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Tai Chi Chuan (TCC), a traditional Chinese martial art, is well-documented to result in beneficial consequences in physical and mental health. TCC is regarded as a mind-body exercise that is comprised of physical exercise and meditation. Favorable effects of TCC on body balance, gait, bone mineral density, metabolic parameters, anxiety, depression, cognitive function, and sleep have been previously reported. However, the underlying mechanisms explaining the effects of TCC remain largely unclear. Recently, advances in neuroimaging technology have offered new investigative opportunities to reveal the effects of TCC on anatomical morphologies and neurological activities in different regions of the brain. These neuroimaging findings have provided new clues for revealing the mechanisms behind the observed effects of TCC. In this review paper, we discussed the possible effects of TCC-induced modulation of brain morphology, functional homogeneity and connectivity, regional activity and macro-scale network activity on health. Moreover, we identified possible links between the alterations in brain and beneficial effects of TCC, such as improved motor functions, pain perception, metabolic profile, cognitive functions, mental health and sleep quality. This paper aimed to stimulate further mechanistic neuroimaging studies in TCC and its effects on brain morphology, functional homogeneity and connectivity, regional activity and macro-scale network activity, which ultimately lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the beneficial effects of TCC on human health.

Sustained sleep problems such as insomnia have been shown to be detrimental to health. This study examines the less understood, finer grained effects of a single bad night's sleep on mood, cognitive, autonomic and electrophysiological functions. We assessed 338 individuals who had no symptoms of a clinical sleep disorder. Of these, 226 individuals had six or more hours sleep and 112 individuals had less than six hours sleep prior to an assessment of mood, cognition, autonomic and electrophysiological functioning. Individuals in the relatively "bad night" sleep group had higher depression, anxiety, and stress scores and reported significantly poorer overall wellbeing. They made more errors on simple cognitive tasks while more complex task components were unaffected. They also had an increase in heart rate and EEG alpha and beta power at rest. Participants in this study had no symptoms of a clinical sleep disorder, however the effects of a poor night sleep on measures of mood, cognition, autonomic and electrophysiological function were similar, but less severe than those reported in insomnia patients. The integrative profile of measures reported here point to an increase in physiological arousal and sub-optimal cognition, following a poor night's sleep.

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.

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.