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Death benefits tend to be a hard sell, especially to those designated to do the dying. Stephen Levine once framed this conundrum for me nicely by asking: “Would you sell your death for a million dollars?” What that would mean is that you don’t get to die. You’re forced to remain in your body as time and gravity take their crushing toll on you. Imagine living for 500 or 1000 years confined immobile to a hospital gurney with your skin barely hanging onto your bones, your bones no longer able to support your weight, your neck no longer able to support your head. The temptation to sell our death – the instinctual desire to live forever – involves the last of Bonnie Badenoch’s Nine Neural Pathways of Integration that we’ve been exploring: Temporal Integration.
Timely Temporal Integration
People possessing good temporal integration have more than a dissociated denial or an isolated intellectual understanding of the inevitable reality that “Yes, we are all going to die.” They have given it considerable thought and have often found ways to creatively express great feeling with respect to it. Many such people end up working in hospitals and hospices and grief counseling agencies. When my friend Errol, who was also my daughter’s nursery school teacher, encountered a wild pig running across Highway 101 up near Ukiah several years ago, he instinctively swerved to avoid it. The car rolled, tossed him out, and then rolled over him. When hospital personnel went through his personal effects, they found a card with a Lakota saying on it: “Today is a good day to die.” Errol had just celebrated his 30th birthday. He died with good temporal integration.
Temporally Integrating Early
Errol’s mother Marnie, was also a nursery school teacher. Marnie was adamantly in favor of not shielding children from death, but of doing our best to explain it in terms kids can understand, while at the same time not hijacking their limbic systems. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the Grand Dame of Death, was also in similar favor. Explaining the Don’t-Know Mystery of death in simple terms, she thought was far better than trying to keep death hidden from children, or explaining death away with some incomprehensible notion that kids will often fearfully distort. Having personally helped dozens of kids who’ve lost loved ones work through their grief, I can unequivocally say that not only can children handle the experience when placed in an environment that supports healthy grieving, but for optimal ongoing growth and development, they absolutely need to address their loss.
Temporally Integrating Late
Many people have close brushes with death. Some have been pronounced clinically dead and come back to tell about Near Death (NDE) and Out of Body Experiences (OOBE). The International Association of Near Death Studies is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes many accounts of these experiences. A peer-reviewed prospective study of 344 patients who had suffered cardiac arrest was published in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet by Dutch cardiac surgeon, Pim von Lommel. In that account roughly 18% of his patients reported an NDE. Perhaps the most well-known account is by Pam Reynolds, a country singer who had all the blood temporarily diverted from her brain and had her body temperature lowered to 60 degrees while neurosurgeons worked to remove an aneurysm buried at the base of her brain. Had it burst it would have killed her. Pam’s tale is detailed in the BBC documentary, The Day I Died.
Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath (I love that name. I often wonder about the parents who came up with it.) Tagore seemed to possess the full spectrum of integration when he anguishly expressed: “I weep inside this prison that bears my name.” This is much the same sentiment that Pam and many others who have had OOBE’s and NDE’s report upon returning – that the experience of dying was such that they are disappointed to be required to come back. Many do so most unwillingly. The literature is legion with folks who have returned from such experiences with their priorities, and presumably their brains, significantly changed. A great number who have such experiences simply drop ego-driven striving and begin devoting themselves to a life of service. Many report totally losing all fear of death.
How might your your life change were you no longer the least bit fearful of death?
Last week, we explored six of the Nine Pathways of Neural Integration offered up by Bonnie Badenoch in her well-crafted guidebook, Being a Brain-wise Therapist. This week let’s explore two of the last three pathways and find out why they might be important to address.
Interpersonal Integration
Your brain and mine are relational organs constantly trying to predict the future. Success in this endeavor insures your and my survival. Our brains grow and integrate best when the future looks bright and it’s in the company of more organized brains, i.e. brains with better neural integration. Thus the value of healthy, parents, teachers, clergy, therapists, mentors and even peers for children (Recall Bruce Perry’s account:The Kindness of Children). People don’t necessarily judge you by the company you keep, but your brain is significantly impacted by that company. And whether we know it or are aware of it or not, we are constantly scoping out the intentions and feeling states of the company we keep every day. And as we develop increasing Interpersonal Integration, this capacity becomes more and more conscious – we know what we think and how we feel about different people, and most importantly – why.
Integrating Compassion
Gene Knudsen Hoffman, who travels the world doing conflict resolution in places like Israel and Palestine and Azerbaijan and Armenia, is the founder of The Compassionate Listening Project. Her experience is summed up in this statement which probably represents a pinnacle of Interpersonal Integration: “An enemy is someone whose story we have not heard.” A natural, empathic outcome of Interpersonal Integration, I think, is a deep, embodied understanding of Buddha’s First Noble Truth: “Life contains great suffering.” We only need turn on the nightly news, or better yet, look into our own personal histories to find evidence for the truth of this declaration. With this understanding, and the awareness of the “brain damage” that mostly accompanies unskillful actions in the world, compassion and forgiveness become the natural, inevitable response to people. So, for example, when we see someone blow up the Pakistan Marriott and themselves along with it, we don’t ask “How could someone do something like that?” An Integrated Interpersonal brain instead might ask: “What might it take for me to fully commit to a course of destruction like that?” For most of us, it is most likely unimaginable. And yet, there are many people living in countries the world over who think America – you, me and our elected representatives – already is committed to such destruction. Those are people we typically think of as our enemies – in other words, people whose story we haven’t fully heard. And in addition to Interpersonal Integration, it might require more than a little Transpirational neural integration before we can actually begin to.
Transpirational Integration
Transpiration means “to breathe across.” In the sense of brains integrating, it essentially refers to a developing awareness that the body boundary we all walk through the world carrying, is an artificial one. As Transpirational Integration unfolds it moves us away from Martin Buber’s I-It interactions to more and more authentic I-Thou relationship, one in which there is little separation between me and a terrorist bomber. Not that I would do what a terrorist bomber does, but I can understand his conditioned mind and his sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. Some of us may be feeling that way in America today!
Einstein probably described Transpirational Integration best when he wrote:
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty …. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.
I’m sure that many of us have seen or heard these words of Einstein’s before. But things are different now. Now we know that what’s required for his words to possess deep, embodied meaning for us, is a level of heart-brain-mind-body integration that does NOT currently appear to be on the scene in overwhelming abundance. Without the development of Transpirational Integration and the Right Action that flows from such integrated coherence, Planet Earth’s survival might truly hang in the balance. Next week we’ll explore the critical role that the last pathway – Temporal Integration – very likely plays in this unfolding neural drama.
… but when I lost weight, cleared up my skin and joyfully began walking through the world as if living a Zen Story, they finally started to sit up and take notice. But first of all they wanted to know, “What the heck does ‘integrate your brain’ actually mean?”
Well, it turns out integration means something quite un-special, but very specific. Integration is what brains would do naturally and automatically, were it not for the fact that all of us have to find a way to make it through birth, childhood and adolescence – dangerous and disruptive enterprises at best – painfully disorganizing and dementia-inducing at worst.
So, what is integration and why am I saying things both terrible and commendable about it? In her recently published (and very readable) book, Being a Brain-Wise Therapist, Bonnie Badenoch does an outstanding job of describing the nine ways our brains are constantly orienting in the direction of optimal integration. Freud, who started out as a neurologist, thought of integration as a kind of striving for mastery (which formed the basis of his “repetition compulsion”- we attempt things over and over until we get them right). I tend to think of integration as “healing constantly trying to happen.” And recent studies attempting to facilitate integration using Deep Brain Electrical Stimulation seem to support my premise. The same way that a cut finger will try to heal and restore itself to full integration, the brain too, is constantly attempting similar efforts, only on the most complex structure in the known universe. Selectively stimulating under-performing areas seems to provide healing relief for a number of conditions, resulting, in theory at least, of greater neural organization and integration.
So, to help bring some clarity to this complexity, first I’ll list the nine pathways that Bonnie identifies, and then I’ll explore what fully integrating of few of them might mean for you, me and the children of the world. Think about how they might apply in your own life.
The Nine Pathways of Integration
First is Vertical Integration; next Bilateral – the integration of the right and left hemispheres; then Narrative, Memory and State Integration; after that, Consciousness; then Interpersonal Integration; then, my favorite, and one I’ve been diligently working on for nearly 40 years – Temporal Integration; and finally, there’s Transpirational Integration.
Vertical Integration
Vertical integration simply means that the body, limbic structures and prefrontal areas are wired together optimally with lots of connections. This allows for a strong body-awareness putting me easily in touch with feelings. Strong vertical integration allows me to tolerate a broad range of emotion without becoming either frozen or overwhelmed and reactive. Differences in vertical integration are responsible for one man’s ceiling ending up being another man’s floor.
Bilateral Integration
Like a house with a solid foundation, bilateral integration is built upon strong vertical integration and simply refers to numerous connections crossing both sides of the brain. This allows me to easily put words to feelings and to translate and make meaning from the images and sensations arising in my complex inner world which result primarily from right brain firing.
Narrative, Memory and State Integration
Narrative, memory and state integration is the natural outcome of either secure attachment in childhood or earned secure adult attachment later on – I’ve come to terms with my personal history and can talk about it in a coherent, emotionally engaged manner. It’s also responsible for what Dan Siegel calls Mindsight – being able to readily think about and observe my own and others’ thought processes. For those of us who can do this easily, it often comes as a revelation that many people – children and adolescents especially – do not possess sufficient neural integration to be able to readily thinkabout their own thoughts. In other words, they don’t ever realize that “a mind is a terrible thing to trust.”
Consciousness Integration
Consciousness integration is the ability to easily move back and forth between my inner world and the outside world – endoawareness and exoawareness. Integration allows me to do this with the calm curiosity of a caring observer. Accomplishing this integration allows me to “be here now” – fully focused in the present moment more often than not, without a preponderance of negative judgments or excessive reactivity. This is a very useful integration to possess in politics and in negotiations with teenagers.
So, those are the first six pathways. Integration is not something that is “won and done,” but as your own experience might suggest, develops on sort of a recursive, upward-spiraling continuum. Next week we’ll explore the last three pathways and the implications they might have for promoting and fostering a life of rich complexity, flexibility, compassion, peace and service.
When my daughter was little, I had a fail-proof way of getting her attention when I wanted it. I use the same method to get the attention of a room full of high-spirited students when it’s time to begin class. And I trained the family dog to respond to a similar method as well. What I do is simply speak in Broken Record at a whisper. Not only does it take a lot less energy, but I find using it to be unfailingly effective at getting attention.
Aural Assault
By contrast, when I listen to any of the four candidates currently running for office in America, I often feel as if I’m being aurally assaulted. If I fully focus on voice tone, rhythm and cadence, and don’t pay particular attention to the words they’re saying, I can’t really listen to any of them for more than a few minutes. I soon notice myself glazing over and going numb. (Perhaps that’s what they intend? If it is, they might want to consider some more powerful creative possibilities).
Sweet nothings, baby-byes, lullabies, pillow talk – they all have great power, and could be put into service much more than they are by parents and politicians alike. Why? Because they all work the same soothing magic on the brain’s limbic structures. They repeatedly activate the resonance circuitry – those pathways between the amygdala, hypocampus, hypothalamus and the prefrontal cortex. We tend to like and trust people who activate our resonance circuits, and when we’re not limbically hijacked, we tend to be much more agreeable, relaxed and amenable to outside influence.
Practicing Prosody
The formal term for this way of speaking and listening is prosody. Wikipedia has this to say about prosody:
prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect the emotional state of a speaker; whether an utterance is a statement, a question, or a command; whether the speaker is being ironic or sarcastic; emphasis, contrast and focus, and other elements of language which may not be encoded by grammar.
Emotional prosody describes the perception of feelings expressed in speech, and was recognized by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man to predate the evolution of human language: “Even monkeys express strong feelings in different tones – anger and impatience by low notes, fear and pain by high notes.” Native speakers listening to actors reading neutral text to project emotions were able to recognize happiness 62%, anger 95%, surprise 91%, sadness 81%, and neutral tone 76% correctly in trials.
There continues to be a lot of research in neuroscience on prosody. Search through Google Scholar and you’ll come up with studies like these:
Prosody and the Right Hemisphere
What makes prosody particularly interesting to me is that it seems to provide direct access to structures in the right brain, the places where early implicit memories are primarily stored. Those are the memories we all have that we don’t have words for – memories of things that happened to us shortly after conception up to the time we began acquiring language. Many of these memories live in us as something attachment researchers call “The Unthought Known.” These are things we know, but can’t easily put into words. These are memories, often overwhelming and disorganized, that talk therapy can’t help much to integrate. Prosody is why music soothes the savage beast, and why a therapy like psychoanalysis can go on for years with little real change taking place. Much of our early wounding is stored in imagery and somatic sensation, and implicit memories are inaccessible using language alone. (Check out The Limits of Talk for more detailed information).
Voice Magic
If you want to compare and contrast people using prosody well, listen to any one of the current political speeches, and then go and listen to the speakers in this short YouTube video. Pay particular attention to how each of them makes you feel in your stomach, chest, neck and back. Which works to increase tension? Which works to release it?
How would you like to go to sleep each night having one of these sweet voices reading you a bedtime story?
Somewhere between birth and roughly age three, I suffered a substantial decline in social intelligence. My earliest memory of one significant incident was being left in the care of total strangers in St. Raphael’s hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. I went to sleep only to wake up in great pain – the result of having had my tonsils removed. I remember being given an orange Popsicle to eat. I also remember throwing it up before I had half eaten it.
Hospital Trauma
It’s no accident that I’ve retained this memory for almost 60 years! Current traumatology research points to a very high probability of traumatic memory formed in the wake of any hospital procedure that uses a general anesthetic. In my case, the reason was simple: my autonomic nervous system retained awareness that sharp implements were cutting pieces of flesh out of my throat. In response it sent out fight or flight chemicals (adrenaline, cortisol, etc.), the same as it would do if I were consciously awake and experiencing the pain of this traumatic assault. But, because my body was immobilized, what I ended up with was PTSD, and an intense dislike of orange Popsicles. And a dread-filled fear of strangers.
The Power of Powerlessness
It’s freezing or being immobilized that seems to cause the problem, as evidenced by the next insult to my social intelligence which took place at around age four. My older sister Andrea was pushing me on a swing in the park across the street from our house. I can clearly recall the exhilarating feeling of going up just a little bit too high on the back swing and the thrill of arcing back down and then gliding up into the front arc. On the next downswing however, I was suddenly struck full in the face and knocked painfully to the ground. Blood was spattered everywhere and my eyes filled with tears as I lay immobilized on the ground while my nose began to swell rapidly. Through those tear-filled eyes I saw my sister yelling at a girl who was running with her little brother out of the park. For no known reason, she had simply walked up and smashed me in the face as I swung down toward her. This experience too, carved large inhibition grooves on my emerging social intelligence. Once again it was becoming clear: strangers were not safe.
Public Humiliation
The next incident I recall came when I started public school. I remember standing in the lunch line amidst a whole group of new kids, most of whom I did not know. Johnny Mathis, the one kid I did know, was standing behind me. Suddenly, he grabbed hold of my arms and held me as he yelled out to the other kids: “Look at Brady and his wimpy, pointed elbows!” I remember being held frozen and turning tomato-red as all the other kids stared at me, or rather, at my elbows and laughed. Strike three of dozens – hanging out with strange people had become way too trying for me. Still, it took a number of other immobilizing and painful experiences at the hands of strangers before my social intelligence was essentially reduced to zero. (One result: I spent seventh through twelfth grade never uttering a single word in any class).
The Tragedy of the Common
The tragedy of seemingly innocuous events such as these (when viewed through 1950s knowledge and sensibilities) is that they cultivate conditions that are completely antithetical to the way the brain is designed and ideally structured to unfold. As I’ve since learned from Peter Levine’s and Maggie Kline’s book, Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes, a typical childhood is filled with experiences of all kinds that disrupt, disorganize and delay optimal neural development. Many of them happen without any parental or adult awareness of grave damage done. Here are a few pictures of everyday incidents demonstrating what I mean:
In each of these pictures the experience of emotional overwhelm in combination with immobilization appears to store these experiences similar to the way it records and stores real life-threatening incidents. The same neurotransmitters are involved. The same brain disorganization results.
Waking Up to Brain Development
Parents, teachers and childcare workers would be wise to be aware of the neural disorganization incidents like these can produce. One good intervention in the wake of such experiences is to have the child stand up and move – walk or run. Repeating movements like Brain Gym or Smart Moves that cross the midline of the body (making the sign of the cross?) are also helpful. Finally, some kind of “triumphant action” is further useful to diminish the sense of powerlessness resulting from the overwhelming experience, transforming it to permit greater potential for confident social intelligence.
