The Death of a Dear Heart

My sister died this week.

She was seven years old when I was born – my big sister. I remember her reading me to sleep at age three to Longfellow’s “midnight ride of Paul Revere.” I also remember her teaching me how to play 500 rummy when I was eight. She was sixteen years old and just starting to teach me how to dance, when she became pregnant. In a fit of Electra shame-rage, my mother threw her, and the few clothes she owned, out into the scrubby gravel street that ran through the housing projects where we lived. Several years later, at Christmas, Andrea showed up unexpectedly at the front door with her arms full of wrapped presents for my younger sister Melanie and me. In a rage replay, those presents too, were hurled out into the street.  Being poor damages your brain and makes you often act like someone who’s had stroke damage, so I suppose my mother really couldn’t be faulted. By the same token, she also couldn’t be trusted.

Several years later though, my sister’s persistent heart was ironically rewarded: our mother had a psychotic break and had to be hauled off to the State Mental Hospital at Middletown.  In an inspired act of seemingly never-ending compassion, she married a guy who’d been in jail, thus allowing her to become the legal guardian of Melanie and me. The State of Connecticut required legal guardians to be married in those days. After some creative negotiations, she was awarded custody of two teenagers who would have otherwise become wards of the State. It boggles the mind and inspires the heart to be so cared for. She was only 23 years old.

Persistence Perseveres

Without having parents to adequately soothe her and strengthen her neurophysiology – one of the most important parental responsibilities according to Siegel and Hartzell in Parenting From the Inside Out – Ann took up smoking cigarettes to serve as a replacement. A poor substitute, it served as a grounding means of self-medicating, self-regulating. I think many people initially take up smoking for similar reasons. Our mother did. For the last ten years or so, Ann has suffered from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Not being able to breathe easy is an impediment to a fully joyous life, I suspect. I know she lost her smile long ago.

In addition to raising three kids, interestingly Andrea worked for many years at a private orphanage. Several years ago, she opened a pet store to care for animals.  She was a caregiver. I would have wanted and expected her life to have lasted much longer – a just reward for such good works.  But then I’m reminded of a story Ram Dass tells in Death is Not an Outrage. Death, he said, is like getting to be done with third grade and then being released to enjoy summer break before having to show up for fourth grade next fall.  It appears that Andrea completed all her assignments and got done early. There was no good reason to hold her back. My sister Andrea’s heart knew how to answer The Big Brain Question “Yes.”  She was lost to me though, the day we stopped dancing together … and I still miss her.

The Neural Road Less Traveled By

Albert Einstein’s brain was left to science. What can we learn from his gift that might be useful to caretakers, teachers, parents and children? What things don’t we do for our kids that we might, things which could make a significant, positive difference throughout their whole lives?

First of all, Einstein’s brain was different than yours and mine, but apparently not by all that much. According to Dr. Ken Heilman, author of Creativity and the Brain …

Einstein had an enlarged left inferior… undivided parietal lobe, suggesting that this bigger and more highly connected supra-modal cortex gave Einstein an advantage in doing mathematics and spatial computations. In 1985, Geschwind and Galaburda posited that delay in the development of the left hemisphere of the brain may allow the right hemisphere, which mediates spatial computations, to become highly specialized. It was Einstein’s view that his own creativity was heavily dependent on spatial reasoning. Thus, the abnormal development of his left hemisphere may have led to the right hemisphere becoming highly specialized for spatial computations.

If you have something going on in one side of the brain, [could] that “disinhibit” the other side of the brain [into] developing even greater ability? Could Einstein’s dyslexia and lack of development of his left hemisphere have allowed his right hemisphere to grow and be well connected and to have excellent modules? People who have tremendous creativity also have tremendous connectivity.

What does this mean in everyday language?  It might mean that American education’s early emphasis on left brain learning – logical and linear thinking, language learning and literal-mindedness, might be coming at a greater cost than we realize. Because our left brain is allowed to dominate so early, might it end up costing our children a life of brilliant creativity?

Cultivating Human Connectivity

According to Heilman and his colleagues, creative innovation is “the ability to understand and express novel orderly relationships.” A key here for me, is that creative innovation requires having someone important and significant to express that creativity to!  One piece that I think is critical to Einstein’s development is that he wasn’t excessively shamed and ridiculed for his “differentness.”  And I would argue that his lifelong involvement with the supportive allies who formed his Olympia Academy: Michele Besso, Paul Ehrenfest, Conrad Habicht, Marcel Grossmann, Maurice Slovine, not to mention his math-whiz wife, Mileva, were essential to his success. Would Einstein, for example, have continued his work in physics after his University of Zurich doctoral dissertation was rejected, had he not had this group’s unqualified support?

 

In his new book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell further underscores the importance of creative allies – significant people who “get” us in ways that allow us to feel embraced and welcomed in all our weirdness and divergence. Bill Gates had his Paul Allen, Steve Jobs had his Steve Wozniak, Sergei has Larry, and the Beatles had each other, which allowed them to learn their trade playing together in Germany. They played for months and months for little money to a distracted audience in the Indra Club and the Kaiserkeller, located in Hamburg’s red-light district. Without passionate and compassionate allies, it becomes difficult to deal with the inevitable hardships and challenges that will inevitably arise and threaten to derail us.

Back to Brain Basics

What I find particularly compelling about this social necessity for optimal neurological development, is that it continually brings us back to The Big Brain Question. Most of the struggles and suffering that have shown up in my life have been when I was not able to answer The Big Brain Question with an unqualified “Yes” for those who counted on me.  And they were not able to answer it “Yes” for me, especially in times of crisis, when each of us was most in need of having it answered unfailingly in the affirmative.

And answering this question Yes consistently is not at all an easy thing to do, especially when our neurophysiology is working against us – when our limbic system is being regularly highjacked and flooding our body and brain with cortisol and adrenaline. In excessive amounts, these chemicals become neurotoxins that we know “damage” the brain. Important connections wither and die, particularly where the prefrontal regions connect to and help regulate the limbic structures. Without these connections it’s difficult to consistently feel calm and safe. When we’re operating at the level of survival, it becomes a superhuman challenge to make our life a creative work of art. In fact, the brain at survival level more closely operates as it does in someone who’s suffered a stroke.  Stay tuned for ways to creatively address this challenge.

Tivo Your Dreams

At around age 30 I started to seriously forget things, like where I dropped my keys, or last set down my glasses, or put my checkbook. When I complained to my friend Pete about the problem, he put the idea of an electronic Key Finder out into the Meme-o-sphere. Within a year someone else had one out on the market. So instead of using a keyfinder, I developed a free, almost foolproof way of locating misplaced keys and glasses and such: Dream Incubation. Once I got familiar with the protocol, it rarely failed. Dreams seemed to provide ready access to procedural or implicit memory, and they are happy to answer easy, Lost Item Questions – provided however, that I am able to accurately recall and interpret the images they send me during the night.

Tofu Tivo

Yale neurosurgeon, Katrina Firlik, in her book Another Day In The Frontal Lobe, describes my brain much “like tofu, the soft kind, which, when caught in suction during surgery, slurps into the tube.” Scientists are now able to wire up that slurpy tofu while I’m sleeping and TIVO my dreams! And soon they will send them wirelessly to be stored on the Internet for easy downloading onto my personal computer’s hard drive! How amazing is that? It won’t be long before frustrated mornings of awakening with no memory of my lost keys dream imagery will become a forgotten thing of the past.

I can see lots of positive possibilities for this technology. Psychotherapists have long used dreams to help facilitate their work with clients. Historically, therapists are limited by what clients remember or feel safe enough to disclose. Assuming that dream images arise from deep in the unconscious, and that their fleeting, ephemeral nature makes them difficult to retain, this technology will allow us to capture and preserve even the smallest, seemingly insignificant details. That little Doodlebug crawling along the top of the bed rail – what meaning might that hold for you? Or the Jungian Scarab trapped in your toilet bowl – what secrets might it be trying to flush down the drain?

Creativity Components

Being able to Tivo our dreams could also be a great way to introduce kids to the three components of creativity that Nancy Andreasen outlines in her book,The Creating Brain - originality, utility and production. By being easily able to access dream imagery and being encouraged to make sense of the esoteric connections between different dream elements, kids and parents can begin to get comfortable with anxious-making originality. They can get practice in giving voice to what attachment researchers call “the unthought known”– those images and experiences we all have stored in implicit memory without any language connected to them.
In order for creations to have “legs,” kids also need to learn how to think in terms of utility. Utility may be something as concrete and obvious (after it’s on the market) as a gyroscoped, electric people mover (Segway), or something like a song that fires up the resonance circuitry in others, and also answers The Big Brain Question “Yes!” (Stand by Me - watch this video. You won’t be sorry). Which leads inevitably to production – something creative must be produced by a person through a process that results in a product – picture, song, poem or object. Tivo itself is one such example. Tivo for your tofu brain is another.

Creative Connectivity

I can easily imagine that working with such a device would help develop and encourage traits in kids that are often found in creative individuals: openness to experience, adventuresomeness, rebelliousness, individualism, playfulness, persistence, curiosity, sensitivity and simplicity. Of course, it helps if parents have a few of these traits well-developed in themselves as well.

A Dream Tivo might also encourage further investigation and experimentation with other forms of creativity. Parents and kids could be inspired to play creativity games like Idea Quota: the deliberate generation of a designated number of ideas; or Absurdity Days: days when we’re permitted and encouraged to be silly and outrageous; or using the SCAMPER Creativity Checklist: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, Rearrange/Reverse. Creativity expert Michael Michalko, in his book, Cracking Creativity, claims that concentrated thinking in creative ways, increases neural connectivity. Based upon how these kinds of things feel to me in my own body and brain, I strongly suspect he is right. If I could, I would incubate a dream regarding this possibility and Tivo the answer tonight!

The Workplace as Moral Testing Ground

I remember the first job I ever got fired from. I was one of three purchasing agents for a company called AeroWorld Manufacturing.  We manufactured and sold “replacement spares” to the U. S. Air Force – chrome-moly bolts for landing gears, threaded turnbuckles for flap assemblies, or maybe stainless steel hinges for the ailerons.

My job was to get bids based on blueprints purloined from the major plane-makers and award contracts to manufacture parts from them. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that by starting my own secret company with a friend and phonying competing bids from our regular suppliers, I could make a lot of money by awarding myself lucrative contracts. (This is part of the unfortunate process that results in the U.S. Government ending up paying $400 for a $10 toilet seat).

One day, Ted and Ernie, the AeroWorld owners, called me into their offices. They handed me a Dun and Bradstreet report that listed me and my partner, Jeff, as the principal owners of Aeronautic Industries, a company to whom AeroWorld had just lost a sizeable government contract. When Ted and Ernie asked me for an explanation, all I could manage was some lame stammer about a mistake being made. I was twenty-one years old and fired from my first job.

The Influence of Environment

AeroWorld operated in a culture of distrust and deceit. Even though I owned a house, a boat, a new Corvette and was part owner of a Beechcraft Bonanza airplane, I was distraught and depressed for much of my time at AeroWorld. I remember being out sick a lot. Furthermore, the whole time I worked there, I had the persistent feeling that something else was supposed to be going on, something other than simply putting in the time and taking home a fat paycheck. What that “something” was hit me like a ton of aircraft sheet metal one day when I happened upon a transcribed talk by Jiddu Krishnamurti entitled simply, Think on These Things. What I was supposed to be doing at AeroWorld was waking up – waking up to something larger than my own small-minded concerns, self-centered adolescent strivings, and petty grievances. Profoundly influenced by Krishnamurti, I decided I wanted my life be about something more “constructive,” something more moral. Put simply – something I could feel good about in body, mind, heart and soul. Within weeks of reading that book, I sold my half interest in Aeronautic Industries and became an apprentice carpenter, learning to frame apartment buildings in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. I was 23.

Fruit for the Juicer

Morality, it turns out, is facilitated by a lot of good modeling and caretaker support beginning early on in our brain development. If we want to have a moral culture, parents, teachers, clergy and caretakers must begin helping to develop morality early in the brains of our children. Morality appears to require considerable neural connectivity in the orbital prefrontal cortex – the central processing area – much like that depicted in the fourth illustration here:   

Without it, many of us will grow into adults who simply lack the networked “processing power” to manage the fears and emotions that distort and drive our daily doings.  It isn’t at all surprising to me, therefore, to see the current mess on Detroit or Wall Street – Madoff’s 50 billion dollar swindle of charities and pension funds being the latest - or The Smartest Guys in the Room – the Enron energy traders – showing up pretty much as clueless teenagers in their emotional and moral development. These smart guys’ greatest crime wasn’t that they bilked state and federal governments and their own fellow employees out of billions of dollars. Their greatest crime is that this “laboratory” hasn’t been put into conscious service as “fruit for the juicer” – workplace experiences to profoundly grow from emotionally, morally and spiritually. 

While time spent teaching reading in prison worked wonders for Michael Milken, prisons are not the best places to grow our moral brains. Social neuroscience asserts that “it takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain.” From society’s perspective,  a more restorative justice might be to require people like the Enron perpetrators to serve time in places like cloistered monasteries. More than a few emotionally and morally challenged folks – like Saul in Christianity and Milarepa in Buddhism – have used suboptimal origins as springboards for great moral transformation. We are all developmental works in progress. Both we and our children deserve the best support possible so that our neurology and our cardiology may profit handsomely from our failings and firings.

Honoring Heroic Hearts and Brains

I watched CNN name their Hero of the Year last Sunday night. While their winner was my third pick from a very impressive list, there were a number of things that stood out for me with all of the nominees. First, there wasn’t a depressed soul among them. Second, they appeared to be just ordinary folks who’ve managed to learn to regulate their limbic systems in ways that have moved them beyond fear and survival. Third, most all of them had lots of thanks to give – to friends, family and to some personal version of God. Finally, all of them had warts.

Will you teach me?

Were I as skilled in the art of voter “influence” as some, the 2008 Hero of the Year would have been Detroit grandmother Viola Vaughn who has answered the Big Brain Question for more than 15000 children in Senegal with a resounding “Yes!” Using the concept of “each one teach one” Viola has been responsible for her own significant micro-financing project in Senegal. Her work is awe-inspiring, her energy irrepressible and her presence electric.

As a retired homebuilder, I couldn’t be too disappointed in CNN’s selection of Liz McCartney , founder of the St. Bernard Project, as their 2008 winner. Liz has organized more than 8000 people to do the hard, hands-on work of restoring homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. What makes her most impressive is that she knew zero about houses and remodeling before she took on this project. What she had was good support and a brain that didn’t let anxiety and ignorance hold her back. She has heart and trust and a drive to have her life be meaningful.

Recalling Days of Yesteryear

But for the Action Jackson part of my own brain – where the kid who grew up on Superman, Batman and the Lone Ranger lives – the most compelling nominee was mild-mannered geek, Tad Agoglia. Agoglia founded the First Response Team, which has been responsible for saving thousands of lives in the wake of the seeming daily disasters striking across the country in the last few years. His four-man team drives to a disaster site in two Mack Trucks outfitted with more than a million dollars worth of really cool equipment that allows them to begin restoration work almost before the disaster is done, clearing roads, pumping floodwaters and rescuing people trapped in destroyed structures.

Each of these Heroes appears to me to be operating much like a well-integrated brain might. First of all, they each possessed high energy coupled with a clear, focused vision. There wasn’t a lot of “noise” – dissociated distraction – keeping them from accomplishing their missions. Next, their work in the world doesn’t appear to be overly inhibited by fear, ambivalence or uncertainty. They’ve identified the need and they’ve brought their own multiple intelligences to bear in order to address it. They connect and collaborate with lots of other people, and they bring a lot of creative flexibility along with them in their pursuit of the goal.

Bringing it All Back Home

I took a number of things away from the CNN Hero show. One is that the work of heroes seems to confirm what the altruism research of Stephen Post, co-author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People empirically suggests … that such work is good for what ails us. It’s good for our own and for other people’s bodies, brains, minds and hearts.

I also think we can model, teach and parent for heroism. We can hold up people like these in front of our children (a few of whom were children themselves), and explore together questions like: “What do you think makes these people tick?”  “What things might you like to do as a hero(ine) in the world?” “Who might you like to get together and do heroic things with?”

Tears for Fears

Finally, while none of the hero nominees was depressed, there was a LOT of crying taking place at the Awards Ceremony.  Many of the celebrities in the audience, and those presenting on stage were crying, as were the recipients of the awards. Many of the beneficiaries of the good works were crying as well. From a heartbrainmindbody perspective, what this mostly means is that people were navigating in uncharted waters, places where they were uncomfortably operating in unfamiliar territory. They were doing their best to process more energy and information than their neuro- physiology was currently capable of handling. But they were handling it nonetheless, perhaps aware that “the soul would have no rainbow, had the eyes no tears.” I, for one, am all for painting rainbows on our souls.