Heart-based right brain enrichment programs and early learning centers

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 4

Otto Loewi

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960

Otto Loewi, who won the 1936 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for showing that nerve impulses are transmitted by chemical agents, describes how the critical experiment came to him in a near-sleep state.

He had come up with the idea of chemical transmission 17 years earlier, but had put it aside for lack of a way to test it. Fifteen years later, he performed experiments (unrelated to his old idea) for which he had designed a technique to detect fluids secreted by a frog's heart.

One night two years later...

"I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o'clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl.

"The next night, at three o'clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design."

-- Otto Loewi

Accelerated Learning for the 21st Century

Colin Rose

New York: Delacorte Press, 1997 (pg. 43)

"Alpha seems to let you reach your subconscious, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that you store information most effectively in your long-term memory when you are in a relaxed, yet alert state.

"When alpha (and, indeed, theta) brain waves become more dominant, logical left-brain activity -- which normally acts as a filter or censor to the subconscious -- drops its guard. This allows the more intuitive, emotional, and creative depths of the mind to become more increasingly influential.

"The object of accelerated learning is to actively involve the emotional brain -- thereby making things more memorable, and to synchronize left- and right-brain activity. Introduce moments of relaxation to allow consolidation to take place. Although understanding something and memorizing it are different, all learning -- to be useful -- needs to be stored in the memory."

-- Colin Rose