The Brains You Were Born With

Some friends of mine are of a mind that human development is not only an individual lifelong process, but one that involves humanity as a whole. In other words, as a species we’re not quite done climbing up the evolutionary chain. While not a friend of mine, the cartoonist Gahan Wilson appears to be in this camp. You can see what he thinks by clicking here.

So, what might that ongoing development look like say, fifty years or a thousand years from now. Joseph Chilton Pearce thinks he might have a handle on it. In his book, The Biology of Transcendence, he argues that out beyond Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain, many of us are already well into the process of growing out our Fourth Brains – the structures that make up the orbital prefrontal cortex – and some of us are now working on our Fifth Brains. As evidence for this Fourth Brain growth, Pearce offers a series of photos of young children with foreheads extending out beyond their noses, like this one. This forehead extension, he hypothesizes, is the result of prefrontal growth so extensive, that we are in the process of maximizing all that can be contained in the human skull. So, the Fifth Brain will have to relocate elsewhere, and that “elsewhere” Pearce argues, will inevitably end up in the human heart.

The Brain in the Heart

There’s not currently a lot of support for Pearce in the medical research community. Research cardiologist J. Andrew Armour, who co-edited the medical text, Neurocardiology readily admits that there are a number of neurons in the heart – somewhere between twenty and forty thousand, as compared to one hundred billion in the brain – but that they serve a specific identified function. To grow additional new neurons in the heart, or to increase the connectivity of the neurons already there, Armour theorizes would actually interfere with optimal heart function. Interestingly, both Pearce and Armour serve on the board of the Heartmath Institute, which is actively researching the heart-brain connection. Here’s what they have to say about the brain in the heart:

The heart’s nervous system contains around 40,000 neurons, called sensory neurites, which detect circulating hormones and neurochemicals and sense heart rate and pressure information. Hormonal, chemical, rate and pressure information is translated into neurological impulses by the heart’s nervous system and sent from the heart to the brain through several afferent (flowing to the brain) pathways. It is also through these nerve pathways that pain signals and other feeling sensations are sent to the brain. These afferent nerve pathways enter the brain in an area called the medulla, located in the brain stem. The signals have a regulatory role over many of the autonomic nervous system signals that flow out of the brain to the heart, blood vessels and other glands and organs. However, they also cascade up into the higher centers of the brain, where they may influence perception, decision-making and other cognitive processes.

Don’t Know Mind

Probably the best stance to bring to this discussion is a kind of Buddhist, Don’t Know Mind. That’s a kind of open, curious wonder-full mind that healthy children bring to the world. How might the connections between the heart and brain really work? How might those connections be increased – by prayer or meditation or other contemplative practices, like knitting or quilting, golf or gardening? And what actually happens when you do? Is that what it means to have a “big heart,” and why so many saints are often depicted with a glowing red heart in the middle of their chests? Have they simply managed to somehow build out their neural real estate in an optimal manner?

Living the Questions

These are probably questions that we are going to have to live the answers to. In addition, it would probably be a good thing to help our children live the answers to them as well. In order to do that, it might be a useful assumption to consider that we, and they, all possess the possibility for growing bigger hearts and better-connected brains than we were born with. Doing so would be an early start at this late date on increasing the world’s supply of kindness.

On Becoming Mentally Tough

If, as a renown wisdom teacher once proclaimed, “Our life is the creation of our mind,” it might be worthwhile to spend some time Getting Good (a minimum of 10000 hours worth?) at observing our mind and studying how it works. This point was recently driven home to me last weekend watching Tiger Woods in the U.S. Open. Near the end of the broadcast on Sunday, with Tiger needing to make a crucial putt to tie and send the tournament into a playoff, a commercial was broadcast for Nike featuring Tiger and his recently deceased father, Earl. “Tiger, I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life. And he hasn’t and he never will.” This was Earl explaining why Tiger would not only make the putt to tie the tournament, but why the following day he would eventually go on to win the U.S. Open. And he would do it with a ruptured Anterior Cruiate Ligament in his left knee and a shin bone stress fractured in two places. Mentally tough would seem to also include being physically tough.

Here’s one neurological description from Richard Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin of what it might mean to be “mentally tough”:

Activation in specific neural systems associated with conflict monitoring (e.g. the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), selective attention (e.g. the temporal parietal junction, ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex, frontal eye fields) and sustaining attention (e.g. right frontal and parietal areas and the thalamus).

Translated, this essentially means that central structures in the front of the brain have acquired the wonderful ability to act in a chief executive capacity. Their central location allows them easy access and connectivity to other brain areas, particularly the limbic structures. This improved executive function allows for greater capacity for emotional self-regulation – fewer people, places and things trigger fear reactions. There is also some evidence that growing out this area of the brain improves immune function. Based on Tiger’s performance this past weekend, I would hypothesize that it also improves pain tolerance!

A Terrible Thing To Trust

I play golf, and one thing I recognize is that I am not mentally tough. I’m easily distracted, often frustrated and dejected after hitting a poor shot, and rarely find my way back to any kind of centered, calm state of relaxed alertness. I often have to take a Mulligan on the first hole, and it takes me three or four holes to settle down enough to actually begin thinking about the game I’m playing, both the inner and outer. On the golf course and through the rest of my life, settling down most often works by taking a number of deep, 7-11 breaths and reminding myself that: “My mind is a terrible thing to trust.” In other words, the things I think and the emotions those thoughts generate, often aren’t particularly helpful. Left mostly to its own devices, my mind regularly throws up fear-based and anxiety-ridden thoughts about things like getting old, sick and/or being homeless. Every abdominal cramp is stomach cancer, every chest pain is “the Big One,” and every headache is the long-awaited brain tumor finally come home to roost. In order to feel comfortable and not be regularly “tossed away” by the thoughts I think, it would have been good to have begun some kind of contemplative or martial practice as a young kid, much as Earl Woods did when he started Tiger in the martial art of golf at an early age.

Mindscoping

Lacking the obvious benefit of that early support and training, I have had to find other means of developing what child neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel calls Mindsight – the weaving of insight and empathy to promote kindness and compassion. I study social neuroscience, occasionally practice Aaron Beck’s cognitive behavioral thought confrontation techniques which I call “mindscoping,” and spend as much time as I can hanging out with people who minds I trust. These are people who, somewhere along the way, have had the benefit of great early mind training. Such associations form a sort of Sangha for me, one that serves as a continual reminder that with becoming mentally tough, practice makes … for a good reminder to put in more practice.

Getting By on Half a Brain

I was born with only half a brain. To make matters worse, my mother smoked a pack-a-day of unfiltered Camel cigarettes and was a bed-ridden alcoholic for virtually all of the first 16 years of my life. So, the damage caused by those unfortunate addictions means that I was actually born with even less than half a brain. Before each of you begins expressing astonishment, incredulity and amazement – “Wow, how did he ever manage to make it through high school, let alone earn a graduate degree?” – let me clarify things a bit.

The Plastic Brain

First of all, I owe it all to my remarkable, flexible, plastic, regenerative half a brain. Here’s an interesting excerpt from Marian Diamond’s extraordinary book, Magic Trees of the Mind (co-written with noted Science News editor, Janet Hopson):

“By the best estimates, natural cell death can eliminate 50 percent of the neurons in the cerebral cortex before the baby is born, and up to 40 percent of the synaptic connections between nerve cells by the age of twenty-one months. Think of it: your neural heyday came and went before you had your first serious thought!” (pg. 47).

Apoptosis

Think of it, indeed. So, not only was I born with only half a brain, but so were you. And so were all your children. (I found this statement so astonishing that I contacted Dr. Diamond directly to confirm this actual neural research, which she graciously did for me. The process of programmed cell death is happening all the time in our bodies and our brains. It’s called apoptosis and is one of the reasons we’re not all born with the webbed hands and feet that we use to wade around in the womb – apoptosis programs all those webbing cells for very early retirement.

I have since investigated infant apoptosis further and it turns out that in about-to-be-born babies, the 50% brain cell reduction takes place primarily between the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy. That reduction manages to take the baby’s head size down to only 101.8 percent of the size of the mother’s birth canal. If this cell death didn’t happen, we’d be an extinct species. (Or else we’d have a world full of mothers whom no one in their right half-mind would ever consider messing with).

Losing Half Your Marbles

But think about it. Imagine today, as you’re reading this column, you have all your brain cells present and accounted for and firing and fully up to any task. But a mere 30 days from today, you have only half that number operating in your cerebral cortex. What might that experience be like? I’m guessing it’s something most of us would notice. Or at least our friends and family would. Not to mention, our own bodies. I’m also guessing that it’s something a baby notices as well. Or, at a minimum, something a baby remembers somatically – it remembers what it was like living in utero with twice as many neural resources available.

Of course, neurologists claim that this programmed pruning – apoptosis – mostly functions to improve neural functioning – getting rid of poorly formed cells, unused cells, old cells, poorly connected cells or cells that are simply surplus and not needed for the neural function they and their comrades were designed to perform. That seems reasonable – but 50 percent of the brain! At no other time in our lives will such a radical massive pruning take place (although some lesser bit of programmed pruning as been documented to happen several more times up through our early 20s).

Apprehending the Divine

Nevertheless, I like to think that with double the neural resources available, babies in utero are somatically able to apprehend the Divine. It’s undocumented, pure conjecture, but what I notice that is often alive and well in me is a recurring desire to reconnect with such an experience. Psychosynthesis writer, Frank Haronian described it as “the repression of the sublime.” To be in touch with life sublime, it looks like we have to deliberately do intentionally, what brain neurons do naturally – we have to heartfully connect with other like entities. People.

Acting Like My Brain

As a reclusive misanthrope, i.e. people-fearer, for much of my life, I find the above statement somewhat astonishing to be making at this juncture. I was fully planning on happily retiring to an isolated cabin in some beautiful, California redwood forest to a life of contemplative leisure. (Whidbey Island, it turns out is a lovely compromise). But something has changed in my brain. And Dan Siegel, in The Mindful Brain, details exactly what that change is. Through many years of contemplative and other kinds of integrative practices, I’ve apparently managed to grow new neurons and connections (synaptogenesis) and reclaim lost neural real estate in my prefrontal cortex. This central area connects to many of the limbic regions in my brain. Growing these connections has become the newfound blessing that allows me to begin to regulate my anxiety around people. People are now rarely draining or scary to me!

Not too shabby for someone operating in the world with only half a brain!

Mark Brady, Ph.D. is a father and a parent 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 volunteered until very recently. 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: 12 Findings from Neuroscience That Can Help You Raise Happy Healthy Children will be available in 2009.