extract from The Secret Life of the Brain:
The meditating mind
WHEN Zen Buddhists meditate, they may be deliberately switching off their default network, a recently discovered system within the brain that has been strongly linked with daydreaming (see main story).The goal of Zen meditation is to clear the mind of wandering, stream-of-consciousness thoughts by focusing attention on posture and breathing. Giuseppe Pagnoni, a neuroscientist at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, wondered whether this meant they had learned to suppress the activity of their default network.He recruited a group of volunteers trained in Zen meditation and put them in an fMRI scanner. He presented them with random strings of letters and asked them to determine whether each was an English-language word or just gibberish. Each time a subject saw a real word, their default network would light up for a few seconds – evidence of meandering thoughts triggered by the word, such as apple… apple pie… cinnamon.Zen meditators performed just as well as non-meditators on word recognition, but they were much quicker to rein in their daydreaming engines afterwards, doing so within about 10 seconds, versus 15 for non-meditators
The “default network” of which this passage speaks is studied during the metabolism of radioactive glucose by the brain during an fMRI scan.
As you know, magnetic resonance imaging depends upon nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to work. NMR depends on the principle of the nuclear core of atoms to respond to resonant frequencies and reflect them back to the imaging sensors. When different nuclear cores respond to the same signal, this indicates resonance between these atomic cores or quantum coherence.
In this case, they were focused on the radioactive glucose during its metabolism, but functional MRIs capture all activity, of which the metabolism of glucose was prevalent. This makes sense because glucose is the main nutrition for the brain. Knowing the resonant frequency of radioactive glucose, we can easily see its path with fMRI scanners.
Consequently, we also discover the neural pathways which are most active during thought processing since the correlating neural pathways are metabolizing the most glucose. Isn’t that fun?
What may not be obvious to some neuroscience researchers are the comparisons we can draw from this observation. When human intention focuses on something, the energies within the brain are drawn to that focus rather than the “default network” which seems to be using the whole brain rather than certain parts.
We can easily compare the brain to a system of coherent plasma energy. First, here’s an fMRI of someone’s default network of elaborate, distributed patterns of activity such as when daydreaming:
Here’s the brain activity as it is posed to focus on one activity (namely an emotion which creates the most prominant activity in the prefrontal cortex):
Here’s a plasma globe. Let’s say that it’s experiencing a “default network.” When there is no outer stimulation for it to focus upon, the activity is random:
Here is an example of a plasma globe made to focus. As the demonstrator shows you, the plasma globe is able to excite a fluorescent bulb with its electromagnetic field. This action is akin to the brain which has its own set of subtle energy fields which can stimulate adjacent systems into a state of excitation:
Neural activity is similar to high energy plasma state activity in that they both have a “default network” and they both respond and focus upon external stimuli. The brain uses the same principles of a high energy plasma state because of its ability for quantum coherence.
I will have further evidence in the long run. For now, please examine the next article which deals with effects on the brain through human intention and energy psychology.
Thanks for your time,
Randolph