New Scientist Premium- How life shapes the brainscape - News

New Scientist Premium- How life shapes the brainscape - News: "How life shapes the brainscape
25 November 2005
Helen Phillips
Magazine issue 2527
From meditation to diet, life experiences profoundly change the structure and connectivity of the brain
OUR brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives. It is a mind-blowing statistic, and one that highlights the amazing flexibility of our most enigmatic organ. While the figure emphasises how much we still have to learn about brain structure, it also reveals the huge importance of our everyday experiences in making our brains what they are.
Anatomy, neural networks and genes are yesterday's hot topics. Today, neuroscientists are increasingly concentrating on how the way we live our lives creates profound and often long-lasting changes in the structure and connectivity of our brains. They are focusing on how influences as diverse as our emotions, environment, social interactions and even our spiritual lives help make us tick.
To reflect this shift, the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC last week invited a leading religious figure to open its annual meeting for the first time. The Dalai Lama "

Central Doctrines of Tibetan Buddhism

Auxilary to this?? Maybe it is that the emptiness mearly implies existance is based on the cooperation of all things. The only definition and separtion of one thing to the next is caused simply by all these things Being here. Mab has chosen to be separate. The nothingness of the mind, where we hold onto no particular reality creates the "space" for allowing other things to be, and subject their beingness onto the mind.... whereby we can know all things. So the nothingness brings the beingness of everything into us.... So "what we do an think in our own lives becomes of extreme importance as it affects everything we are connected to."*

Central Doctrines of Tibetan Buddhism: "The philosophical outlook of all four Schools of Tibetan Buddhism is the Mahayana doctrine of emptiness. On this view, all things and events are said to be devoid of any intrinsic and absolute existence. They come into being due to the aggregation of multiple causes and conditions. Not only is their material existence dependent upon other factors, even their very identity as they are is contingent upon other factors, such as language, thought and concepts that together make up worldly convention. This absence of intrinsic existence and intrinsic identity is what is referred to as 'emptiness' and is considered to be the ultimate truth of all things and events. One of the most profound implications of this theory of emptiness is that it suggests that all things and events come into being only by means of a process of dependent origination. They are dependent upon other factors, and this fundamental truth about the nature of reality is understood best through a language of interdependence and interrelationship of things."

*Lama, D., H.H. (2005). The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (1 ed.). New York: Morgan Road Books.