Self-referencing is a critical piece here. Recent work has shown that when people are asked to do nothing (in an fMRI scanner while their brain activity is being measured), they default to mind wandering, and much of those wandering thoughts take the form of an ongoing narrative about oneself, “the story of me,” we could say: my future, my past, my successes, my failures, and so forth. What is seen in the brain scans is that a large midline region in the cortex starts lighting up, that is, shows a major increase in neural activity—even though you are being asked to do nothing inside the scanner. This region has been termed the default mode network (DMN), for obvious reasons. Sometimes it is also called the narrative network, because when we just let the mind do what it does, so much of it is caught up in the narrative about oneself, an aspect of our own mind that we are often completely unaware of unless we have had some training in mindfulness.training in the form of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) resulted in reduced activity in the narrative network, and in increased activity in a more lateral network of the cortex that is associated with present-moment awareness, experientially outside of time, and lacking any narrative at all.
The researchers in this study refer to this neural circuitry as the experiential network.
Mindfulness as both a formal meditation practice and as a way of living has two interacting aspects, an instrumental dimension and a non-instrumental dimension. The instrumental dimension involves learning the practices and experiencing the benefits (Jud would say “rewards”) of such practices, much as what happens when one undertakes any kind of ongoing learning process.
The non-instrumental dimension, a true complement to the instrumental dimension of mindfulness practice and absolutely essential to its cultivation and to freeing ourselves from craving-associated mind states, thoughts, and emotions, is that there is, at the very same time—and this is very hard to take in or talk about, which is why the phenomenon of flow plays such a large role in this book—no place to go, nothing to do, no special state to attain, and, ultimately, no one (in the conventional sense of a “you” or a “me”) to attain it.
Both of these dimensions of mindfulness are simultaneously true. Yes, you do need to practice, but if you try too hard or strive for some desired end point and its attendant reward, then you are simply shifting the craving to a new object or a new goal or a new attachment and a new or merely upgraded or revised “story of me.”
context-dependent memory:food. Eat food. Feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward.
After a while, our creative brains tell us: Hey! You can use this for more than remembering where food is. The next time you feel bad, why don’t you try eating something good so that you will feel better? We thank our brains for that great idea, try it, and quickly learn that if we eat ice cream or chocolate when we are mad or sad, we do feel better. It is the same learning process, just a different trigger: instead of a hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal—feeling sad—triggers the urge to eat.
Or maybe in our teenage years we saw the rebel kids smoking outside school and looking cool, and we thought, hey, I want to be like them, and so we started smoking. See cool. Smoke to be cool. Feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. And each time we perform the behavior, we reinforce this brain pathway, which says, Great, do it again. So we do, and it becomes a habit. A habit loop.
After 8 weeks of mindfulness the pituitary gland shrunk means less sensitivity.Left brain associate with positive mental experience . While right brain assoc with negative.
Stimulus--->reaction
Stimulus--->space--->reflex
Try exhalation first cause inhalation more likely to excite autonomic system
When speaking( exhalation) ,stop (breath) before next.
