Asana's and Emotions

[Guest guest]

|| Om Gurave Namah ||Dear Friends,  Below is a very interesting research finding. Yoga asana's recommend Shavaasana (Lying flat like dead) etc to control blood pressure and tensions. Meditations(for gyana etc) is done sitting. Some types of saadhana is done standing.

Prashna Marga Stanza 14.15. says " The

Lagna, the 4th, the 7th and the 10th signify respectively various postures as

'walking', 'lying or resting', 'sitting' and 'standing'. " In yoga we have basically all asana's commence a) from Sitting pose, b) from Standing pose or c) from lying down pose

 

Warm Regards,Sanjay Phttp://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17580-why-insults-are-better-taken-lying-down.html

 

Why insults are better taken lying down

 

 

14:22 11 August 2009

by

Ewen Callaway

 

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The Human Brain

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If

you really must offend someone, wait until they are lying down: people

handle anger differently when they're lying on their backs, compared

with sitting upright.

University

students who heard personal insults while seated exhibited brain

activity linked to so-called " approach motivation " – the desire to

approach and explore something. This potential urge disappeared when

students took their insults lying down, despite their anger remaining.

" In the upright or leaning forward state one might be more likely to attack, " says Eddie Harmon-Jones,

a cognitive scientist at Texas A & M University in College Station,

who led the study. " Maybe in the reclining state you're more likely to

brood. "

Harmon-Jones

worries that MRI studies performed on subjects lying on their backs –

which is practically all of them – could miss the neural signatures of

certain emotions.

Seeing red

It

isn't every study that requires researchers to infuriate their

volunteers, and Harmon-Jones and his colleagues have honed their

technique over more than decade.

Students

are not told that they are participating in an anger study. The

researchers instead ask them to pick a hot-button issue, such as

abortion or public smoking, and write a brief essay on their stance.

Next, they are hooked to an electroencephalograph, which measures

electrical pulses created by firing neurons, and told that a person in

an adjacent room will evaluate the essay.

This

is a ruse, and Harmon-Jones's team play a voice recording of someone

disparaging the intelligence, likeability and logical skills of the

essayist. " People get angry in response to this kind of feedback, " he

says.

Chilled out

Volunteers

who heard these insults while on their backs felt as angry as

volunteers who were seated. But EEG recordings showed that, for the

upright volunteers, a brain region called the right prefrontal cortex

was more active than its counterpart in the brain's left hemisphere.

Other research has linked this lopsided activation to anger and

approach motivation.

Volunteers

who received their digs while lying down, however, exhibited EEG

patterns no different from subjects who got slightly positive reviews,

Harmon-Jones says.

He

thinks lying down could affect how the brain handles other emotions,

such as desire and happiness. The mental shift provoked by lying down

may even be strong enough to affect the results of brain-imaging

studies performed on people lying on their backs.

Unnatural circumstances

" It's

unknown how much of an effect this has, but this study suggests that

people should start looking to see if body position is affecting

processing in other types of experiments, " Harmon-Jones says, noting

that most of our decisions are made while we're upright, not lying down.

Peter Bandettini,

a brain imager at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda,

Maryland, agrees – to a point. " It never occurred to me that body

position might influence behavioural or neuronal activity in the

context of aggression – but it makes sense, " he says. " I do think that

this is somewhat specialised to things like aggression or anger. "

After

all, he says, it's not as if neuroscientists pretend that massive,

tunnel-like MRI scanners are exact replicas of regular human

environments. " The scanner noise, closed space, and generally very

alien context might influence the results of other studies as well, "

Bandettini adds.

Journal reference: Psychological Science (DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02416.x)