MINDRAMP PODCAST - LIVE LONG, LIVE WELL

Our mind becomes muddled when our two hemispheres fail to cooperate and when left hemisphere perspectives dominate our thinking. I believe that music can help us restore balanced cooperation of our hemispheres by strengthening right hemisphere perspectives. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

How does music promote the health and development of our brains? Learn how music can engage the protective factors associated with MINDRAMP's eight Behavioral Roots of Brain Health . MINDRAMP favors a "risk management" approach to brain health, which involves minimizing behaviors and conditions that put your brain at greater risk and adopting behaviors that make your brain stronger and more resilient. We organize the scientific research around eight behavioral areas we call the Behavioral Roots of Brain Health. In this episode we review the risk and protective factors associated with each of the Behavioral Roots of Brain Health and explore how music can play a positive role in amplifying the protective aspects of nearly all of the areas. The Behavioral Roots of Brain Health: Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

This episode, the first of three episodes on music, explores the purpose and power of music. MINDRAMP's mission is to provide evidence-based information that can help you to live long and to live well. We focus on keeping our brains healthy and on managing our minds to promote happiness and equanimity. Can music play a role in these goals? Yes, it can! Music can help us keep our bodies and brains healthy. Music helps us to develop the capacities we need to survive and thrive in our environments. We provide a number of framing ideas that make it easier to understand the evolutionary purpose of music and easier to understand how music has the power to change our physiology. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

In this episode of the MIND OVER MUDDLE series we begin our look at the role EMOTIONS play in muddling our minds and how emotional regulation can help in the un-muddling process. We introduce the important concept of EMOTIONAL GRANULARITY. Neuroscientist and emotions expert Lisa Feldman Barrett expounds this idea, which suggests that emotions are constructed and that we only feel those emotions that we can name. A such, we are emotional illiterates, making use of a limited range of basic emotions like Happy, Sad and Mad. Barrett suggests that we can expand our emotional range - our emotional literacy and regulation - by expanding our vocabulary of emotion words. By, in other words, being more "granular" in our choice of words to describe what we think we are feeling. We also focus on the important and healing emotion of AWE. I introduce a new emotion word - a neologism - to describe the ecstatic feeling we get when exposed to something awesome. In such instances, we have AWEGASMS! And we explore the psychological evidence that awegasms are good for your health and your happiness. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

In this episode I explore how we can use Buddhist psychology - specifically the Four Noble Truths - to help us un-muddle our minds. Buddhism's Four Noble Truths suggest that our minds get muddled because we are too often afflicted by suffering and frustration that is caused by attachment and the desire to resist inevitable change. The Four Truths suggest, therefore, that we can un-muddle our minds by learning to cultivate a more equitable disposition that diminishes our attachments. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

In this episode I introduce a new term I am using - "Hemisphere Gelassenheit." It is a combination of the german word, "gelassenheit," coined by the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and the hemisphere hypothesis as expounded by the contemporary scholar iain McCilchrist. Gelassenheit is a process of letting go. The full process involves a letting go from one thing and an opening up to something else. Combining this with the hemisphere hypothesis gives us the strategy for un-muddling our mind and escaping from the distorting effects of left hemisphere dominance. The hemipshere gelassenheit strategy is to let go of left hemisphere modes of perceptions and an opening up to a more realistic, holistic and integrated perspective of reality afforded by the right hemisphere. Click the CHAPTERS tab above to access a list of chapter divisions within the podcast. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

What do people undergo when they have a mystical experience, and why would a mystical experience help us to un-muddle our minds? In this episode I explain how mysticism is an expression of what I call hemispheric gelassenheit. I use first person accounts of mystical experiences from neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, the philosopher jiddu Krishnamurti and the primatologist Jane Goodall to explore the common characteristics of a mystical experience and to speculate how it reflects an adjustment of the way the two hemispheres of our brain interact with each other. Take a look at the chapter headings. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

A mystical experience, similar to the "enlightenment" described by Buddhists and other contemplative practices, involves a disillusion of self and a sense of unity with something grander than ourselves. We describes this something-grander-than-ourselves, in various ways - as God, as Tao, as the natural order and so on. In this episode we explore the following topics Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

When you think of brain cells, you probably think of neurons. That's perfectly understandable. Discussions of the brain almost always focus on neurons. But there is another family of brain cells, (glial cells) that, by some estimates, outnumber neurons by 10 to 1!. Even if the the percentage is more like 50/50, that's a lot of cells - billions! Based on what I have read, I have a sneaking suspicion that glial cells are in charge of the brain! Yup. Neurons are the work horses, but glial cells hold the reins. In this episode, I discuss the mysteries of glial cells with Dr. Jeff Darling. We discuss the four basic types of glial cells and what they do - and why I think they are running the show. Click on Chapters (above) to see specific topic ares. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

Are men's and women's brains different. Yes! The brains of men and women are more alike than they are different, but there are differences. Not better, or worse, but different. Neuroscientists, Dr. Jeff Darling and I discusses a range of topics related to sex differences in the brain , including; Support our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

Neuroscientist Dr, Jeff Darling and I discuss various aspects of aging, including" Support our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

We struggle to prevent and treat dementia because the need for researchers to publish positive results, coupled with the urge to put profits over people, leads to fraud, corruption and quackery. We end up with bad research and misguided public policy. This podcast is a reading of a recent article of mine for 3rd Act Magazine in which I give recent examples of fraud, corruption, and quackery that have made it harder for us to prevent and treat dementia. Support our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

There are intriguing similarities between the way the condition of schizophrenia and a brain with a dominant left hemisphere can distort our perceptions of reality. In this episode we examine those similarities using the inspiring story of Elyn R. Saks, who tells about her lifetime struggle with schizophrenia in her wonderful book THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD. Iain McGilchrist, in his monumental work THE MATTER WITH THINGS, suggests that modern western culture is dominated by left hemisphere thinking. Could this orientation be muddling our minds and causing the unique kind of madness we find in contemporary culture? Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

Why did the two hemispheres of our brain evolve to have such different perspectives - such divergent ways of attending to our world? In this episode we explore evidence that the evolution of the human brain has evolved along three axis: Bottom-to-Top; Side-to-Side; and Back-to-Front. Each evolutionary development enhanced the capacity and complexity of a different part of the human brain and exaggerated the divergent roles of the two hemispheres. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

In this episode I preview some of the practical ways we can begin to un-muddle our minds. We can use our growing understanding about the different nature of our two hemispheres to re-balance the influence of our left hemisphere (LH) and our right hemisphere (RH). Since LH dominance causes distortions of reality, we should search for strategies to control LH influence. At the same time, we should find strategies to pump up engagement with RH perspectives. Strategies we will begin to explore include: Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

A rose loses its "roseness" when perceived only through the Left Hemisphere perspective. The man who mistook his wife for his hat had trouble identifying a rose. When Oliver Sacks presented him with a rose, Dr.P described it as "About six inches in length. A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment." He went on to observe that the perplexing object "lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own." Dr. P suffered from a Right Hemisphere (RH) dysfunction that forced his mind to rely almost exclusively on his Left Hemisphere (LH) . Robbed of the unifying and organic perspective of the RH, Dr. P saw the world as a collection of abstractions, the LH perspective. Our minds get muddled when our LH dominates and relate to the world through abstract representations of life, rather than on on direct experience. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

In this episode we examine what happens to the mind when it loses the perspective of the Right Hemisphere (RH) and is forced to rely on the Left Hemisphere's (LH) interpretation of the world. We will use the example of the well-known case reported by Oliver Sacks of the man who mistook his wife for his hat. We are exploring the hemisphere hypothesis that states that the two hemispheres of our brain have two dramatically different ways of relating to the world and that our minds get muddled when the perspective of one hemisphere (usually the LH ) dominates and suppresses the other (usually the RH). We can learn to recognize the symptoms of LH dominance by studying the lives of people with dysfunctional RHs, such as Dr. P who, among other things, lost his ability to recognize faces. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

This new episode continues the story of Jill Bolte Taylor’s left hemisphere stroke and her life, as experienced through her Right Hemisphere. We focus on her recovery process and restoration of the use of both hemispheres of her brain. Although Jill Bolte Taylor found life in the silent world of her Right Hemisphere to be seductively blissful, as though she was “enfolded by a blanket of tranquil euphoria,” she recognized that she needed, and wanted, to return to her “normal” life. To do so she needed to will herself out of her state of near paralysis and restore use of her left hemisphere function. Her path of recovery began with a little rock forward. Then another. She rocked & rocked & rocked some more. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

We are exploring the hemisphere hypothesis, which states that the two hemispheres of our brain present us with very different perspectives on what’s going on. In this episode we are going to explore what it is like to experience the world exclusively through Right Hemisphere modes of perception. What happens when people, because of disease or injury, lose use of the left hemisphere and are forced to rely exclusively on the right hemisphere. This is what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor whose story is the focus of this episode. As she describes in her wonderful book MY STROKE OF INSIGHT, she had a massive stroke in her left hemisphere and lived for eight years in what she called the "silent mind" of her right hemisphere. What was that like? Her story gives us unique insight into the unique ecosystem of the right hemisphere. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.

We continue to explore how the two hemispheres of our brain influence us in different ways. In this episode I borrow a story from Iain McGilchrist who, in turn, borrowed it from Friedrich Nietzsche. McGilchrist uses his story - The Master and His Emissary - as the title for his book that first introduces his "hemisphere hypothesis." The two main characters in the story represent the Right Hemisphere (The Master) and the Left Hemisphere (The Emissary). It tells of their relationship and of the destruction of their realm that follow the Emissary's usurpation of leadership from the Master. I have taken the liberty to change the gender of the leader to a woman and to add some embellishments that I believe help illustrate McGilchrist's full thesis. The essence of his idea is that the two hemispheres have different ways of relating to the world. When they cooperate, under the guidance of the Right Hemisphere, things go well. But when the Left Hemisphere dominates - as it does in modern culture - our minds get muddled and the culture starts to unravel. Support the showSupport our work to promote creative aging. Subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast.