Caregivingly Yours
welcomes our first ever guest post. Patricia Walling is a web content designer
in Washington State for several websites regarding the field of medicine and
careers in health care, including Medical Transcription.
Christopher deCharms,
who has a doctorate degree in neurophysiology, and his colleagues have made
some amazing discoveries concerning the power of the human brain to control its
own functionality. By using a mixture of Western technology and the medical
concepts merged with the theories behind Buddhist meditation and self-awareness
practices, deCharms has managed to allow people to interact with their own
neural patterns. This interrelation of brain functions with perception and
neural learning systems is quickly proving to be successful, particularly for
those with chronic pain.
For years Buddhists
have, as a matter of religious practice, been studying the interactions of
themselves with themselves. Practices such as meditation make them more aware
of the small things that happen within the body that most are wont to ignore.
With increased technology in MRI and neuroimaging these processes can now be
seen in real-time via virtual reality (VR) goggles by the patient. The patients
who participated in the clinical trials were trained to selectively control
localized portions of their brains and induce or reduce neural activity levels
in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (RACC), which is related to pain
perception and regulation. The initial results showed a 44-64 percent reduction
among chronic pain victims – not perfect, but definitely a start considering
the relative infancy of this theory. Furthermore, the results were tested with
control subjects who were fed false information. These subjects had no
instances of success. Eventually, the subjects were able to take control of
these patterns without the help of the MRI, showing that one can be trained to
have a permanent sort of control over his or her brain functions.
One doesn't have to be
well-versed in the health care (which runs the gamut from nursing to medical coding) to see that above and beyond pain, the potential for this sort of
technology is amazing. Some of the things that deCharms discusses in his talk on TED.com suggests control over more obscure elements of neural functioning
such as depression levels, addiction patterns and even physical performance. If
the process can be developed to these levels, then the raw power that a human
being will possess over their own development is evolutionary in its scope.
Being able to re-route neural processes and “re-map” the brain could be used to
heighten desirable mental patterns while eliminating negative ones, at the will
of the individual. Some other tests performed by deCharms and his colleagues
show similar control over the somatomotor cortex, which controls muscle group
activation. Again, the training was shown to be useful even after removing the
MRI.
How interesting! I'm definitely going to have to look into this. Thank you so much for posting it!
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