Page 519 - Total War on PTSD

growth and development, states of consciousness, perception and awareness, locomotion, autonomic function, neural repair, and rehabilitation. That’s a long list, but all you really need to know in order to begin is Tai Chi and Qigong movements are repetitive and rhythmic and slow motion. Slow, precise motion trains the brain for fast motion.
One of the hallmarks of Tai Chi is the practice of “silk reeling” which is a training where all the joints of the body are coordinated to perform in a spiraling synchrony. The biomechanics at each joint are integrated with all other joints, and the force is generated from the ground. Practice trains the bone, tendon, ligaments, joints to be “connected” like a single snake. And through a special form of stretching in Tai Chi, the combined muscle force/activation patterns produce whole-body superior power without muscle.
Communication between distant brain areas is important for integration of complex information to adapt to changes in the environment and to generate appropriate responses necessary for successful behavior in daily life. Through numerous experiments, it has been established that cortical neurons strengthen their connections by repeated stimulation and synchronous activation — this is called ‘Hebb's Rule,' commonly stated as “neurons that fire together, wire together.”
On the basis of this, it has been assumed that perceptions or actions are represented in the brain by large numbers of distributed neurons firing in synchrony. Synchronous activity is often associated with oscillatory firing patterns, rhythms, in discrete frequency bands that represent certain aspects of behavior, learning, common motion, direction and velocity, or coordination. These rhythmic activities are synchronous over relatively large areas of the cortex and even deeper brain structures, between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, between the visual and motor (movement command) centers of the brain, and between the motor and somatosensory (what the body feels) centers. They are also enhanced in amplitude when performing new and complicated motor acts.
Mental practice and movement imagery trains the brain:
519 of 1042