The Making of a Social Retard

September 2, 2008 at 12:42 pm (Uncategorized)
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Somewhere between birth and roughly age three, I suffered a substantial decline in social intelligence. My earliest memory of one significant incident was being left in the care of total strangers in St. Raphael’s hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. I went to sleep only to wake up in great pain - the result of having had my tonsils removed. I remember being given an orange Popsicle to eat. I also remember throwing it up before I had half eaten it.

Hospital Trauma

It’s no accident that I’ve retained this memory for almost 60 years! Current traumatology research points to a very high probability of traumatic memory formed in the wake of any hospital procedure that uses a general anesthetic. In my case, the reason was simple: my autonomic nervous system retained awareness that sharp implements were cutting pieces of flesh out of my throat. In response it sent out fight or flight chemicals (adrenaline, cortisol, etc.), the same as it would do if I were consciously awake and experiencing the pain of this traumatic assault. But, because my body was immobilized, what I ended up with was PTSD, and an intense dislike of orange Popsicles. And a dread-filled fear of strangers.

The Power of Powerlessness

It’s freezing or being immobilized that seems to cause the problem, as evidenced by the next insult to my social intelligence which took place at around age four. My older sister Andrea was pushing me on a swing in the park across the street from our house. I can clearly recall the exhilarating feeling of going up just a little bit too high on the back swing and the thrill of arcing back down and then gliding up into the front arc. On the next downswing however, I was suddenly struck full in the face and knocked painfully to the ground. Blood was spattered everywhere and my eyes filled with tears as I lay immobilized on the ground while my nose began to swell rapidly. Through those tear-filled eyes I saw my sister yelling at a girl who was running with her little brother out of the park. For no known reason, she had simply walked up and smashed me in the face as I swung down toward her. This experience too, carved large inhibition grooves on my emerging social intelligence. Once again it was becoming clear: strangers were not safe.

Public Humiliation

The next incident I recall came when I started public school. I remember standing in the lunch line amidst a whole group of new kids, most of whom I did not know. Johnny Mathis, the one kid I did know, was standing behind me. Suddenly, he grabbed hold of my arms and held me as he yelled out to the other kids: “Look at Brady and his wimpy, pointed elbows!” I remember being held frozen and turning tomato-red as all the other kids stared at me, or rather, at my elbows and laughed. Strike three of dozens - hanging out with strange people had become way too trying for me. Still, it took a number of other immobilizing and painful experiences at the hands of strangers before my social intelligence was essentially reduced to zero. (One result: I spent seventh through twelfth grade never uttering a single word in any class).

The Tragedy of the Common

The tragedy of seemingly innocuous events such as these (when viewed through 1950s knowledge and sensibilities) is that they cultivate conditions that are completely antithetical to the way the brain is designed and ideally structured to unfold. As I’ve since learned from Peter Levine’s and Maggie Kline’s book, Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes, a typical childhood is filled with experiences of all kinds that disrupt, disorganize and delay optimal neural development.  Many of them happen without any parental or adult awareness of grave damage done. Here are a few pictures of everyday incidents demonstrating what I mean:

In each of these pictures the experience of emotional overwhelm in combination with immobilization appears to store these experiences  similar to the way it records and stores real life-threatening incidents. The same neurotransmitters are involved. The same brain disorganization results.

Waking Up to Brain Development

Parents, teachers and childcare workers would be wise to be aware of the neural disorganization incidents like these can produce. One good intervention in the wake of such experiences is to have the child stand up and move - walk or run. Repeating movements like Brain Gym or Smart Moves that cross the midline of the body (making the sign of the cross?) are also helpful. Finally, some kind of “triumphant action” is further useful to diminish the sense of powerlessness resulting from the overwhelming experience, transforming it to permit greater potential for confident social intelligence.

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WWIBD?

August 30, 2008 at 1:46 pm (Uncategorized)
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These days I’m more than a little surprised to find myself as a “systems thinker.” I tend more and more to look at people, places and organizations and respond through the filter, WWIBD? - What Would an Integrated Brain Do?

It turns out that an optimally integrated brain continually seeks neural synchrony, and it apparently does a lot of things differently than I normally do; and differently than many parents, organizations, states and countries do. Dan Siegel, the king of the neuro-acronym, suggests in The Mindful Brain that an integrated brain often produces attunement with and within people, states, countries and organizations. Which is nice, but I like it best when synchrony produces attunement in me. Attunement results in COHERENCE:  Connection, Openness, Harmony, Engagement, Receptivity, Emergence (freshness and newness), Noesis (deep, authentic knowing), Compassion and Empathy (p. 193). Nice things to carry through my day. Not a limbic hijacker in the bunch!

Even a Stone Can Still a Mind

Contemplative practices seem to lie at the root of optimal integration and coherence, working as they do in support of enhanced Executive Functioning. And the research seems to suggest that such practices can span the gamut of things from formal prayer and meditation to walking or running in the woods to knitting or quilting or gardening. I remember being struck by a story told by Natalie Goldberg a number of years ago. When she hesitantly confessed to her meditation teacher, Katagiri Roshi, that she was a terrible meditator, his response to her was, “Well, what do you LIKE to do?” It turned out to be writing. “Make that your practice then,” was Roshi’s response. This was a revelation to me - you mean I can do something I actually enjoy and make it a regular contemplative activity and obtain many of the same benefits of formal spiritual practice? Who knew? My best guess would be that the specific activity we choose - flower arranging, tea preparing, serving and drinking - doesn’t matter so much. What matters most is simply that we practice with a kind of mindful, ritual regularity - a minimum of 10,000 hours worth in order to attain some degree of proficient ease and integration.

WWHD?

Notice those two C’s in COHERENCE - connection and compassion. Throw in the three E’s - emergence, engagement and empathy and we have what a lot of people consider a profound “heart” connection. There’s considerable neuro-disagreement about whether the heart is actually involved in such operations. My suspicion is that it is and that we simply don’t have tools sufficiently refined enough to accurately measure its involvement. But once again we have Executive Function and Seven Brains to provide us with clues. I know how it feels to spend a lot of time stuck in my head - not all that splibby. Too much language rooted in literalness, logic, and linearity. My emotional life appears to live in the right brain hemisphere along with the two C’s and the three E’s. And I know how those things feel as well. And they feel different. Ideally, both sides need to operate in with some degree of harmonic balance. Too many right brain actions without left brain discernment and I end up with faux-connections and what Pema Chodron calls “Idiot Compassion” - offering up what eases my own discomfort rather than what is of true benefit to others. Not optimal.

Never Can Tell What an Integrated Heart-Brain Might Do

So, regular, consistent practice is something that my integrated brain would do at least once, and preferably more each and every day. So, what’s my practice?  Turns out it’s WWIBD! I spend a great part of each day observing all the instances when I’m not operating COHERENCE-ly. For example, when I feel withdrawn, disconnected and closed. Or distracted, self-absorbed and isolated. By first of all knowing how my brain works, and then knowing many of the ways it might work better, I’m able to step back and observe it, and then deliberately decide to move things toward better integration. That ability to observe neuro-self, it turns out, is Executive Function hard at work. And it appears to be working right down at the heart of the matter.

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Integrating Our Seven Neural Samurai

August 19, 2008 at 4:08 pm (Uncategorized)
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The long-held notion of the brains we were born with being primarily located inside our skull is a hypothesis that doesn’t seem to be holding at the center very well these days. Much like intelligence, which science pretty much considered a single entity (until Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner argued for a varied collection), I come up with seven different brains - count ‘em - that need constant care and feeding.

First of all there’s Paul MacLean’s somewhat antiquated Triune Brain - The Reptilian Brain (brain stem and cerebellum) - which controls muscles, balance and autonomic functions; the Limbic Brain (amygdala, hypothalamus and hippocampus) is the source for emotions and instincts and assesses all things either good or bad; and the Neocortex (divided into four lobes - frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital) which controls higher-order thinking skills, reason, speech and meta-cognition (Interestingly, the female neocortex contains roughly 19 billion neurons, while the male neocortex contains 23 billion - more possibly required by men to keep them safe on the hunt and competitive in business?).

A Billion Nodes of Light

After these three brains, the gastroenterologist whom I mentioned last week, Michael Gershon, considers the billion enteric neurons located in the gastrointestinal system and capable of operating independently from the Triune brain, a brain in and of itself. Integrating this brain in children I suspect might very well lead to great empowerment. One way to develop this gut brain might be to repeatedly ask two questions over and over again in any variety of guises. These two questions, culled from the work of Patricia Hopkins and Sherry Ruth Anderson in their qualitative research published as The Feminine Face of God, I call the Saint-Making Questions. Each of the “spiritually mature” women Hopkins and Anderson interviewed, asked these questions of themselves over and over again in one form or another. The two questions are: “What’s true for me?” and “What do I want?” These are not easy questions to continually put to ourselves or our children, either as a gut check or as disciplined inquiry, since they invite us to confront “the things that CAN be changed,” and thus no longer allow us to hide from real things that actually need changing. By teaching our children to ask such questions, and supporting them in the answers their seven brains come up with, especially this brain in the GI Tract, I would hypothesize we take great steps in significantly supporting optimal neural integration. Think about it: what might your life be like had coaches, peers, teachers, clergy and parents repeatedly invited you to sincerely consider: What’s true for you? What do you want? Who knows, you might have found early inspiration to begin amassing the 10000 hours required for excellence in a chosen interest.

Next, while his assertions are somewhat anecdotal and theoretical for the most part, in his book The Biology of Transcendence, author Joseph Chilton Pearce considers the growing collection and integration of neurons in our prefrontal cortex to be part of an evolutionary expansion that is currently unfolding. Pearce considers this a separate and independent brain in and of itself, an argument that recent neuroscience research on mindfulness based stress reduction would seem to support. When Buddhist monks’ brains are compared to the general population, there seems to be greater prefrontal development and integration.

In conjunction with ongoing research at the Heartmath Institute in Boulder Creek, California, Pearce next considers the collection of neurons that are located in the heart (the organ in the body that generates the strongest magnetic field - up to 5000 times stronger than the brain itself) to be the most current stop on our neuro-developmental evolutionary journey. Might it be in exemplars like Jesus and Buddha that this neuro-cardio integration (much of which is theoretical and more than a little controversial) has shown up as optimally developed?

So, these can be considered six brains. As for the seventh, I would consider it to be all of those six taken as a whole, sort of like an over-arching, super-connected, meta-brain. And I would suspect that as they become optimally developed and integrated, the whole begins to surpass the sum of its six parts. And as that happens, I would expect the human inhabitants of planet earth (people-sized neuron replicas living in the Earth’s brain? ;-)> ) to become much more connected and integrated as a species.

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On Neuro-Gastro Integration

August 12, 2008 at 2:13 pm (Uncategorized)
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At a seminar on child neural development last year, I was sitting in the audience marveling at two single neurons that had just received a rousing ovation. Bruce Perry, the developmental psychiatrist, had played us a video of a single neuron from the auditory cortex in a baby being activated at the same time as a single neuron from the visual cortex. With each activation the two individual neurons wiggled and edged closer and closer to one another. They reminded me of two mixed martial artists, warily moving about the middle of the cage. Finally, when proximity was sufficient, in one surprising dramatic burst, instead of a knockout, they instantly embraced and fused together. When they did, applause spontaneously erupted in the audience.

What we were looking at was neural integration. In the actual room where this neural drama was being played out, a mother was playing with her baby, and scientists were observing using some of the latest brain imaging technology. What Mom was actually doing was taking her index finger and placing it on her nose over and over again; at the same time she was saying, “nose” aloud. With each repetition the two neurons wiggled and moved closer. When they finally joined together, baby had learned what a “nose” was.

Techno Marvels

Technology has given us extraordinary entry into the mysterious workings of the body and brain. For many years the gold standard for brain research has been functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Scans from fMRI machines measure blood flow to the brain signified by color variations that look much like this:

New technologies however, like diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) are affording increasing ability to discriminate even finer detail, all the way down to individual neural connectivity. These new scans show up looking like this:

I Can Feel Clearly Now

There are many benefits to be had from being able to see things going on in the brain more clearly. For example, here’s a recent practical application that turns out to be an effective Dsylexia Cure. That’s a relatively straightforward intervention. As we become able to provide an early deficiency diagnosis in the “resonance circuits” - the neural highway between the limbic structures and the middle prefrontal areas - we will begin to pave the way for optimal development of the nine integrative functions that Siegel identifies in The Developing Mind. Those nine functions involve body regulation, empathy, emotional regulation, response flexibility - the ability to pause and think before acting, resonance - our capacity for empathy and attunement with others, insight or self-awareness, fear extinction, morality and intuition.

Bonnie Badenoch, writing in her new book, Being a Brain-wise Therapist has this to say about integration as it pertains to intuition:

The sometimes mysterious capacity of intuition may actually be the ability to pay attention to the messages of our viscera (i.e., stomach, intestines, heart, lungs). Our bodies’ signals are intimately involved in affective experience, and often the first awareness we have of our emotions comes from a bodily response. When we suddenly “know” something without a path of logic, it often comes directly from the body into the right hemisphere, where the integrated map of the body is assembled, and only then flows to the left hemisphere for understanding and expression in words. (p. 31)

The Thoughtful Bowel

If we could integrate the resonance circuits such that only our intuition improved, my hypothesis would be that a whole host of ancillary benefits would accrue. If we could receive, understand and trust the information obtained from the one billion strong enteric nerve cells in what gasteroenterologist Michael Gershon calls “The Thoughtful Bowel,“ I’m guessing our serotonin levels would be positively affected. Serotonin is “the happy molecule,” and over 95% of it is produced in the bowel. Optimizing serotonin production and distribution, I’m guessing would also lead to improved immune function, greater resilience, increased social and emotional intelligence, etc. Because they are raised by parents who fully understand the power of this Second Brain, “trusting your gut” will become second nature to our children. They will have learned how to befriend their bowel, and to include it in many of the difficult decisions life requires of us.

I fully expect new and current imaging technologies to enable us to learn how to help those long axons from the prefrontal cortex join up and fully embrace the enteric nerves of the bowel, similar to the way the auditory and visual neurons did above. As this happens, I think the world will become a much safer and happier place. This is, after all, the 21st century!

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The Neurophysiology of Make-Wrong

August 6, 2008 at 2:26 pm (Uncategorized)
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I was 24 years old when I met my father after an absence of nearly twenty years. Like many fatherless kids, I had no idea what I’d missed by his absence, although alexithymia - no words for emotion - seems to be one thing I gained. We spent a number of days together trying to get to know one another over the next year, but I had no idea how to respond or really be in relationship to him. One thought that frequently arose after a day spent together was: “I’m sure glad I missed twenty years of this.”

“This” was apparently in part, the result of his role in the Merchant Marines during WW II - a form of PTSD that made him talk incessantly. That was struggle enough for me to endure, but the harder part was his frequent need to point out to me all that I was doing wrong and could be doing better. At the time, I was co-founder of a very successful manufacturing business and attending UCLA as an undergrad - all without any encouragement or support from him, thank you. For some reason, I was frequently physically sick during and after his visits - sore throats, stomach aches, headaches …

Making Wrong Right

I characterize my father as a Make-Wrong Person and not surprisingly I occasionally meet up with people who remind me of him in my current life. When I do spend time with such people, I pay close attention to how they affect my mind and body. First of all, I notice my breathing often gets very shallow, next my stomach tightens and I get very still. A kind of hypervigilance takes hold. It’s like I’m steeling myself for the next “assault.” This kind of automatic reaction it turns out, is all part of a Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenaline (HPA) axis stress response. My father’s way of interacting with me - unwittingly, of course - effortlessly managed to turn protective allostasis into damaging allostatic load.

Right Speaking

Seattle of Hospice director, Rodney Smith, writing in one of my favorite books, Lessons From the Dying, speaks to the power of speech to affect neurophysiology. He suggests using the things we say to others as the object of contemplative practice, and offers up Socrates’ Triple Filter for “right speaking” as a useful guide. Socrates suggested that before we go about correcting people, or gossiping about them, or making them wrong, we consider the following: Is what we’re about to say … good? This is not some kind of polyannish directive to simply always accentuate the positive, particularly when applied in conjunction with the second filter: Is what we’re about to say … true?  Finally, and this is one of my own particular challenges: is what we’re about to say … useful? If what we’re about to say is not good, true or useful, perhaps we might want to explore what our motivation is for saying it.

Prosodic Elegance

One of the things I would add to Rodney’s and Socrate’s guidance is a fourth consideration: does what we’re about to say have Prosodic Elegance? Prosody has to do with how the rhythm, tone and syllable stress of language convey feelings. Gregory Bateson identified it as part of the deep structure of language and it’s what we respond to in communications more than the words themselves. Prosody has also been shown to powerfully affect neurophysiology, especially in young children. UCLA developmental psychiatrist, Allan Schore has written extensively on the role of prosody in brain development. Unknown to most of us, we emerge from the womb finely attuned to prosodic elements or our mother’s speech, which has played a significant role in our early neural development (it’s not an accident that hearing is the first sense to develop, and the last to go). Prosodic Elegance then, is the conscious ability to use our voice and speech to achieve the outcomes we most desire. In martial arts, the voice is used loudly and forcefully to thwart an attack. In plays and poetry readings, the voice is used to move the listener emotionally.

Considering this evidence, were my father alive today, I would hope to have the awareness and ability to take him aside and in the most gentle voice I could manage, simply tell him that I understand he did the best he could given what life delivered to him. And that I love him, and I forgive him. And if he wants to spend time with me, he’ll have to curb his advice and criticism.

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Good at the End

July 30, 2008 at 4:57 pm (Uncategorized)
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There’s an awareness practice in Buddhist Psychology known as The Three Noble Principles. I’ve used this practice in many different venues over the years and find it to be a good one to help me recapture a positive focus in lectures, work settings or just my daily life doings. The Three Noble Principles are: Good at the beginning, Good in the middle, and Good at the end.

Good at the end, in my limited experience, is the most challenging of these three. Class endings, marriage endings, life endings - many of the transitions that life offers us can be challenging to have turn out good at the end.

This week I’d like to invite you to bear witness to Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, of “The Last Lecture” fame, research and do the hard work of living through an extraordinary, exemplary … Good at the End.

There are twenty separate video links on the above website. I promise your time will be exceptionally well-spent if you use it to watch them all. Have plenty of Kleenex handy.


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The Neurobiology of Play

July 25, 2008 at 2:06 pm (Uncategorized)
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People who know me well, often find me to be a playful sort, particularly if they are playful sorts themselves. Play feels good to me, and neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp explains why when he calls play “the brain source of joy.” From his research play appears to increase gene expression in the frontal lobes, the same areas where longtime meditators show greater numbers and connections of neurons. Increased frontal lobe connectivity is also believed to play a significant integrative function, enhancing my capacity for self-reflection along with these other nine qualities that Dan Siegel identifies in The Mindful Brain: enhanced body regulation, more attuned communication, greater emotional balance, increased flexibility, greater empathy, expanded insight, easier fear modulation, increased intuition and more active moral awareness. Play also appears to be critical in strengthening my immune system  (I am, in fact, rarely sick), and increases resilience under stress  (which I severely put to the test this past spring when a home purchase in the current very restrictive lending environment put the closing more than two months past the scheduled date).

Snail’s Play

By studying the California sea snail Aplysia for nearly 30 years, Eric Kandel discovered how learning and memory work (He originally started out searching for the neural equivalents of Freud’s id, ego and superego!). Essentially, five sequential pulses of serotonin cause a brain neuron to shoot out a new branch (dendrite), significantly increasing neural connectivity. Kandel partly won the Nobel Prize for this discovery, depicted here.

The Happy Molecule

And what is serotonin?  The Happy Molecule. Which suggests that play involves learning how to learn, and children who demonstrate an ease with play learn best and are also more likely to feel free to be creative. They also have more fun while they learn! Because of its often unscripted nature, play prepares children for an unpredictable world, one in which flexibility and curiosity will later stand them in especially good stead. And just like with puppies and bear cubs, roughhousing in the grass is a brain-directed activity that seems to provide for optimal brain development in kids as well. Years ago, I recall Joseph Chilton Pearce writing in The Magical Child that “anxiety is the enemy of intelligence.” Play would seem to be nature’s way of easing that anxiety.

EF

As something of a test for this point of view, Wray Herbert writes in Newsweek (Is EF the new IQ?) about several interesting studies attempting to improve Executive Function (EF - Check out this Link!) in children, again, involving the frontal area of the brain. In one study, working with four and five year olds in a northeast preschool, Adele Diamond at the University of British Columbia, put the Tools of the Mind Program to scientific test. She had these kids walk around, talk to themselves and tell each other stories - in other words, actively play! She then compared them to a control group of kids in a traditional classroom. Their performance on standardized tests was so markedly improved that school officials stopped the experiment and put all the kids into the Tools of the Mind program.

Child’s Play

I think that the Wisdom Teaching suggesting adults “become as little children” is essentially an optimal neural directive, one closely connected to the cultivation of Beginner’s Mind. Beginner’s Mind invites inquiry, curiosity and play. I have little doubt that Eric Kandel was able to work with Aplysia for more than 30 years because he found a wonderful playmate, as this poem his daughter, Minouche wrote, and a photo of Aplysia wearing his Nobel Prize medal suggests. In the beginner’s mind there are lots of possibilities to vitally engage in play, in the expert’s, few. Might we all benefit by the experts of the world giving up their titles in favor of finding suitable playmates?

But what if we aren’t people who play well - with ourselves or with others?  What then? It comes down, I think, to the way any of us get to Carnegie Hall … practice, practice, practice. At playing. About 10000 hours worth, or so the experts tell us will do the trick.

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Honoring Our Own Authority

July 11, 2008 at 2:16 pm (Uncategorized)
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My friend Sean and his wife Jaimee took their six month old son Levi in to see a pediatric urologist last year. She’s a highly respected, well-known doctor on the San Franscisco Peninsula. Let’s call her Ursala.

“Your baby has this urinary tract infection because you didn’t have him circumcised,” Ursala authoritatively pronounced, as she looked at Levi’s chart on her computer screen. Sean and Jaimee just listened politely and didn’t defend or justify their circumcision decision. They suspected that his urinary infection was instead connected to a very difficult birth that went four weeks past term. “You’re also going to spoil him by constantly fussing over him the way you do.” This was Ursala’s next pronouncement. Again, Sean and Jaimee just listened politely. When it came time to actually examine Levi, Ursala’s next comment was surprisingly contradictory: “Actually, Levi’s doing remarkably well, when you consider all he’s been through. You’re very lucky.”

Levi had indeed been through a lot. But in Sean and Jaimee’s mind, the only thing that luck had to do with it was the fact that they were Laboring Under Correct Knowledge. As parents they have worked hard to become their own pediatric authorities. The first bit of knowledge they have acquired is that baby’s brains are sufficiently developed before birth such that they can unquestionably feel pain and experience trauma. Thus - and this is clearly obvious to any parent who’s attended a circumcision and didn’t dissociate during it - intentionally inflicting a large, painful laceration on a very sensitive area of a baby’s body represents a massive betrayal of trust. With circumcision, the Big Brain Question has NOT been answered “Yes.” The people whom a baby most needs to protect them and keep them safe and secure, have essentially failed in that responsibility. Bob Scaer, a retired neurologist and long-time medical director of a health center in Colorado, claims that the trauma of circumcision has lifelong ramifications, none of them neurologically positive. In his outstanding book (the rewritten, second edition), The Body Bears the Burden, he makes a very strong, medically-based argument that the trauma of circumcision may lie at the root of such things as ADHD and excessive male aggression. Sean and Jaimee have thus made what they consider a very informed decision intended to optimize Levi’s brain development.

On the audio program, The Neurobiology of Healing, contrary to Ursala’s negative judgment, Scaer also claims that it is simply impossible to spoil a child under three years old. I agree. The brain of a child under three is simply insufficiently developed and requires all the care and attentive nurturing parents are able to offer. This is yet more of the information and knowledge that are making Sean and Jaimee pediatric authorities.

We’re in the midst of a worldwide research, knowledge and information explosion right now. This development is working to make any of us authorities on virtually any subject of deep interest to us. In a lecture at the Carnegie Foundation for Education last year, I heard John Seeley Brown, former director of Xerox PARC, announce that in five years, all the knowledge currently known in the world will be available online for free! The last estimate I heard is that 35000 new studies in neuroscience alone are published every year! No single person can be expected to keep current. That includes our professional healthcare providers. By the same token, it allows us to become our very own authority in any area where we have the desire and motivation to do research and make in-depth inquiry. And as parents, teachers and counselors, we can certainly seek and find information and knowledge that is particularly pertinent to us, our students, clients and the members of our family.

The acquisition of knowledge about things child and parent-related has long been a prime parental responsibility, one that goes beyond simply saying “This is how my parents did it, and I turned out all right.” When I hear that rationale, my question in response is often: “Compared to what?” How might you have turned out if your parents had known more than they did?  Had addressed and healed more of their own wounding? How much pain and suffering might you have avoided had your parents had more information available to them, especially during the first three years of your life, which we’ve now discovered has lifelong impact on things like immune and epigenetic function. Nevertheless, we now have the tools, and if we make the time, it’s never too late to do the work of becoming our own authority in the areas that have the greatest heart and meaning for us.

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The Happiness Formula

July 3, 2008 at 6:19 pm (Uncategorized)
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Social psychologists - in particular, the positive ones - have a formula for happiness. Here it is: H=S+C+V. Happiness equals your natal Set point, plus your life Conditions, plus the Voluntary activities you choose to engage in.

It’s useful to try to quantify happiness, I think. Palliative caregivers quantify pain by asking patients to hold up fingers to indicate their discomfort level - generally anything more than a three receives pain relief medication. For happiness, anything less than seven fingers probably requires our attention. But to what should we be attending?  To the elements in the formula perhaps? While I know of no neuroscience research measuring the efficacy of these specific elements, my hypothesis would be that all three, when operating well, optimize neural development and integration.

Set Point, Life Conditions and Voluntary Activities

The more we attend to these Big Three for ourselves, and thus model them for our children, according the the positive psychologists, the higher the probability that we will all be hiking the Happy Trail. Set point refers to the biological gifts for happiness that we were fortunate enough to be genetically endowed with. Positive psychologists don’t think we have much of a shot at changing those genetic gifts, but as I’ve written about earlier, epigeneticists think we do. Interestingly, some of the things that impact which proteins genes express turn out to be… the C in the Happiness Formula: our life conditions.

The Conditions for Happiness

Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis, lists five life conditions that research suggests I might want to address in order to be happier.  ”Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.”  In other words, noise helps turn allostasis into allostatic load. My increasing need for quiet as I’ve gotten older, would seem to suggest this is indeed an organic happiness factor. (I can feel my glucocorticoids already readying for the prospect of the impending Independence Day fireworks!)

A Long Way to Go and a Short Time to Get There

The second happiness factor that Haidt identifies is the length of time and the distance I have to commute to work. People who have to drive in heavy traffic arrive at work with higher levels of stress hormones in their blood than I do. In my last job I arrived at work in less than five minutes driving on empty city streets at six in the morning across the Stanford campus. Often I would ride my bike (which sometimes turned out to be more stressful than driving - I once took a header over a four foot drop on the trail around Lake Lagunita; another time I toppled into a drainage ditch trying to use my gate security card; and another time klutzily drove into a new metal security bollard that I failed to see in the dark). I currently work mostly at home, thus significantly shortening the commute even further and usually making it even less stressful.

Who’s in Charge?

The third condition for happiness turns out to be how much control I feel I have over things in my life. If I feel victimized by things like my long commute or the oppressive noise in my community, things that I am unable to influence or change, then I am not likely to be very happy.  In a seminal experiment on the benefits of feeling in control in one’s life, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin provided plants and free movies to nursing home patients. The floors where the patients got to choose their own plants and select their own movies had better health overall and 50% fewer deaths!  Seems like it’s good to have some control. Or at least the illusion of it.

It’s a Crying Shame

Research suggests that improvements in personal appearance tend to also lead to lasting increases in happiness.  While breast augmentation or reduction heads the list of improvements, I’m thinking I might just settle for a haircut and losing a few pounds. Haidt suggests that underlying this need are feelings of shame over what people feel are personal deficiencies. That makes sense - if I don’t like the way I look, I’m not going to be all that happy. And it’s probably going to significantly affect the last, and most important happiness requirement…

Strong, Positive Relationships

Finally, and not surprisingly, positive relationships are the “trump” condition required for high levels of happiness. But how many, and with whom?  And to what degree of intimacy? The answer is somewhat circular, of course: as many and to the degree that makes you - and those you are in relationship with - happy.

Gaming the Weather

Interestingly, weather is not a factor in Haidt’s happiness hypothesis, mostly because people appear to adapt over time to seasonal weather conditions. But I suspect more and more, weather will need to be factored into the formula, and neuroscience suggests something you can do for your brain to increase happiness during foul weather - you can play this research-derived computer game for only five minutes a day: Mind Habits. Which would make the new happiness formula, H=S+C+V+HF.

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