The Perils of Taking Life Sitting Down

I once had a girlfriend in my late teens named Marlyce Greco. She was a starstruck fan of Arthur Lee and Love, and so one summer Saturday night we went to see him and the band at the Whiskey a Go-Go on Sunset Strip in Hollywood. Around midnight, after we came over Mullholland and cruised down into the Valley on my Triumph motorcycle, a woman who’d had too much to drink, made a sudden left turn in front of us just as we entered the intersection at Coldwater Canyon and Moorpark. We broadsided her at 40 miles an hour, sending Marlyce and I flying over the top of her station wagon and out into the traffic trying to avoid us.

Miraculously neither of us ended up seriously hurt. In the aftermath, we were both able to stand on the street corner and speak semi-coherently to people who came to our aid. Except for one problem – I couldn’t stop shaking. Forty-plus years later, I’ve come to learn I was having a body and brain-stabilizing, Acute Stress Reaction.

The “Oh Shoot” Moment

In the moment when I realized we were going to smash into that station wagon, all my major muscles tensed. All thinking ceased, my breathing stopped and my whole body was flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. From studies of animals in the wild by ethologists like Robert Sapolsky and Peter Levine, we know that the shaking afterwards was my nervous system’s way of trying to move those powerful glucocorticoids out of my body and brain in order to keep them from doing neurological harm. Instead of loading me into an ambulance and taking me to the UCLA Medical Center and exposing me to the horrendous pain and suffering that abounds in any inner city Emergency Room on a Saturday night, probably better would have been to trot or walk me around the block a few times. It is lack of physical movement – the freeze response – that seems to play a significant role in traumatic experiences becoming intrusively fixed in long term memory.

Walk it Off, Shake it Off, Dance it Off

When my daughter was small, I noticed that whenever she fell or scraped her knee, her first response would be to look to me for a reaction. If I was cool and simply picked her up, brushed her off and walked her around, she was over the incident quite rapidly. My calm became her calm. I’m pretty convinced, and research from folks like Bessel van der Kolk, Bob Scaer and Pat Ogden seem to confirm that anything we do that helps us mitigate the Freeze Response in the wake of spills and trauma, provides great neurological benefits – physical movement in the wake of overwhelming experiences seems to keep us from forming “Dissociation Capsules,” those easily-acquired neurological snarl-jams that work to frequently float us away from the stress of the present moment.

The need for, and the power of physical movement, even “triumphant action” as a potential healing aid in the wake of traumatic experiences, is important to realize for parents and other caregivers in the world, especially those parts of the world where exploding IEDs and other traumatic assaults are a regular, unpredictable way of life. Anything we can do to support the physical and mental health of any one of us is invariably good for all of us.

Challenging Conversations

Related to physically traumatic experiences are the neurologically similar experience of difficult conversations – those emotionally-laden, adrenaline-fueled discussions we find ourselves frequently faced with involving family members, friends and creative colleagues. Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen – members of the Harvard Negotiation Project – have written a book on just this topic. They present a series of flexible guidelines for deliberately and consciously engaging in Difficult Conversations.

They suggest breaking difficult discussions into three parts: the story part – what happened; the feeling part – how we feel about what happened; and the Third Story – the result that often emerges from deep listening and mutually inclusive, beneficial problem-solving. Missing from their guidelines is my feeling that these conversations should rarely be engaged in sitting down. Such conversations jazz up our neurobiology and then leave us with nowhere to go with all that vibrating energy. Moving that energy through our system in my experience is best accomplished by not taking such encounters sitting down. And this is probably a good practice for the rest of our lives as well.

Invoking the Gravitas of Affirmation

More than 50 years have passed and I can still clearly remember Mrs. Lieberman, my fourth grade teacher, announcing to the rest of the class: “Mark is a very good reader. He reads with excellent comprehension.” That single piece of praise shaped a significant part of my life thereafter – reading became a daily mainstay, as necessary for me as food, air and water.

And then, in my early twenties I attended a talk in Ojai, California by the renown Indian spiritual teacher, J. Krishnamurti. I was flabbergasted when I heard him say that he never read books, that books were a distraction on the spiritual path!

Teachable Gravitas

I love that spacey diastema!

Each of these declarations made a lasting impression on me. The first is a demonstration of what Princeton philosopher, Cornel West calls “The Gravitas of Affirmation,” the second an illustration of what spiritual adepts call a “teachable moment.” In the latter instance, I was ripe for waking up to the possibility that something I learned in the fourth grade, which I held sacrosanct, might not hold the truth and power in the real world that I thought it did.

But the point of this little vignette is that parents, teachers, therapists and clergy have great power, often more than many of us realize. The things that we say and do in the presence of children (and adults as well) can leave lasting impressions for good or ill. For example, just last week the New York Times published this piece on the negative impact that yelling has on kids – something I’ve been railing against for years. All we need do is pay attention to how we feel when we’re screamed at – attend to the flood of neural-inhibiting glucocorticoids racing through our bodies, along with the guilt that often follows – to know that yelling is not “best for the children.” Nevertheless, as the article indicates, the majority of parents in America do yell at their kids, without realizing its negative neural impact. What to do?

The Power of Proclamation

I’m sure many of you reading this column can recall a casual positive remark, perhaps made in passing by some person of consequence long ago. It’s very likely one that greatly impacted your life and remains with you still: Mrs. Creel in the third grade telling you you had a lovely blue eyes, or Ms. Levitt in the sixth grade proclaiming you as very good at long division, or Mr. Fisher, the school principal, genuinely amazed when you scored off the charts on the Minnesota Spatial Relations test. The sum of these kinds of affirmations can take on a gravitas of their own, a kind of collective meta-gravitas, if you will. And while I know of no direct empirical research on their neurological power, there is little doubt in my mind that they can do wonders for neural growth and connectivity. I know this mostly by extrapolating from research on the neurobiology of successfully managing stress, laughter and play, all of which do enrich neural development.

Anything that keeps allostasis (good stress) from turning into excessive or sustained allostatic load (bad stress), has to be placed on the plus side of the neurological ledger, especially for expectant mothers. And timely, authentic praise makes our neurophysiology hum like a symphony string section. For empirical evidence, simply check in with your own body. Essential though, is that the praise and affirmation we bestow needs to be just that: timely and authentic. It can’t be faint praise offered days later with a hidden or double agenda. Interestingly, these are also aspects of contingent communication, for which we do have a lot of empirical research confirming neurological efficacy.

Right Speech

There’s a wonderful Zen directive that lives in my long-ago memory as something like this: “Do not think bad thoughts. But if you do think bad thoughts, do not speak them. But if you do speak them, do your best to correct any damage they may have done.” We don’t have to be perfect in this practice. We only have to be willing to attend closely to the intent of the words we put out into the world and work on repairing any damage they may have do. With practice (about 10000 hours worth), the things we do think and the things we do say may more and more begin to take on their own affirmative gravitas.

The High Cost of Kvetching

The older I get the more whining and kvetching (naggy, critical griping) I seem to find myself doing. One example: I need to cut down on my American news-watching, especially the political/financial reporting, because I spend too much time finger-pointing and barking at the TV. In the either/or world between strategic optimism or defensive pessimism, I generally tend to excel on defense.

It’s interesting to explore what goes on internally when I find myself reacting in this way. At the root of much of my reactivity often lies … fear. Fear that politicians are going to make the mess they’ve already made, worse. Fear that Wall Street – and specifically the big banks – are going to ruin any possible chance that I might have for a happy financial retirement. Fear that what lies ahead for me is mostly greater and greater pain, anxiety and suffering until I finally give up and die. The irony is not lost on me: while I’m so busy being driven by all of this Future-fear, I’m not very present to the glorious life around me in the moment. I blame it on my brain’s inability to easily manage anxiety, which of course, is simply more finger-pointing.

The High Costs of Kvetching

There are a number of things that make whining and kvetching less than optimal, both as a role model for kids, and for my own integrated brain development as well. In the parlance of economics, one might be lost opportunity cost. While I’m all too busy kvetching, it’s taking up way too much of my time, energy and attention. But the brain can only focus fully on one thing at a time. Just as it can’t fully attend to the road while driving and simultaneously eat and send text messages, it doesn’t easily allow me to talk attentively on the phone and simultaneously pay bills on line or give kids or kittens full attention. Because I’m so busy kvetching, as a result of this brain limitation, I’m not paying attention and fully focused on the constructive things I might be doing,  like decoding the brain using light or practicing over-expressing the NR2B gene. (This is the lone gene which seems to inspire our brains to process more energy and information faster – which would make me much smarter, able to manage anxiety more effectively, and thus be less inclined to kvetch. What a double bind!).

The Kvetching Catch

But is kvetching all bad? Dr. Barbara Held believes you can kvetch your way to better health and she offers these five aspects (my interpretation) for the practice:

1. Safeguard your inalienable right to kvetch

2. Practice selective kvetching; honor the limits of your kvetchee

3. Don’t pseudo-kvetch – kvetch with gusto

4. Don’t practice kvetching one-upmanship

5. Praise the power of the practice of kvetching

As a defensive pessimist, I don’t particularly agree with Dr. Held’s premise, although I do subscribe to her main point: we need to be able to be honest with ourselves and others about what’s true in our experience, and then find effective avenues for expressing it.

Kvetching as a Call to Action

In my mind, kvetching is a conditioned response left over from childhood. I whined as a kid because whining preceded words. Kvetching also seems closely related to the Two Perilous Questions which have inspired many to spiritual maturity. Expressing dissatisfaction generally gives voice to momentary truths, answering the first question: What’s true for me?  While it often misses the bigger picture – that in any moment of my life things are actually going quite well, and there’s very little to actually really fear – kvetching is a bit like winning the Nobel Peace Prize before you’ve actually done anything real to bring about peace. In the best of all possible worlds, it stands as a first alert and sets the stage for taking action required to address and resolve Perilous Question Number Two. Addressing this question – What do I want? – invites exploring a further and deeper truth, one that requires me to take action, often life-changing in ways big and small. It also often requires me to reconfigure my ordo amorum – rearranging the unfortunate human hierarchy of the things I love against the things I love most. Difficult choices that often require painful action. No wonder I’m so passively disinclined to make such changes until circumstances force me to.

In addition, kvetching often seems to trap me in a neurological loop, one that I deeply believe at some level is trying to move me towards greater healing integration. It often feels like I’m trapped in small, narrow, fear-generated thought-bubbles, which is what a traumatized brain normally does in the face of threat. The brain orchestrates these life-saving measures even with threats that aren’t particularly real, like in response to voices debating politics on my television screen. At which point, I can either turn off the television, or breathe my way back to a mindful awareness that “in this moment, everything’s all right.” Some day, brain willing, I might even be able to do both!

How to Beautify Your Disorganized Brain

In my early thirties I took a job as a psychology intern at a private residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed adolescents. Many of the residents came to that center having been physically, emotionally and sexually abused as young kids. As a result they had to be removed from their upper middle class home environments.

The center was located on an abandoned farm up in northwestern Connecticut – a bucolic paradise, replete with old barns converted into cozy bunkhouses and comfortable work and meeting spaces, with acres of gardens and lovely hiking trails woven through the evergreen forests.

It was ironic for me to be hired there – only the week before I’d been a resident in a not-so-similar place in downtown New Haven. I had voluntarily committed myself to this free, urban mental hospital in the wake of an “extreme grief reaction” – a three-decade backlog of ungrieved losses finally claiming their due expression.

Who’s in Charge Here?

Two things have stayed with me from that internship at The Country Place: first, there was very little difference that I could discern between the patients and the staff. And in fact, as I later learned, when patients got better, many elected to become staff. The second thing that has stayed with me: The beauty of the place itself seemed to work an active, healing magic. In less than a year, my brain became completely reorganized and my soul fully restored such that I could resume pursuing the graduate degree I had unexpectedly interrupted by taking my own psychiatric time out.

From that experience I’ve come to think it’s not an accident that monasteries, convents and spiritual retreat centers are beautiful and orderly environments – as within, so without. One of the clearest “tells” that a resident was getting better at The Country Place, was the point when they would begin to automatically put their living space in good order – making their bed each morning, picking dirty clothes up off the floor, organizing their desks.

Ever since that restorative stint in the country, I have been continually drawn to inspiring environments, places that are nourishing for the soul, and not by accident, I don’t think.  I spent two years attending classes to earn a master’s degree here, and I spent ten years as part of a team keeping the grounds of this think tank on the hill overlooking Silicon Valley environmentally inspiring. I seem to be irredeemably drawn to create and spend time with beautiful environs.

Environmental Entrainment

Environment, it turns out has tremendous impact on everything living. Our genes and every cell in our body, especially our brain cells, have been designed to creatively adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here’s what MacArthur fellow and Stanford neurobiologist, Robert Sapolsky, in his book Monkeyluv, has to say about the importance of environment:

… it is at least as valid to think “genes can be convenient tools used by environmental factors to influence behavior,” … and “evolution is mostly about natural selection for different genetic sensitivities and responses to environmental influences.”

A Tale of Two Neurons

My interpretation of what Sapolsky is saying is that the safer and more beautiful the environment we spend our lives in, the greater the potential for optimal genetic, neural and cellular organization, especially during our early formative years – not to mention, improved health, as this study suggests. We can’t consider our own or our children’s welfare without simultaneously consciously considering the environment that surrounds all of us.

It is not surprising to me in the least that neuroscientists have discovered that environments, particularly natural ones, positively impact neural development and integration, especially those of us most vulnerable to disorganization. Even watching the Ken Burns’ PBS special, The National Parks has the power to positively affect me in body, brain, mind and spirit – it inspires me and makes me want to immediately get out into the wild.

The point of this piece is that beauty and order are something that children need to be regularly exposed to. And they need to have the importance of both gently taught to them and modeled on an ongoing basis. They aren’t born with full-blown capacities for appreciating beauty and order. And if you’re anything like me, you can teach and model  -  much like charity and self-compassion – that there’s no better place to begin beautifying brain, heart, mind and body than … right at home.

The End of Kids as We Know Them

These days I often find myself feeling blessed that I’m not a kid growing up in today’s world. Change happens way too fast, and the amount of information that assaults the senses daily often feels tsunami-like. According to science writer, Jonah Lehrer, there are roughly 35,000 new neuroscience studies published every year alone! Who could possibly keep up?

Dr. Drew Endy

Trying to prepare kids for the world of today deserves a purple heart and a medal of honor; preparing them for the world of tomorrow, that’s pretty far outside what my aging brain can even begin to imagine. Still, one “tomorrow” area where kids would be well-served by parents, teachers and clergy, would be in learning how to make intelligent decisions around the emerging field of synthetic biology, a field that’s changing so rapidly even its leaders find it challenging to keep current. According to civil engineering-trained, Stanford “alpha synthusiast” Drew Endy, “what occupies our finest minds today, will be a seventh-grade science project in five years. Or three…”

Leading the Synthetic Bio Charge

Endy leads the charge in the synthetic biology movement, and based upon some of today’s most recent research, one seventh-grade science project for tomorrow’s kids might very likely involve designing a wide array of features for your grandchildren! From eye and hair color, to height, to total number of desired brain cells – an extensive menu with a wide variety of options to choose from will be available for designing the children of the future. And if number of brain cells can be programmed for, presumably so can intelligence. As a parent, how much smarter would you want your kids to be than you are? And how should our kids go about making that decision? (There are currently billions of dollars being devoted to this research. Do a Google search of terms like “synthetic biology,” “gene synthesis” or “nanopore sequencing” to get a small sense).

Synthetic biologists effuse greatly about the positive human potential of their work. They combine elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science and molecular biology with the express intention of deliberately designing the living world, of “competing with God,” as the editors at Nature described them in 2007. Synthetic biologists have developed methods for programming living cells similar to the way a computer scientist programs a computer. Using that knowledge, they have created a new form of life – an “app” named “Synthia.” Synthia can replicate her own DNA. With millions of dollars supplied by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, bioengineers at Amyris Biotechnolgies have already synthetically created a scarce drug, artemisinic acid, that promises to eradicate malaria in the world. These new life forms created almost daily, synthetic biologists catalog on the BioBricks registry. If your kids want to create their own unique life forms, all they need do is order a collection of BioBricks – akin to cellular legos – obtain a used automated DNA synthesizer on eBay for as little as $1000 (they used to cost $100,000 less than a decade ago), and voila!, they can begin experimenting with building their own unique little life forms.

To Design or Not to Design

Tomorrow’s kids are going to have to decide if engineering life forms is something human beings should be morally and ethically allowed to do. They’re going to need emotional, intellectual and spiritual resources in order  to be able to rationally discuss the pros and cons of such pursuits without getting hijacked at every turn. And they won’t have much time – advancements currently occur at an exponential rate that exceeds Moore’s Law, necessitating its own measure – Carlson’s Curve.

I’m of two minds with respect to the creation of Designer Kids. As an old carpenter, I recognize that synthetic biology is just a tool, much like nuclear energy – one that can be used constructively or destructively. My ability to use tools skillfully has changed over time. Carpentry tools allow for such growth in skill, while only threatening a few personal body parts. Synthetic biology presents a different kind of tool, however. In addition to holding the promise of successfully addressing the nation’s number one killer – heart disease – using synthetic biology to perform “closed heart” operations – it is also a tool with the potential to not only end kids as we know them, but life itself as we know it. I’m not sure we’re wise enough or spiritually evolved enough to skillfully put such tools into widespread use before we accelerate completely out of control around Carlson’s Curve. And what does it say that we’re already developing a strategy for first responders to an anticipated bioterrorism emergency? If human beings are going to successfully reach the next stage of development, the kids we’re raising today will need to have greater intelligence and strength of heart than we had when we developed and dropped the first atomic bomb.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Raising Hearty Children

Pithy quotations often provide motivating inspiration for these columns. Here’s one often attributed to former British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.” A second inspiration – if we can call it that – comes from this astonishing statistic: 92.5% of adult Americans show up with increased risk for heart disease … 92.5%!

What does this mean exactly? Well, might it mean that something essential that could have happened for more than nine out of ten Americans when they were kids, didn’t? Something that should have, or could have made a significant difference later on in their adult lives?

According to a number of respected neurologists, what happens shortly after conception until we acquire language takes on lifelong implications, whether we realize it or believe it or not. This period of profound neurological growth and integration influences how robust and interconnected our neural network will become later on. It will also determine how well we manage fear and anxiety as children and adults, how strong our immune systems become, which people we can easily be friends and hang with, what kinds of work in the world become even imaginable. So might it be that what more than nine out of ten kids didn’t get in order to not be at risk for heart disease is an environment optimized for robust neural development?

To foster such development, in the world of my health care reform, every parent in America would get government aid from conception through the first three years of a child’s life! Along with an intensive course of study in how their own brains work and how the brains of their children can be supported and encouraged to develop optimally. One model might be what Geoffrey Canada does with Baby College and the Harlem Children’s Zone, where pregnant women are contacted before they give birth and their children are continuously engaged with until they graduate from college. My prediction is that answering The Big Brain Question “Yes!” for parents and children in this way will more than pay for itself in reduced health care costs over the lifespan, which, as many gerontologists predict will be increasing at an accelerated pace. Roughly half of today’s baby boomers will reach age 100 in good health and the average lifespan in 2050 is projected to be …150 years!

Teaching Kids to Cheat Death

Anyway, here are the five measures for increased heart disease risk that the above statistic is based upon:

*  Never smoked or former smoker;

*  Total cholesterol below 200 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) and not using cholesterol-lowering drugs;

*  Blood pressure below 120/80 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) without using blood pressure-lowering medication;

*  Not overweight or obese, as reflected in a body mass index (BMI) less than 25 kg/m2; and

*  Never diagnosed with diabetes.

I’m guessing that directly admonishing or instructing kids in behaviors intended to remedy these conditions will produce only minimally improved results. Better to approach these issues as Geoffrey Canada does or indirectly, through imagery, play and role modeling. And environment. I’d be willing to bet that the early environments, both at home and at school, of the 7.5% of the adults free of heart disease risk were significantly different than the majority of us. I’d bet that there were few or no people modeling cigarette smoking, that considerable time and thought went into meal planning and preparation and that exercise and play were a natural part of every day. In other words, these kids were taught early on how to cheat death. One simple thing that Canada found was that teaching parents to speak to children often and with positive intent, produced significant outsized benefits.

The Lie in the Statistic

Not everyone in the 92.5% of the population identified in this cohort is actually going to contract heart disease, of course. Being at risk simply means the odds aren’t even. And in the end, 100% of us are going to die of the exact same thing anyway: oxygen deprivation to the brain. Since that’s not going to happen for many of today’s kids for another 150 years, we might as well do everything in our power to make sure those fifteen decades are powered with great strength of heart.

The Secret Power of a Mother’s Kiss

While watching the documentary, Fierce Grace, the other night, I was struck by a statement made by Subramanyum, a fellow disciple along with Ram Dass, of the Hindu sage, Neem Karoli Baba. Subramanyum said something to the effect that his teacher represented the epitome of love, that he exuded love, and that he rarely personally felt as loving as he did in this spiritual teacher’s presence. He had apparently received the “kiss of the guru.” Subramanyum also goes by the name of Larry Brilliant, currently the head of the billion dollar Google.org foundation. A good organization to head if your mission is to spread love in the world, I think.

Subramanyum

What Brilliant’s account immediately made me think of is The First Law of Social Neuroscience: “It takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain.” In my opinion, helping to organize all our brains is the first work of parents, teachers, therapists and clergy. This appears to happen by a kind of wireless neurological transmission – provided one of the brains actually is more organized than the other at any moment in time.

There’s a good possibility that the organizing energy of love might actually be life’s default condition (emanating from, or accelerated by the heart?). Nevertheless, I seem to walk around oblivious to it most of the time. Things like stress chemicals and survival worries tend to lock me into Logical Mind, where fear lives and perceptions get far too focused and/or seriously skewed. These and other Grave Concerns frequently do a fine job of blocking any awareness I might have of love as life’s underlying energy base.

Love and Kisses and Placebos

My first hint of the possibility of love being the default organizing energy came when I was pretty young. I was out in the back yard one day, carving a wooden spear with a pocket knife, when I slipped and sliced my knee. I ran into the house frightened and bleeding and begged my mother not to take me to the hospital (I had been traumatized at Yale-New Haven hospital at age four when they took my tonsils out under general anesthesia. But I didn’t consciously know that then. I just knew to stay away from hospitals at all costs). My mother took a look, washed the blood off, and told me I would be fine … and promised no trip to the hospital. To this day, more than half a century later, I still remember the feeling of great relief! Then she kissed my knee and told me that would make it all better. And it did.

I have a suspicion that a mother’s kiss and the love exuded by an enlightened guru might have something in common: that they are each somehow related to the placebo response. The power of placebo has inexplicably nearly doubled since the 1980’s, spurring the American medical establishment into finally getting around to doing some real research on it. Some of the early findings are quite surprising. For example, where you live in the world matters to placebos – placebos administered in Germany, for example, work differently than those administered in America. And the color of a placebo pill matters, as well as how much it costs – expensive sugar pills work better than cheaper ones ordered and imported through the Internet.

The Power of Therapeutic Ritual

The conditions under which you are given a placebo matter as well. If I wear a white coat, have a medical degree and give you the placebo in a hospital setting, it’s apparently much more effective than if I administer it in your home wearing jeans and a cotton flannel shirt. The “therapeutic ritual” turns out to be a powerful enhancer of the placebo effect.

Psychotherapist Marsha Lucas, with whom I recently shared this compelling article in Wired magazine about placebos, suggested that perhaps at some level placebos are doing their best to answer The Big Brain Question “Yes!” for us. I suspect she may be right. I’d love to devise some way to empirically test that hypothesis.

To the extent that a mother’s kiss, a guru’s presence and an effective placebo are each able to calm our fears and dissipate unneeded adrenaline and cortisol, my suspicion is that they set us up to be able to touch in to the default organizing energy, this energy that we mostly know as love. I suspect it is actually this energy which has the real power to heal, and that it has little to do with the size, color, cost or the place where a sugar pill is delivered. But I’m guessing it’s going to be awhile before Big Pharma begins designing drug studies to control for the organizing energy of Love Potion # 9. There is, after all, ready, but not necessarily easy access to it for most of us.

Making the Most of Dropportunities

I know a performance artist, a contemplative juggler who’s an expert at making mistakes. One of the extraordinary things he does is teach toddlers and blind people(!) to juggle. Juggling offers a wonderful, embodied metaphor for the content of many of our lives. You can see him in action by clicking on this video link: Wooshclang! (Watch it with the audio on, you’ll find a real treat!). In the process of learning to juggle, a learner must inevitably drop the ball. What Thomas Arthur likes to call such learning experiences are … “dropportunities.” Dropportunities invariably become a necessary part of learning, especially when there is no humiliation involved. You drop a ball, you pick it up and simply begin tossing it again. No harm, no foul.

Shame versus Humiliation

When my daughter Amanda was in middle school, I once offered her $10 to deliberately get a single word wrong on a spelling test. She wouldn’t do it. The peer pressure and the potential for subsequent humiliation stressed her too much. I’ve written about humiliation before, and though we often interchange or confuse the two, humiliation is different than shame. Shame is a developmental stage that all of us encounter in the course of our natural neurological unfolding. According to UCLA neuro-psychiatrist, Allan Shore, the experience of shame results simply from us hearing the word “No” repeated over and over, as parents and other caregivers attempt to provide guidance, socialize us and keep us safe. Humiliation, however, shows up neurologically as a very different animal. People who receive humiliating and esteem-diminishing responses when they make mistakes will rarely persist in the discipline and practice required for learning. You can’t be publicly or privately humiliated and easily learn to be curious and exploratory at the same time – the flood of cortisol and adrenaline that humiliation triggers inhibits the brain from making the necessary connections required for long-term learning. Humiliation instead, often teaches us to fear making mistakes. To avoid that feeling, many of us simply avoid taking on new things that might even remotely repeat our early humiliation experiences. That, in itself, is a great shame.

The Fearless Edu-Punk Model

Based upon the large number of graduate students I encounter who are desperately afraid of taking risks or making “mistakes,” – presumably having been negatively conditioned by earlier experiences – this is actually a significant problem. Especially, when a growing number of Edu-punks are in the process of organizing the Internet to do away with the requirement to enroll in college altogether, not to mention doing away with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that result. Without internal permission to NOT attend college, we’re really literally stuck spending four years acquiring debt for a degree that may or may not one day result in a good job.

Running parallel with the discomfort that making mistakes causes, is the inability for many of today’s kids to emotionally engage and effectively self-regulate in the face of conflict. The “Whatever Generation” turn out to be consummate conflict-avoiders. At the same time, increasing research evidence suggests that engaging in, and successfully resolving conflict works to powerfully enhance neural growth and integration. This makes sense, since the most powerful learning involves emotional learning.

Making History with Necessary Mischief

It’s not an accident that Harvard history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s observation that, “Compliant women seldom make history,” Victoria Castle’s Necessary Mischief and Ann Minch’s “open letter” on the Huffington Post to Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, have all gone viral in this age of the Internet. Ulrich woke up one morning to find her simple statement of truth taken up by the women’s movement, while Castle is convinced that engaging in necessary mischief “brings greater vitality, originality, resilience, and resourcefulness into a weary world.” Which is apparently true for Minch as well, who decided she’s not going to sit still for usurious 30% interest rates, and has taken the first step in leading a debtor’s revolt. These women stopped caring about how they might look to others. They show up as truth-tellers willing to express something essential that has been lost, something yearning to be reclaimed – the candid truth of their experience. Their work (and ours?) is to creatively find ways to respond to the inevitable Dropportunities that life presents.

How about you? What increasingly larger balls are you willing to  risk  dropping? Who can you get to help you manage that risk?

Growing the Eyes of the Heart

My heart often doesn’t see very well. Some days are better than others. Some days I wake up, eye myself in the mirror, and my heart-brain echoes the Adam Sandler refrain: “What the hell happened to me?” Other days, I wake up smiling and the man in the mirror is ready to unself-consciously engage, full of possibilities and appreciation for the world. In my mid-thirties I found myself troubled by a growing suspicion that my neuro-cardio chemistry played havoc with my view of the world, most often without any mid-moment awareness. I now strongly suspect that high levels of cortisol and adrenaline worked to deeply distort my world perceptions – and mostly not in a good way. These fear-stress chemicals are not my friends in twenty-first century America, when chances of a saber-toothed tiger leaping out of the cherry tree in my back yard to eat me alive are slim to non-existent.

It’s an Inside Job

I first began to notice this distortion phenomenon with significant others in my life. For example, when she was a young teen, some days my daughter would show up as Princess Summer-fall-winter-spring. Other days, I would inexplicably find myself face to face with Chief Thunderthud. And my perceptions would usually have little to do with her outward behavior. Instead, something in me fueled this distortion – namely, I suspect, glucocorticoids running wild. When I’m calm and rested and under the compassionate, relaxing influence that many natural empathogens (love hormones) provide, I really prize and appreciate the person looking back at me in the mirror. And those closest to me as well.

Dr. Alison Gopnik

A wild and winding life path has taught me why not everyone sees the world through the same grumpy, often misanthropic eyes that I do. Unlike me, people well-cared for as children tend to show up as positive, people-loving sorts, often deeply in touch with love, truth, beauty and meaning. They grow up as Kids Who Care, kids who see clearly with the eyes of the heart. In her new book, The Philosophical Baby, Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, examines many of the elements that go into raising kids imbued with such a world view. It begins much earlier than most of us realize, pediatricians and parents included. “When it comes to imagination and learning, prefrontal immaturity allows children to be superadults,” is how Gopnik describes such early capacities. This imagination and learning are making an appearance rather late in my life. Fortunately.

Counterfactual Thinking

Counterfactual thinking is what lies at the root of imagination. Gopnik describes it as “woulda-coulda-shoulda thinking” and it’s something very young children are quite good at. It’s a way to make causal connections that give imagination its logic: “I would be able to fly if I could get big winds lift me up.” Explore and evolve creative possibilities from that wishful fantasy and you evolve to today’s Boeing Dreamlifter with a takeoff weight of over 800,000 pounds!

But counterfactual thinking, is something I’m not very good at when my system is flooded with glucocorticoids. Few of us are. I tend to hold a narrow focus and creativity is nowhere to be found. In addition, at times when I see things out in the world that disturb me, there’s little awareness in the moment that perhaps it’s my own neuro-cardio physiology that needs adjusting. I need to get myself relocated to different environments,  inside and outside.

One Central Learning

One thing I would decree as a Central Learning for myself at this late date goes something like this: whenever I’m upset for any reason that is not the result of an immediate threat to my life, I have work to do. And my work is to find ways to restore my neurophysiology to levels that allow my natural empathogens to kick in so they can do their job. In other words, doing the work of moving away from fear-based thinking, and returning to creativity and counterfactual thinking. It is precisely such work that holds the possibility of growing and strengthening the eyes of the heart.

The Four Horsemen of Neuro-Annihilation

I often think it would be very difficult to be a kid in today’s world, especially a teenager. There’s so much going on and change happens so quickly, it’s unquestionably much more stressful than when we were their age, struggling to make sense of the world. Things like Swine Flu, global warming and terrorist threat levels were unheard of then. Even though we had the same raging hormones running sprint races through our bodies, neither we, nor parents, teachers or clergy realized that our brain wouldn’t come to full flower for another six to twelve years! Few teens today will reach early adulthood with instruction or practice in managing what Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has identified as the four primary destroyers of optimal neural growth. Probably the majority of adults don’t know what they are, either.

Neuro-Annihilator One: Lack of Control

Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D.

The first neuro-annihilator for kids (and adults as well) is the experience of having little control in their lives. Teaching kids from an early age, how to recognize what they can and they can’t control in developmentally appropriate ways, and then taking steps to help facilitate them in doing so, goes a long way towards connecting up parts of the brain in the prefrontal cortex where executive function will come to reside. If you click on the link, you’ll be reminded of all the things prefrontal connections allow us to do, things like make plans, keep track of time, reflect on our actions and engage productively with groups.

Unlike many American mortgage bankers who thought it was a good idea to give “liar loans” to people with little hope of ever repaying them, a master at realizing the importance of structuring learning to allow people increasing, appropriate control, is Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. By forming the Grameen Bank which offers women in developing nations a series of graduated micro-loans beginning with $100, Yunus simultaneously puts them in control and manages to keep their neurophysiology from running wild. Compare and contrast this with America’s crushing personal and corporate debt burdens. (U.S. debt, currently the highest in history at over 11 trillion dollars, is expected to more than double in the next ten years! Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury is taking in roughly six times LESS employment tax revenues. Is this a recipe for crushing national allostatic load, or what?)

Neuro-Annihilator Two: Living with Little Predictability

The healthy brain is an anticipation-prediction machine. When we operate in environments where there is little predictability and we have little idea what to anticipate from one moment to the next, chronic stress results. This allostatic load triggers the release of high levels of glucocorticoids like adrenaline, cortisol and glutamate. Glucocorticoids circulating at high levels in the blood eventually end up destroying neurons, particularly in the hippocampus, the center of memory and learning. Things like high unemployment, delinquent bills and home foreclosures are examples of unpredictability that become stressors making it literally difficult to think straight.

Neuro-Annihilator Three: Little Social Support

Archie and Lulu

I’m pretty convinced that most relationships, when you strip away all their complexity, have a single, primary purpose – to help restore us to homeostasis, to help us feel calm and safe.

Recently, we brought two eight-week old kittens home to the house – Archie and Lulu. Initially they were very skittenish, keeping to themselves, dashing behind furniture the moment I walked into the room, and pretty much avoiding all contact. Within three days, though, they were eating out of my hand and napping on my lap. The combination of the rough-house play they continually do with each other and the freedom to rest when they are tired, works wonderfully to grow their little brains. And my letting their natural curiosity bring them to me. I then play with them using bird feathers attached to a string on a tomato stake.  I also make few loud or threatening noises, even reducing the sound of my slippers on the hardwood floor because it startles them. I am someone who “gets” them, someone who understands what scares them and refrains from doing that. So, they have each other, and they have me and my partner for effective social support. The key word being effective – able to play with and care for them and assure their safety and well-being. We do our best to answer the Big Brain Question “Yes” for Lulu and Archie.

Neuro-Annihilator Four: Having Few Outlets for Managing Stress

One question I often ask my students is: How do you know when eustress (good stress) turns into allostatic load (bad stress). I get any variety of responses, but by and large the answer is that most don’t know when that transition has been made usually until long afterwards. They have allergic reactions, make mistakes, get sick, get into accidents, obsess, sleep poorly and displace hostility onto those closest to them, often without the slightest awareness that allostatic load might be the root cause of the difficulties.

Allostatic load damages the brain by suppressing the release of “trophic factors.” (Trophe comes from the Greek word meaning “nourishment.” What sunlight and water do for tomatoes and roses, trophic factors do for brain cells). Learning to preemptively predict and effectively address such stress shifts might be the greatest nourishing gifts we can offer our children, and ourselves as well. Since the evidence is overwhelming that allostatic load significantly damages the brain, if we don’t help one another learn to effectively manage it, then unwittingly, we risk damaging all our brains.