The Stress of the Unthought Known

There’s an unpredictable neural trickster living inside each of us, taking up residence in the dendrites and synapses that weave their way through the right side of our brain. It’s been living there since before we were transformed from embryos into fetuses – between weeks seven and eight in utero. By then, great learning has already begun and the primary driver of learning and brain development turns out to be … sound! (One reason hearing is the first sense to develop and the last to leave us?). Especially powerful is the sound of mother’s voice, which we begin paying close attention to during this important time. The growth that begins unfolding, driven powerfully by mother’s voice initially, almost immediately begins making a preponderance of connections on the right side of our brain.

Many months later, as we begin to acquire language, this lopsided neural development and connectivity will begin to shift over to the left side of the brain. But this period before we acquire language is when everything of consequence in our lives that causes great anxiety or poses a threat to our survival gets registered and stored in the brain without words. These memories are something attachment researchers call The Unthought Known.

The Birth of the Unthought Known

Christopher Bollas

British psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas first coined the phrase “The Unthought Known” more than 20 years ago. What he meant by those words is anything that we “know,” but for any variety of reasons, cannot actually think about. They may be things we’ve forgotten or have an intuitive or felt sense for that we desperately struggle to put into words. Much of the content of the Unthought Known obtains from experiences in utero on and up through the first three years of our lives. Memories of these experiences live in the boundary between our conscious and unconscious mind. In addition to dreamwork and non-verbal forms of therapy, the stress we feel in our bodies is one of the primary ways to trace and uncover much the content of The Unthought Known.

During this period before we acquire language, each of us is subject to many stressful experiences, first by proxy in the womb as a result of stress our mothers experienced. If the stress is long enough and strong enough, and a return to pre-stress levels is not forthcoming in a timely fashion, our developing brain takes emergency action to shut off the “fight or flight chemicals” (cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline, glutamate, etc.) through the use of inhibitory neurons which make up roughly 30% of the brain. You can see a depiction of Inhibitory Commanders at work by visiting the Blue Brain website. This inhibitory action by the brain, in the face of unremitting stress, can then result in what neurobiologist Robert Scaer has accurately termed “dissociation capsules.”  Simply put, dissociation capsules are parts of our neural network that record and store the memories of stressful experiences. These neurons and the memories stored in them are held in check and prevented from firing and from connecting to the larger network by inhibitory neurons. Before we acquire language, these experiences are stored in the right side of the brain primarily as image and sensation. This is most likely the process by which The Unthought Known is created – virtually from conception through birth and into our first few years, the brain stores stressful experiences without the benefit of language.

Neurological Pile Ups

Having few words to speak of such experiences turns out to be a problem for neural integration. Having areas of our neural network not fully operational is less than optimal. It’s like having a pileup on the Autobahn that no one has taken the time or initiative to clear out in order to get traffic easily flowing again. It’s also very stressful. The brain recognizes this suboptimal situation however, and will earnestly attempt to get things cleared up and working again. Some of the ways it attempts this (often unsuccessfully) are through the creation and expression of things like nightmares and panic attacks.

Another way the brain appears to attempt repair is through something Freud long ago identified as the repetition compulsion. Taking his lead from Freud and French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, Harvard trauma expert, Bessel van der Kolk has identified that our “body keeps the score,” and it does so beginning shortly after conception continuously through our whole lifespan. What it keeps score of are real or perceived threats to our survival. Much of that score-keeping, unfortunately shows up in our neural network as the previously-mentioned “dissociation capsules.” Dissociation capsules most frequently occur when overwhelming experiences take place that leave us frozen or immobilized. Surgical operations that employ a general anesthesia are an all too common example of such an experience. With babies strapped to a swaddling board, circumcision is another (My suspicion is that physical movement restricted by swaddling itself may lead to less than optimal neurological development).

One of the ways the reticular activating structures of the brain work to help re-open and re-connect these non-operational or minimally functioning neural structures is by continually scanning the environment in order to find people, places and circumstances that have a similar look and feel to those that created the original encapsulations or engrams. In doing so, somatic psychologists Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton and Clare Pain contend that re-engaging with “familiar” people and/or circumstances and being able to take “triumphant action” in the presence of a significant, understanding, other person, often results in these non-functioning neurons being able to reconnect back up to the larger network and return to being a healthy, reintegrated part of the larger brain. This process of unconscious parts of our brain and mind working to continually move in the direction of greater integration can be a profoundly stress-generating process. Why?

Revisiting Our Wounding

One reason is that in an attempt to resolve early overwhelming experiences, it is continually attempting to place us back in circumstances that we originally were overwhelmed by. And resolution unfortunately, is not so easy to accomplish. When our internal neural trickster guides us into situations with familiar traumatic elements in them, and resolution fails to take place, there is growing laboratory evidence that we suffer damage on top of the damage that has already occurred.

Fortunately, in recent years a number of innovative therapies have been developed to address the stress generated by memories stored in The Unthought Known. Many of them are somatic-based in their approach, incorporating the recognition of the important role played by the body. Some, such as EMDR and Cranial Sacral Therapy, are continuing to have rigorous studies done to confirm their efficacy. Others, like Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing, Emotional Freedom Therapy and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy have a preponderance of anecdotal evidence available in support of their effectiveness. With continuing research efforts and application, in the not-too-distant future, we may all come to better know and be significantly less stressed by The Unthought Known.

The Cost of the Cut: Reflections on Infant Circumcision

by Jeanne Denney

I remember the day after my first child was born. A well-known “OB to the Stars” in New York City who delivered my son came in to see what we wanted to do about circumcision. “This is completely up to you,” she said with authority. “But it only takes a minute and he won’t remember a thing. I do it myself. It is absolutely not a big deal.” I trusted her judgment in a New York nanosecond as I had trusted her throughout the labor. She was beyond confident. I, on the other hand, was 27 years old and quite without confidence. I was unprepared for mothering and comforted by the idea that  the medical establishment had the answers. Still, I had the good sense to turn to my husband, saying simply, “This is up to you.” Nick declined the procedure for Michael, and later for Peter and Gil, our two twin boys even though, or perhaps because, he himself had been circumcised at birth.

Later on, I was surprised to discover the emotions our choice triggered in my father. Not having been circumcised after his home birth on an Iowa  farm, he had it done in the Navy and found it a brutal experience, one he did not want his grandchild to go through. “Best to just get it over and done with early,” he said, never questioning the ultimate need for it, the timing of doing it with a newborn, the humanity of the procedure itself or its ultimate side effects on body or psyche. Dad’s conclusion that it would never be remembered still seems to be the norm in America. Though circumcision rates in the United States have declined from 90% to 57% in the past 40 years, it is still much more common here than in Europe, Australia or Canada where rates are usually well under 20%.

Traumatic Learning

Because of this pervasive lack of public dialogue on this subject, it was probably fifteen years before I discovered literature on trauma while I was studying and practicing body psychotherapy. I learned that, far from never remembering traumas of this nature, a baby’s nervous system registers events such as birth, early bonding and circumcision with a strong neural imprint. In these imprints are messages about the safety and kindness of the world that often lasts a lifetime. Further, I began to notice that circumcision was an experience that exerted a significant influence on the psyches of my male clients. It was certainly far from the innocuous, small procedure, assumed forgotten, I had been assured about after Michael’s birth. I began to ask myself: “Where  had my OB’s authoritative certainty that it would be ‘no big deal’ to my baby come from?” It certainly did not appear to come from sound medical or psychological research.

The idea that babies and children are not significantly influenced by harsh experiences because they do not  have conscious recall of them later, is the greatest distortion of truth I have had to witness as a doula, therapist and mother, one that seems to live on in hospitals and within medical personnel despite their often very good conscious intentions. It is an idea that should, in my opinion, be challenged loudly and at every possible opportunity by many voices, good research and common sense.

Rachel’s Story

Challenging such thinking is just what my friend Rachel did a couple of years ago, however it was not without a price. As a new nurse on a labor and delivery floor in a large New York City hospital, Rachel was given circumcision support duty as one of her first assignments. She had no idea where this duty would take her. When I talked with her after her first few months she was visibly distraught by her job and the suffering she was witnessing. She also worried that she might lose her job for complaining loudly and often about something that seemed unnecessarily cruel. The circumcisions Rachel was assisting were generally administered with no anesthesia to babies. This is a traditional practice still in common use despite the fact that the American Association of Pediatrics does not consider circumcision  medically necessary and has advocated for the use of anesthesia since 1999. (A compelling, but graphic description of what Rachel was witnessing can be read in this description offered by then nursing student, Marilyn Milos who eventually founded NOCIRC).

Being naturally empathic, Rachel’s  experience of the agony of infants during this procedure was nearly more than her nervous system could bear. She was forthright in her complaints to doctors about not using the anesthesia, and assertive in requesting that they follow APA recommendations. She even counseled parents to request the anesthesia, and advised them this would probably not happen without their active intervention (a practice that did not make her popular with colleagues). Indeed, she once witnessed a doctor blatantly ignore a parent’s request for local anesthesia for their child’s circumcision (don’t, and say you did!), unilaterally deciding that it was unnecessary. I am sure that Rachel’s  empathic presence helped many babies she comforted post-operatively, but the toll this compassion took on her own mind and body was extreme. Being new, young and not yet numb to the experience of suffering before her, her own nervous system was at risk. She began to lose both weight and hair as symptoms of what is now recognized as “vicarious trauma.”

Awakening Direct Awareness

I am not saying here that it is necessarily unethical to circumcise infants or intending in any way to impose guilt about choices families make. Certainly if my husband had answered, “Yes, please, let’s have the circumcision,” I would have complied without thought and would have known little about my child’s experience. Circumcision is a world-wide, cross-cultural practice often associated with the initiation of males and religious rites. It has been around a long time and is likely to  be with us for a long time to come. There are undoubtedly arguments in its favor that must be weighed. However, there seems to be ample and growing evidence from places like Circumcision Information and Resource Pages   http://www.cirp.org/, the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers  http://www.nocirc.org/, or advocacy organizations such as Intact America www.intactamerica.org that circumcision as we often do it, is an unnecessary surgery which is significantly traumatizing to infants and may be associated with later sexual problems such as impotence, premature ejaculation, and erection dysfunction. Advocates often note the ethical problem of permanently disfiguring the body of someone else without their consent. Perhaps most importantly, most circumcisions happen without loving parents present to comfort and reassure the baby, and often without the basic courtesy of anesthesia that any one of us would demand if the most delicate part of our body was to be ritually modified.

I recall Mark’s “Big Brain Question” here. A newborn getting a circumcision alone with strangers has got to be screaming, “Are you there for me?!” and “What kind of painful world is this!?,” and not getting very good answers. At least that is what Rachel and other witnesses to live circumcisions tell me (even with anesthesia). Surely if we can put newborns through it, we should be willing to go through such an initiation ourselves, even if only as witnesses and empaths. I have a feeling that directly observing this experience might change a lot of our unexamined views on the subject.

Our Greatest Human Failing …

… could also be our greatest growing edge. What is it? I can’t really speak for you, so I’ll speak for me. My greatest human failing is this: for most of my life I’ve been a very poor contingent communicator. In a graduate school clinical psychology class, where the professor invited each of us to sit in the “hot seat” in the front of the room and take “feedback” from the other students, the critique I heard most often was that I didn’t really engage, didn’t really respond in connecting, resonant ways. People didn’t have any strong sense of who I was.

The reason they didn’t have this sense is because I didn’t have it myself. And the reason I didn’t have it, I suspect, is because I was missing critical limbic-prefrontal connections that are created in the brain by the process of early and frequent contingent communication. These missing connections are very likely the result of not having parents consistently present and accounted for and able to regularly respond to me early on – no possessors of superbly organized brains to help organize my urgent, budding neural networks.

What Is Contingent Communication?

Prof. Colwyn Trevarthen

There has been lots of research on the importance of secure attachment in early child development, and by inference, early brain development and integration. When Colwin Trevarthen, currently considered by some to be the world’s foremost authority on attachment research, was asked what he thought might be the most critical factor in promoting secure attachment, he replied without hesitation: contingent communication. This makes sense, since the brain is an associative organ and seems to grow best when getting accurate, attuned responses in safe situations from other caring human beings.

But what specifically is contingent (or collaborative) communication and why is it so important? And why have I struggled with it so? As I mentioned, the general answer is … early neglect. But, like the brain itself, contingent communication is complex and subtle and often exquisitely nuanced. UCLA Neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel, writing in The Developing Mind, suggests that these lack of early social interactions are primarily responsible for me failing to develop the ability for easy emotional regulation and something called “response flexibility” – the ability to flexibly and creatively adapt to changing events in lieu of often being emotionally reactive or simply mute (often both/and in my case).

Taken at its roots, there are essentially three components required of us to communicate effectively and contingently. One is we have to receive whatever message is being sent in all it’s complexity. This often includes what isn’t being said, as well as the many nonverbal ways that messages get communicated, much of which is often missing in emails and articles like this one. (Emoticons being a poor substitute for the emotional attunement in face to face interactions ).

Two is, after we receive a message, we have to accurately understand its meaning. If you say something to me and I simply look back at you blankly (something I have done a lot in my life), or if you email me a message and get nothing back from me in response, it’s difficult to accurately understand the meaning of that kind of non-response. In such an absence, our minds/brains tend to fill the void and attempt to make meaning with explanatory fictions: “He doesn’t like me.” “He’s weird.” “He’s too busy.” “The email must have gone in to the Spam folder.” Rarely though, will the story be: he appears to be someone with damage to Broca’s area which seems to be affecting his ability to use language to readily respond. This in fact often feels like it’s the case though, for me in my experience.

Third and finally, for communication to be contingent, we must respond in a timely and effective manner. A mute response or a long delayed response is neither timely nor effective, and unquestionably fails the test for collaborative/contingent communication. Such failures happen consistently in contemporary culture in my experience, prime examples being one-way radio and television broadcasting, or talking on the phone while multitasking or listening to your iPod while interacting with other people. There are great opportunity costs in these enterprises for brain development and integration.

Proximate Separation

Most of us have had the experience of being with someone who’s body is present, but whose heart, mind, brain and soul is visiting elsewhere. This frequent inability to be fully present and accounted for, emotionally and cognitively in any moment, seems to have a neurological basis. It’s one that appears to have its roots in the nursery, where, simply put, a lack of contingent communication has inhibited the necessary neural connections that later permit sustained focus and ready emotional regulation. And the good news is that this necessary connectivity is something that neuroscience research is showing contemplative practices seem to be able to help establish later in life. Consequently, kudos are in order to people like Susan Greenland and her family at Inner Kids working diligently to teach kids attention, balance and compassion to help insure those connections get established as early as possible! And it is for similar reasons that I have written a number of books on listening as a contemplative practice – my own attempt to take this personal failing and do my best to turn it into a gift. May we all benefit from diligent practice.

Grokking the Gray Side of Social Neuroscience

Last week I read a scary news report. It bought to mind totalitarian images of George Orwell’s 1984 or Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report. Since I’m trained by people like Pema Chödrön and Robert McKee and Natalie Goldberg to pay attention to the stories that scare me, I did what anyone in their right mind would do – I pulled Michael Gazzaniga’s book, The Ethical Brain off the shelf and began reading about neuroethics. Why? Because as more and more knowledge and understanding about the brain emerges, it’s going to have greater and greater impact on our laws and culture. To me it seems better to be reasonably informed than repeatedly emotionally reactive.

Neuroethics

Dr. Michael Gazzaniga

Neuroethics is concerned with “the rights and wrongs of the treatment of, or enhancement of the human brain.” Gazzaniga considers this area to be one where knowledgeable people do their best to come up with a brain-based philosophy of life. He’s not particularly concerned about giving science or government an inch, fearful of them sliding down the “slippery slope” and taking a mile. And for good reason.

Gazzaniga argues that the direction that human evolution and brain development appears to be taking us is towards a universal set of biological responses to moral dilemmas – a sort of organic ethics is slowly evolving in the development of healthy brains. It’s for this reason, in part, that despots with unhealthy brains inevitably become overthrown, a high percentage of criminals with similar brains eventually get caught, and abhorrent practices that promote unnecessary suffering, like male and female circumcision sooner or later become eradicated. It’s also why evil scientists will never conquer the world with an army of “humanzees,” a human-chimp hybrid. The direction of brain development is oriented towards the good.

One of the ethical questions Gazzaniga attempts to grapple with is: “When does an embryo become a person?”  He argues that the joining of egg and sperm is not the beginning of life since sperm and egg were both alive before the union. At what point on the journey from two cells to the 50 trillion that eventually come to make up an adult human should this creation be considered a person?

To those who have actually studied and borne direct witness to this microscopic early period of development, Gazzaniga reports that there is a clear perceptual moment when an embryo becomes a person. It is an unmistakable moment that is “stark, defining and real.” This is an easily recognizable change that takes place during the eighth week of pregnancy. Should this be the moment when an embryo is granted moral status? Or should it begin at conception? Or at fourteen days when an individual zygote (the size of the period under the question mark at the end of this sentence) is believed to be “cemented,” that is, no longer capable of becoming twins? Or perhaps at day 40 when, on average, primitive unorganized electrical activity first begins in the brain? (Gazzaniga also presents a fascinating discussion on the issue of when, once conferred, moral status should be withdrawn, for example with people in a coma or with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. But that’s a different discussion).

Gazzaniga does not profess to know the answer to this question of precisely when moral status should be conferred, and neither do I. I suspect though that the decision is rightly left to us as individuals and that we’d probably be better served not having science or big government making such decisions for us. But I might be wrong.

Sin Bins for Brain-Damaging Families

The story ***that upset me last week was one where big government apparently did make such an absolute decision. The government of Great Britain decided to place 20000 families under 24-hour in-house, constant closed circuit TV monitoring. The very idea of someone watching everything I do in my own home every moment of every day makes my skin crawl! And yet, these are disorganized families who appear to be disrupting the community and doing serious damage to their children. Is placing them in jail and their kids in foster care a better option? It’s certainly a more costly one, according to the article. And jailing people violates The First Law of Social Neuroscience: “It takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain.” Putting people in jail where they regularly mix and interact with people often more abused and brain-damaged than they are does little to improve their neurology.

So, while a story like this may initially get my limbic juices all fired up, I’m resolved not to let my fear of imagined extreme possibilities hinder what potential good may actually come out of programs like this one.

*** I’ve since come to find out this story was not factually accurate!

What about you?

Food-Rehabbing My Big Fat Brain

As I’ve mentioned here from time to time, I grew up in a housing project on welfare. Such beginnings provided their fair share of allostatic load resulting in a lot of less-than-best early brain conditioning. One area where me and my brain currently struggle mightily is in the area of food and nutrition.

Life on welfare was subsistence living. The welfare check came the first of the month, and after the rent was paid, groceries were ordered. Usually, by the second week of the month the groceries were all gone; but due to the kindness of Ralph, the greengrocer who owned the Fairview Market and provided us with a small mid-month grocery delivery on credit, it wasn’t until the final week of every month that things got more than a little dicey.

To supplement this situation, I took a job delivering the New Haven Register weekdays after school and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. That provided me with pocket money to spend on things I would buy from Charlie. Charlie owned a big step van, a traveling, high-priced grocery store that visited the projects twice a day, selling high-markup items to folks without cars or bus money – shut-ins stuck in the projects and unable to get to the nearest First National Store miles away in Westville. With virtually no nutritional guidance and very little supervision, what I mostly bought with my paper route money was candy, cookies, soda and ice cream – things I am still addicted to, and struggle mightily with, some 50+ years later. Needless to say, this is a diet that is not optimal for heart, brain, mind or body, and I often feel like a junkie with head down and gaze averted in the grocery store when I score a box of Good and Plenty, Famous Amos, Fudgecicles or Black Crows. One purpose eating high sugar foods serves now is the same one it served then: it works rapidly to help me regulate anxiety, lessen allostatic load, something the prefrontal connections in my brain apparently aren’t able to easily accomplish on their own. I was seemingly saved from an early life of struggling with weight issues due to a process researchers call “Banking” – being very active early as a kid. But my savings have been depleted and weight management has become difficult. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that I’m better off denying, rationalizing or simply accepting fat as my fate.

I Am Not Alone

I’m clearly not the only one struggling with diet and nutrition these days: the Center for Disease Control estimates health costs due to high weight have increased nearly 50% in a mere eight years. At the same time, revolving door manufacturers have had to widen their doors by two feet, coffin-manufacturers have begun offering the “Triple-Wide” and flying overweight people is estimated to cost the airlines more than a quarter billion extra dollars in jet fuel annually. The problem particularly affects overweight children between ages six and eleven, whose numbers have more than doubled in less than ten years, tripled in the last twenty-five.

There is more and more research appearing attempting to both explain and remedy this growing epidemic. My favorite is something I call the Big Brain Theory. Michael Power and Jay Schulkin at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists argue in The Evolution of Obesity that our 21^st century brains are currently required to process more energy and information than ever before in human history. This makes them high calorie demanding organs – more than three times the size of our Australopithecus ancestors, whose growth was subsequently spurred during the last Ice Age. Since then, our body’s ability to process and not store the fuel required for the higher energy demands of our more complex, energy and information processing brains hasn’t kept pace for many of us. Not only that, but since the eighties, the cost of fattening foods has dropped by as much as 20 percent, making soft drinks the number one food consumed in the American diet. If we only gave up soft drinks and substituted water for a year instead, supposedly we would each lose fifteen pounds.

But the problem for me is more than just soft drinks. Add in the fact that food scientists are hard at work fashioning foods known in the industry as “eatertainment,” using a lot of fat, sugar and salt to create “a lot of fun in my mouth,” resulting in “conditioned hypereating,” and my early conditioning makes me especially susceptible to things like Cinnebons or Strawberries and Crème Frappuccinos. Conditioned hypereating of food works in the brain, much like compulsive gambling or substance abuse. And what I appear to lack are circuits in my brain sufficiently connected to be able to readily and easily regulate the impulses and food cravings that mindlessly drive my behavior. In other words, I have a neural deficiency.

One Small Kind Step for Man

So, what are my options at this point.  If I ask the Two Perilous Questions, what’s true for me is I don’t like being as heavy as I am, and I don’t like feeling helpless or the experience of being controlled by food cravings. I want to get my conditioning up and my weight down – to under 200 pounds. Unlike with drugs, alcohol or nicotine (which, thankfully, haven’t been challenges for me), I can’t simply quit food cold turkey. But I can identify one area of “food” I ingest and quit that. So, that’s what I’m doing. I’m electing to go cold turkey with soft drinks. I’m currently on Day Two.  I’ll report here periodically on how it’s going. If you can believe that.

Liar, Liar, Brain on Fire

The older I get the more an inveterate, unrepentant liar I find myself becoming. The mechanism is essentially a simple one: the lies I tell tend to offer ready relief from whatever tension I’m feeling at the moment. Take just the other day – I was at the DMV and the examiner asked me how much I weighed. I lied. Last week, a student I like asked me what I thought of a paper I know she put a lot of time and energy into. I lied. Thursday, Valerie, the postal clerk here in Langley, asked me if the package I was sending contained anything other than books. Once again, I lied.

Lies often work much faster and easier than telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Truth is often complex, subjective and situational. And the truth, researchers are finding, turns out to be very plastic, indeed. People who know me and love me in all my pseudology, make it easy for me to often tell the truth spontaneously; as well as to “nuance” it. They, and I, have great admiration for creatively, well-crafted spin.

Well Trained for the Role

Lying is something I was trained to do well as a kid, by parents, teachers and adults who didn’t really want to hear the truth, and who regularly punished anyone who unvarnished it. Getting yelled at or punished for truth-telling it turns out can’t compete with the relief from stress and tension that lying provides in the moment. I think it would have been better to have been offered an environment where it was safe to tell hard truths, and then also be taught how to manage the adrenaline and cortisol that is often triggered in response by people like Tom Cruise, in A Few Good Men, who can’t really handle such truths. This would require parents, teachers and such, becoming skilled at managing their own emotional reactivity, of course. How likely is that?

Lying has turned out to be a pretty big problem in world culture, as the current international economic crisis would seem to bear out. (Not surprisingly, Joe Cassano, the man who “crashed the world” was reportedly a great punisher of truth-tellers). When Big Money is involved – the kind that makes New Jersey rabbis and mayors take graft, and Dominican baseball prospects lie about their age to the New York Yankees (Personally, I’m a San Francisco Giant’s fan) – liars seem to be coming out of the woodwork these days.

The Hard Work of Lying

The recent technological ability to view blood flow in people’s brains as they lie, is causing great concern in the neurosciences. The ethics of being able to accurately read people’s minds and things like that are of concern. Such concerns might be needlessly misplaced though – lying should be considered a given,  since many of us lie … a lot. By omission and commission; willfully and otherwise; consciously and unconsciously, even though we might not readily tell the truth about it.

Lying, like forgetting, might be an important and necessary neurophysiological regulatory mechanism. Recent research by Joshua Greene has come up with the “Will” and “Grace” theory of why people lie or don’t when it’s in their best interest to do so. Lying is hard work, and us natural born liars – or should I say early-conditioned liars – apparently really have to labor hard at telling the truth:

“When honest people leave money on the table, you don’t see anything special or extra going on in their brains at all,” says Greene. “Whereas, when dishonest people leave money on the table, that’s when you see the most robust control network activation.”

To Lie or Forget, That is the Question

But can simply not remembering things accurately be considered lying, or are intent and self-concern necessary additional criteria? In a study often cited in the Recovered Memory literature, after incidents of sexual abuse were publicly reported at an inner-city hospital, thirty-eight percent (!) of the women Linda Williams interviewed 17 years later, reported no recollection of the incident. What might be the brain mechanisms for this occurrence? Repression? Sublimation? Traumatic Dissociation? Whatever it is, to me it begs further study. Knowing what’s going on neurologically may help us more skillfully address it.

One of the most well-known longitudinal studies in modern psychology is George Vaillant’s Harvard happiness study. Formally known as the Grant Study, for nearly 72 years researchers have regularly checked in on 268 men through career, marriage, divorce, parenthood, grandparenthood and old age. Half of those alive are currently in their 80’s. What’s most interesting is how wrong many of them turned out to be in recalling significant events from their past, as distortion, denial and sublimation twisted memories into a pretzel of illusory personal history.

Mr. Mad Cow, Esq.

Take for example, Case No. 218 in the Grant Study, who in one interview expresses healthy regrets for roads not taken, yet subsequently neither has nor recalls any regrets at all. Or the person who at 30 yearned to become a doctor, but in later years completely denied any such desire. “As is well known,” Vaillant reminds us, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.” Forgetting? Or lying? It all looks like Mad Cow to me.

So, let’s see now. In this piece, as I count them up, I’ve managed to tell seven lies here!  Not too shabby. There may even be more, subtly interwoven, of course.

Oh, and by the way, lastly, here’s some interesting research: if I share my birthday with you, you’ll be more likely to buy my book.

Guess what! My birthday is tomorrow, July 27^th!

Repairing Good Brains Gone Bad

Last week, the story of Lt. Collette McLennan, a Seattle firefighter, played on our local news. She took herself to the hospital eleven days after finally realizing her brain might be damaged. She was operated on for a brain aneurysm and back at work full-time four short months later. Here’s the part of the story that caught my attention:

She credits her family of firefighters for playing a big part in her recovery. “That’s what we do, we’re a family,” said her Battalion Chief, Tom Richardson. “We made sure a firefighter was with her at the hospital, and after she went home, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

A Resounding “Yes!”

In my mind, this family of firefighters was clearly answering The Big Brain Question “Yes!” in a very big way. I can’t help but wonder what effect they may have had on her neurobiology as it functioned in her recovery. She seems to think it was considerable. I do as well. What would be really interesting is to find out just how answering that question “Yes” might work to effect such rapid healing. Having spent many years with grieving kids and adults, I have some ideas.

What I consider to be the “First Law” of Social Neuroscience is: “It takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain.” It applies to young kids most obviously when they learn things from older kids that parents wish they didn’t. But I think this First Law might also apply to immune systems and body healing mechanisms as well. The bedside manner of a trusted authority figure might have more healing power than we imagine. It might also be at play in placebo efficacy, wirelessly reorganizing a less-than-optimally functioning healing mechanism. I once had a nearly severed toe healed virtually overnight after receiving a hands-on blessing from the controversial Indian guru Sri Chinmoy. And I’ve had many unmistakable, palpable experiences of receiving healing Reiki transmissions at a distance from skillful practitioners of that art. So, while there might not be a lot of rigorous, scientifically-controlled experiments to confirm such experiences, in my mind there are certainly more than enough anecdotal reports to continue creative inquiry and experimentation in this area.

Mastering the Healing Mystery

Leroy Hood wants to transform health care in America into a system that is predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory. Along the way, he will very likely be addressing some of what is currently of great mystery in healing. What, for example, might be the mechanisms at work for all these cases of cancer spontaneously remitting as reported by Brendan O’Regan (before he himself died of cancer!) in the research he performed for the Institute of Noetic Sciences? Or what of Norman Cousins, an adjunct professor at UCLA who researched the biochemistry of human emotions, and who purportedly laughed himself healed from the pain and fatigue of ankylosing spondylitis (a chronic inflammatory arthritis) using a daily dose of Marx brothers comedies. Laughter might not only be good for the soul, but good for the connections in the brain as well.

Bernie Siegel, M.D.

Finally, what energies or neurobiological processes might have also been at work in the life of Evy McDonald, a registered nurse who Dr. Bernie Siegel writes about in Peace, Love and Healing. Evy cured herself of Lou Gerhig’s Disease by devising her own unique (some might say “crazy” or “silly”) personal treatment plan.

Evy lists seven changes that she made in her life which she considers primarily responsible for her full recovery – changes which presumably significantly altered her brain:

I went from get to give – demanding from life to giving to life. (I’ve previously presented Stephen Post’s research on the great neurological benefits of altruism).

I went from resentment to forgiveness. (I’ve also mentioned the healing power of forgiveness in conjunction with Fred Luskin’s Stanford Forgiveness Project, surely an important aspect of peace, love and healing).

I went from self-hatred to self-acceptance and unconditional love. (Interestingly, she “faked it till she made it.” In other words, she practiced using repetition to gain an ability she didn’t possess, until at last she came to authentically possess it).

I went from wanting to escape from life to accepting life exactly as it is. (This forced her to ask and answer The Two Perilous questions for herself with ruthless compassion).

I went from expecting and preparing for death to celebrating life and living every moment. (There’s apparently great neurological benefit in learning to fully Be Here Now).

I went from denying painful emotions to sharing them and letting them go. (An important, often neglected exocrine function? One not much different from sweating, crying or urinating?).

I went from avoiding intimacy to opening myself to love.

The Soft Subtle Energies of Love

Cuddle Bunnies

This last shift Evy identifies as actually a product of the other six – and perhaps the most important one. She cites a well-known, 30 year old experiment at Ohio State University by Nerem, Levesque and Cornhill where rabbits were given a “heart attack diet” to demonstrate atherosclerotic changes. One group of rabbits had 60 percent less atherosclerotic changes than the other groups. The only variable discovered was that the researcher for this group regularly took the rabbits from their cages and petted, stroked and talked to them, an experiment subjected to many confirmation studies. “Intimacy at every level – emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical – is the flowering of unconditional love.” Not to mention, a flowering that apparently restores neurological function and optimizes immune systems.

To me what this and other research shows is that generally positive emotions – much different than simply putting on a Pollyanna face, which is a response more like denial – tends to help build resilience. Resilience might turn out to be something like simply having more brain neurons, no longer overly devastated by past traumatic physical and emotional injury, making more and more immune-specific connections in the brain.

The result: a repaired brain that significantly improves health and human functioning.

Learning to Love Learning

Amanda’s mother and I were very fortunate to be able to send her to an alternative neighborhood school – the Peninsula School, founded by Josephine Duvenek in 1925 on the San Francisco peninsula. I was recently reminded that it’s a true Tinkering School by the presentation here at this year’s TED conference by Gever Tulley who teaches at a similar school. Peninsula was featured years ago as one of nine schools in Emmy-winning documentary film-maker, Dorothy Fadiman’s excellent account of early education in Why Do These Kids Love School?

The Benefits of Loving School

When kids go to a school they love, any number of important benefits for brain development takes place. Because there is little pressure to conform to national norms, it’s kids’ unique neurological wiring that tends to be prized and appreciated and validated. Being prized and appreciated and validated is one of many powerful ways of answering The Big Brain Question “Yes” for kids. And when that question is consistently answered “Yes,” some essential benefits accrue for neural growth and connectivity. Here’s but ONE possible fun example: Superkids! (Seriously, click the link. You won’t be sorry!).

A Tinkering School for Grownup Kids

I am further fortunate to teach at a graduate school (The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) where students enroll primarily because we offer classes in subjects they really want to learn. Most are not there just to get a degree. They tend to be highly engaged and motivated students unhindered by internal conflict, a state that allows them to go creatively and passionately into their studies, something we whole-heartedly embrace and encourage, not to mention, prize, appreciate and validate. (My own dissertation research – in part, how spiritual communities provide shelter for their members – was something I was deeply interested in at the time. I was caught completely unaware when the president of ProQuest – where all American doctoral dissertations go to rest – called me personally one day to tell me mine was one of the most interesting studies he had ever read! I attribute much of that result to the support and encouragement I received from the school community. It was lack of such personal and validating support that contributed to me transferring to ITP from UCLA way back when).

Learning as Art

Josh Waitzkin, a twenty-one time national martial arts champion and eight time national chess champion, was the subject of his father’s book and the subsequent movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer. In his own book, The Art of Learning, he speaks in detail about how much learning often requires risk-taking, the giving up of comfort and safety that ultimately results in the drive and ambition that allows “the freedom to create like a child under world championship pressure!” To get there, learners often have to return to Tinkering School, go through a rough patch where we are “soft, in flux, vulnerable, broken-down or in a period of growth.” This description would also seem to apply to Michael Jackson, whose life’s work was revisited in his memorial celebration this past week. It would also apply to Paul Simon, who was recently honored at the Library of Congress with the nation’s first George Gershwin prize.

Waitzkin further points out that “much of what separates the great from the good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered. This is a nuanced and largely misunderstood state of mind that when refined involves a subtle reintegration of the conscious mind into a free-flowing unconscious process.” In other words, high level brain integration that results from strong intention and committed practice.

To Last For the Long Run, Make It Fun

When I think of the 30 years that Eric Kandel spent studying just two neurons in Aplysia, the California sea snail, I marvel and wonder at what I imagine was his own commitment and persistence. The fact that what he was doing was actually fun for him – something he really enjoyed getting out of bed and doing every day – I’m guessing played a big role as well. A fan of Freud, he originally set out to find the neural correlates of the ego, and Aplysia provided him with his own living Tinkering School. Stimulating the two neurons visible to the naked eye in Aplysia, allowed Kandel to devise countless creative experiments fueled by curiosity and wonder. The result: he discovered precisely how learning and memory operate in the human brain and won the Nobel Prize for that work.

That’s a pretty fine result from just playing around for 30 years. Would that we could relax and let all of our kids have so much fun for so much of their lives.

(To see a poem about Aplysia, hand-written by Kandel’s daughter Minouche, click here and scroll to the bottom of the screen).

How to Give Kids Cancer

Here’s a recently published study that I hope will turn out to become a landmark and be the last of its kind that ever needs to be done: Child Abuse and Cancer. Essentially, abused children run almost a 50% higher risk for contracting cancer later on as adults than those who haven’t been abused. Admittedly, many of the causes of cancer remain mysterious and complex, but as a result of reading books like Bob Scaer’s The Body Bears the Burden and The Trauma Spectrum, and oncologist Gabor Mate’s When the Body Says “No!,” this study makes perfect sense to me. I’ve often wondered why, on a percentage basis, incidents of cancer have increased so profoundly over the last 100 years? I think a pretty compelling neurological case could be made that is it because incidents of child abuse have increased as well, perhaps leaving many children’s brains severely compromised like this.

The High Costs of Doing Nothing

Several years back, Suzette Fromm conservatively calculated the direct and indirect annual costs of child abuse from reported incidents at 100 billion dollars. Privately, she told me that she only used reported incidents (which is estimated at only 6% of all incidents), because when she told people what she thought the real costs were, based on all incidents of child abuse in America, people’s eyes glazed over or they simply didn’t believe her. It’s kind of like Freud during the Victorian era refusing to believe that the primary cause of so many of his women patients’ difficulties were rooted in the sexual abuse they experienced as kids. His incredulity forced him to contort his thinking until he finally came up with the bizarre explanatory fiction called: Penis Envy! Not one of his finer contributions.

But if we don’t distort our own thinking like Freud, and add adult-onset cancer to the list of annual abuse costs, which was $72 billion in 2004, I’m pretty sure we can add over another $100 billion dollars to those costs.

Controlling for Abuse

And then, of course, abused children often turn out to be abusers themselves. Why? Because the damage that has been done to them often prevents abused children from being able to self-regulate their emotional reactivity to the people and circumstances that life brings their way as adults (or that their brains unconsciously draw them to, in futile attempts to compulsively heal the trauma?). Because they can’t control themselves, as a society we are forced to find other means to try to provide “self-control.” We call one of those “other means” prisons. Prison-building, as you may know, has exploded here in America in recent years. America has five percent of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners.

If we add in the $50,000 annual cost of housing the 2.2 million people in prison in America in 2006, we can add another 100 billion dollars to our growing costs! And that’s not factoring in the lost productivity and opportunity costs that would be obtained were these folks well and working to make a positive contribution to the world.

More Money, More Suffering

Paraphrasing the observation popularly attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen, “A hundred billion here and a hundred billion there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real money.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the real total costs of child abuse in this country were over a trillion dollars annually. (To get a proportional sense of these numbers, consider that a million seconds is a little less than 12 days. A billion seconds, roughly 32 years. A hundred billion seconds is just shy of … 320 years.  A trillion seconds puts us back 100 years before Christ, and sends us forward into a very tentative future).

So, disease and crime and early abuse are all connected, resulting in a lot of money being spent, money that will most likely not pay much of a return, mostly because so many parents, teachers and caregivers don’t really know when their actions are causing damage. Nor do they know how to repair such damage once it’s occurred. In my opinion, this is where the real education and interventions need to be aimed – at the harm that is done unwittingly to our children as a result of simple ignorance (for example, screaming at kids!).

Profound Human Suffering

Underneath all that money, what we’re really talking about though, is profound human suffering. And it’s suffering that’s widespread, suffering that begins early and often repeatedly recurs over a lifetime.

It was out of making these connections between early abuse and lifelong suffering, that it seemed to make the most sense to me to attempt to focus on early, optimal interventions. A lifetime of leverage can be gained by beginning to educate parents, teachers and caregivers about the brain, even when children are still in utero. Together with continued, mentored learning, like that provided by the midwife Colorado-based, Nurse-Family Partnership, we can greatly optimize the first three years of every child’s development in areas like immune and executive function, social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, and basic overall human goodness.

It seems like something not only “best for the children,” but ideal for the caring, connected adults it’s possible to become as well.

Growing Our Gandhi Neurons

One of my favorite working neuroscientists is V.S. Ramachandran at the University of San Diego. He reminds me a lot of Nobel Prizewinner, Eric Kandel, someone who loves to investigate anomalies and who is acutely aware of the role that intuition and play play in scientific discovery. He can’t remember where he parks his car, but Ramachandran dreams up all kinds of simple, creative experiments aimed at alleviating people’s pain. For example, he used a five dollar drugstore mirror to rid amputees of phantom limb pain, a procedure that has been tested and adopted by The Walter Reed Army Hospital. He was also the first researcher to publish the fact that the brain doesn’t let unused real estate simply go to weeds. If we lose our sight, the area of the brain customarily developed for vision – the visual cortex – will be taken over by other nearby sensory areas, like hearing and touch. It’s a kind of neural redevelopment project that reliably happens in our heads.

Jesus on the Brain

Ramachandran has been described as both “the Marco Polo of neuroscience” and a free-thinking “poet of neurology.” As an example, off the top of his head he hypothesized a mechanism for how people might hear God or Jesus speaking to them. The thoughts we think every day produce unconscious movement in our vocal cords. Brain damage that results in enhanced sub-vocalization might be the actual process that produces the sensation of an outside voice speaking inside one’s head. In fact, my suspicion is that any number of neurological anomalies might be responsible for many of the “spiritual” experiences that have been passed down to us through the ages. Early life was considerably more stressful then, and trauma-induced neural disorganization very likely accounts for many such “visitations.” For example, if I begin seeing auras or hearing voices coming from a burning bush on my little offshore island, one might question the strength of my connection to everyday reality. The bet with the best payoff would most likely be brain lesions, rather than an actual inspired visitation.

Gandhi Circuits

In a recent New Yorker profile by John Colapinto, Ramachandran spoke about neurons in the brain that he calls “Gandhi Neurons.” As a number of his critics have pointed out, they are more likely Gandhi Circuits, but the critics miss the point. Ramachandran’s assertion is that there are parts of the brain that we can get to fire repeatedly that will grow and connect and move us more and more in the direction of someone like Gandhi – or any number of other people who might serve as inspiring role models. This capacity to imagine ourselves as someone else helps move us away from an egocentric view of the world into a more allocentric view. I don’t think it’s an accident that our current President has studied the life of Lincoln, even going so far as to replicate his train ride to the Capitol. He’s actively working to strengthen the connections to his “Lincoln circuits!” I’m also guessing that when Larry Kincheloe, a doctor in Oklahoma City, practices “intuitive obstetrics,” he’s grown and is activating his own Gandhi Neurons.

Home Growing Our Own

Ramachandran’s point seems to be clearly supported not only by neuroscience research, but by lots of anecdotal evidence as well: if there are qualities in others that we admire and respect and would like to acquire and express for ourselves, we can simply practice acting in the ways those people act. And we can teach and encourage our children likewise, to “fake it til we make it.” At some point, the brain will connect up the circuitry such that we are no longer faking.

But part of such practice must be to actively address those parts of ourselves and our kids that might be the antithesis of what we’re attempting to manifest – we have to somehow admit to and creatively address our dark, unskillful sides. Aversion and denial won’t cut it. So, if I want to be like Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity, for example, I have to start doing things for other people, perhaps even with great reluctance and resentment initially. But I can still do them nonetheless – growing my Gandhi Neurons in the process. I’m thinking such an enterprise would make quite Gandhi happy. As a matter of fact, I often hear his high-pitched, lilting voice in my head telling me that himself!