Good at the End

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.

The Neurobiology of Play

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.

Vital Engagement

My best work has historically been done in partnership. Co-teaching with any variety of friends seems to lend itself perfectly to what the positive psychologists have identified as Vital Engagement, a way to characterize life as love made visible. My two friends – both named Ruth – and I have collaborated and taught many college classes together over the years. My last stint with Ruth # 1 was at San Francisco State where the biggest challenge we faced was getting the students feeling safe and comfortable enough to sit in a classroom with the chairs in a circle! After class, walking to the parking lot, we passed classroom after classroom of students sitting in rows being lectured to, mostly looking bored and distracted. They lacked fizz and risibility. (I love this phrase and purloined it from KRJ). They are sadly far removed from being caught up in any wild, compelling, magnificent obsession.

Engaged Grief

Ruth # 2 and I got together with other friends and co-founded The Children’s Grief Program at Kara a number of years ago. Even in the midst of grief – or perhaps because of receiving good support for it – by the end of their time in the program, most of these kids ended up being Vitally Engaged.

Exuberance

MacArthur Fellow and neuropsychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison addresses the issue of Vital Engagement in a whole book entitled Exuberance. (Jamison’s understanding of Vital Engagement is profound, rooted as it is in her own long history of suicidal manic-depression). Here’s how she describes it:

Exuberance is an abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion. It is kinetic and unrestrained, joyful, irrepressible. It is not happiness, although they share a border. It is instead, at its core, a more restless, billowing state. Certainly it is no lulling sense of contentment: exuberance leaps, bubbles, and overflows, propels its energy through troop and tribe. It spreads upward and outward, like pollen toted by dancing bees, and in this carrying ideas are moved and actions taken. Yet exuberance and joy are fragile matter. Bubbles burst; a wince of disapproval can cut dead a whistle or abort a cartwheel. The exuberant move above the horizon, exposed and vulnerable.

Hair on Fire

Social documentary filmmaker, Dorothy Fadiman found kids moving “above the horizon” and made a film about them. In her award-winning investigative study, Why Do These Kids Love School? there is nary a row of desks or a lecture to be found. In some of the schools she visited, the kids were so passionately engaged in things they loved, it was a challenge to film them. Likewise with Oprah $100,000 Use Your Life Award-winner, Rafe Esquith. His inner city Los Angeles elementary school students love school so much they show up two hours before classes start and stay two hours past the time classes end. I would say that’s Vital Engagement. I would also say we need more models like this to look to for guidance.

Three Primary Practices

What prevents all of us from becoming Vitally Engaged? Perinatal neuropsychologist Annie Brook has some ideas about how Vital Engagement gets lost. You can hear her talk a bit about them or attend her presentation at the U.S. Body Psychotherapy Conference. I’m guessing she will cover what I consider to be Three Primary Practices, which, if put into active practice by parents, teachers and counselors, would go a long way in the support and development of Vital Engagement, I think.

What are the Three Primary Practices? They must begin early with parents, of course, but parents, teachers, counselors and clergy would be well-advised to all be aware of them and to initiate a personal practice with them. And, not surprisingly, we practice best when we play well with others. I invite you to investigate them here: The Three Primary Practices.

Honoring Our Own Authority

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.

The Happiness Formula

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.