The End of Kids as We Know Them

These days I often find myself feeling blessed that I’m not a kid growing up in today’s world. Change happens way too fast, and the amount of information that assaults the senses daily often feels tsunami-like. According to science writer, Jonah Lehrer, there are roughly 35,000 new neuroscience studies published every year alone! Who could possibly keep up?

Trying to prepare kids for the world of today deserves a purple heart and a medal of honor; preparing them for the world of tomorrow, that’s pretty far outside what my aging brain can even begin to imagine. Still, one “tomorrow” area where kids would be well-served by parents, teachers and clergy, would be in learning how to make intelligent decisions around the emerging field of synthetic biology, a field that’s changing so rapidly even its leaders find it challenging to keep current. According to civil engineering-trained, Stanford “alpha synthusiast” Drew Endy, “what occupies our finest minds today, will be a seventh-grade science project in five years. Or three…”

Leading the Synthetic Bio Charge

Endy leads the charge in the synthetic biology movement, and based upon some of today’s most recent research, one seventh-grade science project for tomorrow’s kids might very likely involve designing a wide array of features for your grandchildren! From eye and hair color, to height, to total number of desired brain cells – an extensive menu with a wide variety of options to choose from will be available for designing the children of the future. And if number of brain cells can be programmed for, presumably so can intelligence. As a parent, how much smarter would you want your kids to be than you are? And how should our kids go about making that decision? (There are currently billions of dollars being devoted to this research. Do a Google search of terms like “synthetic biology,” “gene synthesis” or “nanopore sequencing” to get a small sense).

Synthetic biologists effuse greatly about the positive human potential of their work. They combine elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science and molecular biology with the express intention of deliberately designing the living world, of “competing with God,” as the editors at Nature described them in 2007. Synthetic biologists have developed methods for programming living cells similar to the way a computer scientist programs a computer. Using that knowledge, they have created a new form of life – an “app” named “Synthia.” Synthia can replicate her own DNA. With millions of dollars supplied by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, bioengineers at Amyris Biotechnolgies have already synthetically created a scarce drug, artemisinic acid, that promises to eradicate malaria in the world. Thsee new life forms created almost daily, synthetic biologists catalog on the BioBricks registry. If your kids want to create their own unique life forms, all they need do is order a collection of BioBricks – akin to cellular legos – obtain a used automated DNA synthesizer on eBay for as little as $1000 (they used to cost $100,000 less than a decade ago), and voila!, they can begin experimenting with building their own unique little life forms.

To Design or Not to Design

Tomorrow’s kids are going to have to decide if engineering life forms is something human beings should be morally and ethically allowed to do. They’re going to need emotional, intellectual and spiritual resources in order  to be able to rationally discuss the pros and cons of such pursuits without getting hijacked at every turn. And they won’t have much time – advancements currently occur at an exponential rate that exceeds Moore’s Law, necessitating its own measure – Carlson’s Curve.

I’m of two minds with respect to the creation of Designer Kids. As an old carpenter, I recognize that synthetic biology is just a tool, much like nuclear energy – one that can be used constructively or destructively. My ability to use tools skillfully has changed over time. Carpentry tools allow for such growth in skill, while only threatening a few personal body parts. Synthetic biology presents a different kind of tool, however. In addition to holding the promise of successfully addressing the nation’s number one killer – heart disease – using synthetic biology to perform “closed heart” operations – it is also a tool with the potential to not only end kids as we know them, but life itself as we know it. I’m not sure we’re wise enough or spiritually evolved enough to skillfully put such tools into widespread use before we accelerate completely out of control around Carlson’s Curve. And what does it say that we’re already developing a strategy for first responders to an anticipated bioterrorism emergency? If human beings are going to successfully reach the next stage of development, the kids we’re raising today will need to have greater intelligence and strength of heart than we had when we developed and dropped the first atomic bomb.

Lies, Damn Lies and Raising Hearty Children

Pithy quotations often provide motivating inspiration for these columns. Here’s one often attributed to former British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.” A second inspiration – if we can call it that – comes from this astonishing statistic: 92.5% of adult Americans show up with increased risk for heart disease … 92.5%!

What does this mean exactly? Well, might it mean that something essential that could have happened for more than nine out of ten Americans when they were kids, didn’t? Something that should have, or could have made a significant difference later on in their adult lives?

According to a number of respected neurologists, what happens shortly after conception until we acquire language takes on lifelong implications, whether we realize it or believe it or not. This period of profound neurological growth and integration influences how robust and interconnected our neural network will become later on. It will also determine how well we manage fear and anxiety as children and adults, how strong our immune systems become, which people we can easily be friends and hang with, what kinds of work in the world become even imaginable. So might it be that what more than nine out of ten kids didn’t get in order to not be at risk for heart disease is an environment optimized for robust neural development?

To foster such development, in the world of my health care reform, every parent in America would get government aid from conception through the first three years of a child’s life! Along with an intensive course of study in how their own brains work and how the brains of their children can be supported and encouraged to develop optimally. One model might be what Geoffrey Canada does with Baby College and the Harlem Children’s Zone, where pregnant women are contacted before they give birth and their children are continuously engaged with until they graduate from college. My prediction is that answering The Big Brain Question “Yes!” for parents and children in this way will more than pay for itself in reduced health care costs over the lifespan, which, as many gerontologists predict will be increasing at an accelerated pace. Roughly half of today’s baby boomers will reach age 100 in good health and the average lifespan in 2050 is projected to be …150 years!

Teaching Kids to Cheat Death

Anyway, here are the five measures for increased heart disease risk that the above statistic is based upon:

*  Never smoked or former smoker;

*  Total cholesterol below 200 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) and not using cholesterol-lowering drugs;

*  Blood pressure below 120/80 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) without using blood pressure-lowering medication;

*  Not overweight or obese, as reflected in a body mass index (BMI) less than 25 kg/m2; and

*  Never diagnosed with diabetes.

I’m guessing that directly admonishing or instructing kids in behaviors intended to remedy these conditions will produce only minimally improved results. Better to approach these issues as Geoffrey Canada does or indirectly, through imagery, play and role modeling. And environment. I’d be willing to bet that the early environments, both at home and at school, of the 7.5% of the adults free of heart disease risk were significantly different than the majority of us. I’d bet that there were few or no people modeling cigarette smoking, that considerable time and thought went into meal planning and preparation and that exercise and play were a natural part of every day. In other words, these kids were taught early on how to cheat death. One simple thing that Canada found was that teaching parents to speak to children often and with positive intent, produced significant outsized benefits.

The Lie in the Statistic

Not everyone in the 92.5% of the population identified in this cohort is actually going to contract heart disease, of course. Being at risk simply means the odds aren’t even. And in the end, 100% of us are going to die of the exact same thing anyway: oxygen deprivation to the brain. Since that’s not going to happen for many of today’s kids for another 150 years, we might as well do everything in our power to make sure those fifteen decades are powered with great strength of heart.

The Secret Power of a Mother’s Kiss

While watching the documentary, Fierce Grace, the other night, I was struck by a statement made by Subramanyum, a fellow disciple along with Ram Dass, of the Hindu sage, Neem Karoli Baba. Subramanyum said something to the effect that his teacher represented the epitome of love, that he exuded love, and that he rarely personally felt as loving as he did in this spiritual teacher’s presence. He had apparently received the “kiss of the guru.” Subramanyum also goes by the name of Larry Brilliant, currently the head of the billion dollar Google.org foundation. A good organization to head if your mission is to spread love in the world, I think.

Subramanyum

What Brilliant’s account immediately made me think of is The First Law of Social Neuroscience: “It takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain.” In my opinion, helping to organize all our brains is the first work of parents, teachers, therapists and clergy. This appears to happen by a kind of wireless neurological transmission – provided one of the brains actually is more organized than the other at any moment in time.

There’s a good possibility that the organizing energy of love might actually be life’s default condition (emanating from, or accelerated by the heart?). Nevertheless, I seem to walk around oblivious to it most of the time. Things like stress chemicals and survival worries tend to lock me into Logical Mind, where fear lives and perceptions get far too focused and/or seriously skewed. These and other Grave Concerns frequently do a fine job of blocking any awareness I might have of love as life’s underlying energy base.

Love and Kisses and Placebos

My first hint of the possibility of love being the default organizing energy came when I was pretty young. I was out in the back yard one day, carving a wooden spear with a pocket knife, when I slipped and sliced my knee. I ran into the house frightened and bleeding and begged my mother not to take me to the hospital (I had been traumatized at Yale-New Haven hospital at age four when they took my tonsils out under general anesthesia. But I didn’t consciously know that then. I just knew to stay away from hospitals at all costs). My mother took a look, washed the blood off, and told me I would be fine … and promised no trip to the hospital. To this day, more than half a century later, I still remember the feeling of great relief! Then she kissed my knee and told me that would make it all better. And it did.

I have a suspicion that a mother’s kiss and the love exuded by an enlightened guru might have something in common: that they are each somehow related to the placebo response. The power of placebo has inexplicably nearly doubled since the 1980’s, spurring the American medical establishment into finally getting around to doing some real research on it. Some of the early findings are quite surprising. For example, where you live in the world matters to placebos – placebos administered in Germany, for example, work differently than those administered in America. And the color of a placebo pill matters, as well as how much it costs – expensive sugar pills work better than cheaper ones ordered and imported through the Internet.

The Power of Therapeutic Ritual

The conditions under which you are given a placebo matter as well. If I wear a white coat, have a medical degree and give you the placebo in a hospital setting, it’s apparently much more effective than if I administer it in your home wearing jeans and a cotton flannel shirt. The “therapeutic ritual” turns out to be a powerful enhancer of the placebo effect.

Psychotherapist Marsha Lucas, with whom I recently shared this compelling article in Wired magazine about placebos, suggested that perhaps at some level placebos are doing their best to answer The Big Brain Question “Yes!” for us. I suspect she may be right. I’d love to devise some way to empirically test that hypothesis.

To the extent that a mother’s kiss, a guru’s presence and an effective placebo are each able to calm our fears and dissipate unneeded adrenaline and cortisol, my suspicion is that they set us up to be able to touch in to the default organizing energy, this energy that we mostly know as love. I suspect it is actually this energy which has the real power to heal, and that it has little to do with the size, color, cost or the place where a sugar pill is delivered. But I’m guessing it’s going to be awhile before Big Pharma begins designing drug studies to control for the organizing energy of Love Potion # 9. There is, after all, ready, but not necessarily easy access to it for most of us.

Making the Most of Dropportunities

I know a performance artist, a contemplative juggler who’s an expert at making mistakes. One of the extraordinary things he does is teach toddlers and blind people(!) to juggle. Juggling offers a wonderful, embodied metaphor for the content of many of our lives. You can see him in action by clicking on this video link: Wooshclang! (Do it, you’ll find a real treat!). In the process of learning to juggle, a learner must inevitably drop the ball. What Thomas Arthur likes to call such learning experiences are … “dropportunities.” Dropportunities invariably become a necessary part of learning, especially when there is no humiliation involved. You drop a ball, you pick it up and simply begin tossing it again. No harm, no foul.

Shame versus Humiliation

When my daughter Amanda was in middle school, I once offered her $10 to deliberately get a single word wrong on a spelling test. She wouldn’t do it. The peer pressure and the potential for subsequent humiliation stressed her too much. I’ve written about humiliation before, and though we often interchange or confuse the two, humiliation is different than shame. Shame is a developmental stage that all of us encounter in the course of our natural neurological unfolding. According to UCLA neuro-psychiatrist, Allan Shore, the experience of shame results simply from us hearing the word “No” repeated over and over, as parents and other caregivers attempt to provide guidance, socialize us and keep us safe. Humiliation, however, shows up neurologically as a very different animal. People who receive humiliating and esteem-diminishing responses when they make mistakes will rarely persist in the discipline and practice required for learning. You can’t be publicly or privately humiliated and easily learn to be curious and exploratory at the same time – the flood of cortisol and adrenaline that humiliation triggers inhibits the brain from making the necessary connections required for long-term learning. Humiliation instead, often teaches us to fear making mistakes. To avoid that feeling, many of us simply avoid taking on new things that might even remotely repeat our early humiliation experiences. That, in itself, is a great shame.

The Fearless Edu-Punk Model

Based upon the large number of graduate students I encounter who are desperately afraid of taking risks or making “mistakes,” – presumably having been negatively conditioned by earlier experiences – this is actually a significant problem. Especially, when a growing number of Edu-punks are in the process of organizing the Internet to do away with the requirement to enroll in college altogether, not to mention doing away with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that result. Without internal permission to NOT attend college, we’re really literally stuck spending four years acquiring debt for a degree that may or may not one day result in a good job.

Running parallel with the discomfort that making mistakes causes, is the inability for many of today’s kids to emotionally engage and effectively self-regulate in the face of conflict. The “Whatever Generation” turn out to be consummate conflict-avoiders. At the same time, increasing research evidence suggests that engaging in, and successfully resolving conflict works to powerfully enhance neural growth and integration. This makes sense, since the most powerful learning involves emotional learning.

Making History with Necessary Mischief

It’s not an accident that Harvard history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s observation that, “Compliant women seldom make history,” Victoria Castle’s Necessary Mischief and Ann Minch’s “open letter” on the Huffington Post to Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, have all gone viral in this age of the Internet. Ulrich woke up one morning to find her simple statement of truth taken up by the women’s movement, while Castle is convinced that engaging in necessary mischief “brings greater vitality, originality, resilience, and resourcefulness into a weary world.” Which is apparently true for Minch as well, who decided she’s not going to sit still for usurious 30% interest rates, and has taken the first step in leading a debtor’s revolt. These women stopped caring about how they might look to others. They show up as truth-tellers willing to express something essential that has been lost, something yearning to be reclaimed – the candid truth of their experience. Their work (and ours?) is to creatively find ways to respond to the inevitable Dropportunities that life presents.

How about you? What increasingly larger balls are you willing to  risk  dropping? Who can you get to help you manage that risk?

Growing the Eyes of the Heart

My heart often doesn’t see very well. Some days are better than others. Some days I wake up, eye myself in the mirror, and my heart-brain echoes the Adam Sandler refrain: “What the hell happened to me?” Other days, I wake up smiling and the man in the mirror is ready to unself-consciously engage, full of possibilities and appreciation for the world. In my mid-thirties I found myself troubled by a growing suspicion that my neuro-cardio chemistry played havoc with my view of the world, most often without any mid-moment awareness. I now strongly suspect that high levels of cortisol and adrenaline worked to deeply distort my world perceptions – and mostly not in a good way. These fear-stress chemicals are not my friends in twenty-first century America, when chances of a saber-toothed tiger leaping out of the cherry tree in my back yard to eat me alive are slim to non-existent.

It’s an Inside Job

I first began to notice this distortion phenomenon with significant others in my life. For example, when she was a young teen, some days my daughter would show up as Princess Summer-fall-winter-spring. Other days, I would inexplicably find myself face to face with Chief Thunderthud. And my perceptions would usually have little to do with her outward behavior. Instead, something in me fueled this distortion – namely, I suspect, glucocorticoids running wild. When I’m calm and rested and under the compassionate, relaxing influence that many natural empathogens (love hormones) provide, I really prize and appreciate the person looking back at me in the mirror. And those closest to me as well.

Dr. Alison Gopnik

A wild and winding life path has taught me why not everyone sees the world through the same grumpy, often misanthropic eyes that I do. Unlike me, people well-cared for as children tend to show up as positive, people-loving sorts, often deeply in touch with love, truth, beauty and meaning. They grow up as Kids Who Care, kids who see clearly with the eyes of the heart. In her new book, The Philosophical Baby, Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, examines many of the elements that go into raising kids imbued with such a world view. It begins much earlier than most of us realize, pediatricians and parents included. “When it comes to imagination and learning, prefrontal immaturity allows children to be superadults,” is how Gopnik describes such early capacities. This imagination and learning are making an appearance rather late in my life. Fortunately.

Counterfactual Thinking

Counterfactual thinking is what lies at the root of imagination. Gopnik describes it as “woulda-coulda-shoulda thinking” and it’s something very young children are quite good at. It’s a way to make causal connections that give imagination its logic: “I would be able to fly if I could get big winds lift me up.” Explore and evolve creative possibilities from that wishful fantasy and you evolve to today’s Boeing Dreamlifter with a takeoff weight of over 800,000 pounds!

But counterfactual thinking, is something I’m not very good at when my system is flooded with glucocorticoids. Few of us are. I tend to hold a narrow focus and creativity is nowhere to be found. In addition, at times when I see things out in the world that disturb me, there’s little awareness in the moment that perhaps it’s my own neuro-cardio physiology that needs adjusting. I need to get myself relocated to different environments,  inside and outside.

One Central Learning

One thing I would decree as a Central Learning for myself at this late date goes something like this: whenever I’m upset for any reason that is not the result of an immediate threat to my life, I have work to do. And my work is to find ways to restore my neurophysiology to levels that allow my natural empathogens to kick in so they can do their job. In other words, doing the work of moving away from fear-based thinking, and returning to creativity and counterfactual thinking. It is precisely such work that holds the possibility of growing and strengthening the eyes of the heart.

The Four Horsemen of Neuro-Annihilation

I often think it would be very difficult to be a kid in today’s world, especially a teenager. There’s so much going on and change happens so quickly, it’s unquestionably much more stressful than when we were their age, struggling to make sense of the world. Things like Swine Flu, global warming and terrorist threat levels were unheard of then. Even though we had the same raging hormones running sprint races through our bodies, neither we, nor parents, teachers or clergy realized that our brain wouldn’t come to full flower for another six to twelve years! Few teens today will reach early adulthood with  instruction or practice in managing what Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has identified as the four primary destroyers of optimal neural growth. Probably the majority of adults don’t know what they are, either.

Neuro-Annihilator One: Lack of Control

Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D.

The first neuro-annihilator for kids (and adults as well) is the experience of having little control in their lives. Teaching kids from an early age, how to recognize what they can and they can’t control in developmentally appropriate ways, and then taking steps to help facilitate them in doing so, goes a long way towards connecting up parts of the brain in the prefrontal cortex where executive function will come to reside. If you click on the link, you’ll be reminded of all the things prefrontal connections allow us to do, things like make plans, keep track of time, reflect on our actions and engage productively with groups.

Unlike many American mortgage bankers who thought it was a good idea to give “liar loans” to people with little hope of ever repaying them, a master at realizing the importance of structuring learning to allow people increasing, appropriate control, is Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. By forming the Grameen Bank which offers women in developing nations a series of graduated micro-loans beginning with $100, Yunus simultaneously puts them in control and manages to keep their neurophysiology from running wild. Compare and contrast this with America’s crushing personal and corporate debt burdens. (U.S. debt, currently the highest in history at over 11 trillion dollars, is expected to more than double in the next ten years! Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury is taking in roughly six times LESS employment tax revenues. Is this a recipe for crushing national allostatic load, or what?)

Neuro-Annihilator Two: Living with Little Predictability

The healthy brain is an anticipation-prediction machine. When we operate in environments where there is little predictability and we have little idea what to anticipate from one moment to the next, chronic stress results. This allostatic load triggers the release of high levels of glucocorticoids like adrenaline, cortisol and glutamate. Glucocorticoids circulating at high levels in the blood eventually end up destroying neurons, particularly in the hippocampus, the center of memory and learning. Things like high unemployment, delinquent bills and home foreclosures are examples of unpredictability that become stressors making it literally difficult to think straight.

Neuro-Annihilator Three: Little Social Support

Archie and Lulu

I’m pretty convinced that most relationships, when you strip away all their complexity, have a single, major primary purpose – to help restore us to homeostasis, to help us feel calm and safe.

Recently, we brought two six-week old kittens home to the house – Archie and Lulu. Initially they were very skittenish, keeping to themselves, dashing behind furniture the moment I walked into the room, and pretty much avoiding all contact. Within three days, though, they were eating out of my hand and napping on my lap. The combination of the rough-house play they continually do with each other and the freedom to rest when they are tired, works wonderfully to grow their little brains. And my letting their natural curiosity bring them to me.  I  then play with them using bird feathers attached to a string on a tomato stake.  I also make few loud or threatening noises, even reducing the sound of my slippers on the hardwood floor because it startles them. I am someone who “gets” them, someone who understands what scares them and refrains from doing that. So, they have each other, and they have me and my partner for effective social support. The key word being effective – able to play with and care for them and assure their safety and well-being. We do our best to answer the Big Brain Question “Yes” for Lulu and Archie.

Neuro-Annihilator Four: Having Few Outlets for Managing Stress

One question I often ask my students is: How do you know when eustress (good stress) turns into allostatic load (bad stress). I get any variety of responses, but by and large the answer is that most don’t know when that transition has been made usually until long afterwards. They have allergic reactions, make mistakes, get sick, get into accidents, obsess, sleep poorly and displace hostility onto those closest to them, often without the slightest awareness that allostatic load might be the root cause of the difficulties.

Allostatic load damages the brain by suppressing the release of “trophic factors.” (Trophe comes from the Greek word meaning “nourishment.” What sunlight and water do for tomatoes and roses, trophic factors do for brain cells). Learning to preemptively predict and effectively address such stress shifts might be the greatest nourishing gifts we can offer our children, and ourselves as well. Since the evidence is overwhelming that allostatic load significantly damages the brain, if we don’t help one another learn to effectively manage it, then unwittingly, we risk damaging all our brains.

The Stress of the Unthought Known

There’s an unpredictable neural trickster living inside each of us, taking up residence in the dendrites and synapses that weave their way through the right side of our brain. It’s been living there since before we were transformed from embryos into fetuses – between weeks seven and eight in utero. By then, great learning has already begun and the primary driver of learning and brain development turns out to be … sound! (One reason hearing is the first sense to develop and the last to leave us?). Especially powerful is the sound of mother’s voice, which we begin paying close attention to during this important time. The growth that begins unfolding, driven powerfully by mother’s voice initially, begins making a preponderance of connections on the right side of our brain.

Many months later, as we begin to acquire language, this preponderance of neural development and connectivity will begin to shift over to the left side of the brain. But this period before we acquire language is when everything of consequence in our lives that causes great anxiety or poses a threat to our survival gets registered and stored in the brain without words as something attachment researchers call The Unthought Known.

Christopher Bollas

The Birth of the Unthought Known

British psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas first coined the term, The Unthought Known more than 20 years ago. What he meant by that term is anything that we “know,” but for any variety of reasons, cannot actually think about. They may be things we’ve forgotten or have an intuitive or felt sense for that desperately struggle to put into words. Much of the content of the Unthought Known obtains from experiences in utero on and up through the first three years of our lives. Memories of these experiences live in the boundary between our conscious and unconscious mind. In addition to dreamwork and non-verbal forms of therapy, the stress we feel in our bodies is one of the primary ways to trace and uncover much the content of The Unthought Known.

During this period before we acquire language, each of us is subject to many stressful experiences, first by proxy in the womb as a result of stress our mothers experienced. If the stress is long enough and strong enough, and a return to pre-stress levels is not forthcoming in a timely fashion, our developing brain takes emergency action to shut off the “fight or flight chemicals” (cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline, glutamate, etc.) through the use of inhibitory neurons which make up roughly 30% of the brain. You can see a depiction of Inhibitory Commanders at work by visiting the Blue Brain website. This inhibitory action by the brain, in the face of unremitting stress, can then result in what neurobiologist Robert Scaer has accurately termed “dissociation capsules.”  Simply put, dissociation capsules are parts of our neural network that record and store the memories of stressful experiences. These neurons and the memories stored in them are held in check and prevented from firing and from connecting to other neurons by inhibitory neurons. Before we acquire language, these experiences are stored in the right side of the brain primarily as image and sensation. This is most likely the process by which The Unthought Known is created – virtually from conception through birth and into our first few years, the brain stores stressful experiences without the benefit of language.

Neurological Pile Ups

Having few words to speak of such experiences turns out to be a problem for neural integration. Having areas of our neural network not fully operational is less than optimal. It’s like having a pileup on the Autobahn that no one has taken the time or initiative to clear out in order to get traffic easily flowing again. It’s also very stressful. The brain recognizes this suboptimal situation however, and will earnestly attempt to get things cleared up and working again. Some of the ways it attempts this (often unsuccessfully) is through the creation and expression of things like nightmares and panic attacks.

Another way the brain appears to attempt repair is through something Freud long ago identified as the repetition compulsion. Taking his lead from Freud and French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, Harvard trauma expert, Bessel van der Kolk has identified that our “body keeps the score,” and it does so beginning shortly after conception continuously through our whole lifespan. What it keeps score of are real or perceived threats to our survival. Much of that score-keeping, unfortunately shows up in our neural network as the previously-mentioned “dissociation capsules.” Dissociation capsules most frequently occur when overwhelming experiences take place that leave us frozen or immobilized. Surgical operations that employ a general anesthesia are an all too common example of such an experience. With babies strapped to a swaddling board, circumcision is another (My suspicion is that physical movement restricted by swaddling itself may lead to less than optimal neurological development).

One of the ways the reticular activating structures of the brain work to help re-open and re-connect these non-operational or minimally functioning neural structures is by continually scanning the environment in order to find people, places and circumstances that have a similar look and feel to those that created the original encapsulations or engrams. In doing so, somatic psychologists Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton and Clare Pain contend that re-engaging with “familiar” people and/or circumstances and being able to take “triumphant action” in the presence of a significant, understanding, other person, often results in these non-functioning neurons being able to reconnect back up to the larger network and return to being a healthy, reintegrated part of the larger brain. This process of unconscious parts of our brain and mind working to continually move in the direction of greater integration can be a profoundly stress-generating process. Why?

Revisiting Our Wounding

One reason is that in an attempt to resolve early overwhelming experiences, it is continually attempting to place us back in circumstances that we originally were overwhelmed by. And resolution unfortunately, is not so easy to accomplish. When our internal neural trickster guides us into situations with familiar traumatic elements in them, and resolution fails to take place, there is growing laboratory evidence that we suffer damage on top of the damage that has already occurred.

Fortunately, in recent years a number of innovative therapies have been developed to address the stress generated by memories stored in The Unthought Known. Many of them are somatic-based in their approach, incorporating the recognition of the important role played by the body. Some, such as EMDR and Cranial Sacral Therapy, are continuing to have rigorous studies done to confirm their efficacy. Others, like Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing, Emotional Freedom Therapy and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy have a preponderance of anecdotal evidence available in support of their effectiveness. With continuing research efforts and application, in the not-too-distant future, we may all come to better know and be significantly less stressed by The Unthought Known.

The Cost of the Cut: Reflections on Circumcision

by Jeanne Denney

I remember the day after my first child was born. A well-known “OB to the Stars” in New York City who delivered my son came in to see what we wanted to do about circumcision. “This is completely up to you,” she said with authority. “But it only takes a minute and he won’t remember a thing. I do it myself. It is absolutely not a big deal.” I trusted her judgment in a New York nanosecond as I had trusted her throughout the labor. She was beyond confident. I, on the other hand, was 27 years old and quite without confidence. I was unprepared for mothering and comforted by the idea that  the medical establishment had the answers. Still, I had the good sense to turn to my husband, saying simply, “This is up to you.” Nick declined the procedure for Michael, and later for Peter and Gil, our two twin boys even though, or perhaps because, he himself had been circumcised at birth.

Later on, I was surprised to discover the emotions our choice triggered in my father. Not having been circumcised after his home birth on an Iowa  farm, he had it done in the Navy and found it a brutal experience, one he did not want his grandchild to go through. “Best to just get it over and done with early,” he said, never questioning the ultimate need for it, the timing of doing it with a newborn, the humanity of the procedure itself or its ultimate side effects on body or psyche. Dad’s conclusion that it would never be remembered still seems to be the norm in America. Though circumcision rates in the United States have declined from 90% to 57% in the past 40 years, it is still much more common here than in Europe, Australia or Canada where rates are usually well under 20%.

Traumatic Learning

Because of this pervasive lack of public dialogue on this subject, it was probably fifteen years before I discovered literature on trauma while I was studying and practicing body psychotherapy. I learned that, far from never remembering traumas of this nature, a baby’s nervous system registers events such as birth, early bonding and circumcision with a strong neural imprint. In these imprints are messages about the safety and kindness of the world that often lasts a lifetime. Further, I began to notice that circumcision was an experience that exerted a significant influence on the psyches of my male clients. It was certainly far from the innocuous, small procedure, assumed forgotten, I had been assured about after Michael’s birth. I began to ask myself: “Where  had my OB’s authoritative certainty that it would be ‘no big deal’ to my baby come from?” It certainly did not appear to come from sound medical or psychological research.

The idea that babies and children are not significantly influenced by harsh experiences because they do not  have conscious recall of them later, is the greatest distortion of truth I have had to witness as a doula, therapist and mother, one that seems to live on in hospitals and within medical personnel despite their often very good conscious intentions. It is an idea that should, in my opinion, be challenged loudly and at every possible opportunity by many voices, good research and common sense.

Rachel’s Story

Challenging such thinking is just what my friend Rachel did a couple of years ago, however it was not without a price. As a new nurse on a labor and delivery floor in a large New York City hospital, Rachel was given circumcision support duty as one of her first assignments. She had no idea where this duty would take her. When I talked with her after her first few months she was visibly distraught by her job and the suffering she was witnessing. She also worried that she might lose her job for complaining loudly and often about something that seemed unnecessarily cruel. The circumcisions Rachel was assisting were generally administered with no anesthesia to babies. This is a traditional practice still in common use despite the fact that the American Association of Pediatrics does not consider circumcision  medically necessary and has advocated for the use of anesthesia since 1999. (A compelling, but graphic description of what Rachel was witnessing can be read in this description offered by then nursing student, Marilyn Milos who eventually founded NOCIRC).

Being naturally empathic, Rachel’s  experience of the agony of infants during this procedure was nearly more than her nervous system could bear. She was forthright in her complaints to doctors about not using the anesthesia, and assertive in requesting that they follow APA recommendations. She even counseled parents to request the anesthesia, and advised them this would probably not happen without their active intervention (a practice that did not make her popular with colleagues). Indeed, she once witnessed a doctor blatantly ignore a parent’s request for local anesthesia for their child’s circumcision (don’t, and say you did!), unilaterally deciding that it was unnecessary. I am sure that Rachel’s  empathic presence helped many babies she comforted post-operatively, but the toll this compassion took on her own mind and body was extreme. Being new, young and not yet numb to the experience of suffering before her, her own nervous system was at risk. She began to lose both weight and hair as symptoms of what is now recognized as “vicarious trauma.”

Awakening Direct Awareness

I am not saying here that it is necessarily unethical to circumcise infants or intending in any way to impose guilt about choices families make. Certainly if my husband had answered, “Yes, please, let’s have the circumcision,” I would have complied without thought and would have known little about my child’s experience. Circumcision is a world-wide, cross-cultural practice often associated with the initiation of males and religious rites. It has been around a long time and is likely to  be with us for a long time to come. There are undoubtedly arguments in its favor that must be weighed. However, there seems to be ample and growing evidence from places like Circumcision Information and Resource Pages   http://www.cirp.org/, the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers  http://www.nocirc.org/, or advocacy organizations such as Intact America www.intactamerica.org that circumcision as we often do it, is an unnecessary surgery which is significantly traumatizing to infants and may be associated with later sexual problems such as impotence, premature ejaculation, and erection dysfunction. Advocates often note the ethical problem of permanently disfiguring the body of someone else without their consent. Perhaps most importantly, most circumcisions happen without loving parents present to comfort and reassure the baby, and often without the basic courtesy of anesthesia that any one of us would demand if the most delicate part of our body was to be ritually modified.

I recall Mark’s “Big Brain Question” here. A newborn getting a circumcision alone with strangers has got to be screaming, “Are you there for me?!” and “What kind of painful world is this!?,” and not getting very good answers. At least that is what Rachel and other witnesses to live circumcisions tell me (even with anesthesia). Surely if we can put newborns through it, we should be willing to go through such an initiation ourselves, even if only as witnesses and empaths. I have a feeling that directly observing this experience might change a lot of our unexamined views on the subject.

Our Greatest Human Failing…

… could also be our greatest growing edge. What is it? I can’t really speak for you, so I’ll speak for me. My greatest human failing is this: for most of my life I’ve been a very poor contingent communicator. In a graduate school clinical psychology class, where the professor invited each of us to sit in the “hot seat” in the front of the room and take “feedback” from the other students, the critique I heard most often was that I didn’t really engage, didn’t really respond in connecting, resonant ways. People didn’t have any strong sense of who I was.

The reason they didn’t have this sense is because I didn’t have it myself. And the reason I didn’t have it, I suspect, is because I was missing critical limbic-prefrontal connections that are created in the brain by the process of early and frequent contingent communication. These missing connections are very likely the result of not having parents consistently present and accounted for and able to regularly respond to me early on – no possessors of superbly organized brains to help organize my budding neural networks.

What Is Contingent Communication?

Prof. Colwyn Trevarthen

There has been lots of research on the importance of secure attachment in early child development, and by inference, early brain development and integration. When Colwin Trevarthen, currently considered by some to be the world’s foremost authority on attachment research, was asked what he thought might be the most critical factor in promoting secure attachment, he replied without hesitation: contingent communication. This makes sense, since the brain is an associative organ and seems to grow best when getting accurate, attuned responses in safe situations from other caring human beings.

But what specifically is contingent (or collaborative) communication and why is it so important? And why have I struggled with it so? As I mentioned, the general answer is … early neglect. But, like the brain itself, contingent communication is complex and subtle and often exquisitely nuanced. UCLA Neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel, writing in The Developing Mind, suggests that these lack of early social interactions are primarily responsible for me failing to develop the ability for easy emotional regulation and something called “response flexibility” – the ability to flexibly and creatively adapt to changing events in lieu of often being emotionally reactive or simply mute (often both/and in my case).

Taken at its roots, there are essentially three components required of us to communicate effectively and contingently. One is we have to accurately receive whatever message is being sent in all it’s complexity. This often includes what isn’t being said, as well as the many nonverbal ways that messages get communicated, much of which is often missing in emails and articles like this one. (Emoticons being a poor substitute for the emotional attunement in face to face interactions L).

Two is, after we receive a message, we have to accurately understand its meaning. If you say something to me and I simply look back at you blankly (something I have done a lot in my life), or if you email me a message and get nothing back from me in response, it’s difficult to accurately understand the meaning of that kind of non-response. In such an absence, our minds/brains tend to fill the void and attempt to make meaning: “He doesn’t like me.” “He’s weird.” “He’s too busy.” “The email must have gone in to the Spam folder.” Rarely though, will the story be: he appears to be someone with damage to Broca’s area which seems to be affecting his ability to use language to readily respond. This in fact often feels like it’s the case though, for me in my experience.

Third and finally, for communication to be contingent, we must respond in a timely and effective manner. A mute response or a long delayed response is neither timely nor effective, and unquestionably fails the test for collaborative/contingent communication. Such failures happen consistently in contemporary culture in my experience, prime examples being one-way radio and television broadcasting, or talking on the phone while multitasking or listening to your iPod while interacting with other people.

Proximate Separation

Most of us have had the experience of being with someone who’s body is present, but whose heart, mind, brain and soul is visiting elsewhere. This frequent inability to be fully present and accounted for, emotionally and cognitively in any moment, seems to have a neurological basis. It’s one that appears to have its roots in the nursery, where, simply put, a lack of contingent communication has inhibited the necessary neural connections that later permit sustained focus and ready emotional regulation. And the good news is that this necessary connectivity is something that neuroscience research is showing contemplative practices seem to be able to help establish later in life. Consequently, kudos are in order to people like Susan Greenland and her family at Inner Kids working diligently to teach kids attention, balance and compassion to help insure those connections get established as early as possible! And it is for similar reasons that I have written a number of books on listening as a contemplative practice – my own attempt to take this personal failing and do my best to turn it into a gift. May we all benefit from diligent practice.

Grokking the Gray Side of Social Neuroscience

Last week I read a scary news report. It bought to mind totalitarian images of George Orwell’s 1984 or Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report. Since I’m trained by people like Pema Chödrön and Robert McKee and Natalie Goldberg to pay attention to the stories that scare me, I did what anyone in their right mind would do – I pulled Michael Gazzaniga’s book, The Ethical Brain off the shelf and began reading about neuroethics. Why? Because as more and more knowledge and understanding about the brain emerges, it’s going to have greater and greater impact on our laws and culture. To me it seems better to be reasonably informed than repeatedly emotionally reactive.

Dr. Michael Gazzaniga

Neuroethics

Neuroethics is concerned with “the rights and wrongs of the treatment of, or enhancement of the human brain.” Gazzaniga considers this area to be one where knowledgeable people do their best to come up with a brain-based philosophy of life. He’s not particularly concerned about giving science or government an inch, fearful of them sliding down the “slippery slope” and taking a mile. And for good reason.

Gazzaniga argues that the direction that human evolution and brain development appears to be taking us is towards a universal set of biological responses to moral dilemmas – a sort of organic ethics is slowly evolving in the development of healthy brains. It’s for this reason, in part, that despots with unhealthy brains inevitably become overthrown, a high percentage of criminals with similar brains eventually get caught, and abhorrent practices that promote unnecessary suffering, like male and female circumcision sooner or later become eradicated. It’s also why evil scientists will never conquer the world with an army of “humanzees,” a human-chimp hybrid. The direction of brain development is oriented towards the good.

One of the ethical questions Gazzaniga attempts to grapple with is: “When does an embryo become a person?”  He argues that the joining of egg and sperm is not the beginning of life since sperm and egg were both alive before the union. At what point on the journey from two cells to the 50 trillion that eventually come to make up an adult human should this creation be considered a person?

To those who have actually studied and borne direct witness to this microscopic early period of development, Gazzaniga reports that there is a clear perceptual moment when an embryo becomes a person. It is an unmistakable moment that is “stark, defining and real.” This is an easily recognizable change that takes place during the eighth week of pregnancy. Should this be the moment when an embryo is granted moral status? Or should it begin at conception? Or at fourteen days when an individual zygote (the size of the period under the question mark at the end of this sentence) is believed to be “cemented,” that is, no longer capable of becoming twins? Or perhaps at day 40 when, on average, primitive unorganized electrical activity first begins in the brain? (Gazzaniga also presents a fascinating discussion on the issue of when, once conferred, moral status should be withdrawn, for example with people in a coma or with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. But that’s a different discussion).

Gazzaniga does not profess to know the answer to this question of precisely when moral status should be conferred, and neither do I. I suspect though that the decision is rightly left to us as individuals and that we’d probably be better served not having science or big government making such decisions for us. But I might be wrong.

Sin Bins for Brain-Damaging Families

The story *** that upset me last week was one where big government did make such an absolute decision. The government of Great Britain decided to place 20000 families under 24-hour in-house, constant closed circuit TV monitoring. The very idea of someone watching everything I do in my own home every moment of every day makes my skin crawl! And yet, these are disorganized families who appear to be disrupting the community and doing serious damage to their children. Is placing them in jail and their kids in foster care a better option? It’s certainly a more costly one, according to the article. And jailing people violates The First Law of Social Neuroscience: “It takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain.” Putting people in jail where they regularly mix and interact with people often more abused and brain-damaged than they are does little to improve their neurology.

So, while a story like this may initially get my limbic juices all fired up, I’m resolved not to let my fear of imagined extreme possibilities hinder what potential good may actually come out of programs like this one.

*** I’ve since come to find out this story was not factually accurate!

What about you?