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There’s a well-known artistic depiction of our body based upon the amount of neural real estate in the brain allocated to our respective body parts. It’s known as a Homunculus, and you can see what one looks like on cognitive neuroscientist, Kevin Allan’s web page here. Looking at this artistic rendition, there’s little doubt about which body parts our brain thinks are most important to allocate resources to.
There’s also a famous experiment (Tranel, et al, 2000) by noted neuroscience researchers Daniel Tranel, Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio that is interesting for associated reasons. Using the “stacked” decks popularized in the Iowa Gambling Task decision-making experiments, they wired the hands of participants with electrodes to measure Galvanic Skin Response. At some point in the Gambling Task participants become consciously aware that two of the four decks they are playing with are stacked in their favor and two are stacked against them. However, what the Iowa researchers discovered is that GSR measurements indicate that a participant’s hands signaled which decks were stacked long before their conscious minds realized it! This would be a good awareness for professional card players to develop, I suspect. But it also has lots of implications for educating our children as well. How might we model early education to take optimal advantage of the “brains in our hands?”
Neurologist Frank Wilson thought this question worthwhile enough to devote his whole career to answering it in his book simply entitled The Hand. In graduate school, Arthur Hastings, my clinical hypnosis professor, introduced me to Applied Kinesiology and an elegant decision-making method that begins to make use of the wisdom in our hands. It works like this: in the moment, you designate one hand to represent “Yes” and the other to represent “No.” Next, you form a circle or “link” by touching each thumb and index finger together. After that, you form a two-link chain by inserting one thumb-index finger circle inside the other. Finally, you pose a Yes-No Question to your hands. For example, “Should I make the Olympia Marriott real estate investment?” Now you simply pull your fingers apart. The thumb-index fingers that remained connected – that is, that didn’t give way in response – indicates your answer. Might this very simple method be one example we can use to begin teaching our kids to cultivate the wisdom in their own hands?
My friend, Elizabeth Bothwell, has more advanced things that kids could begin learning early. Elizabeth earned a graduate degree in … hand analysis. As she describes it “Hand analysis is an exploration of all aspects of the hand — shape, lines, fingers, and especially fingerprints — for the purpose of discerning human character, temperament, gifts, and individual life purpose. In our hands we see the imprint of our brains’ neural pathways and energies accumulated during a lifetime of experiences. Hand analysis is not predictive.” If you ever have Elizabeth or someone who has studied and deeply understands the “language” embodied in our hands give you a reading, you cannot help but come away convinced there is intelligence encoded there. Hand analysis, too, is something we can expose our children to and educate them about early. Might doing so begin to make even greater use of the neural real estate our Homunculus is already devoting to this resource?
Tranel, D., Bechara, A., & Damasio, A.R. (2000). Decision making and the somatic marker hypothesis. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.) The new cognitive neurosciences, Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
I often find myself split into many confusing and conflicted emotional and intellectual fragments when I contemplate the notion of forgiveness. An image arises of my head constructed as a multi-colored mind map filled with neural clusters (Bob Scaer’s “Dissociative Capsules?”) all representing overwhelming and painful experiences that unfolded from before birth up until the present moment. Many of them seem to be inviting me to forgive my parents.
There’s a toxic level of alcohol and nicotine present in the womb as I expand at a firestorm rate of 50,000 cells a minute the moment I am conceived. That needs to be forgiven. There’s a sister, Melanie, born after me, knocking me from the throne of inconstant mothering. That needs to be forgiven. There’s a father who flees, offering not a single shred of support for 20 years. That needs to be forgiven. There is a childhood filled with drunken disorder, tattered clothes, more beer than food in the refrigerator. That needs to be forgiven. There is the pre-adolescent shame of having to visit my mother in Middletown, the Connecticut State Mental Hospital. That needs to be forgiven. Just through my first ten years of life, the list of things that need to be forgiven is a long, long one.
But not any longer than anyone else’s I’ve come to realize. When all of us, parents and children alike, have the time and space to tell the truth about what happened to us during our childhood, it turns out we have all been the witting and unwitting victims of great unfairness, suffering and ignorance – our own, our parents’ and their parents’ before them, all the way back to Adam and Eve, most likely. And telling the truth about all of this is a necessary and essential requirement of us if we are to be committed parents. And as Stanford and transpersonal psychologist, Fred Luskin writes in his latest book, Forgive for Love, telling the truth about all of this until it no longer drives our emotional engines is a necessary aspect of forgiveness. It is a part of the journey that allows us to begin to have compassion for all living beings in the world, even our own parents.
If we don’t do the work required to come to a truly integrated place of forgiveness, in a very real neurological sense all that’s left for us is to end up becoming more and more retarded as we age. Neurology never stands still. We’re either making more neurons and connections, or we’re making less. And while I mostly only know of anecdotal evidence to support it, the work of forgiveness intuitively seems like a work that would contribute profoundly to interpersonal neurobiologcal organization and integration. (How’s that for a mouthful?).
What might happen when we do the emotional work of forgiveness? Might our brain makes more neural connections to more neural structures, but even more importantly … to our hearts? I’m not going to traumatize you by attempting to get you to understand Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, but in the context of Steve’s theory, I’d be willing to predict one day neuroscience researchers will find that forgiveness does actually help to connect our brains to our hearts. In The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit, child development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce argues that we are all in the process of growing and expanding our “Fifth Brain”- the neurological clusters that work to let our heart know what’s needed by all the rest of us. When the heart is finally sufficiently connected up neurologically to run the show, might forgiveness become a given?
There is a Wisdom Teaching that says, “You can search the whole world over and never find anyone more deserving of love than … you.” That saying also applies to our parents and to us as parents, and forgiveness is one profound way to express that love.
Mark Brady, Ph.D. is a father and a child brain science educator. Many years ago, together with friends, he co-founded the Children’s Grief Program at Kara, a public service agency in Palo Alto, California, where he still volunteers today. He is the prize-winning author of a number of books. Two of his most recent books are entitled A Little Book of Parenting Skills and A Father’s Book of Listening. Those and others can be ordered from bookstores, or on the Internet or directly by emailing: committedparent@gmail.com. His most current book- Safe and Secure: Recent Findings from Social Neuroscience that can Help You Raise Generation Pax Children will be available in 2009.
I love good science. There’s a kind of elegant, brilliant sanity to a well-crafted and carried-out study. They make me smile inside when I hear about them.
I was up on Whidbey Island channel-surfing one rainy Sunday afternoon when I happened upon Bill Gates Senior speaking on the University of Washington’s public access channel about a person who conducts such studies. He was introducing Pat Kuhl, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Learning at the University of Washington. She was talking about the critical period in children’s brain development when language is most easily acquired – the point where children switch from being little citizens of the world to culture-bound listeners and learners. Some pretty amazing things can take place during this time when the language window is open. In the talk Pat described an experiment where one group of 18 month old children joined with their mother and interacted with a young graduate student who playfully spoke Mandarin to the mother and baby for 20 minutes, twice a week for twelve weeks. A control group of children were offered a neutral activity with mother and a graduate student present.
In the follow-up, it turned out that those children exposed early to Mandarin later showed as much ease in learning the language as native-born Chinese children. This was not the case for children in the control group. But here’s the finding that really caught my attention: the children exposed to early second language learning (and the specific language learned doesn’t appear to matter), demonstrated greater neural executive function and stronger ability for directed attention! It’s as if the additional neural real estate that became connected up early as these children acquired the language skills, also somehow managed to strengthen the whole overall network. I would predict that this improvement in executive function would also translate into greater immune function – fewer sick days home from school, and greater impulse control – fewer behavioral problems in school. And all from briefly optimizing the early language learning window in infants.
There was another discovery from this research that I also found fascinating: Dr. Kuhl’s team also ran groups of children exposing them first to audio recordings, and next, to video recordings of native speakers. In each case, little new learning occurred. The finding: for early learning to work best, it needs to be … social learning! Living brains, hearts, minds and bodies need to communicate directly to other brains, hearts, minds and bodies. Score a big one for us social neuroscientists! ;-)
Pat’s work is pretty rigorous, controlled science, which I love. But I also love so-called “junk” science. A scientist colleague and teacher, Steve Porges, recently gave me permission to look at such science and confess the truth, which is that I find it immensely interesting. And in fact, what makes it interesting in my mind is often what makes it most worthy of further study.
Take the work of Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer, for example. If I understand his work correctly, Dr. Hamer claims he can look at a brain scan of a hospital patient, make an accurate diagnosis of their malady, and in addition, tell you the precise earlier trauma (which often occurred in childhood) that precipitated and lies at the root of their illness – a pretty remarkable claim. Not surprisingly, Dr. Hamer has not been welcomed with open arms by members of the medical establishment. Is his work “junk” science? It’s really not for me to judge; better would be for me to secure some funding and actually hire researchers to test it.
Or, take another example, that of Evy McDonald. Evy was diagnosed with ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. As a registered nurse, she knew she had been given a death sentence, and like a good patient, she quietly went home to die. But in the midst of her dying, she somehow managed to turn fully toward her illness and become intimately familiar with it. Quite surprisingly and unexpectedly, she ended up curing herself! She later came to identify the seven essential steps she took that were an integral part of her cure. Is this good science?
Whether it’s good science or junk science, here’s something that my colleague Anne Peterson recently pointed out to me: science proves nothing! She was reminding me that no matter how much we might want to, we simply can’t make science our deity. As The Escort pointed out years ago in the movie, Heaven Can Wait, it’s all about “probability and outcome.” Thus, it’s not for nothing that good science essentially works to fail the null hypothesis.
I teach a fair amount of social neuroscience to parents. Since I have a very low threshold for repetition and routine, I tend to change things up a lot from class to class. What I like best is to find exercises that the whole class can do that best illustrate whatever point I might be trying to make.
One exercise that I’m particularly fond of is a very simple one. I use it primarily to demonstrate the power of language to affect neurobiology. I ask parents to pair up, and then take turns first saying “No!” to each other. After two minutes or so of that, I then ask the same person in the dyad to say,“Yes!” Before the exercise I ask both people to pay close attention to what happens in their bodies. If you’ve been paying attention to your own body while you’ve been reading my description of this exercise, I imagine you already know what people report during the debriefing – in response to “No” they experience lots of muscle tightness, shallow or reduced breathing, very little conscious capacity for expanded thinking, fear, etc. especially when directly contrasted on the heels of the “Yes” experience.
It turns out this neurobiological response is significant, especially when it involves yelling and especially when yelling is insulting, critical or humiliating. Depending upon context and the emotional (dis) organization of the parent, this constitutes emotional abuse. Several years ago the New York Times described a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry that reported emotional abuse as a more powerful predictor of mental illness than either physical or sexual abuse!
The damage caused by yelling is serious. It is suspected to compromise such things as clarity of thinking, susceptibility to further stress, social intelligence and immune function. (In junior high school, I had a classmate named Al Mentone. His mother and father would yell at him to the point of apoplexy. He developed a severe case of acne vulgaris, and I while I only have neurologist, Bob Scaer’s The Trauma Spectrum as a general reference, I personally suspect the yelling played a significant role). Unless effectively treated, this damage appears to progress over the lifespan – the key word here being effectively. Trauma that results from emotional abuse needs something additional to Talk Therapy.
With further respect for the power of words to affect neurobiology, we might also consider something as wild and apparently out beyond the fringe as the findings of Japanese researcher, Masaru Emoto. The words we say to water appear to dramatically affect its crystalline structure. While there has been only one peer-reviewed confirmation study of Emoto’s work as far as I know, what makes his work interesting to me is that they make me want to be more conscious and respectful of the words I use and how I use them. As a speaker, such words, after all, may impact the water that makes up the 70% of my own body.
But we don’t need scientific studies to tell us that yelling or being yelled at is bad for children and other living beings. All many of us need do is recall what it was like being a kid and how the experience of being yelled at affected us in body,mind and spirit. And also, how the opposite – being affirmed and validated – affected us. I can still clearly remember Vic Weber and Dave Woods, two Yale Divinity School students who worked as counselors at a camp I attended for several weeks one summer. On an overnight camp-out, they asked a Young Woodsman Question: “How wide a cut should you start with when cutting a tree that has to come down?” In the glow of a crackling fire, we all pondered the question deeply. “Well, how big is the tree?” I blurted out. “Exactly,” both counselors responded in unison. I still beam with expansive neuro-pride at my out-beyond-yes-and-no answer more than fifty years later! A very different, memorable experience than being shamed, dismissed or yelled at for not answering correctly.
I was driving home from the airport last Monday night and happened to catch an elder statesman of social psychology on It’s Your World. If you’ve heard it a few times, it’s easy to recognize Phil Zimbardo’s New York accent, especially as he’s offering up some of the intimate details of his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. I love listening to the inside stories, the human side of social science – all the messy details that never make it into the professional journals – the stuff that makes science an oh-so-human operation.
Dr. Z was talking about The Lucifer Effect, his latest book about “understanding how good people turn evil.” This is a fitting topic for a guy who went to high school with Stanley Milgram, the social scientist who proved conclusively with his sixteen Obedience to Authority experiments that more of us have an Adolph Hitler living inside us than we would ever care to admit. But what was most interesting to me about Zimbardo’s talk was his account of why the Stanford Prison Experiment was called off before it had even run half the time it was supposed to.
It turns out that at one point in the experiment, he brought in a number of outside observers to witness how a created context, together with roles assigned by an authority (him) were able to transform intelligent, decent Stanford students into abusive, demeaning nastyboys. One of the people he brought in was a woman who began crying at the sight of what she observed. She confronted Zimbardo and declared that what he was doing was ethically immoral. This strong emotional reaction and the truth of her words surprised Zimbardo to such an extent that he immediately put a stop to the experiment. Then, impressed with this woman’s ability to observe clearly and “speak truth to power,” he later proposed to and married Christina Maslach.
We need more people willing and able to speak truth to power, and to do so skillfully, with clear agendas aimed at carefully considered outcomes. And it is my contention that parents are the people who have the greatest ability to foster and nurture such people … when they’re little. In order to be able to speak truth to power, I think children need experiences of having The Big Brain Question repeatedly and unfailingly answered “Yes.” (This is what Zimbardo did big-time with Christina Maslach!). Rather than being “Shusshed” or dismissed, children need to have frequent experiences, at home and at school and in spiritual communities where they are embraced and encouraged and rewarded for telling the truth as they see it. One suggestion from Dr. Z which I love, is to have parents spend time deliberately cultivating our children’s “Heroic Imagination!”
I have occasionally stood up and spoken truth to power. Each time has been memorable, challenging and extremely painful. And each time the Big Brain Question was unfortunately answered “No.” If you’re interested, you can read the details of one such instance here: My Difficulty with Dharma Talks. In this case I used gentle inquiry (I thought) and asked the leaders of a popular spiritual teacher’s group about things I found quite disturbing about the day’s activities. But even gentle confrontation, I discovered, can unskillfully hijack a limbic system – both mine and others’. (Years later I came upon a painful account by one of the central characters in my story about later being ostracized from the community himself. When I heard my own interior voice exclaim, “Serves you right, you fascist ass!” it became clear to me that I still had some work to do to heal that experience).
I’d love to hear some of your own experiences with speaking truth to power – what motivated you to speak out and what outcomes resulted? I’d especially love to hear about accounts that worked out well. I will do my best to welcome them with open arms and heart.
