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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.
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.
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!
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.
