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All living systems are dependent on information from the past. While this information may in part be inherent and genetically coded, there was through evolution a steadily growing increase of flexible and individual-specific information encoding, storage, and retrieval. In mammals, and especially man, this biological tendency resulted in a largely environment-stimulated access to information most essential for survival of the individual and the species. Consequently, the remembrance of emotionally and motivationally flavored events was of greatest importance. The apparent result of this is that there is a substantial overlap of those brain structures implicated in the processing of emotional, motivational, and memory processes, a conclusion obvious from the roles attributed to the Papez circuit. How interwoven arousal, attention, mood, and affect are, can most directly be deduced from the assessment of brain damaged patients. Examples from cases with memory disturbances in whom mood and affect influence memorizing as well as some hypotheses on the possible or likely interaction of mood and memory are given.

Mind-body exercise, a form of physical exercise originating in the East with increasing popularity in the West, has a unique characteristic that requires conscious control of each body movement and concurrently maintaining a peaceful and relaxed state of mind during practice. With the ultimate goal of training both the body and the mind, there have been empirical findings supporting the positive effects of mind-body exercises on improving physical health condition (e.g., pulmonary function) as well as cognitive functions (e.g., learning and memory). This chapter will introduce a form of Chinese Chan-based mind-body exercise, namely Shaolin mind-body exercise or Chanwu, which was developed upon the traditional Shaolin Healing Approach. A brief description on some movements of Shaolin mind-body exercise will also be provided. Treatment outcomes based on both clinical observations and cumulative empirical evidence are so far encouraging. Specifically, intervention with the component of Shaolin mind-body exercise has been found to be able to foster a relaxed and attentive mind state of normal adults, significantly improve depressive mood and enhance bowel function and neurophysiological activity of both community-dwelling adults and patients with major depressive disorder. Some clinical cases with severe cognitive impairment have also been assessed to show significant enhancement in their attention, memory, language and executive functions. These positive findings have suggested potential clinical applicability of the Shaolin mind-body exercise as a possible neuropsychological intervention for improving cognitive function and psychological status of patients with various brain disorders or psychiatric illnesses.