Jammu, January 05: The popular gossip going on WhatsApp groups “kya aapke toothpaste mein namak hai” to indicate how West first ridiculed Indians using charcoal and salt to clean teeth and after several decades sells its best brand under the punch line that it contains charcoal and salt to clean our teeth.
Whatever may be the reality of the toothpaste makers but the truth is that West has been propagating what India has been doing for thousands of years and while our own people shun it westerners embrace it.
There are numerous such examples where Indians have forgotten their rich old past while Westerners discover it now and sell to us under their own brand names.
Yoga was discovered by Indians thousands of years ago and practiced as a way of life but while we began forgetting it and adopted the so called modern Aerobics West is lapping up Yoga in a big way and also branding it in their own style.
Similarly we discovered Ayurveda thousands of years ago treating generations after generations but shun by our modern generation completely to embrace Western Allopathy while the West is now discovering the benefits of Ayurveda and Naturopathy investing billions to research, what we have already proved, only to brand it again and sell to us.
The music and spiritual healing therapy is the latest to be adopted by the West as after ‘thorough research’ it was found that it affects our creativity, emotions and life style in a big way forgetting that the Raja Maharajas’ and Yogis’ of yore used the music therapy and spiritual healing, meditation etc to sooth their nerves through different ragas.
Infact Indian classical music and dance has many forms to treat different ailments but then we Indians are ahead to forget our own past and adopt the so called modern system even if that means we purchase what we actually own.
A recent study at University of California-San Francisco has found how emotions affect our brain’s creativity.
According to a report “emotional expression affects the brain’s creativity network, says a new brain-scanning study of jazz pianists, adding that “happy” and “sad” music evoked different neural patterns in their brains.
The workings of neural circuits associated with creativity are significantly altered when artists are actively attempting to express emotions, the researchers report.
“The bottom line is that emotion matters. It can’t just be a binary situation in which your brain is one way when you’re being creative and another way when you’re not,” says senior author Charles Limb from University of California-San Francisco.
“Instead, there are greater and lesser degrees of creative states, and different versions. And emotion plays a crucially important role in these differences,” he explains.
The team focused in a brain region known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is involved in planning and monitoring behaviour.
The researchers found that DLPFC deactivation was significantly greater when the jazz musicians improvised melodies intended to convey the emotion expressed in a “positive” image (a photograph of a woman smiling) than a “negative” image (photo of the same woman in a mildly distressed state).
On the other hand, improvisations targeted at expressing the emotion in the negative image were associated with greater activation of the brain’s reward regions.
“This indicates there may be different mechanisms for why it’s pleasurable to create happy versus sad music,” added first study author Malinda McPherson.
For each musician, any brain activity data generated during these passive viewing periods, including emotional responses, were subtracted from that elicited during their musical performances.
This allowed the researchers to determine which components of brain activity in emotional regions were strongly associated with creating the improvisations.
Moreover, Limb said, the research team avoided biasing the musicians’ performances with words like “sad” or “happy” when instructing the musicians before the experiments. The paper appeared in the journal Scientific Reports.
With this so called discovery one only wonders why we Indians forget our own rich past and instead of taking it to greater heights, adopt western concept of life which is not only hollow but also temporary and without much research while our own system as evolved over thousands of years making it better by the day.