Neuroplasticity (Part II) - by Lucky

As you know I have some concerns about how the new found capacity of the human brain is being thought about, and used. We are in a new brain-changing era. The public relations people, the advertising agencies, and the corporate world, are all poising to capitalize on the amazing capacity of the human brain to change with its environment. I can predict a not too distant future where there will be intense social pressure to be actively enhancing your brain function. It seems likely, with the flexibility of the brain, and new brain measuring capabilities, that we may be able to modify our brain function. The concern I have is that we might not do so wisely. Here is why I think that way.

The human brain has been plastic for a long time. Do you know why? The short answer, and it is correct as far as it goes, is because it gave our species a competitive advantage. Basically, we were made the fittest by this development. But, that isn’t a very deep, or informative reason. No one really knows why. Researchers, as far as I can tell, are not really looking into that. Instead they are being funded to find applications for this new knowledge. This poses the prospect that we, as a species, could gain some control over our own brain development, and accidentally override the real reasons nature endowed us with this quality.

Consider the social dimension of our development. There is some evidence that the human brain developed as it did because we are a social species. Language, culture, art, and community all co-evolved with our plastic brains. We may have established the scientific capacity to provide evidence that we can improve memory, speed-up cognitive function and make the brain function more efficiently, but we don’t know how to measure, and show, if our brains are gaining the capacity for cooperation, social coordination, and compassion. In fact messing with one might mean messing with the other.

I come down in the camp, where it seems to me, that what is vitally important to the well-being of our species is that we preserve our ability to care for each other. I worry about us gaining this ability, to engineer the brain, in a culture that is so oriented toward individuality, that sees human potential in those same terms, and easily overlooks the social nature of who we are. Brain-change might just mean reinforcing these tendencies, the emphasis on individuality, at the expense of the social glue that gives us such incredible potential.

For instance, as I reviewed the body of public literature describing research into brain plasticity, I found no research addressing the social aspects of brain functioning. I found this despite Dan Goleman’s well-documented book on the social nature of the brain, despite neuro-scientists pointing out that the human brain develops best under conditions of  synchrony with other brains, and even despite recent research that shows that human life is extended, with better quality, when people are more socially connected. The field is primarily interested in how individuals can change their brains.

This isn’t the end-all, or be-all, of brain research. There are a small minority of researchers, and practitioners, who are interested in how relationships effect brain development. There are some limited findings that show that human beings grow, in wisdom, consciousness,  and social capacity through neuroplastic events. There are conditions that accompany and increase the probability of these kind of neuroplastic events. They happen primarily through intimate activities. Imagine that, intimacy promotes brain development! Below you will find some of the conditions that make this possible.

• a strong and resilient collaborative (mutually attuned) alliance

• moderate levels of stress and emotional arousal (interpersonal tension), alternating with calm

• intense and profound intersubjective moments of meeting

• information and experience gathered across multiple dimensions of cognition, emotion, sensations, and behaviors.

• activating brain neural networks involved in processing and regulating thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behavior

• new conceptual knowledge integrating emotional and bodily experience

• organizing experiences in ways that foster continued growth and integration.

                 (from Intimacy and Desire by David Schnarch, Ph.D. pg.289, (parentheses are mine)

It is my contention that all forms of intimacy promote the growth of the social dimension of our brains. This includes the very difficult forms of public intimacy, being real, that can occur in community situations. When this aspect of who we are, as a species, is ignored (because it seems too difficult) then we deprive each other of what is needed to create neuroplastic events that enhance our brains and feed our social capabilities. I believe we have an as yet unexplored social potential, that I would hate to see reduced, by too great an emphasis upon the potential of our individual brains.

l/d

Lost - by Lucky

 

I got lost this week. Very lost. I was traveling home from work in Palo Alto, when I discovered I was caught in the wrong lane and I was shuffled off onto another freeway going someplace I didn’t want to go. No problem. I just took the first exit and found my way back onto the freeway going the other way. Then the trouble began. I could not find an exit back onto my original road, and as I looked for what I sought, it got foggier and foggier. Soon, I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t read the highway signs, and eventually I didn’t even know which way I was headed. I kept driving, thinking I would see something I recognized, something that would help me get oriented, but I didn’t, instead I just got further disoriented.

This Slow Lane is my meditation upon being lost. I’ve had many experiences with being lost, and it now seems that being lost is a great metaphor, or perhaps the actual truth, for the experience of trying to make it through this world. The existential truth seems to be that I have to keep going and I have very little to go on. Every step of the way I like to think I know where I am going, but I really have no idea. The more oriented I believe I am, the more lost I discover myself to be.

I remember that my grandfather used to take me with him on his driving adventures when I was a small child. We used to enjoy driving around trying to get lost, so we could find our way back home. A really good adventure meant that we had gotten really lost. Then we had the joy of a good puzzle and of a happy return home. These were happy moments that were special for my grandfather and I. I never knew what they meant to him, but I was never afraid of getting lost, and always felt I would find my way back home.

The year of my stroke, but a few months before it, I did something similar. I drove deep into a part of Northern California I had never been to. I took the highway until I got way out into the country, then I left the highway for fire roads. Eventually I was so far from civilization that I hadn’t even seen another vehicle for hours. Then I knew I was lost. I was completely alone, had no idea where I was, and could die. I had no water, food, or extra fuel. I scared myself by feeling irrationally exhilarated and at peace. I sat in my car for a while, knowing I was far enough from home that I might not make it home, and yet determined to try. Looking back, I think I was a little crazy, and in intuitive touch with the changes that were coming to alter my path.

In that case, as in my childhood, being lost was part of the thrill of living. I didn’t have that feeling when I got lost recently. I crept along highways at 25 miles an hour, endangering myself, and others, searching for some indication of which way to go. I reached such a fevered terror, such a state of lostness and aloneness, that I wanted to just drive off the road and let natural consequences take me. I was so lost, afraid and alone that I came face to face with my willingness to live. Eventually, I took responsibility for my poor broken self, figured I still wanted to live, and got myself together, got help, and got myself home. The journey was arduous, left me shaken, and reminded me how much I depend upon myself to keep the vital connections that bind me to this life.

Being lost like that has left me in some kind of altered state. I think that the experience of being so lost, and of deciding, despite my fear, vulnerability, and hopelessness, to live, to keep going, is a kind of omen. My life, or what I think of as my life, is probably taking another careening step in some new direction that I have no idea about. I am about to discover that where I am, or where I thought I was, is not really where I am at all. I am lost right here in this life. 

It’s a good thing, a gift from my grandfather (I wonder if he ever knew what he was doing), that I have some good associations with getting, and being, lost. At the moment I feel overwhelmingly touched by the sense that when I am most lost, I am closest to home, on the right path at last, and when I know where I am headed, or think I do, I am most lost.

I found my way home last week, to an elder circle where we talked about loss, need, and the gifts they can bring. I made the decision to live, to get un-lost, only to return to a very human circle being confronted with the question, “How can we help each other with the many challenges associated with getting older and facing death?” This circle brought to mind the realization that all of us are likely to live long-enough to be stripped of most of the ways we have known ourselves, and our lives. We are essentially heading into being lost, and, in the estimation of this group, of being found, as the true beings of light we are.

It is funny that being so lost can help one find what is so essential.

l/d

Diminishment - by Lucky

As you may remember I’ve been blessed to be part of an elder’s circle that has been meeting monthly for about 5 months now. I have learned a lot and been touched by many things. At the moment, I am wrestling with something that seems to be counter-intuitive, paradoxical and miraculous. Something that I have experienced personally, and something that it turns out is a part of the human experience. I’m talking about diminishment.

When the elder circle first started I used to joke that chronologically I was a baby elder, but experientially I was precocious. I was of course referring to my age (62), my stroke, and the losses that attended it. I have always been somewhat amazed (and a little too proud of) the fact that the stroke, and its aftermath, both reduced and enlarged me. By listening to the experiences of others, elder’s who had losses, of loved one’s, health, economic stability, or other vital connections, or hearing about the losing of faculties, I discovered that these diminishments set up a kind of awakening to what it means to be human.

This reality, that living seems to diminish, and thereby, grow us, is fascinating to me, and seems to me not widely known. Ageing is transformed, if it isn’t just about loss, but also is about gain. The idea that elders might contain wisdom has been around for a long time. There haven’t been too many elders, until recently, to say what that particular wisdom is, but now something of elder wisdom is starting to emerge.

One facet is that the losses of life, put us (human beings) into another world, where the fragility of being human is the strength that binds us to each other and life. That is an amazing reversal, one that you need a certain kind of life experience to know. Luckily, and I do mean luckily, ageing makes that realization possible, maybe even necessary. I think that is a kind of miracle. In an age where there is so little emphasis upon human resilience, who among us would ever believe that the old folks amongst us, the one’s who had been through so much, would have important experiences that could shed light on our capabilities.

Diminishment isn’t just a tragedy. Sure, no one likes to see a young person (or anyone) crippled by disease, war, malnutrition, or accident. The sense of potential wasted, and of loss and suffering, is palpable. But, and here is where elder wisdom is handy, that isn’t the end of the story. Loss, which is painful, could mean gain, for the individual, and for the community, and that is another kind of pain, a miraculous pain born of wonder and a realization of human fragility.

Diminishment isn’t something you look forward to. No wonder elders are so often isolated. It isn’t the kind of miracle anyone wants to befall them. Yet, when it does, it helps to have a few people around who know what a gift it can be. Elders, by and large, are those people. They know loss intimately. They know that a certain end is coming. They have been shaved down to meet it, and in being shaved down, they knowsomething about what is really important about human life.

Diminishment, despite its bad rep, is a doorway, a kind of opening that can introduce us to our own deeper humanity. At a core level, which hardship and diminishment make clear, we are social animals, beings that thrive as part of each other. Losing individual faculties is hard, I know, but all that harder if one is isolated. If one has a sense of being part of something bigger, part of a larger community, then diminishment, means turning to that something larger for what is needed. This turning is the beginning of a new life, the reliance on a miracle that is already in place.

This is a part of what elder’s know, a part of what I am learning, and the thing that diminishment brings. Death, the big diminishment, awaits us all, facing it is easier, though never certain, when you know diminishment can be a gain, and is part of the circle of life.

l/d

Aging

“I’ve protested all my life

 that I didn’t exist for anyone else’s sake,

 not to fight your wars,

 to make your filthy lucre,

 or to give meaning to your existence,

 and suddenly,

 I want to exist for the sake of future generations,

 to make things better,

 to give living an on-going chance.”

I wasn’t looking, and suddenly I turned 61. I am aging. I can’t deny it. I’m turning into a geezer. For me this is momentous. Everything is changing. The game is about to go on without me. It isn’t over yet, and I still want to play, I have some ideas coalesced from my experience, I could help the game improve. I need to do what elders have been doing for millennia, figure out how to change the game from the sidelines. But, how is that done today, what does modern eldering look like?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m determined to find out, and I’m on a trajectory that is going to lead me there. I don’t want to go down the “old” hole that has awaited those who have gone before me. Why not? After all, I’ve had a full life, my share of the adventures of human existence. Why object? Well, for one thing I’m still alive, still chomping at the bit, still wanting to make a difference. And I could. Old age isn’t what it used to be. It is changing. There could be room for something new. We Baby Boomers are entering the scene. It could be a good time to be a senior, by that I mean dynamic, unusual, different, lively in ways unlike the past.

The past. All the good ideas about eldering come from the past, yet, now we need something new, some blend of what an elder was, and a new elder for our times. This seems to me to be a propitious time for a curious and rebellious generation to be coming on the scene. Old age, to be relevant, needs an infusion of imaginative energy. And, it needs a special kind of reverence too.  To make eldering good, valued, timely, the spiritual dimension must inform. Are we up to that level of challenge? Am I?

We are about to find out. 79 million of us are entering our sixties. I am one of the people who will make up 26% of the population. Are we going to do old age the old way, or our way? I know what my answer is. I’m going to find a way to do it that reflects the values that have made my life meaningful. Some of that is old, very old, and some of it is still forming, it is new, innovative, and intended to be good for all. I am excited. Who knew old age could be an adventure, a dynamic time of change, a way to make a difference?

I am excited and I am extremely sober. I don’t think the old notions of old age are going to go a way without some difficulty, nor do I think new ideas of later life are just going to materialize, so I am expecting a time fraught with experimentation and uncertainty. This suits the one in me that isn’t ready for obsolescence. But, it challenges the one in me who is growing ready for simpler connections. I’m not looking for free love, but I am interested in open hearts.

Aging seems to offer a lot of possibilities.  I can imagine the possibility that caring, mutual aid and interdependence could be the coin of the realm. I am thrilled by the sense that it could be acceptable, even fashionable, to need and rely upon the help of others. As a generation, we have known about community, but never before had we the pressure of mortality-awareness, and the encroaching infirmities of aging, to aid us in turning toward each other. I am awed by the prospect that the final scene could be simultaneously difficult and rich.

l/d