Mobin Khan

You may be able to read this text effortlessly but don’t be fooled into thinking that reading is an easy task! It took you many years of learning and long hours in school to become proficient at recognizing letters and words. How does your brain do it? The brain consists of 10 billion cells called neurons. On average, each neuron is connected to 10,000 other neurons through connections called synapses. When you see or think of something, that input stimulus excites a neuron. If the input is high enough, the neuron passes an electric signal to the neighboring neurons, through their connecting synapses.  Synapses  are chemical bridges that can change their  electrical resistance  according to how much they are used—lower resistance if the connection between two neighboring neurons is important and higher resistance otherwise. The brain constantly creates such paths of electricity and modifies the synapses along the way, rewiring itself in order to learn and adapt to the environment

Consciousness Might Be a Result of Basic Physics, Say Researchers Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there?  Why are some things conscious  and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium? These questions are all aspects of the ancient "mind-body problem," which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It's resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years. The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades. Now it's generally known as the "hard problem" of consciousness, after  philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a  now classic paper and further explored it in his 1996 book, " The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

What is neuroplasticity? Want to break a habit or change the way you feel about something? Change your brain physically with contemplative exercises and watch your thinking and points of view change………… It’s relatively easy when you know how. Meditate. Several research studies have shown that contemplative practice, such as meditation, can physically transform the structure of your brain and thought patterns. The physical changing of the structure of one’s brain is known as neuroplasticity. In essence, they are saying that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” The following is dialog excerpted and edited from the Institute of Noetic Sciences’ teleseminar series “Exploring the Noetic Sciences” with neuropsychologist and meditation teacher Rick Hanson, originally posted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences: Broadly defined, contemplative neuroscience is the study of what happens in the brain when people are doing contemplative practices, how the brain changes with such practices