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Scientist Seeks Neural And Biological Basis For Creativity, Beauty And Love
One of the world’s leading neuroscientists is to search for the neural and biological basis for creativity, beauty and love after receiving over £1 million from the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest medical research charity. The research will bring together science, the arts and philosophy to answer fundamental questions about what it means to be human.
Professor Semir Zeki from University College London (UCL) has received a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to establish a programme of research in the new field of “neuroaesthetics”. The research will build on his previous work into the neural mechanisms behind beauty and love.
Together with Professor Ray Dolan, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, Professor Zeki will look at questions that have been debated for millennia by writers, artists and philosophers and yet have been little studied by neurobiologists: Can we measure beauty objectively” How are beauty and love related” What does it mean to be happy”
“All human societies place a high premium on art and the pursuit of beauty,” says Professor Zeki. “We all value and reward creativity. We all want to pursue happiness. But what do these entities mean in concrete, neurobiological terms” We hope to address these issues experimentally. The results will not only increase our knowledge about the workings of the human brain but will also give deep insights into human nature and how we view ourselves.”
Neuroesthetics aims to illuminate the brain’s workings through its cultural products in a similar way to how neuroscientists study the brain through malfunctions caused by disease. However, Professor Zeki believes its impact may be much wider.
“The new field of neuroaesthetics will teach biologists to use the products of the brain in art, music, literature and mathematics to better understand how the brain functions,” he says. “Success will encourage an interdisciplinary approach to other fields, such as the study of economics or jurisprudence in terms of brain activity. This will have a deep impact on social issues.”
Using Wellcome Trust funding, Professor Zeki hopes to attract students and researchers from the sciences, arts and humanities in truly interdisciplinary research. Their work will be overseen by an Advisory Board that will include author AS Byatt, physician, opera producer and broadcaster Sir Jonathan Miller and Dr. Deborah Swallow, Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
“Professor Zeki is a Renaissance Man for the twenty-first century,” says Professor Richard Morris, Head of Neurosciences and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust. “His research sees no boundaries between science and the arts and humanities and will provide an exciting insight in issues that strike at the heart of what it is to be human.”
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Recovery Check list handout
- Accept that you have an addiction.
- Practice honesty in your life.
- Learn to avoid high-risk situations.
- Learn to ask for help.
- The most difficult path of recovery is doing it alone.
- Practice calling friends before you have cravings.
- Become actively involved in self-help recovery groups.
- Go to discussion meetings and begin to share. You are not alone.
- Get a sponsor and do step work.
- Get rid of using friends.
- Make time for you and your recovery.
- Celebrate your small victories.
- Practice saying no.
- Take better care of yourself.
- Develop healthy eating and sleeping habits.
- Learn how to relax and let go of stress.
- Discover how to have fun clean and sober.
- Make new recovery friends and bring them into your life.
- Deal with cravings by “playing the tape forward”; consequences.
- Find ways to distract yourself when you have cravings.
- Physical activity helps many aspects of recovery.
- Deal with post-acute withdrawal symptoms.
- Develop strategies for social environments where people use.
- Keep a gratitude list of your recovery, your life, and people.
- Say goodbye to your addiction.
- Develop tolerance and compassion for others and for yourself.
- Begin to give back/help others once you have a solid recovery.
- See yourself as a non-user.
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Coloring Page Mandala
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The Creative Life and Well-Being
The Creative Life is full of new possibilities, discoveries, exploration, experimentation, self-expression, and invention. It’s a habit, a way of being, a style of existing. But is the Creative Life full of well-being?
Depends on how you define well-being.
In recent years, psychologists have taken a deeper look at well-being. The traditional approach to well-being focuses on hedonic pleasures and positive emotions. However, while positive emotions often accompany happiness, the mere experience of positive emotions is not necessarily an indicator of happiness, and the presence of negative emotions doesn’t necessarily decrease one’s well-being. This deeper approach to well-being, often described as “eudaimonic well-being”, focuses on living life in a full and deeply satisfying way.
What are the dimensions of eudaimonic well-being? Psychologist Carol Ryff makes the case for no less than six dimensions of eudaimonia:
- Autonomy (“I have confidence in my opinions, even if they are contrary to the general consensus“)
- Environmental mastery (“I am quite good at managing the many responsibilities of my daily life”)
- Personal growth (“I think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world”)
- Positive relations with others (“People would describe me as a giving person, willing to share my time with others”)
- Purpose in life (“Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them”)
- Self-acceptance (“I like most aspects of my life”)
See more at: http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/the_creative_life_and_well_being
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How To Talk About Your Feelings
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Coloring Page Mandala
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Creativity
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. Bill Moyers
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Medication And Addiction
Drug treatment providers in California and elsewhere have relied for decades on abstinence and therapy to treat addicts. In recent years, they’ve turned to medication.
Faced with a worsening opiate epidemic and rising numbers of overdose deaths, policymakers are ramping up medication-assisted treatment.
President Barack Obama at the end of April 2016 said he’d allocate more money for states to expand access to the medications. He also proposed that physicians be able to prescribe one of the most effective anti-addiction drugs, buprenorphine, to more patients.
California already plans to expand access to medications as it launches an overhaul of the state’s substance abuse treatment system for low-income residents. The state recently embarked on a five-year demonstration project on the premise that addiction is a chronic disease and should be treated as such.
While medication is not for everyone, it can be critical for some people with severe addiction, said Marlies Perez, chief of the substance use disorder compliance division for the state Department of Health Care Services. The medications, she said, “have been proven as the gold standard for really helping people recover.”
The best-known medication, methadone, blocks the effect of certain drugs and lessens withdrawal symptoms. It is highly regulated and can only be prescribed by clinics that have government approval. Buprenorphine, which can be prescribed in doctors’ offices, produces mild opioid effects while also easing withdrawal symptoms. Another medication available by prescription, naltrexone, blocks the effect of opioids.
The medications are available across the country but must be prescribed by physicians with special training. There are only about 30,000 authorized doctors nationwide, and they can only prescribe to a limited number of patients.
Obama’s proposal would allow qualified doctors to prescribe buprenorphine to 200 patients, up from 100.
That could make a big difference in California, Perez said. The state is also trying to better link treatment centers with trained prescribing doctors so that physicians can consult with one another on treatment options for their patients. “Not all physicians, even in the substance use field, have that clinical knowledge,” she said.
The use of medication in treatment conflicts with the 12-step and Narcotics Anonymous philosophy of addiction recovery, which is based on abstinence, experts said. For many, experts said, simple abstinence doesn’t work.
“You would hope that just by talking to somebody, they could get rid of their problem with drugs,” said James Sorensen, a University of California, San Francisco professor and interim director of the substance abuse and addiction medicine program at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. “The reality is, that is simply not efficient, so we look for other tools.”
Medication is one of the most successful, evidence-based treatments available, and more access should have a big impact on those with substance abuse disorders, said John Connolly, deputy director for substance abuse prevention and control for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. But, he cautioned medication should be used alongside more traditional treatment methods.
“The medication has tremendous effect, but it is most impactful when it is prescribed with the necessary counseling and social supports,” he said.
Stephen Kaplan, director of behavioral health and recovery services for San Mateo County, said the county has increased its use of medication. About two years ago, the county began a pilot project to prescribe naltrexone to people with severe alcoholism who hadn’t been successful in traditional treatment.
The medication reduced people’s cravings and drinking, Kaplan said. The county recently began expanding the project to include people with opiate addictions.
Kaplan said he respects providers who believe that replacing one drug with another is not true recovery. But from a policy standpoint, Kaplan said, the medications are effective and should be more integrated into overall recovery for people with substance abuse disorders.
“We need to make available to them every possible option,” he said.
Perez of the state Department of Health Care Services said she believes that Obama’s focus on the opiate epidemic — and his recognition that it is a disease and not a moral failing — helps reduce the stigma.
“That makes a huge difference in folks coming forward and looking for treatment,” she said
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Coloring Page Mandala
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Behavior Influences Attitudes
It’s true that our behavior influences our attitudes. Tibetan monks say their prayers by whirling their prayer wheels on which their prayers are inscribed. The whirling wheels spin the prayers into divine space. Sometimes, a monk will keep a dozen or so prayer wheels rotating like some juggling act in which whirling plates are balanced on top of long thin sticks. Many novice monks are not that all emotionally or spiritually involved at first. It may be that the novice is thinking about his family, his doubts about a religious vocation or something else while he is going through the motions of spinning his prayer wheel. When the novice adopts the pose of a monk and makes it obvious to themselves and others by playing a role, their brain will soon follow the role they are playing. It is not enough for the novice to have the intention of becoming a monk: the novice must act like a monk and rotate the prayer wheels. If one has the intention of becoming a monk and goes through the motions of acting like a monk, one will become a monk.
The great surrealist artist Salvador Dali was described by his fellow students at the Madrid art academy as “morbidly” shy according to his biographer Ian Gibson. He had a great fear of blushing and his shame about being ashamed drove him into solitude. It was his uncle who gave him the sage advice to become an actor in his relations with the people around him. He instructed him to pretend he was an extrovert and to act like an extrovert with everyone including your closest companions. Dali did just that to disguise his mortification. Every day he went through the motions of being an extrovert and, eventually, he became celebrated as the most extroverted, fearless, uninhibited and gregarious personalities of his time. He became what he pretended to be.
The Greek philosopher Diogenes was once noticed begging from a statue. His friends were puzzled and alarmed at this behavior. Asked the reason for this pointless behavior, Diogenes replied, “I am practicing the art of being rejected.” By pretending to be rejected continually by the statue, Diogenes was beginning to understand the mind of a beggar. Every time we pretend to have an attitude and go through the motions, we trigger the emotions we create and strengthen the attitude we wish to cultivate.
If you want to become an artist and go through the motions of being an artist by painting a picture every day, you will become an artist. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you will create the attitude of an artist and you will become more of an artist than someone who has never tried.
Mona Lisa’s Smile
Think, for a moment, about social occasions-visits, dates, dinners out with friends, gatherings, birthday parties, weddings, etc. Even when you’re unhappy or depressed, these occasions force us to act as if we were happy. Observing other’s faces, postures, and voices, we unconsciously mimic their reactions. We synchronize our movements, posture, and tone of voice with theirs. Then my mimicking happy people, we become happy. You begin to behave like the people who surround you, and that behavior influences your attitude.
Leonardo da Vinci also observed that it’s no mystery why it is fun to be around happy people and depressing to be around depressed people. He also observed the melancholy that painters usually give to portraits. He attributed that to the solitariness of the artist and their joyless environment. According to Giorgio Vasari (1568) that while painting the Mona Lisa Leonardo employed singers, musicians and jesters to chase away his melancholy as he painted. The musicians and jesters forced him laugh and be joyful. This behavior created the attitude of joy and pleasure as he painted. As a result, he painted a smile so pleasing that it seems divine and as alive as the original.
Even Facial Expressions Can Change Your Emotions
CIA researchers have long been interested in developing techniques to help them study facial expressions of suspects. Two of the researchers began simulating facial expressions of anger and distress all day, each day for weeks. One of them admitted feeling terrible after a session of making those faces. Then the other realized that he felt poorly, too, so they began to keep track. They began monitoring their body during facial movements. Their findings were remarkable. They discovered that a facial expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the nervous system.
In one exercise they raised their inner eyebrows, raised their cheeks, and lowered the corner of their lips and held this facial expression for a few minutes. They were stunned to discover that this simple facial expression generated feelings of sadness and anguish within them. The researchers then decided to monitor the heart rate and body temperatures of two groups of people. One group was asked to remember and relive the most sorrowful experience in their life. The other group in another room was simply asked to produce a series of facial expressions expressing sadness. Remarkably, the second group, the people who were pretending, showed the same physiological responses as the first.
The CIA researchers in a further experiment had one group of subjects listen to recordings of top comedians and look at a series of cartoons while holding a pen pressed between their lips an action that makes it impossible to smile. Another group held a pen between their teeth which had the opposite effect and made them smile. The people with the pen between their teeth rated the comedians and cartoons much funnier than the other group. What’s more, neither group of subjects knew they were making expressions of emotion. Amazingly, an expression you do not even know you have can create an emotion you did not choose to feel. Emotion doesn’t just go from the inside out. It goes from the outside in.
Try the following thought experiment.
•Lower your eyebrows.
•Raise your upper eyelid.
•Narrow the eyelids.Press your lips together.
Hold this expression and you will generate anger. Your heartbeat will go up ten or twelve beats. Your hands will get hot, and you will feel very unpleasant.
The next time you’re feeling depressed and want to feel happy and positive, try this.
•Put a pen between your teeth in far enough so that it’s stretching the edges of your mouth back without feeling uncomfortable. This will force a smile. Hold it there for five minutes or so. You’ll find yourself inexplicably in a happy mood. Then try walking with long strides and looking straight ahead. You will amaze yourself at how fast your facial expressions can change your emotions.
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