Word: frontals
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head - aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does - particularly concerning matters of faith...
...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...
...have to be trained to use them and must rehearse a random, energy-intensive brain task like mentally singing a song in order to light up a pattern of brain activity that sends a signal to the researchers. The new technique extracts information much more directly by targeting the frontal lobe's preference functions. What's more, while other studies have required the subjects to activate their brains over and over again so that researchers could average the subtle changes in their scans across many trials, Chau and Luu's technique is precise enough that they needed to look only...