/5kqobt

The life of sorcery

The magical life demands the abandonment of comfort, conventionality, security and safety -- for competition, combat, extremes, and adversity are needed to produce higher resolutions for personal evolution. An air of desperation is required in a life lived close to the edge. One must be living by one's wits. In a stagnant environment the body-mind creates its own adversity -- disease and fantasy. Only in extremes can the spirit discover itself. A fluid environment is required as a vessel for magical consciousness. Only a fluid environment can conform to beliefs about it and be subject to the subtle magical forces.

-- Carroll, Liber Null

Thin line between love & hate

Love and hate are intimately linked within the human brain, according to a study that has discovered the biological basis for the two most intense emotions. Scientists studying the physical nature of hate have found that some of the nervous circuits in the brain responsible for it are the same as those that are used during the feeling of romantic love, even though love and hate appear to be polar opposites. But one major difference between the two seems to be in the fact that large parts of the cerebral cortex (associated with reasoning) become deactivated during love, whereas only a small area is deactivated in hate. "This may seem surprising ... But whereas in romantic love, the lover is often less critical and judgemental regarding the loved person, it is more likely that in the context of hate the hater may want to exercise judgement in calculating moves to harm, injure or otherwise exact revenge," a professor involved in the study said.

http://tinyurl.com/6oe43a

Om-ing at Beth Israel Hospital

A foundation run by fashion designer Donna Karan (founder of the DKNY clothing label) has donated $850K for a one-year experiment combining Eastern and Western healing methods at Beth Israel Medical Center. The Karan-Beth Israel project combines yoga and meditation with modern scientific procedures such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy to enhance the healing of people with various types of cancer.

http://tinyurl.com/6pofj4

Cosmo-omnivorousness

In this world everything is on the menu, including us.

Treat Depression with Magnetic Stimulation

The government has approved a new transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) device, similar to the "thinking cap" mentioned in our story of October 7, but this version may be used to treat depression and related maladies. Like the "thinking cap" stimulator, this device transmits magnetic pulses through the skull to trigger neurons to fire more effectively. The great benefit of such devices is that they require no surgery and are safer than other treatment methods.

(Click on image to enlarge)

http://tinyurl.com/5mhee5

Yoga that is Not

A high school in the state of New York has won approval to offer students a voluntary yoga program — as long as it's not called yoga.

http://tinyurl.com/3l8bxa

Laws Within (Hesse)

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised.

-- from Demian (Herman Hesse)

Put on Your Thinking Cap

Using the cutting-edge technology of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), this "thinking cap" currently in the experimental stage uses a small but potent magnetic coil to beam energy directly into the brain through the skull. Researchers claim that such technology may be able to improve memory, creativity, and overall thinking ability.

(Click on image to enlarge and read text)

http://dvice.com/archives/2008/10/thinking_cap_tu.php

True Sanity (Laing)

True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality, the emergence of the “inner” archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

-- R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience