Word: frontal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues - which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying...
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...
...matter what explains the shape of the brain, it can pay dividends. Better-functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one study, Newberg scanned the brains of people who complained of poor recall before they underwent meditation training, then scanned them again after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved...
...inhabitants of The Real World--the hug is gaining ground on the handshake. There are many iterations, including the hip-hop hug (a manly shake-and-squeeze combo), the ass-out hug (an awkward ordeal that precludes genital contact) and, for someone you're really close to, the full frontal (your standard bear hug). The big squeeze has been on the rise at least since 2006, when the Free Hugs campaign exploded worldwide. It got another boost last year, when hikers from Ohio and Pennsylvania started the Hugs for Humanity project, walking across America to deliver a million hugs...