Can Mind Power REALLY Stop Pain?

Laid on a bed of nails or run 21 miles lately? PROBABLY NOT. But you do not need to be a holy man or marathon runner to use mind power to block out pain.

“Pain is an emotional reaction to an evaluation in one’s head,” said Ruediger Fabian, president of German Pain Aid, an organization based in the town of Gruenendeich.  “The sensation of pain is subjective,” he said.

As explained by Professor Rolf-Detlef Treede, president of the Boppard-based German Society for the Study of Pain (DGSS), sensory receptors transmit the signal to the spinal cord. The central nervous system then passes it on to the brain, which processes it in any of various ways.

“The brain has to decide what’s important and what’s not,” Fabian noted. Pain is a protective mechanism of the body, he explained, and a pain stimulus on its way to the brain always takes precedence over other stimuli. But a pain stimulus can be waylaid before it gets there, for example by medication. Anyone who goes to the dentist’s knows that. “Local anesthesia prevents the pain stimulus from reaching the brain,” Treede said.

More important, however, is how the brain processes a pain stimulus that has arrived. “The brain can learn that a certain pain isn’t so important,” Treede explained. If someone scrapes an arm, he said, the injury often looks bad but the injured person knows it is harmless.

The brain can also grow accustomed to pain, Treede said. “Like it gets used to the hot cup of coffee in the morning, for example.”

Through training, people can influence how their brains evaluate pain, according to Professor Walter Zieglgaensberger from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. Pain sufferers need to take an active part in this process.

“The brain has no delete key,” Zieglgaensberger said, noting that every pain leaves tracks in the brain. After drug treatment, therefore, it is important that patients do things that they used to avoid because of pain, he advised. This causes the brain to overlay old memories of pain with new, positive links. “The fear of pain is worse than the pain itself in such cases.”

Source: The China Post

What Love Does to Your Brain

How Love Lights You Up
When you’re in love your eyes light up, your face lights up and so do four tiny portions of your brain.

Neurobiologists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College in London used MRI brain scans to peer into the brains of college students in the throes of that crazed, can’t-think-of-anything-else stage of early romantic love.

When the subjects were shown photographs of their sweet hearts, the MRI images showed that four parts of their brains lit up.

The researchers compared the MRI images to brain scans taken from people in different emotional states, including se.xual arousal, feelings of happiness and coc.aine-induced euphoria.

But the pattern for romantic love was unique. Interestingly, looking at a picture of their loved one also reduced activity in three portions of the brain active when one is upset or depressed.

Is Love Addictive?
When you fall in love your skin flushes, you breathe heavy, and your palms tend to sweat.

Why? Because your brain is experiencing a biochemical rush of dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine close chemical cousins to amphetamines.

But it’s easy to build up a tolerance to these stimulating bio-chemicals. Then, as with any other tolerance, it takes more of the substance to get that special feeling of infatuation.

Some neuroscientists theorize that folks who jump from one relationship to another are hooked on the intoxication of falling in love.

But interestingly, in the case of enduring romance, simply the presence of one’s partner stimulates the production of endorphins. Endorphins are the feel good biochemicals also behind the experience of runner’s high, and are natural pain-killers.

The Biology of Romance
Recent research suggests that romantic attraction is actually a primitive, biologically based drive just like hunger or thirst.

The biology of romance helps account for why we might travel cross-country for a single ki.ss, and plunge into hopeless despair if our beloved turns from us. It’s the drive for romance that enables us to focus on one particular person, although we often can’t explain why.

What we’re seeing here is the biological drive to choose a mate, to focus on one person to the exclusion of all others, claims Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University.

Research has proven that romantic attraction activates portions of the brain with high concentrations of receptors for dopamine, Fisher explains. And dopamine is the chemical messenger also tied to states of euphoria, craving and addiction.

Other scientific studies have linked high levels of dopamine and a related agent, norepinephrine to heightened attention and short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness and goal-oriented behavior.

Sound like love?

When they first fall in love, Fisher explains, couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: Increased energy, less need for sleep or food, and highly focused attention.

The Psychology of Love
Poets and song writers have long claimed that the power of the biochemical state we call romantic love is enough to blind one’s judgment.

We all know how new lovers tend to idealize their partner magnifying their virtues, and explaining away their flaws.

But though love may be blind, take hope.

Pamela Regan, a Cal State LA researcher, believes such idealization may be crucial to a long-term relationship. If you don’t sweep away the person’s flaws to some extent, you’re just as likely to end a relationship, she claims.

This at least gives you a chance, Regan feels. If you think of romantic attraction as a kind of drug that alters how you think, then in this case it’s allowing you to take some risks you wouldn’t otherwise take.

Not a bad thing.

But if passionate romance is like a drug, as the MRI images suggest, then it’s bound to lose its kick. But perhaps viewing romance as a biologically based, drug-like state can at least provide some balm for a broken heart.

Healthy Romanticizing
In a 1996 experiment, psychologists at the State University of New York at Buffalo followed a group of 121 dating couples. Every few months the couples answered questionnaires to find out how much they idealized their partner, and how well their relationship was doing.

The researchers discovered that the couples who idealized each other the most were closest one year later.

The Issue of Self-Love
How does the love of one’s self  also known as a positive self concept or good self-esteem fit into this picture?

Recent research indicates that depressed people who feel ‘unloved’ are 50% more likely to get cancer.

Negativity, fear, anger and depression are not just in your head. They are biochemical states. Remember neuroscience has proven beyond a doubt that we can consciously create the biochemical states known as joy, happiness, motivation, and even ecstasy.

Double Your Brain Power

Do you think you have an average or perhaps an above average mental capacity?Actually you have far more brainpower than you can begin to imagine. You have close to, or perhaps even beyond, genius potential.

You don’t believe me? The past ten years could well be called the decade of the brain. Neuroscience now has the means of observing a healthy living brain in action.

Physicists have discovered parallels between the human brain, and Einstein’s quantum universe. Biological scientists are demystifying the brain’s chemical and electrical mysteries.

Trying to define our brain’s ultimate capacity is like trying to place your finger on a globule of mercury. The human brain is infinitely complex and subtle. And your amazing brain is no exception.

The Amazing Capacity of your Brain
Your brain contains a minimum 1,000,000,000,000 individual nerve cells neurons.

But this figure is even more astounding when you consider that each nerve cell can connect with as many as 100,000 other nerve cells.

If we add upthe potential capacity of your brain cells to make interconnections  the resulting number will stretch at least 10.5 million kilometers long. Isn’t that remarkable?

No known person has even approached using their full mental capacity. The human brain is virtually limitless.

It was once estimated that we use about 10% of our mental potential. Today neuroscience has dropped that estimate to less than one percent. And even that figure seems overly optimistic.

Your Thinking Cap
You’ve heard the expression thinking cap. That term refers to your brain’s cerebral cortex the cortical grey matter neuroscientists consider to be the source of your logical thinking capacity.

Your cortex is actually split into two separate sides that are connected by a fantastically dense and complex highway of nerve fibers called the corpus collosum.

In most people, the left side of the cerebral cortex deals with logical matters words, numbers, reasoning, and analysis. It spends a lot of time in the beta brainwave range.

The right side of your cerebral cortex, on the other hand, deals with imagination, images, color, day-dreaming, visualization, and pattern recognition. It tends to focus quite a bit in the alpha brainwave range that’s so highly developed in meditators.

Was Einstein Right-Brained or Left-Brained?
There’s a common assumption that most people are either right-brained OR left-brained.

If that’s true, then we must assume that the great scientific genius Albert Einstein was left-brained while the great creative master of photography Ansel Adams would then have been right-brained.

But was this the case?

An examination of the notebooks of Albert Einstein and Ansel Adams pokes huge holes in this common theory. In fact, Einstein did NOT credit his greatest scientific insights to his left-brain logic but rather to right-brain highly creative daydreaming.

And Ansel Adams credited his greatest art photographs not to his right-brain artistic eye but rather to his left-brain detailed analytical note taking.

The Whole-Brain Secret
Actually – your most powerful and expansive mental activities are those using both sides of your cortex.

If you describe yourself as primarily creative or intuitive right-brained, or analytical and logical left-brained, you are just describing the side of the cortex you have most successfully developed.

With the correct nurturing, the other side of your cortex can also flourish and develop! This has the potential to double your mind power.

Get Immediate Results
There’s an outrageously powerful way for you to immediately refine the non-dominant side of your cortex. Great athletes do it. So do top executives, famous artists, and people from all walks of life who seek to excel in their lives.

On first reading, the following solution may seem too simple to be effective. But just give it a try, and you’ll be amazed at the expanded depth of your mental capacity.

The solution? Do what Einstein and Ansel Adams did.

If you’re analytical encourage yourself to daydream. And if you’re instead predominantly creative encourage yourself to begin to logically analyze your creative efforts.

Notice as many details of life or a problem as possible. Activate your mind and ask yourself what if. And begin to pay more attention to your mental wanderings.

Build Your Mental Focus
A really big key to making this work is commitment and mental focus.

Here’s why: The instant you commit, and focus your amazing brain on a single thought, you fire up laser-like mental power. In that millisecond you actually physically strengthen your brain’s neural networks attached to that thought or goal.

This is the true key to peak performance and masters-level performance in all areas of life.

Want to TRIPLE your brain power? Dr Jill would like to help! What type of peak performance would YOU like to experience? Would you like to feel the power of reaching a major goal in only 6 weeks from start to finish? Click here.

How about physically installing the brainwaves and thoughts of self-made millionaires into YOUR brain? Click here.

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