Brady on the Brain

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 powerful 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).

Here’s a recently published study that I hope will turn out to become a landmark: 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 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 looking 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, 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 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 (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 not abused.

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 overall human goodness.

It seems like something not only “best for the children,” but ideal for the adults we are destined to become as well.

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 anger and resentment arising. 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!

Way back in the day (the early 1990s), two respected psychologists in Northern California let their curiosity and perhaps their own woundedness drive their research interests. They wondered what factors contributed to the unfolding of the sacred in women’s lives – how they weathered the disruptive processes of being transformed from a child of God into “an adult of God.”  So they went around to all their friends and asked them to nominate candidates they considered to be “spiritually mature.” In the end they came up with people like the poet, Maya Angelou, Jungian psychologist, Marion Woodman, former nun and artist, Meinrad Craighead, and meditation teacher, Toni Packer. Then they set out on a five year journey doing a kind of Grounded Theory-Appreciative Inquiry research study to essentially discover how these women “found the river of their own lives and surrendered to its currents.”

In essence they would meet with these women and ask them to tell about transformative periods in their lives. They also asked them what was most meaningful and sacred to their unfolding spiritual development. Patricia Hopkins and Sherry Ruth Anderson compiled, edited and published the results of their interviews in their best-selling book,The Feminine Face of God. What I took away from this extraordinary research is that the journey of each of the women interviewed was primarily driven by what I call The Two Perilous Questions.

Create at Your Own Peril

These questions have shown up for me in one form or another in the work of many different people. For example, Robert Fritz, the retired conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, has written extensively on the process of creativity. By examining his own creativity in minute detail, he was able to break the actions down in ways that actually make the creative process replicable. And in my mind, becoming spiritually mature is, by decree and by definition, a very creative process. And best-selling author, Steven Covey’s Second Effectiveness Habit – Begin with the End in Mind – is certainly related to these questions and to creativity.

The Lens of Neurotheology

It’s interesting to go back and revisit this research, looking at it through the lens of neurotheology. By what neurological process might these women have arrived at this place of spiritual maturity? While mostly conjecture on my part, based solely on the stories they’ve told, I suspect it was accomplished in two ways. Assuming that the brain played in integral part in their process, the first way seemed to involve things like therapy, contemplation and prayer. By this process, a number of these women apparently returned to the “scenes of the crimes,” those early remembered trespasses against them. And in that revisiting they seemed to find creative ways to emerge triumphant from those trespasses, if only in their own imaginative heart. The second way to spirituality involved frequently invoking The Two Perilous Questions.

The First Question

So, what are The Two Perilous Questions? The first one is: What’s true for me? This, like the second, is to be asked recursively. In simple terms a recursive question is one that, asked repeatedly, grows an ever-deepening awareness and clarity out of itself. It also, I suspect, spurs the growth of profound neural connectivity in the brain and body. This question invites us to raw self-examination, keeping us current and continuously caught up with our lives, apart from what significant others may think or wish for us. It’s perilous because it sets the stage for change, often needed but frequently resisted … leading almost inevitably to the second question.

The Second Question

The second Perilous Question is: What do I want? When this question follows on the heels of the first, it becomes considerably more difficult to resist the needful changes awakening in our hearts, brains, minds and bodies. Often the answer to this question is … peace and relief. Sometimes it is joy, or adventure, or simply change for change’s sake. Other times these questions force us to construct our own Ordo Amorum – a personal hierarchy that consciously forces us to choose between the people, places and things we love, versus those we love most. What makes these questions perilous is the fact that they often bring us face to face with humanity’s and our own unadulterated suffering, plunging us into the Dark Night of the Soul on the way to spiritual emergence. It certainly did for many of the women who attained spiritual maturity as they searched for The Feminine Face of God.

Ask them at your own risk.

In most of the educational and training venues where I’ve studied and trained, I have almost always been a part of very large male minority. From grief counseling, to marriage and family systems classes, to transpersonal psychology study, I have invariably ended up in a room where women outnumbered men ten or fifteen to one. Many of these settings required a set of relational skills that included some ease and facility with … listening.

Listening skillfully with some degree of emotional awareness, what I call Deep Listening, is much more than simply hearing. It appears to require some neural connectivity in the brain that UCLA neuro-psychiatrist, Dan Siegel identifies as the “resonance circuitry.” This appears to involve our mirror neuron system, the superior temporal cortex and the insula cortex. The early evidence seems to be that men do not generally possess as many connections in these areas as women do. We seem to have a “resonance connection deficiency.” Extrapolating from communication studies that    found men speaking roughly 7000 words a day compared to women’s 20000, Louanne Brizendine, a neuro-psychiatrist at UCSF, places that deficiency at roughly 60%! That’s a pretty significant neuronal network handicap. Here’s what she has to say about it directly:

No surprise then, that some verbal areas of the brain are larger in women than in men and that women, on average, talk and listen a lot more than men. The numbers vary, but on average, girls speak two to three times more words per day than boys … Girls speak faster on average – 250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males. Men haven’t always appreciated that verbal edge. In Colonial America, women were put in the town stocks with wooden clips on their tongues or tortured by the “dunking stool,” held underwater and almost drowned – punishments that were never imposed on men – for the crime of “talking too much.” (p.36)

(So, is the practice of water-boarding simply a displacement by neuron-deficit male leaders onto Iraqi prisoners of war? An outlet for something men can no longer get away with taking out on women in America?)

Men – 0 – Pause

But wait, there’s more. Raphael Pinaud and his colleagues at the University of Rochester have discovered that a key hormone in auditory functioning is … estrogen. While men do convert some bit of testosterone into estrogen, we never end up carrying around anywhere near the amount that women do. Might we also ebb and flow throughout the month, with communication skills peaking like they do for women on day 12 of their cycle?

How important is estrogen to social ease and intelligence? A 2005 study by Rebecca Knickmeyer and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina measuring testosterone levels in utero found that those children with the lowest levels of exposure (and thus higher estrogen) were discovered to have the highest quality social relationships at age four.

Plastic Bombastic

The good news though, is that all is not lost for men. The brain is plastic; it can learn new things. And learning to listen skillfully is one of those things, but it takes practice. And more than a little. I’ve been teaching and practicing listening skills for more than 15 years, and I would grade my skill at listening at around a B, maybe B+. The biggest shift for me in this area is that I come to know when I’m NOT listening well much more quickly. Once I do, I am often able to course correct in mid-sentence. Sentences which, while I’m speaking, often interfere with listening. Some people who know me well might take issue with the grade I’ve given myself, especially since I’m almost deaf in my left ear. 

But if we men really want to improve our listening skills, we might B-L-O: Be Like Obama. We might go live as the lone male in a house with four other women! I guarantee it will improve our skills exponentially!

Women Manning Up

Because women would seem to have a considerable advantage, both neurologically and hormonally, I think it becomes incumbent upon them to voluntarily play the communication game with their tongue tied behind their back, to mix a metaphoric image. What that means is that if women want to be heard, they will have to do several things to level the playing field. First of all, they would be well-served to extend invitations for men to speak up, and then allow the space for that to happen. There are great benefits to be obtained by doing that. Next, as Kathy Speeth, a professor I had in graduate school once memorably instructed: “You can’t invite men to expose themselves, and then cut off their balls!” Not such an easy thing to do, since often when men do speak up, there’s a high probability that they’re going to say things that women are not necessarily going to love hearing. But once we are fully heard, we do tend to be able to listen with many more of our few, precious neural resources available.

On the other side of the equation, if we men are going to improve in the listening area, the best thing might be for us to man-up and grow some breasts and wear a “bro.” That extra estrogen will most likely greatly improve temporal lobe functioning.

I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and I have to say that rich smells different. Money represents happiness in the abstract; a perfect pursuit for those of us incapable of direct happiness. Thus, having a lot of money carries particular challenges, many outlined in the book, We Gave Away a Fortune. That book intimately details the struggles of the heirs of the Pillsbury, Rockefeller and other massive American fortunes as they tried to go against family tradition – they actually gave away principal (God forbid!), the hoard of money that earned much of the interest customarily given away to charity.

For me one central difficulty with having a lot of money was distressingly summarized one day when I picked my daughter up from elementary school. She was crying because the other kids didn’t want to come over to her house and play, “because you’re rich!” Wealth can isolate and powerfully foster the illusion of separation, individually and collectively in my experience. The rich keep their distance from the poor, and the poor envy and aspire to become like the rich.

With a Little Help from my Friends

Becoming rich was never a high priority for me. We got that way seemingly by accidental good fortune, and a lot of help from family, friends and strangers. One stranger was the town manager of Atherton, one of the wealthiest communities in the San Francisco Bay area. Our social “resonance circuits” somehow connected up with his, and of his own accord he volunteered to personally mentor my wife and me through the town’s complex subdivision process. When the planning commission initially nixed our substandard subdivision request, the town manager pointed us to a little-known Ordinance that would tie their hands. The end result was that this one property that we maxed our credit cards to buy in the go-go days of real estate, became two, both ultimately worth several million dollars.

To this day I continue to explore and grapple with the issues of wealth and poverty, pulsating perhaps too frequently between those poles (I filed for bankruptcy protection shortly after 911). Some recent neuroscience studies have helped me bring things into considerably sharper focus, however.

Pinging the Pleasure Centers

I’ve written and published seven books in the last six years, and what I notice is that donating them to individuals and organizations that will make good use of the information they contain, feels MUCH more satisfying than simply selling them to folks at talks, conferences and on the Internet. Stanford neuroeconomist Brian Knutson (pictured on the right) and Dharol Tankersley and her colleagues at UC San Diego have discovered the possible reasons for that: the pleasure centers in the brain and the altruism centers in the brain of most people tend to be two very different, independently operating networks. The nucleus accumbens is considered to be the centerpiece of the pleasure center, while the posterior superior temporal sulcus fires up to fuel altruistic activities. In most people, when these two centers go head to head, the pleasure centers rule the brainpan. I suspect the opposite is true for me – the pleasures I receive from altruistic activities like working with Hearts and Hammers, making charitable book donations and writing this free blog far outweigh the pleasure I get from simply peddling merchandise. But that’s me. It also seems to be Bill Gates, who recently exhorted his fellow billionaires to give away their billions. He’s mistaken though, about them enjoying it. They won’t, unless they’ve somehow wired up their brains as he has – to find great pleasure in the giving.

Now Pitching for Parents

So, now comes the pitch: I’ve just published a new book. It, like the six others before it, have one objective – to inform parents of the fact that the role they play in the lives of their children during the first three years is all-powerful: it will impact everything for better or worse across the whole lifespan! Social neuroscience, trauma and attachment research suggest that parenting for optimal brain development during these first three years will have enormous benefits, ones that will pay big dividends both for individual children and for the larger culture as well. Here’s my new book based on much of that research:

Wait, There’s More!

And so, I’d like to get the word out. I think learning about the brain and how it works, even just a little, can make a great difference for parents and children. If you’re one of the first 25 people to send an email with your name and address (safeandsecuremarkbrady@gmail.com), I’ll send you a book free of charge. And if you want to simply buy one outright, that’s okay, too.

And, if you know of young parents (or old grandparents, or daycare providers) who might benefit from learning how to optimally parent with the brain in mind, I’ll be happy to supply five or more copies at a 50% discount. And I’ll gladly ship directly to anyone you designate. Might such an action ultimately be something best for the children?

The brain-minded parents of these children told me they think so:

Since the birth of this column several years ago I’ve mentioned this question a number of times. I came upon it many years ago in a piece written by the poet, Alice Walker. Its potency, elegance and simplicity resonated deeply with me. She suggested that every policymaker or decision maker in the world simply ask this basic question when confronted with any decision of consequence. In other words: Is it best for the children for a Wall Street Bank to leverage itself 40-1 in the pursuit of out-sized financial gain for a few upper echelon executives? Is it best for the children to brainwash them to wrap themselves in explosives and walk with a detonator into a crowded market? Is it best for the children to deforest the Amazon rain forest at an increasingly accelerated rate? Is it best for the children to attend public schools where the stress of excessive competition for grades, and things like bullying and ostracism almost inevitably results in significant brain disorganization?

Midwives versus Doctors

Here’s a recent study that was a surprise to me, but will not come as much of a shock to most midwives: Doctors don’t like them. Don Creevy, the Stanford doctor who delivered my daughter, Amanda – was an active advocate and vocal supporter of midwives. It seemed like a no-brainer to me. Midwives are not the enemy. So is it best for the children for doctors and midwives not to be able to get along? Especially in a country with our shameful infant-mortality rate – tied with Poland and Slovakia for 34^th place? What if they began dialoging to explore and create possibilities for supporting and enhancing each others’ work? Right now these two groups do not appear to be answering The Big Brain Question “Yes” for one another very convincingly. Might answering it “Yes” be better for America’s children?

A story by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker suggests so. Salaried medical teams working in Grand Junction, Colorado, provide significantly better care at less than one third the cost than in McAllen, Texas, where the bulk of the doctors have turned their medical practices into private profit centers. The most expensive piece of medical equipment in McAllen, turns out to be a doctor’s pen.

The Big Brain Question Revisited

In the past few months it has been driven home to me over and over again just how much of the struggle, suffering and heartbreak in the world is the result of people simply not having had the Big Brain Question answered with an unequivocal “Yes” for themselves, either as children, or later on as adults. Almost every conflict in the world, locally or globally, seems rooted in this failing. The Catch-22 is that if we haven’t had this question answered “Yes” ourselves, then we have very likely not developed the neural resources needed to understand the power that answering this question affirmatively actually has.  One unfortunate result is that it leaves us unable to answer it “Yes” for others. The Big Brain Question – “Are you there for me?”- has untold individual and cultural implications.

In an oversimplified but useful explanation, it seems to work like this: Having people around us that we can unequivocally count on – especially early on with parents who “get us” – works to help us build the resonance circuitry and the neural connections necessary for learning to effectively manage stress and anxiety. Well-managed stress and anxiety allows for more and better neural growth and connectivity, particularly in the all-important pre-frontal areas. Since the brain does not have toxic stress chemicals constantly killing off recurring attempts at pre-frontal development – not needing to produce them for the life-preserving, stress-addressing limbic areas – greater integrative growth and connectivity results. (I don’t think it’s an accident that in his early years Buddha was a sheltered, protected prince, and Christ was born to a Holy Mother). Pre-frontal growth and connectivity permits significantly greater emotional self-regulation, improved immune systems and makes more resources available for so-called executive functioning and creative thinking. The result: less stress in the family; less unmanageable fear. Less stress and less fear equals more comfort with innovative risk-taking, or what Berkeley anthropologist Terrence Deacon calls “relaxed selection.” It’s the natural progression of Darwinian natural selection – survival of the fittest is supplanted by survival of the calmest. Is it best for the children to have people in their lives they can unquestionably count on, especially during the times of “growing pains,” the trying times? Absolutely and unequivocally.

What Two Can Easily Do

It’s not an accident that people who have significant relationships with other living beings tend to live longer and enjoy better health than those who don’t. They tend to be there for one another, their “resonance circuits” helping to soothe and calm in savage times. Even cranky curmudgeons living with other people live longer than those living alone. And curmudgeons with pets live better lives than those without them. It could be argued that his relationship with birds helped keep Robert Stroud (The Birdman of Alcatraz) alive for 73 years during a time when the average lifespan was considerably less. Prisons don’t tend to be low-stress environments. The noise level alone is mind-numbing. (Interestingly Stroud died shortly after he no longer had access to his birds and his wife and mother were denied visiting privileges).

And so, answering the Big Brain Question “Yes” for ourselves and one another in times both good and bad, in my mind is very possibly the absolute best thing for the children. How might you increasingly answer it “Yes” for the children in your own life, young and old alike?

by Jennifer Buergermeister

As if we didn’t already know how amazing we are – juggling chores, parenting, meal-planning, and managing careers – did you know that ancient Hindu philosophy claims the female essence created the entire universe?  No wonder we often feel tired as if there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done. Inevitably, we are Shakti.

Shakti is a Sanskrit word the means “sacred force” or “empowerment.” It is often referred to as The Divine Feminine, responsible for creation and change. If you want something changed, put a woman in charge. The innate creative power of Shakti is our own life-force, full of pulsating potential. Shakti is the force that empowers our body-mind, and inspires all of our experiences and perceptions. She is the flow of energy and information driving our thoughts, behaviors, desires, feelings, and experiences and she provides the raw materials for building our essential humanity.

Shakti Loves Shiva

We experience Shakti as the pulsating, vibrating, throbbing power of manifestation in the material world. Shakti is the feminine attribute to the balance of being (shakti) from no-thing (shiva). She is the ultimate creative force of the universe. As women realize this power, we move away from limitation and move toward the awakening of a higher consciousness. As human beings expressing this latent energy, often released in large spurts of creativity, we often experience depletion and exhaustion. Essentially, we’ve become low on Shiva, or male counterbalance energy necessary for healthy balance.

We can have a lot of energy inside us flowing as Shakti and yet feel physically exhausted. When we channel Shakti as an open conduit, it can be a challenge to maintain the physical body’s energy – creativity sometimes will not let us rest. Since Shakti is also the force that liberates us from individual limitation and takes us to higher levels of awareness, we need to learn to skillfully manage it physically. At higher levels of awareness we see truth and objective reason through subjective feeling of our higher Selves, as well as through our micro-Cell-ves, as biologist Candace Pert showed us in her book, Molecules of Emotion. Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies unite through Shakti.

Our work then, is to Tame the Shakti by restoring and maintaining balance because without awareness of this energy over-expenditure, we can seriously deplete the physical body.  Creative people need a lot of rest, often more than 7-8 hours per night! However, we do not always insure we get it. I learned this all too well through personal experience.

Psychic Grief

Immediately after my husband passed in 2001, I lost 30 pounds. I was unable to sleep or eat. In the process, I became open to creative psychic experiences, or perhaps more accurately, psychic experiences became open to me. The pain of grief was unbearable at times. I had not known that such pain existed until I suffered the loss of my husband. Strange things were beginning to happen. The lightness of being seems to open us up to extraordinary experiences.

For example, during my grieving one day I was reading the book, Many Lives, Many Masters, written by Dr. Brian Weiss. My dog, Henry was sleeping at the foot of the couch when I heard a clicking sound. The motion detector in the hallway was blinking mysteriously. This was strange since nothing was moving to trigger it. Perhaps it was running low on batteries. I realized, no, it was hardwired to the electric panel. Unable to determine the cause, I returned to my book.

A few moments later the clicking began again, this time faster and louder. Henry glanced up so I peered in the direction of his gaze and witnessed the most amazing thing.  It was a vortex. It shimmied to and fro, dancing in front of me and Henry. The motion detector was going wild. My jaw dropped, and I stood up. Amazed, yet completely fearless, I walked toward it. As I approached, I noticed tiny blinking lights inside which formed a spiral galaxy spinning at chest-height.  I could clearly see the vortex.

I was sure it was my husband who came back to say hello. God, how I missed him! I stepped inside the vortex and my life changed forever. I felt a love and awe so great and more intensely sweet than I ever could have ever imagined. It felt like an ocean breeze filled with tingling negative ions that only a perfect spring day could bring. I felt calm – a peacefulness beyond words. I knew that everything was okay and that I would endure this “crazy” time in my life. I have often felt that these grieving experiences have re-patterned and reprogrammed me in such a way that I see a much bigger picture: the holographic nature of life and splendor. Am I still dreaming? How can you sleep after an experience with the seemingly supernatural?

Feeling the awe and the energy of the vortex has taught me trust.  These feelings were important to the awakening of my heart, a cosmic force that compels us to love and to serve. Shakti awakened in me and since, I have been driven beyond any other to share the knowledge of breath and spirit.

Sometimes, I have to unplug, which isn’t always easy. Last week I turned everything off so that I could go to bed early. Learning to enjoy the silence of being is important – the no-thing, which led me to a prophetic dream about an old friend.  Though I hadn’t seen her in six years, I dreamed of her and predicted I would see her the very next day, and I did!

It is imperative for all of us to rest, exercise, and spend time in nature. Taming the Shakti requires balancing with Shiva, holding steady, and moving with grace from the heart, not driven by anxiety or craze from the mind. As I have emerged from my grieving process, I have grown into a conduit of Shakti energy.  One important thing for me is to pace myself. I would create 24/7 if I didn’t make my routine more conducive to rest.

If you are one of the millions of women who go, go, go, and then wonder why you are so tired all of the time, it might be time to step back, get a grip on your creative force – gently tug the reigns a little, “whooaaaa,” and spend quiet, self-care time Taming your Shakti.

With over 20 million YouTube viewings and still counting, there’s a good chance many of you who receive this column every Sunday have already been exposed to Seattle resident, Matt Harding. He’s the young guy doing the goofy dance with different people all over the globe. Well, Matt has written an essay gleaned from his dervish-like travels for the program, This I Believe on National Public Radio. It’s about the need for all of us, adult and child alike, to grow and change our brains in very specific ways. I’ve decided to feature Matt’s essay as the centerpiece of this week’s column. You can read or listen to it by clicking here:

Where in the World is Matt’s Brain?

Enjoy.

Lots of things affect us as kids, things that we rarely realize the full impact of. I’ve mentioned one such thing in previous columns: The Unthought Known. Recently though, some interesting neuroscience research points out something that I’m sure impacted my sisters and me that we didn’t realize was so hugely beneficial at the time: our mother loved classical music. It lives in memory mostly as an embarrassment – ours was the only apartment in the housing projects blaring the musical creations of Brahms, Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

Mozart Off the Chart

While the research supporting The Mozart Effect has been called into question by a number of respected scientists – mostly for being a poorly designed study – neuroscientists have since shown that listening to music actually does turn out to change the brain in positive ways. For example, Glenn Schellenberg, at the University of Toronto, has demonstrated that listening to music over the long term appears to increase the density of neural connections in the primary auditory cortex. Harvard neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug and his colleagues have shown that the tissue that connects the two halves of the brain (corpus callosum) contain a much greater number of connecting fibers in musicians versus nonmusicians, especially for musicians who began their training early. As a general rule, more connections make for more processing power.

Professor and record producer, Daniel J. Levitin runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University. In his fascinating book, This is Your Brain in Music, Levitin provides numerous accounts of how music actually works to increase the size of our cerebellums and increases the concentration of gray matter in the brain (Gray matter is believed to be primarily responsible for information processing, while white matter is primarily responsible for information transmission).  As another general rule, when it comes to organized human brains, bigger equals better.

Music therapy, too, has been shown to be effective treatment for many psychological and physical challenges. For many years I used music to help me deal with my own grief and loss – Jackson Browne’s national grief anthem, For a Dancer, for example. As a direct consequence of this research, for many of the classes I teach, I try to make music an integral part of the curriculum.

Unchained Melodies

All of this though, is but a lead-in to some very interesting research recently published in, of all places, the Department of Homeland Security! What brain scientists have been able to do is take down the notes and write the unique musical score generated by individual human brains – we all have our own individual neural sonata constantly playing inside our heads! Here’s an excerpt from the research article:

If the brain “composes” the music, the first job of scientists is to take down the notes. Each recording is converted into two unique musical compositions designed to trigger the body’s natural responses, for example, by improving productivity while at work, or helping adjust to constantly changing work hours. The compositions are clinically shown to promote one of two mental states in each individual: relaxation – for reduced stress and improved sleep; and alertness – for improved concentration and decision-making.

Each 2–6 minute track is a composition performed on a single instrument, usually a piano. The relaxation track may sound like a “melodic, subdued Chopin sonata,” while the alertness track may have “more of a Mozart sound,” according to Burns. (It seems there’s a classical genius—or maybe two genii—in all of us.) Listen to an example of an instrumental alert track.

After their brain waves are set to music, each person is given a specific listening schedule, such as once an hour for four hours each day, personalized to their work environment and needs. After an extended length of time, people may be able to listen to the music more sporadically. If used properly, the music can boost productivity and energy levels, or trigger a body’s natural responses to stress. A selected group of firefighters will be the first emergency responders taking part in the project.

I don’t think it’s an accident that our individual brains produce something akin to classical music. And I have little doubt but that our own singular melodies could turn out to be a tremendous boon to overstressed and overworked parents, teachers, clergy, policeman and firefighters. Not to mention bankers, politicians and Wall Street finance ministers. Rock on with your bad neuro-solo selves!