Yoga as a practice and philosophy of life has been followed for more than 4500 years with known evidence of Yogic practices in the Indus Valley Civilization. A plethora of scholars have contributed to the development of the field, but in last century the profound knowledge remained inaccessible and incomprehensible to the general public. Last few decades have seen a resurgence in the utility of Yoga and Meditation as a practice with growing scientific evidence behind it. Significant scientific literature has been published, illustrating the benefits of Yogic practices including asana, pranayama and dhyana on mental and physical well being. Electrophysiological and recent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies have found explicit neural signatures for Yogic practices. In this article, we present a review of the philosophy of Yoga, based on the dualistic Sankhya school, as applied to consciousness summarized by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras followed by discussion on the five vritti (modulations of mind), practice of pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, different states of samadhi, and samapatti. We introduce Yogic Theory of Mind and Consciousness (YTMC), a cohesive theory that can model both external modulations and internal states of the mind. We propose that attention, sleep and mind wandering should be understood as unique modulatory states of the mind. YTMC allows us to model the external states, internal states of meditation, samadhi and even the disorders of consciousness. Further, we list some testable neuroscientific hypotheses that could be answered using YTMC, analyse the benefits, outcomes and possible limitations.
Wayfinding difficulties in healthcare facilities have been shown to increase anxiety among patients and visitors and reduce staff operational efficiency. Wayfinding-oriented interior design features have proven beneficial, but the evaluation of their performance is hindered by the unique nature healthcare facilities and the expense of testing different navigational aids. This study implemented a virtual-reality testing platform to evaluate the effects of different signage and interior hospital design conditions during navigational tasks; evaluated through behavioral responses and mobile EEG. The results indicated that using color to highlight destinations and increase the contrast of wayfinding information yielded significant benefits when combined with wayfinding-oriented environmental affordances. Neural dynamics from the occipital cortex showed beta-band desynchronization with enhanced color condition and additional theta-band desynchronization with enhanced environmental affordance. This multimodal testing platform has the potential to establish a robust body of evidence for future wayfinding design strategies.
Default Mode Network (DMN) has been called a "task-negative" network which deactivates during engaging extrinsic tasks. But the behavior is more nuanced. We analyse the DMN during three different tasks (visual, affect and language; n=54) and find inter trial variability which gets amiss when analysed using General Linear Model (GLM). The region also shows significant across subjects variations which limits the use of Inter Subject Correlation (ISC) method to detect correlated deactivations during the task. We introduce Temporal Synchronization Analysis (TSA), a family of methods that can help detect inter-trial (IT-TSA) and inter-subject (IS-TSA) synchronization across the brain. We find that DMN is weakly synchronized across trials and subjects, challenging the notion of task negative behavior. Our study suggests the role of DMN as an active component associated with self-referential, autobiographical processes which are deactivated differentially and non linearly across trials and subjects in the presence of extrinsic processes.
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