Unusual properties of the brain of yogis and shamans

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Yogis manage emotions better, are less stressed, and retain their thinking ability longer. Meditation, like shamanic trance, includes a neural network in the brain that leads a person into a state of detachment and insight. Scientists came to this conclusion by analyzing experimental data.

How the brain withdraws into itself

Yoga, which originated in India more than two thousand years ago, is designed to help a person achieve harmony in body and spirit.

In the West, yoga is also very popular, so scientists do not lack volunteers for experiments, and functional MRI provides a lot of factual material about the activity of certain parts of the brain right during classes.

One of the latest discoveries is the default mode network. It is a large neural structure that links different parts of the brain. It is activated when a person withdraws into himself, disconnects from the outside world. In principle, people spend half their lives in this state. But mindful meditation also leads to it.

To further explore the passive mode of the brain, scientists from Germany and Spain invited newcomers to take a 40-day intensive meditation training. Before and after the experiment, the brain was scanned in order to map the active sites by the inflow of oxygenated blood to them. This is a BOLD functional MRI with registration of the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations, which allows examining the brain during rest.

After the training, all volunteers were found to have a thickening of the left fore-wedge. This area is located in the parietal region of the cortex and is involved in the passive mode neural network. At the same time, the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations there decreased, and people themselves noted a decrease in symptoms of depression and stress.

Yoga also strengthens the coherent functioning of the brain. This was shown by scientists from Brazil and the United States, observing three groups of women over the age of 60 years. The first - with many years of experience in meditation, the second - beginners, the third do not do anything like that at all.

Everyone underwent an MRI scan, filled out a questionnaire. It turned out that for experienced yogis, the passive mode network works much more efficiently. And their thinking functions were better preserved. The authors of the work concluded that yoga is a promising method of anti-aging therapy.

Shamans help to comprehend the secrets of the brain

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Thinking and Brain and Harvard Medical School invited 15 experienced shamans from Germany and Austria to participate in the experiment. For eight minutes, the volunteers listened to the rhythmic beat of tambourines with their eyes closed, while their brains were scanned and electroencephalograms (EEG) were taken. A total of four sessions took place, the shamans periodically fell into a trance.

It turned out that in this state, the interaction of those parts of the brain that are included in the passive mode neural network is enhanced - we are talking primarily about the posterior cingulate gyrus of the cortex (especially the precuneus). The anterior cingulate gyrus and the islet, which is responsible for the stability of brain functioning, were connected to it. The sound processing departments, on the contrary, were turned off. Such a restructuring of neural networks allows you to organize the flow of internal thoughts, which is why insights arise, the authors of the article believe.

Here is an example given by scientists from Canada and France, who studied the French woman Corinne Sombrune (co-author of the article). She was born in Burkina Faso and experienced clinical death as a child. She studied music and art, worked as a correspondent for the BBC.

While filming a reportage in Mongolia, Korin involuntarily experienced a trance to the sound of a tambourine, could not control her movements. Local elders invited her for training, and after eight years of study, she became the first European to achieve the status of an udgan, a female shaman in the Mongol tradition.

Having made her an EEG of the brain and an electro-magnetic tomography, the scientists concluded that trance is not a pathological condition. It cannot be reduced to psychosis. In trance, the right hemisphere dominates the left, which usually controls the brain. And there is also a shift from the anterior prefrontal to the posterior somatosensory system, which is responsible for the senses.

In the early 2000s, under the leadership of Valentina Kharitonova from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropologists of the Russian Academy of Sciences, they launched an interdisciplinary project to study shamanism and altered states of consciousness in general. In particular, the brain of shamans during a trance was examined in the laboratory of Nina Sviderskaya at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

It was found that in the normal state the anterior lobes of the left hemisphere and the posterior lobes of the right hemisphere dominate in the brain. They are separated by a conventional diagonal - the "cognitive axis". In a trance, during creative work or special breathing exercises, a switch occurs: the front lobes of the right hemisphere are excited and the rear lobes of the left. The conventional diagonal becomes the "axis of superconsciousness". And in an altered state of consciousness, the visual areas of the brain are activated, so a person sees flashes of light.