We all know that stress and anxiety have been clinically shown to be detrimental to one’s physical health, but what about the opposite? Can holding positive thoughts be an elixir for good health?

Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers set out to find the answer to that question and came up with some enlightening discoveries that could have strong implications for the design of disease prevention and health intervention strategies.

Not only do positive emotions and optimism prevent the ravages caused by stress-related emotions, but they provide protection against cardiovascular disease (CVD) by slowing the progression of disease.

The Harvard researchers found that individuals who felt a greater sense of well-being derived from practicing optimism and holding positive emotions engaged in healthier behaviors such as exercising, eating a balanced diet, and getting sufficient sleep. Those individuals also experienced better biological function, such as lower blood pressure, healthier lipid (blood fat) profiles, and normal body weight.

“The absence of the negative is not the same thing as the presence of the positive. We found that factors such as optimism, life satisfaction, and happiness are associated with reduced risk of CVD regardless of such factors as a person’s age, socioeconomic status, smoking status, or body weight,” said lead author Julia Boehm, research fellow in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at HSPH. “For example, the most optimistic individuals had an approximately 50% reduced risk of experiencing an initial cardiovascular event compared to their less optimistic peers,” she said.

“These findings suggest that an emphasis on bolstering psychological strengths rather than simply mitigating psychological deficits may improve cardiovascular health,” Kuzbansky said.

Participants of a University of California, San Francisco-led study that blended ancient meditation practices with the most current scientific methods for regulating emotions showed less depression, anxiety, and stress, and increased feelings of compassion and awareness of others’ feelings.

Schoolteachers who practiced meditation in a short yet intensive program were part of a new study that was designed to create new techniques to reduce destructive emotions while improving social and emotional behavior. Previous research has linked meditation to positive changes in blood pressure, metabolism, and pain, but less is known about the specific emotional changes that result from the practice. The female teachers, who were new to meditation, were chosen due to their stressful work environment, and it was hoped they could immediately benefit from the practice and the benefits would spill over into their classrooms.

“The findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior,” said lead author Margaret Kemeny, PhD, director of the Health Psychology Program in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The study is particularly important because opportunities for reflection and contemplation seem to be fading in our fast-paced, technology-driven culture.”

The idea for the study arose after Paul Ekman, PhD, a UCSF emeritus professor and world expert in emotions, attended a 2000 meeting with the Dalai Lama, Buddhist scholars, behavioral scientists, and emotion experts for a discussion on the psychological benefits from meditation. At that meeting, the Dalai Lama posed a question: In the modern world, would a secular version of Buddhist contemplation reduce harmful emotions?

The Dalai Lama’s question led Ekman and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace to develop a 42-hour, eight-week training program, integrating secular meditation practices with techniques learned from the scientific study of emotion. It involved three areas of meditative practice:

• Concentration practices involving sustained, focused attention on a specific mental or sensory experience;
• Mindfulness practices involving the close examination of one’s body and feelings;
• Directive practices designed to promote empathy and compassion toward others.

“The findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior,” said lead author Margaret Kemeny, PhD, director of the Health Psychology Program in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The study is particularly important because opportunities for reflection and contemplation seem to be fading in our fast-paced, technology-driven culture.”

The study involved researchers from a number of institutions including UCSF, UC Davis, and Stanford University.

Yale psychologists, wondering if our souls really are located within our eyes, set out to test if the long-held belief was a universally shared intuition.

In three experiments, the Mind and Development Lab researchers explored preschoolers’ and adults’ intuitions about the location of the self using a novel method that asked when an object is closest to a person. Children and adults judge objects near a person’s eyes to be closer to her than objects near other parts of her body. They postulated from the findings that children and adults intuitively think of the self as occupying a precise location within the body, at or near the eyes.

“The indirect nature of our method, and the fact that these judgments are shared by adults and preschoolers, suggests that our results do not reflect a culturally learned understanding … but might instead be rooted in a more intuitive or phenomenological sense of where in our bodies we reside,” Christina Starmans and Paul Bloom concluded.

Some mind-body experts felt the suggested implications of the study were far-fetched. Neurologist Robert Burton, a mind-body connection expert, believes that the perceptual judgments are culturally indoctrinated. He also noted that the four-year-olds were at times actually at odds with how the adults perceived the experiments. ”This suggests that something has transpired during the time between age 4 and adulthood that affects our understanding of the identity of other people,” Burton said. He also noted that self-awareness just happens to reside in the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex – located behind the eyes.

You can be your own judge – take the online test yourself:
http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2257-souls-eyes-experiment.html

Source: http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2256-souls-eyes.html

Over the past decade, the use of music as medicine has been evolving into an accepted part of recovery programs at hospitals and clinics nationwide. As an adjunct to standard medical treatment, it is used primarily to reduce stress, ease pain, and reduce nausea. Now, researchers are linking certain types of music with enhancing the immune system.

Although the underlying mechanism of the effects of music on the immune system is not fully understood, researchers from Japan found that playing opera and classical music influenced the survival of heart transplants in mice. Both types of music increased the time before the transplanted organs failed, but single frequency monotones and new age music did not.

Some evidence points to music’s healing effects originating with the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates the bodily functions that we have no conscious control over, including digestion. In this Japanese study, the research team pinpointed the immune system’s source of this protection specifically to the spleen.

Source: Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells; Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi; Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery

UCLA researchers point to new evidence that shows people who meditate for years experience positive changes to the brain, specifically more folding of the cortex, which may allow the brain to process information faster. It is believed the more folding that occurs, the better the brain is at processing information, making decisions, forming memories and so forth.

They compared meditators who had practiced their craft on average for 20 years using a variety of meditation types — Samatha, Vipassana, Zen and more – with people who didn’t meditate. They found pronounced differences (heightened levels of folding in active meditation practitioners) across a wide swatch of the cortex.

Their findings from comparing the difference in brain structure in long-time meditators to non-practitioners point to proof of the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes.

They also looked for a link between the amount of meditation practice and the extent of brain alteration.

“Meditators are known to be masters in introspection and awareness as well as emotional control and self-regulation, so the findings make sense that the longer someone has meditated, the higher the degree of folding in the insula,” said Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging.

Previous evidence from UCLA showed that long-time meditators experienced a strengthening of the connection between brain cells.

Two natural forms of pain relief – the placebo effect and redirecting one’s attention, usually by a high-level cognitive function – were previously thought to rely on the same brain mechanism since both activities originate in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. But a recent study counters that belief and actually shows that adding the two together greatly increases the pain-relieving effect from both applications.

In the study, researchers from Columbia University and the University of Colorado Boulder reduced pain in two ways – either by giving participants a placebo, or a difficult memory task. But when they put the two together, “the level of pain reduction that people experienced added up. There was no interference between them,” says Buhle.

The findings are promising for pain relief. Clinicians use both placebos and distraction—for instance, virtual reality in burn units. But they weren’t sure if one might diminish the other’s efficacy. “This study shows you can use them together,” says Buhle, “and get the maximum bang for your buck without medications.”

According to Heaton’s research, Shakespeare was a master at portraying profound emotional upset in the physical symptoms of his characters, and many modern-day doctors would do well to study the Bard to better understand the mind-body connection, concludes an analysis of Dr. Heaton’s works, published in Medical Humanities.

Shakespeare focused on portraying psychosomatic symptoms in characters expressing profound emotions significantly more common than in works by other authors of the time.

For instance, fatigue brought about by emotional distress was exhibited by numerous characters, most notably in “Hamlet”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “As You Like It”, “Richard II” and “Henry IV” part 2.

“Shakespeare’s perception that numbness and enhanced sensation can have a psychological origin seems not to have been shared by his contemporaries, none of whom included such phenomena in the works examined,” writes Dr. Heaton.

“Many doctors are reluctant to attribute physical symptoms to emotional disturbance, and this results in delayed diagnosis, overinvestigation, and inappropriate treatment,” he writes.

Researchers wanted to know why we are not getting smarter than we are given the adaptive evolutionary process. Their findings suggested that for every gain in cognitive functions, there is a price to pay elsewhere.

For instance, among individuals with enhanced cognitive abilities – such as savants, people with photographic memories, and even genetically segregated populations of individuals with above average IQ – these individuals often suffer from related disorders, such as autism, debilitating synaesthesia, and neural disorders linked with enhanced brain growth.

Also included in the research was the use of drugs like Ritalin, which only help people with lower attention spans, whereas people who don’t have trouble focusing can actually perform worse when they take attention-enhancing drugs.

University of Warwick psychology researcher Thomas Hills said: “If you enhance your ability to focus too much, and end up over-focusing on specific details, like the driver trying to hide in your blind spot, then you may fail to see another driver suddenly veering into your lane from the other direction.”

The research, entitled ‘Why Aren’t We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancements,’ is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Brain shrinkage is typical of Alzheimer’s disease. Previous studies hinted at the role that nutrition may play in staving off the disease, but this study, the first of its kind, measured 30 different blood nutrient levels, reflecting a much wider range of nutrients, and adds specificity to the findings.

“This approach clearly shows the biological and neurological activity that’s associated with actual nutrient levels, both good and bad,” said Maret Traber, a principal investigator with the Linus Pauling Institute and co-author on the study.

“The vitamins and nutrients you get from eating a wide range of fruits, vegetables and fish can be measured in blood biomarkers,” Traber said. “I’m a firm believer these nutrients have strong potential to protect your brain and make it work better.”

The study group included elderly people with an average age of 87 with no special risk factors for memory or mental acuity.

The most favorable cognitive outcomes and brain size measurements were associated with two dietary patterns – high levels of marine fatty acids, and high levels of vitamins B, C, D and E. Trans-fatty foods were associated with the worst cognitive performance.

The hypnosis was performed on breast cancer and thyroid patients. ”In all of these procedures local anaesthesia is feasible but not, on its own, sufficient to ensure patient comfort,” says Professor Roelants from the Department of Anaesthesiology at the Cliniques Universitaires St. Luc, UCL, Brussels, Belgium.

“In addition to reducing drug use and hospital stay time, being able to avoid general anaesthesia in breast cancer surgery is important because we know that local anaesthesia can block the body’s stress response to surgery and could therefore reduce the possible spread of metastases,” said Professor Roelants.

The anesthesiologists use eye fixation, progressive muscle relaxation, or the retrieval of a pleasant memory to focus a patient’s attention on one particular point, enabling a modified state of consciousness, with a different perception of the world.

“There is still a lot of debate around the exact mechanism that allows hypnosis to reduce pain perception,” said Professor Roelants,” but what it absolutely clear is that it does so. The result is that one third of thyroidectomies and a quarter of all breast cancer surgery carried out at the UCL hospital are performed under local anaesthetic with the patient under hypnosis.”

The anesthesiologists have confirmed that, regardless of sex or age, and if the patient is motivated, ready to co-operate, and trusts the doctors, hypnosis will work. It can also be applied to surgical patients who undergo carotid artery surgery, inguinal hernia, knee arthroscopy, gynaecological surgery, ophthalmology, ear nose and throat, plastic surgery and egg retrieval for fertility treatment.

The research findings were presented June 12, 2011 at the European Anaesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam.