How to Give Kids Cancer

Here’s a recently published study that I hope will turn out to become a landmark: Child Abuse and Cancer. Essentially, abused children run almost a 50% higher risk for contracting cancer later on as adults than those who haven’t been abused. Admittedly, many of the causes of cancer remain mysterious and complex, but as a result of reading books like Bob Scaer’s The Body Bears the Burden and The Trauma Spectrum, and Gabor Mate’s When the Body Says “No!,” this study makes perfect sense to me. I’ve often wondered why, on a percentage basis, incidents of cancer have increased so profoundly over the last 100 years? I think a pretty compelling neurological case could be made that is it because incidents of child abuse have increased as well, perhaps leaving many children’s brains looking like this.

The High Costs of Doing Nothing

Several years back, Suzette Fromm conservatively calculated the direct and indirect annual costs of child abuse from reported incidents at 100 billion dollars. Privately, she told me that she only used reported incidents, because when she told people what she thought the real costs were based on all incidents of child abuse in America, people’s eyes glazed over or they simply didn’t believe her. It’s kind of like Freud during the Victorian era refusing to believe that the primary cause of so many of his women patients’ difficulties were rooted in the sexual abuse they experienced as kids. His incredulity forced him to contort his thinking until he finally came up with the bizarre explanatory fiction called: Penis Envy! Not one of his finer contributions.

But if we don’t distort our thinking like Freud, and add adult-onset cancer to the list of annual abuse costs, which was $72 billion in 2004, I’m pretty sure we can add over another $100 billion dollars to those costs.

Controlling for Abuse

And then, of course, abused children often turn out to be abusers themselves. Why? Because the damage that has been done to them often prevents abused children from being able to self-regulate their emotional reactivity to the people and circumstances that life brings their way (or that their brains unconsciously draw them to, in futile attempts to compulsively heal the trauma?). Because they can’t control themselves, as a society we are forced to find other means to try to provide “self-control.” We call one of those “other means” prisons. Prison-building, as you may know, has exploded here in America in recent years. America has five percent of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners.

If we add in the $50,000 annual cost of housing the 2.2 million people in prison in America in 2006, we can add another 100 billion dollars to our growing costs! And that’s not factoring in the lost productivity and opportunity costs that would be obtained were these folks not abused.

More Money, More Suffering

Paraphrasing the observation popularly attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen, “A hundred billion here and a hundred billion there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real money.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the real total costs of child abuse in this country were over a trillion dollars annually. (To get a proportional sense of these numbers, consider that a million seconds is a little less than 12 days. A billion seconds, roughly 32 years. A hundred billion seconds is just shy of … 320 years.  A trillion seconds puts us back 100 years before Christ, and sends us forward into a very tentative future).

So, disease and crime and early abuse are all connected, resulting in a lot of money being spent, money that will most likely not pay much of a return, mostly because so many parents, teachers and caregivers don’t really know when their actions are causing damage. Nor do they know how to repair such damage once it’s occurred. In my opinion, this is where the real education and interventions need to be aimed – at the harm that is done unwittingly to our children as a result of simple ignorance (for example, screaming at kids!).

Profound Human Suffering

Underneath all that money, what we’re really talking about though, is profound human suffering. And it’s suffering that’s widespread, suffering that begins early and often repeatedly recurs over a lifetime.

It was out of making these connections between early abuse and lifelong suffering, that it seemed to make the most sense to me to attempt to focus on early, optimal interventions. A lifetime of leverage can be gained by beginning to educate parents, teachers and caregivers about the brain, even when children are still in utero. Together with continued, mentored learning, like that provided by the midwife Colorado-based, Nurse-Family Partnership, we can greatly optimize the first three years of every child’s development in areas like immune and executive function, social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, and overall human goodness.

It seems like something not only “best for the children,” but ideal for the adults we are destined to become as well.

Growing Our Gandhi Neurons

One of my favorite working neuroscientists is V.S. Ramachandran at the University of San Diego. He reminds me a lot of Nobel Prizewinner, Eric Kandel, someone who loves to investigate anomalies and who is acutely aware of the role that intuition and play play in scientific discovery. He can’t remember where he parks his car, but Ramachandran dreams up all kinds of simple, creative experiments aimed at alleviating people’s pain. For example, he used a five dollar drugstore mirror to rid amputees of phantom limb pain, a procedure that has been tested and adopted by The Walter Reed Army Hospital. He was also the first researcher to publish the fact that the brain doesn’t let unused real estate simply go to weeds. If we lose our sight, the area of the brain customarily developed for vision – the visual cortex – will be taken over by other nearby sensory areas, like hearing and touch. It’s a kind of neural redevelopment project that reliably happens in our heads.

Jesus on the Brain

Ramachandran has been described as both “the Marco Polo of neuroscience” and a free-thinking “poet of neurology.” As an example, off the top of his head he hypothesized a mechanism for how people might hear God or Jesus speaking to them. The thoughts we think every day produce unconscious movement in our vocal cords. Brain damage that results in enhanced sub-vocalization might be the actual process that produces the sensation of an outside voice speaking inside one’s head. In fact, my suspicion is that any number of neurological anomalies might be responsible for many of the “spiritual” experiences that have been passed down to us through the ages. Early life was considerably more stressful then, and trauma-induced neural disorganization very likely accounts for many such “visitations.” For example, if I begin seeing auras or hearing voices coming from a burning bush on my little offshore island, one might question the strength of my connection to everyday reality. The bet with the best payoff would most likely be brain lesions, rather than an actual inspired visitation.

Gandhi Circuits

In a recent New Yorker profile by John Colapinto, Ramachandran spoke about neurons in the brain that he calls “Gandhi Neurons.” As a number of his critics have pointed out, they are more likely Gandhi Circuits, but the critics miss the point. Ramachandran’s assertion is that there are parts of the brain that we can get to fire repeatedly that will grow and connect and move us more and more in the direction of someone like Gandhi – or any number of other people who might serve as inspiring role models. This capacity to imagine ourselves as someone else helps move us away from an egocentric view of the world into a more allocentric view. I don’t think it’s an accident that our current President has studied the life of Lincoln, even going so far as to replicate his train ride to the Capitol. He’s actively working to strengthen the connections to his “Lincoln circuits!” I’m also guessing that when Larry Kincheloe, a doctor in Oklahoma City, practices “intuitive obstetrics,” he’s grown and is activating his own Gandhi Neurons.

Home Growing Our Own

Ramachandran’s point seems to be clearly supported not only by neuroscience research, but by lots of anecdotal evidence as well: if there are qualities in others that we admire and respect and would like to acquire and express for ourselves, we can simply practice acting in the ways those people act. And we can teach and encourage our children likewise, to “fake it til we make it.” At some point, the brain will connect up the circuitry such that we are no longer faking.

But part of such practice must be to actively address those parts of ourselves and our kids that might be the antithesis of what we’re attempting to manifest – we have to somehow admit to and creatively address our dark, unskillful sides. Aversion and denial won’t cut it. So, if I want to be like Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity, for example, I have to start doing things for other people, perhaps even with great anger and resentment arising. But I can still do them nonetheless – growing my Gandhi Neurons in the process. I’m thinking such an enterprise would make quite Gandhi happy. As a matter of fact, I often hear his high-pitched, lilting voice in my head telling me that himself!

The Two Perilous Questions

Way back in the day (the early 1990s), two respected psychologists in Northern California let their curiosity and perhaps their own woundedness drive their research interests. They wondered what factors contributed to the unfolding of the sacred in women’s lives – how they weathered the disruptive processes of being transformed from a child of God into “an adult of God.”  So they went around to all their friends and asked them to nominate candidates they considered to be “spiritually mature.” In the end they came up with people like the poet, Maya Angelou, Jungian psychologist, Marion Woodman, former nun and artist, Meinrad Craighead, and meditation teacher, Toni Packer. Then they set out on a five year journey doing a kind of Grounded Theory-Appreciative Inquiry research study to essentially discover how these women “found the river of their own lives and surrendered to its currents.”

In essence they would meet with these women and ask them to tell about transformative periods in their lives. They also asked them what was most meaningful and sacred to their unfolding spiritual development. Patricia Hopkins and Sherry Ruth Anderson compiled, edited and published the results of their interviews in their best-selling book,The Feminine Face of God. What I took away from this extraordinary research is that the journey of each of the women interviewed was primarily driven by what I call The Two Perilous Questions.

Create at Your Own Peril

These questions have shown up for me in one form or another in the work of many different people. For example, Robert Fritz, the retired conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, has written extensively on the process of creativity. By examining his own creativity in minute detail, he was able to break the actions down in ways that actually make the creative process replicable. And in my mind, becoming spiritually mature is, by decree and by definition, a very creative process. And best-selling author, Steven Covey’s Second Effectiveness Habit – Begin with the End in Mind – is certainly related to these questions and to creativity.

The Lens of Neurotheology

It’s interesting to go back and revisit this research, looking at it through the lens of neurotheology. By what neurological process might these women have arrived at this place of spiritual maturity? While mostly conjecture on my part, based solely on the stories they’ve told, I suspect it was accomplished in two ways. Assuming that the brain played in integral part in their process, the first way seemed to involve things like therapy, contemplation and prayer. By this process, a number of these women apparently returned to the “scenes of the crimes,” those early remembered trespasses against them. And in that revisiting they seemed to find creative ways to emerge triumphant from those trespasses, if only in their own imaginative heart. The second way to spiritual maturity involved frequently invoking The Two Perilous Questions.

The First Question

So, what are The Two Perilous Questions? The first one is: What’s true for me? This, like the second, is to be asked recursively. In simple terms a recursive question is one that, asked repeatedly, grows an ever-deepening awareness and clarity out of itself. It also, I suspect, spurs the growth of profound neural connectivity in the brain and body. This question invites us to raw self-examination, keeping us current and continuously caught up with our lives, apart from what significant others may think or wish for us. It’s perilous because it sets the stage for change, often needed but frequently resisted … leading almost inevitably to the second question.

The Second Question

The second Perilous Question is: What do I want? When this question follows on the heels of the first, it becomes considerably more difficult to resist the needful changes awakening in our hearts, brains, minds and bodies. Often the answer to this question is … peace and relief. Sometimes it is joy, or adventure, or simply change for change’s sake. Other times these questions force us to construct our own Ordo Amorum – a personal hierarchy that consciously forces us to choose between the people, places and things we love, versus those we love most. What makes these questions perilous is the fact that they often bring us face to face with humanity’s and our own unadulterated suffering, plunging us into the Dark Night of the Soul on the way to spiritual emergence. It certainly did for many of the women who attained spiritual maturity as they searched for The Feminine Face of God.

Ask them at your own risk.

Why (Many) Men (Fathers) Are Such Lousy Listeners

In most of the educational and training venues where I’ve studied and trained, I have almost always been a part of very large male minority. From grief counseling, to marriage and family systems classes, to transpersonal psychology study, I have invariably ended up in a room where women outnumbered men ten or fifteen to one. Many of these settings required a set of relational skills that included some ease and facility with … listening.

Listening skillfully with some degree of emotional awareness, what I call Deep Listening, is much more than simply hearing. It appears to require some neural connectivity in the brain that UCLA neuro-psychiatrist, Dan Siegel identifies as the “resonance circuitry.” This appears to involve our mirror neuron system, the superior temporal cortex and the insula cortex. The early evidence seems to be that men do not generally possess as many connections in these areas as women do. We seem to have a “resonance connection deficiency.” Extrapolating from communication studies that    found men speaking roughly 7000 words a day compared to women’s 20000, Louanne Brizendine, a neuro-psychiatrist at UCSF, places that deficiency at roughly 60%! That’s a pretty significant neuronal network handicap. Here’s what she has to say about it directly:

No surprise then, that some verbal areas of the brain are larger in women than in men and that women, on average, talk and listen a lot more than men. The numbers vary, but on average, girls speak two to three times more words per day than boys … Girls speak faster on average – 250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males. Men haven’t always appreciated that verbal edge. In Colonial America, women were put in the town stocks with wooden clips on their tongues or tortured by the “dunking stool,” held underwater and almost drowned – punishments that were never imposed on men – for the crime of “talking too much.” (p.36)

(So, is the practice of water-boarding simply a displacement by neuron-deficit male leaders onto Iraqi prisoners of war? An outlet for something men can no longer get away with taking out on women in America?)

Men – 0 – Pause

But wait, there’s more. Raphael Pinaud and his colleagues at the University of Rochester have discovered that a key hormone in auditory functioning is … estrogen. While men do convert some bit of testosterone into estrogen, we never end up carrying around anywhere near the amount that women do. Might we also ebb and flow throughout the month, with communication skills peaking like they do for women on day 12 of their cycle?

How important is estrogen to social ease and intelligence? A 2005 study by Rebecca Knickmeyer and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina measuring testosterone levels in utero found that those children with the lowest levels of exposure (and thus higher estrogen) were discovered to have the highest quality social relationships at age four.

Plastic Bombastic

The good news though, is that all is not lost for men. The brain is plastic; it can learn new things. And learning to listen skillfully is one of those things, but it takes practice. And more than a little. I’ve been teaching and practicing listening skills for more than 15 years, and I would grade my skill at listening at around a B, maybe B+. The biggest shift for me in this area is that I come to know when I’m NOT listening well much more quickly. Once I do, I am often able to course correct in mid-sentence. Sentences which, while I’m speaking, often interfere with listening. Some people who know me well might take issue with the grade I’ve given myself, especially since I’m almost deaf in my left ear. 

But if we men really want to improve our listening skills, we might B-L-O: Be Like Obama. We might go live as the lone male in a house with four other women! I guarantee it will improve our skills exponentially!

Women Manning Up

Because women would seem to have a considerable advantage, both neurologically and hormonally, I think it becomes incumbent upon them to voluntarily play the communication game with their tongue tied behind their back, to mix a metaphoric image. What that means is that if women want to be heard, they will have to do several things to level the playing field. First of all, they would be well-served to extend invitations for men to speak up, and then allow the space for that to happen. There are great benefits to be obtained by doing that. Next, as Kathy Speeth, a professor I had in graduate school once memorably instructed: “You can’t invite men to expose themselves, and then cut off their balls!” Not such an easy thing to do, since often when men do speak up, there’s a high probability that they’re going to say things that women are not necessarily going to love hearing. But once we are fully heard, we do tend to be able to listen with many more of our few, precious neural resources available.

On the other side of the equation, if we men are going to improve in the listening area, the best thing might be for us to man-up and grow some breasts and wear a “bro.” That extra estrogen will most likely greatly improve temporal lobe functioning.

The Stink of Commerce

I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and I have to say that rich smells different. Money represents happiness in the abstract; a perfect pursuit for those of us incapable of direct happiness. Thus, having a lot of money carries particular challenges, many outlined in the book, We Gave Away a Fortune. That book intimately details the struggles of the heirs of the Pillsbury, Rockefeller and other massive American fortunes as they tried to go against family tradition – they actually gave away principal (God forbid!), the hoard of money that earned much of the interest customarily given away to charity.

For me one central difficulty with having a lot of money was distressingly summarized one day when I picked my daughter up from elementary school. She was crying because the other kids didn’t want to come over to her house and play, “because you’re rich!” Wealth can isolate and powerfully foster the illusion of separation, individually and collectively in my experience. The rich keep their distance from the poor, and the poor envy and aspire to become like the rich.

With a Little Help from my Friends

Becoming rich was never a high priority for me. We got that way seemingly by accidental good fortune, and a lot of help from family, friends and strangers. One stranger was the town manager of Atherton, one of the wealthiest communities in the San Francisco Bay area. Our social “resonance circuits” somehow connected up with his, and of his own accord he volunteered to personally mentor my wife and me through the town’s complex subdivision process. When the planning commission initially nixed our substandard subdivision request, the town manager pointed us to a little-known Ordinance that would tie their hands. The end result was that this one property that we maxed our credit cards to buy in the go-go days of real estate, became two, both ultimately worth several million dollars.

To this day I continue to explore and grapple with the issues of wealth and poverty, pulsating perhaps too frequently between those poles (I filed for bankruptcy protection shortly after 911). Some recent neuroscience studies have helped me bring things into considerably sharper focus, however.

Pinging the Pleasure Centers

I’ve written and published seven books in the last six years, and what I notice is that donating them to individuals and organizations that will make good use of the information they contain, feels MUCH more satisfying than simply selling them to folks at talks, conferences and on the Internet. Stanford neuroeconomist Brian Knutson (pictured on the right) and Dharol Tankersley and her colleagues at UC San Diego have discovered the possible reasons for that: the pleasure centers in the brain and the altruism centers in the brain of most people tend to be two very different, independently operating networks. The nucleus accumbens is considered to be the centerpiece of the pleasure center, while the posterior superior temporal sulcus fires up to fuel altruistic activities. In most people, when these two centers go head to head, the pleasure centers rule the brainpan. I suspect the opposite is true for me – the pleasures I receive from altruistic activities like working with Hearts and Hammers, making charitable book donations and writing this free blog far outweigh the pleasure I get from simply peddling merchandise. But that’s me. It also seems to be Bill Gates, who recently exhorted his fellow billionaires to give away their billions. He’s mistaken though, about them enjoying it. They won’t, unless they’ve somehow wired up their brains as he has – to find great pleasure in the giving.

Now Pitching for Parents

So, now comes the pitch: I’ve just published a new book. It, like the six others before it, have one objective – to inform parents of the fact that the role they play in the lives of their children during the first three years is all-powerful: it will impact everything for better or worse across the whole lifespan! Social neuroscience, trauma and attachment research suggest that parenting for optimal brain development during these first three years will have enormous benefits, ones that will pay big dividends both for individual children and for the larger culture as well. Here’s my new book based on much of that research:

Wait, There’s More!

And so, I’d like to get the word out. I think learning about the brain and how it works, even just a little, can make a great difference for parents and children. If you’re one of the first 25 people to send an email with your name and address (safeandsecuremarkbrady@gmail.com), I’ll send you a book free of charge. And if you want to simply buy one outright, that’s okay, too.

And, if you know of young parents (or old grandparents, or daycare providers) who might benefit from learning how to optimally parent with the brain in mind, I’ll be happy to supply five or more copies at a 50% discount. And I’ll gladly ship directly to anyone you designate. Might such an action ultimately be something best for the children?

The brain-minded parents of these children told me they think so: