Sunday, Jan 28
According to this article, scientists are finding that a certain part of the brain, called the insula, is directly responsible for addictive behavior. This could mean that future therapies will involve ways to deactivate the insula in order to break addictions. To me, this sounds like the exact thing that inversions in yoga do for our bodies. Perhaps by inverting, yogis found through experimentation that their brain was rebalanced and insula--if overreactive--was tamed.
So Western science is slowly coming around to what yoga has known for centuries.........
January 26, 2007
In Clue to Addiction, Brain Injury Halts Smoking
Scientists studying stroke patients are reporting today that an injury to a specific part of the brain, near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit. People with the injury who stopped smoking found that their bodies, as one man put it, "forgot the urge to smoke."
The finding, which appears in the journal Science, is based on a small study. But experts say it is likely to alter the course of addiction research, pointing researchers toward new ideas for treatment.
While no one is suggesting brain injury as a solution for addiction, the finding suggests that therapies might focus on the insula, a prune-size region under the frontal lobes that is thought to register gut feelings and is apparently a critical part of the network that sustains addictive behavior.
And at least two previous studies suggest that people can reduce the sensation of pain by learning to modulate the activity in an area of their brain.
"The question is, Can you learn to deactivate the insula?" Dr. Volkow said. "Now, everybody's going to be looking at the insula."
