THIS EPISODE'S NEURAL CORRELATES ARE...
everything we do involves the brain, so it is no surprise that horse-assisted therapy, inflamed sinuses, shamanic meditation & obsessive compulsive disorder all have their very own neural correlates
original articles: Zhu et al., 2021 (Human Brain Mapping), Jafari et al., 2021 (JAMA Otolaryngology-- Head & Neck Surgery), Huels et al., 2021 (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience), Weeland et al., 2021 (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry),
this story was in episode 8 #horse #inflammation #shamanism #OCD
the error bar says
horse-assisted psychotherapy reduces grey matter in your thalamus & caudate nucleus - important parts of the brain involved in movement, reward, thought & sensation
inflammation in your nose & sinuses decreases the connectivity between the frontal & parietal regions of your brain
entering a shamanic state of consciousness & listening to drumming increases electrical brain activity in the so-called gamma frequency band & decreases the beta-band. these are exactly the changes you would expect if the shamans moved around more than the control group. luckily enough, movement wasn't measured, so this paper can be published
and finally, in episode 2, the brain's orbitofrontal cortex was associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder. forget that. a new study of 2551 children shows that OCD is, in fact, associated with a larger thalamus - an important part of the brain involved in horse-assisted therapy