Toward a Unified View of Cognitive and Biochemical Activity: Meditation and Linguistic Self-Reconstructing May Lead to Inflammation and Oxidative Stress Improvement
Author: Carlo Dal Lin1, Laura Brugnolo2, Mariela Marinova2, Mario Plebani2, Sabino Iliceto1, Francesco Tona1, Giuseppe Vitiello3
Affiliation:
1 Department of Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular Sciences, Padua University Medical School, Via Giustiniani 2, 35100 Padua, Italy.
2 Department of Laboratory Medicine, Padua University Medical School, Via Giustiniani 2, 35100 Padua, Italy.
3 Department of Physics "E.R. Caianiello", Salerno University, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 Fisciano (Salerno), Italy.
Conference/Journal: Entropy (Basel)
Date published: 2020 Jul 27
Other:
Volume ID: 22 , Issue ID: 8 , Pages: 818 , Special Notes: doi: 10.3390/e22080818. , Word Count: 211
Stress appears to be the basis of many diseases, especially myocardial infarction. Events are not objectively "stressful" but what is central is how the individual structures the experience he is facing: the thoughts he produces about an event put him under stress. This cognitive process could be revealed by language (words and structure). We followed 90 patients with ischemic heart disease and 30 healthy volunteers, after having taught them the Relaxation Response (RR) as part of a 4-day Rational-Emotional-Education intervention. We analyzed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software the words that the subjects used across the study following the progression of blood galectin-3 (inflammation marker) and malondialdehyde (oxidative stress marker). During the follow-up, we confirmed an acute and chronic decrease in the markers of inflammation and oxidative stress already highlighted in our previous studies together with a significant change in the use of language by the subjects of the RR groups. Our results and the precise design of our study would seem to suggest the existence of an intimate relationship and regulatory action by cognitive processes (recognizable by the type of language used) on some molecular processes in the human body.
Keywords: Rational–Emotional–Education; cognition; dissipative quantum model of brain; language; meditation; relaxation response; stress.
PMID: 33286589 PMCID: PMC7517388 DOI: 10.3390/e22080818
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