Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Immink PhD
three
Principles of
The Brain
f o r Yo gi s
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- eBook
www.integratemindbody.com
Three Principles of the Brain
for Yogis
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Three Principles of the Brain for Yogis 1
© Maarten A. Immink 2007
About the Author
For any further information on yoga and meditation classes as well as human
performance consulting, including integral fitness training, please contact Dr.
Maarten Immink on:
email | docmaarten@integratemindbody.com
phone | Int’l | +61 4 2169 3289 Australia | 0421693289
web | www.integratemindbody.com
NOTE: This eBook is intended for your own personal study. Feel free to make a hard copy of this eBook.
Please do not use any of its content, in whole, part or in abstract, for commercial purposes. Additional
electronic copies of this eBook can be obtained by contacting Dr. Immink or by visiting
www.integratemindbody.com.
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© Maarten A. Immink 2007
Introduction
If you are reading this, then most likely we share a common interest for the
study of the biological basis of the mind and its application to yoga. This is the
area that I have been dedicated to learning about for quite some time.
Indeed, for many years I have been searching for the knowledge that would
allow me to comprehend how the brain and nervous system work and how
their function relates to the concept of the mind. This search has taken me
through many years of studying, reading and researching within the
perspective of western science. Although this approach has offered me a
wealth of knowledge, it was not until I became exposed to the science of yoga
that I truly began to see the bigger picture. Western science and yoga
science compliment each other tremendously well in terms of defining and
applying the workings of the body and mind. What I am presenting to you in
the following reading is a highlight of a massive amount of information on the
topic of the brain. This highlight includes three principles of the brain that I
have come to understand as having particular relevance for the practitioner of
yoga.
I hope that you will find the following principles useful for your yoga journey.
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Principle 1. Awareness takes yoga into the brain
“Use it or loose it” is often used to refer to the fact that unless we remain
active, we stand a high chance of experiencing physical deterioration. Living
a sedentary lifestyle contributes to wasted muscles, weak bones, stiff joints,
heart disease, obesity… and the list goes on. This link between regular
physical activity and a healthy body is now well established and commonly
accepted. The physical practices of Hatha Yoga, called asanas, have also
received substantial attention in terms of the benefits they offer for the
physique of the body. So popular are these body-based benefits that they
actually tend to overshadow another important component of the yoga and
health connection - the nervous system. Yoga has the powerful ability to
prevent and reverse degeneration and disease in the nervous system. The
fact that this is often overlooked is surprising since it is the nervous system
that is the master regulator of the entire body. If this system fails, the rest of
the body will surely follow.
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Awareness is integration
What determines the depth, to which you allow yoga asanas to integrate into
your nervous system, depends on the ability to implement one factor into your
practices. This factor is awareness and it is a skill that must be developed
over time through training and application.
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Asana without awareness is limiting and dangerous
Using automated movement systems do allow you to perform multiple tasks at
once, like talk and walk, but the downfall is that you fail to be fully aware of the
movement itself. Loss of movement awareness means limited connection
between mind and the body. When an asana is performed, countless sensory
experiences are generated in the body but only a few of these can be
experienced in the disconnected mind. When there are less incoming signals
into the brain from the body, the potential for the asana to bring about any
mental benefits is diminished. Even worse, there is an increase in the
likelihood for injury since awareness is the safety mechanism that prevents
the body from being pushed beyond its physical limits.
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Yoga is good for the brain and awareness deepens these
effects
Including yoga asana into your lifestyle is an effective means to improve or
sustain overall health and wellbeing. Part of this means enjoying the benefits
that asana can potentially provide for function of the brain. As the brain is the
major organ which supports the mind, establishing a healthy functioning brain
is key to reaching higher levels of consciousness. Thus, the defining factor
which takes asana from just being an exercise to being a mental and spiritual
practice is the level of awareness that is involved.
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Principle 2. The brain has its habits
(and what yoga does about it!)
As you are sitting and reading this sentence, are you aware of the sensation
of pressure of your buttocks on the chair or cushion? Having read this now
you probably are, but before you most likely were not! The fact is sensations
do drop out of our awareness and this has implications for the way that we
think and control the body. At any given moment we are probably thinking,
talking, moving, eating and/or breathing in ways that we are not even aware
of. Well, we are not entirely to blame. The nervous system has a tendency to
fall into its own habits.
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Habituation of the five senses
This process of habituation happens with all the five senses: touch, taste,
smell, hearing, and vision. One example is walking into a room with a foul
smell which at first is very overwhelming only to find that a few moments later
you ‘forget’ about its presence. At first, the chemicals associated with the
odour are stimulating scent receptors at the top of the nose. These relay the
signal to the brain where the experience of smell and any related reactions are
formed. As the scent lingers, habituation sets in and the brain drops its
awareness of the smelly experience. To your brain it is as if there is no longer
an odour. You can also ‘see for yourself’ the habituation process taking place
in the visual system by following the exercise in Activity Box 1.
Activity Box 1
Now you see them, now you don’t
Move a bit closer to the screen and focus
on the image on the left. In particular, hold
your gaze on the small black dot in the
center of the image. Hold it there for a few
moments until habituation takes over and
the image changes.
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world of the body. This sixth sense is called propioception, which means ‘self
perception’, and relates to information like position of limbs, posture, balance,
and body segment movement. This type of information is what allows you to
perform actions like walking up steps without watching your feet or standing
upright with your eyes closed. Even though propioception is truly a special
type of sensory system, it is also susceptible to habituation. This means that
just as we can loose awareness of stimuli from the external world, it is also
quite possible to loose awareness of the body. The possibility of habituation
in the propioceptive system means that when we perform or hold an asana,
we may loose proper form or alignment without even realising it. For example,
when we hold a sitting posture, we may loose awareness of holding the spine
erect and we begin to slouch forward. When awareness begins to drop out,
the benefits of the practice are minimised and the chance of injury is
maximised due to the loss of proper body alignment. Habituation can also
affect the propioceptive information which supports good breathing function.
Often breathing can be less than optimal because habituation allows bad
habits such as open-mouth, shallow chest breathing to take control of this
important body process.
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another thought. In other words, the mind has to always self-monitor its own
activity to be aware of what it is doing. If you habituate this self-monitoring
process, any awareness of the thought is lost. To the mind, it is as if the
thought no longer exists even though it is still very much active. Once this
happens, the thought has entered the subconscious mind.
Activity Box 2
Sensory Perception on Autopilot
A majority of our perception of the outside world
takes place without any of our awareness. This
implies that the brain automatically imposes its own
expectations in placing meaning on the incoming
sensory information. In other words, the brain sees
what it wants to see.
See the upside down portrait of a popular figure on
the right; do you recognise him? Do you see
anything different about his face? To see how your
brain automatically adjusts its perception of the face,
rotate this page 180 degrees, using the rotate
button on the toolbar.
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trouble sleeping, perfuse sweating, and loss of concentration. In time though,
as the ‘fight or flight’ state is maintained, you may also become habituated to
the physical reactions themselves, especially if this process is facilitated by
the use of recreational or pharmaceutical agents that mask physical
symptoms. With habituation, living physically, emotionally and mentally
stressed begins to feel normal. Even though the body and mind are able to
adapt to stress, when it is sustained, they begin to break down one way or
another. When this happens, a state of dis-ease presents itself. If it sounds
like a precarious situation, it is because unfortunately, in this case it often
requires a doctor’s (or other health practitioner’s) diagnosis to make us aware
that our body and mind need nurturing and healing.
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Pratyahara turns on the dormant parts of the brain
Establishment of pratyahara causes a big change in how the brain functions.
Areas of the brain that are usually dormant become activated. These areas
are found in the parts of the brain which are evolutionary the most advanced
and are said to be unique to humans. Their function is associated with the
ability to become self-aware. It is an illuminative process because activating
these higher brain centres is like turning on the lights in the darkened rooms of
a house; we can now see what has been there all this time. You gain access
to more elevated and refined levels of awareness which allows you to bring
thoughts out of the subconscious into the conscious. Pratyahara, which uses
habituation of the external to remedy habituation of the internal, is a way to
really begin to explore yourself, answering that classical question of yoga,
“who am I?” This knowledge is valuable wisdom and is empowering for it
allows you to have mastery over your mind and your body.
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Principle 3. Yoga can positively re-wire your brain
In order for the brain to be able to carry out its day-to-day functions such as
reading, communicating, and moving the body, it has to rely on well
established neural circuits which have been formed over time. This is the
basis of what is called learning. Not an easy feat when you consider that
there are about 100 billion neurons in the brain and each neuron is connected,
on average, to 10,000 other neurons! One wrong connection and we might
end up tasting colours!
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an important event in terms of learning and so needs to be repeated.
Ensuring that the same neurons will again be active simultaneously involves
two changes. First, neurons form extensions that branch out to form new
connections with other involved neurons. Second, to improve transmission of
signals, connections between neurons, called synapses, are actively
strengthened using cellular level changes. Over time, many neurons connect
and wire themselves together forming a collective group called a neural circuit.
These circuits perform specific functions such as processing and storing
information.
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Association facilitates adaptation
The process of learning is one example of plasticity whereby exposure to
events in our lives has the ability to shape your brain. Learning essentially
involves making new associations, linking unknown information to previously
established memories. In the brain, this involves linking new neural circuits
with already established neural circuits. For example, imagine that you have
an established neural circuit for executing a yoga posture called the seated
forward bend. When the yoga teacher calls out, “come into the seated
forward bend”, your neural circuit for this posture becomes activated and
begins to send signals to turn on some muscles and relax other muscles
allowing you to come into this position. What if the teacher one day calls out,
“come into paschimottanasana” and you have never heard this Sanskrit word
before in class? There is no association between the unfamiliar word and the
posture and so the neural circuit for the asana would not be activated; no
posture just a puzzled look. If the teacher then translates the name into its
English equivalent, then the process of association takes place. A new
paschimottanasana neural circuit becomes associated with the pre-existing
seated forward bend posture circuit. In future classes no translation will be
required since learning has allowed the brain to adapt to a new situation.
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support for this latter notion by demonstrating that our emotional state is an
important event that is associated in the learning process. This implies that
neural circuits that generate certain emotional states like love, happiness,
anger and anxiety become associated with the neural circuits that generate
thought processes like decision making, perception, communication, and
movement production. For this reason, our emotions have the ability to shape
our brain in a way that influences what decisions we make, how we perceive
our world, how we communicate and how we utilise our bodies. The
association is self-reinforcing since the emotion maintains a particular pattern
of thought and in turn, the pattern of thought encourages the linked emotion.
Additionally, each time the neural circuits are activated, their association
becomes increasingly stronger. If the emotions happen to be negative and
the thoughts cynical or unconstructive, their perpetuation could create a shift
of the mind towards unhappiness. It is easy to blame external sources for
discontentment, yet the real source often comes from within.
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it is truly life threatening or not, shifts the brain into survival training mode.
Events and experiences, even if they would normally be inoffensive, are now
interpreted as being threatening. Consequently, self-protective judgements
cause defensive reactions to be played out. Negative emotions, neurotic
thoughts and retaliatory deeds all become associated to the extent that the
brain has learned to view life as a struggle.
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shifts into a unique pattern of activity. The areas of the brain which are
normally active during day-to-day activity become dormant as areas which are
associated with higher levels of consciousness become more active. Here is
where the major influence of meditation on the nervous system begins.
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Figure 3. A Tibetan Buddhist monk preparing to advance brain
science.
trauma as a result of the invasion of the Chinese Army into Tibet. Strong
trauma has a definite ability to influence and shape the brain in negative ways.
This is usually seen as greater activity in the right prefrontal lobe, which has
been associated with unhappiness and depression. So it seems that these
monks were able to use meditation to counteract traumatic mental debilitation
and instead learn to have a positive outlook on life, full of compassion and
forgiveness. In other words, meditation re-wired the brain to develop and
support the higher qualities of the mind.
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Figure 4. Scans of brain activity taken from a Tibetan Buddhist
monk at rest and while meditating. Note the increased levels of
activity (red areas) in the left hemisphere of the brain particularly in
the prefrontal lobe.
If you are interested in the effects meditation has on the brain, read:
Just Say Om by Joel Stein published in TIME magazine July 27, 2003
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