From Dr. Jay Kumar - Your Brain, Nature, and the Relaxation Response
Apr-10-2012

As you celebrate the joyous arrival of spring and witness nature's awakening all around, did you know that nature can actually be a healer? While religion and spirituality have always extolled the glory and healing potential of nature in our pursuit to heal and transform both individually and collectively, a similar message is now coming out from science, specifically, from the field of neuroscience. So how exactly does nature heal? The answer resides in our brains and relates to the concept known as the relaxation response, a mechanism that appears to be "wired" into our biology to cope with stress.

Brain Waves and the Power of Attention

Neuropsychology now believes that the human brain allows us to process two distinct types of attention. The first is a "voluntary or direct" attention that enables us to focus our thoughts and neural energy to tasks that require our direct concentration, e.g. writing this article, watching a movie, or reading a book. The other type is an"involuntary or indirect" attention that our brain does with little or no effort, e.g. watching a sunset, meditating, having a casual conversation, or dancing.

Additionally, there are corresponding brain waves associated with these two types of attention. When our brains are engaged in voluntary, direct attention requiring focused concentration, beta waves tend to be predominant. On the contrary, our brains produce alpha waves when we experience involuntary, indirect attention requiring no fixed awareness. The two other brain waves, theta and delta, are predominant during sleep with theta waves occurring in deep-sleep and delta waves during REM dream-sleep.

While having our brain in beta-wave state is important, as it helps us to focus on daily tasks, unfortunately, many of us live a typical life with our brains disproportionately in the stressful beta-wave state and barely enough time in the healing and regenerative alpha-wave state. Unlike theta and delta waves that occur predominantly in sleep, the healing and regenerative properties of alpha waves are produced only when we are conscious and awake.

In our current technologically driven world, we are on average bombarded with 4,000 bits of information/second and about 700 ads a day. The brain is overwhelmed with all this sensory data, as it requires our attention to be in "voluntary or direct" mode and our brains to reside in the constantly stressful beta-waves for the majority of our day while awake. Rarely, do we take the time in our waking state for the brain to go into the calming, soothing alpha-waves and into "involuntary and indirect" attention.

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Posted by Ken at 6:49 PM - Link to this entry  |  Share this entry  |  Print