The Consciousness (part 2) - You can shape your own brain!

These quotes pretty much speak for themselves. They can be found on pp72-79 (Times Magazine "Mind and Body Special Issue" Jan 29, 2007):

Neuroscientist Pascual instructed the members of one group to play [the piano] as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours...At the end of each day's practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain...In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn. The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it...He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise...when the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups...they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the pysical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in the brains of volunteers who imagined playing the music - just as it had in those who actually played it...the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.

For decades, the prevailing dogma in neuroscience was that the adult human brain is essentially immutable, hardwired, fixed in form and function, so that by the time we reach adulthood we are pretty much stuck with what we have...But research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its place has come the realization that the adult brain retains impressive powers of 'neuroplasticity' - the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience....Even when the brain suffers a trauma late in life, it can rezone itself like a city in a frenzy of urban renewal. If a stroke knocks out, say, the neighborhood of motor cortext that moves the right arm, a new...therapy can coax next-door regions to take over the function of the damaged area. The brain can be rewired.
...
Something as seemingly insubstantial as a thought can affect the very stuff of the brain, altering neuronal connections in a way that can treat mental illness or, perhaps, lead to a greater capacity for empathy and compassion. It may even dial up the supposedly immovable happiness set point.
...
Jeffrey Schwartz and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles...had become intrigued with the therapeutic potential of [the Buddhist practice] of mindfulness meditation...After 10 weeks of mindfulness-based therapy, 12 out of 18 patients improved significantly. Before-and-after brain scans showed that activity in the orbital frontal cortex, the core of the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) circuit, had fallen dramatically and in exactly the way that drugs effective against OCD affect the brain...concluding that "the mind can change the brain."...For the monks as well as the patients with depression or OCD, the conscious act of thinking about their thoughts in a particular way rearranged the brain.

[emphasii are mine]

My conclusion: If the average American would be as concerned about working out and conditioning the mind for greater compassion, and less self-cherishing ego, as much as they were concerned about working out and conditioning their bodies for greater abs, biceps, and triceps, we would be a much much happier nation, as well as a much much less superficial one too. Although the psychiatric practice of Cognitive Behavior Therapy is one way to condition the mind, it's very expensive. Meditation is free. You just have to learn how to do it.