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John Sperling has pledged 3 billion dollars – that’s billion with a B – for research to help us live longer (and to help our kids live even longer still). When that research begins to pay greater dividends than it’s already paying, it will be a good thing if much of that longer life might be spent joyfully. Neuroscience and developmental psychology have some ideas about how that might actually be accomplished.
Joy, it turns out, shows up much like stress in the brain. It’s a neuro-event that needs to be met and modulated, not ignored or dismissed by parents or teachers who don’t truly understand its value and long-term benefits. Unfortunately many of us were born to parents who came through the Great Depression or who suffered through one or more of the major wars that have taken place since then. Wars and Great Depressions are not optimal environments for joy to fully flourish in. But parents can still have a significant impact on our capacity to experience joy even the midst of trying life events. In her wonderful, wide-ranging account on the power that parents possess to affect children’s unfolding for good or bad, English developmental psychologist, Margot Sunderland identifies significant cross-cultural research that illustrates what has to happen in our brains and bodies in order to produce joy:
In the brain there is a foundational genetic system for joy, but how it unfolds depends upon the interaction of those genes with social experiences. By and large, it is not possible to access the brain’s “joy juice” naturally without emotional connection with others. It is possible to experience pleasure, but not real joy. Joy is also a bodily state. To feel heights of joy, as opposed to just pleasure, we have to be moved from the very depths of us. This means that, alongside the activation of the brain’s joy juice, the body’s arousal system has activated high levels of adrenaline, which surges around the body. We can feel this adrenaline boost as our heart rate goes up, we breathe faster, and our appetite is suppressed. Dopamine and opiods in combination have to be activated at optimum levels in the brain if we are to feel joy. The repeated activation of these brain chemicals in childhood can enable your child to access many other wonderful human gifts – namely, to be spontaneous, to have the drive and hope to follow a dream, and to feel awe, wonder, and sheer delight in response to the beautiful and amazing things in the world. (pgs. 91-92)
So joy is experienced in the brain and the body with high arousal and fully activated stress chemicals. As such, the joy circuitry in children must be channeled and modulated by the parents so that it is built up gradually over time until the children themselves can perform the necessary channeling and modulation on their own. Otherwise, joy would possibly end up being just one more overwhelming, unmanageable stressor possibly resulting in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Social neuroscientist, Allan Schore, “the Einstein of Attachment Research” at the UCLA Medical School, has intimately detailed how that channeling and modulation is most likely accomplished. Schore contends that the right brain and the limbic structures store internal working models of our early important dyad relationships. This is the area where fast-acting, social-emotional information (like joy) is processed. And it is the positive emotions like joy and excitement that powerfully impact physical and mental health over the whole lifespan. So joy is unquestionably worth cultivating in our lives.
But what if we have not been fortunate enough to develop the neural circuitry to easily embrace and regulate joy in ourselves – think Ebenezer Scrooge here, or an American politician of your own choosing. Turns out it’s rarely too late to pursue a joy-filled adulthood. Schore and other interpersonal neurobiologists frequently contend that “it takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain.” As adults, we can begin searching for joyful people to begin spending time with. This won’t be easy and won’t feel comfortable, possibly for quite a while – remember, we haven’t yet grown the requisite neural circuitry to easily process and modulate joy. But with time and patience and practice and practice and practice, and a little neurogenesis, gradually the days of our lives may begin to actually feel like joyeuses fêtes.
Just as our own brains have done – learned to process significantly more energy and complex information than our parents’ brains ever had to – our own children’s brains are going to end up processing significantly more energy and information than our brains. Compared to when we were their age, between Twitter and Google and videogames and Instant Messaging and Iphones and Blackberries, I’m guessing many of our children’s brains already do process significantly more information.
But that’s only part of the good news. Renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that our children will very likely be putting their brains to use for an average lifespan of 150-200 years! In his best-selling book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil makes a compelling case that the explosive growth of information technology alone is already creating dramatic changes in all areas of life. And living longer is just one of these changes. Inventions and research findings delivered at a TED talk on Monday morning, can be dissemin- ated and accessed virtually anyplace on the planet by Monday afternoon at the latest. This has significant implications for medicine, nutrition, neuroscience, education – virtually any area where energy and information is put into service by human brains.
Thus, our kids are going to need bigger, better connected and neurologically balanced brains than ours, and they will very likely be needing them far longer – University of Idaho gerontology professor, Steven Austad has bet $500 million that a 150-year-old person will be alive and in good condition by the year 2150. If and as this comes to pass, what are some of the things we can do to insure optimal brain growth and development in our children?
First, it’s important to realize that children’s brains don’t develop uniformly. Rather, neurons begin connecting in the greatest amounts before and after birth on the right side of the brain. This is the side where traumatic, overwhelming memories are mostly stored. Overwhelming memories result from experiences that convey more energy and information than our children’s brains can easily handle. (Obviously, adult brains can be readily overwhelmed as well!).
An example: when my own daughter was under a year old she spiked a very high fever that resulted in her going into convulsions. Needless to say, this comes close to being a parent’s worst nightmare. The remedy for this was to plunge her into cold water. This too, had a chilling effect on everyone, as her body immediately registered the abrupt change in temperature. At the same time, this painful memory became stored in her brain without any way to talk about it. (To this day, the image of Amanda shaking in uncontrollable convulsions remains clear in my mind, although as would be predicted, she has no narrative recall of the experience).
These are the kinds of memories that are stored early on, without the benefit of language, since roughly before age three language has yet to come on line. Consequently, all of us have many such stored memories that we simply can’t speak about. They are stored primarily on the right side of the brain as something attachment researchers call “the unthought known.” When these kinds of stored, overwhelming memories are activated, we are often upset and don’t know why. One important process for helping with brain development in our kids then, is to find creative ways for them to first nonverbally express and then begin to construct narratives about these early stored experiences. Again from the attachment literature this process is known as “constructing a coherent narrative,” and the shift across the mid-line of the brain, which language seems to accomplish, turns out to be important for optimal neural development.
So, helping our children construct coherent narratives is one way to help them grow bigger, better integrated brains. But our children have many different kinds of experiences in the first 36 to 40 months of life (beginning in utero) that exceed the ability of their brain to adequately process. As a result, a lot of neural real estate is taken up with what Bob Scaer calls “dissociative capsules” – collections of neurons that have had to be systematically and preemptively inhibited from firing. The neurons that become wired together and represent such experiences become necessarily shut down so as to allow the brain and body a timely return to a balanced state of homeostasis. Reclaiming this neural real estate can and should be a practice for growing better connected and more robustly integrated children’s brains. Through the upcoming weeks I will be presenting information on effective ways that continue to be developed and discovered to actually accomplish that reclamation.
One of the things that helps provide a strong sense that I am truly there for my children (and for adults as well), and thus provides an optimal environment for neural development, is something Attachment Researchers label “irrational commitment.” I love this term. It clearly captures the relationship that many parents feel with their kids.
A few months back I saw a movie that unexpectedly depicted the profound power and real essence of this bond – the Bruce Willis movie, Live Free or Die Hard. In that movie a rogue ex-government agent has assembled a team of thugs and hackers intent on paying back America for not listening when he warned them about how vulnerable the country was to really smart, socially and emotionally handicapped people like himself. As his “Fire Sale” plot unfolds to disrupt all finance, transportation and utility services across the nation, and in the process steal ALL of the money in America, Thomas Gabriel makes one small unfortunate mistake: he kidnaps NYPD detective John McClane’s (Willis’) teenage daughter.
“My dad’s gonna kick your ass,” Lucy McClane tells this arch-villain, who has just cold-bloodedly murdered all his expendable staff after they have faithfully and naively served his diabolical purposes. And, of course, Lucy’s right. She knows beyond a shadow of a doubt the extent of her father’s love. And in the name of love, John McClane goes up against wave after wave of skilled martial artists, ultra-Uzi-wielding thugs in attack helicopters, a rocket-launching F-14 fighter plane, and surveillance teams who can locate and chastise him instantly anywhere he goes (even as he attempts to take a needed time out in the expected safety of the Warlock’s basement!). In the end, McClane makes the ultimate decision to shoot himself – a flesh wound that goes through his own body and into the heart of the bad guy. As I walked out of the movie, a little teary actually, I thought, “Now THAT is irrational commitment!”
And it is. It is precisely the feeling that many of us have with respect to our children and the lengths we would go to for them (especially if we had the blockbuster budget and the same access to stunt doubles and special-effects wizards that Bruce has). But what if we don’t. What if all we have is an insecure, ambivalent attachment history, a model of parenting that includes a father who left for parts unknown, a mother overworked, overwhelmed and unable to do even half of the ten thousand things that need to be done to adequately care for children in the course of a day? What then?
In this case, a difficult one to be sure, then we have more work to do than other parents. A lot more. Just the work of figuring out what our work is can be confusing – not to mention, frightening and overwhelming. Even more so when we figure out that our work is not “won and done.” That it is work that we will most likely be charged to do as long as we continue to breathe as living beings with embodied consciousness.
It’s for precisely this reason that I am so strongly drawn to brain science. It helps to greatly clarify what the work is that we parents truly do need to do: whatever it takes to grow new neurons and connect them up with as many of the old ones as possible. Essentially, that’s it. Why? Because it is these new neurons and connections that will begin a process of establishing for us in the moment and continuing on into later life, what should have been formed and stabilized early and never got sufficient chance to.
And as I’ve mentioned previously, the Nobel Prize-winning work of Eric Kandel suggests that one of the best ways for parents to do that is by regularly engaging in novel situations in secure environments where it’s safe to play. There are other ways as well to begin doing the necessary neural reconstruction and we’ll continue to explore them in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, consider this question: What might it look like for you to make and sustain an “irrational commitment” to the important people in your life? To the point that you would willingly take a bullet for them?
Our children’s brains (and often our own as well!) are continually asking this basic question whether we’re aware of it or not. The question takes many forms in children’s brains of course: Do I matter enough that you’ll put me first when I need you to – ahead of your job, ahead of your friends, even sometimes ahead of yourself? Can I count on you to attend to me in the ways I need you to? Do I truly and deeply matter to you? These questions are being asked, nonverbally through behavior often, and when they get answered “Yes,” our children can relax and begin to feel safe, just as we are often able to do in our own intimate and business relationships.
The self-preservation structures of the brain continually monitor our environment and the people in it for safety. Our survival depends upon it. We generally love the people we feel the safest being around, and the emotional responsiveness often identified as love arises out of this safe “felt sense.” Canadian psychologist, Susan Johnson thinks about it this way: “These safe bonds reflect deep primal survival needs for secure, intimate connection to irreplaceable others. These needs go with us from the cradle to the grave.” (We often have relationships with people we feel familiar with, but those are not necessarily based upon love. This is something I will discuss in future columns).
Needing to feel safe and secure is especially critical in the first three years of life. (There’s a wonderfully informative website, in fact, that addresses just how important these first years actually are. I encourage you to visit it at: Zero-to-Three). In response to this early, embodied sense of safety, begins to come secure attachment, which numerous studies have confirmed is critical for mental, physical and spiritual well-being all through our life span.
John Bowlby, the English child psychiatrist, and the many attachment researchers who followed him, have demonstrated conclusively that babies and young children who don’t get dependable, reliable, attuned responses from their parents (most often mother), become upset and aggressive in an increasing attempt to have these essential needs met. They need to have the question “Are you there for me?” repeatedly answered “Yes!” Isolation, loneliness and disconnection essentially replicate unhealthy neural processes in the brain. It’s not surprising therefore, that children will often do whatever they need to in order to get any response at all from the environment – any response is better than no response. This can often result in seemingly strange, inexplicable behavior in our children. But viewed through their attachment needs, such behavior begins to make greater sense. When children do not get these needs for attachment and connection met they often give up in despair, become apathetic and depressed and fail to thrive. In other words – they become brain damaged!
On the other hand, mounting scientific evidence is becoming overwhelming clear (review any of the attachment texts in the Neuro-Bibliography): later in life, children from securely attached parent-child relationships have better cardiovascular health, stronger immune systems, lower mortality rates from cancer and other diseases, and less depression and anxiety, and that they face psychological trauma with more emotional and psychological resilience – throughout their whole lifespan!
But what’s mostly required to convey the “Yes” answer to the Big Brain Question? What promotes secure attachment is not the number of positive emotional experiences between parents and children. Rather, it’s the quality, timeliness and rhythm of certain interactions, which often may be intuitive or unconscious in healthy parents, or seem incidental and relatively unimportant, but they turn out to be critical key secure attachment-creating moments for a child. Such moments are often determined by a parent’s ability to attend to emotional cues and respond to them in timely and effective ways that over and over again convey the unfailing sense, “Yes, I am here for you.”
So this is the fundamental question of our children’s lives – are you someone who can really see me, hear me, prize me, and be there for me when it really matters? Can I count on you to come through in a crisis – and there will be crises. In strong, secure relationships, we most often answer this question “Yes” for our children. But what happens if our own early attachment hasn’t been secure, when we can’t or don’t know how to do the things that promote secure attachment? What can we do when the answer to the Big Brain Question in our lives has not been “Yes?” In the next few columns I’ll discuss this all-to-frequent reality and how we can begin to make necessary, life-enhancing repairs for both our own benefit and our children’s.
There’s ONE question that all human brains want answered, and they want it answered, “Yes.” Parent’s brains, children’s brains, all brains. And they don’t want a lukewarm “Yes,” or a “Maybe Yes” or a “Getting-to-Yes Yes.” They want a substantial, resounding, unequivocal, “YES!” Yes.
Before I tell you what that question is, however, I’d like to tell you a little bit about what goes on in a child’s (or adult’s/parent’s) brain when the answer is something other than “Yes.” First of all, if the answer is “Maybe,” or “I’m not sure,” a confusion and uncertainty begins to take shape in our children’s brains. How this looks under an electron microscope is a significantly reduced number of grooves in the brain together with fewer connections between neurons. Reduced connections result, not unexpectedly, in reduced abilities in different areas – for example, motor areas or immune function – resulting in greatly diminished capacities, e.g. lower social or emotional intelligence or reduced impulse control. If you go here and take a look at Gauss’s Brain, you will be able to clearly see a side-by-side comparison of two brains, one that very likely had the Big Brain Question repeatedly answered “Yes” (Gauss’s) and another that most likely had it answered “Maybe.”
Much greater problems arise for parents and children though when the answer to the Big Brain Question is, “No.” When the answer to this question is “No,” children are placed into an untenable position: the place where they live, and the people they need to take care of them are not performing that fundamental function very well. Because they are unable to take care of themselves, our children are now stuck. Feeling, or actually being helplessly stuck with no ready resolution in sight, has been found to be the primary experience that results in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in adults and children alike. What PTSD actually looks like when a brain-scanning machine takes a picture of it is something like this – major neural real estate is simply not optimally integrated and operating in the neural network.
This kind of brain damage, in differing degrees, is believed to have a lifelong impact on our children. Here’s what “recovering neurologist,” Dr. Bob Scaer, has to say about it: “The cumulative experiences of ‘life’s little traumas’ shape virtually every single aspect of existence. This accumulation of negative life experiences molds one’s personality, choices of mate, profession, clothes, appetite, pet peeves, social behaviors, posture, and most specifically, our state of physical and mental health.”
All that might not be so bad. Given the great plasticity and regenerative capacity of the brain, it might be something children could work with. However, Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician, sees the damage caused by the answer “No” to the Big Brain Question as even more serious. Here’s what he has to say: “The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviors toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.”
So, we can see that children’s brains need tender, loving, consistent care. But what exactly IS this Big Brain Question, and what do we need to do in order to consistently answer it “Yes”? I’m going to refrain from telling you the question and the many ways that we can begin to answer it “Yes” for our children until next week.
Stay tuned.
