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.

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.
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%.
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 “
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.
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).
To supplement this situation, I took a job delivering the New Haven Register every afternoon after school and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. That provided me with pocket money to spend on things I would buy from Charlie. Charlie owned a big step van, a traveling, high-priced grocery store that visited the projects twice a day, selling high-markup items to folks without cars or bus money – shut-ins stuck in the projects and unable to get to the nearest First National Store miles away in Westville. With virtually no nutritional guidance and very little supervision, what I mostly bought with my paper route money was candy, cookies, soda and ice cream – things I am still addicted to, and struggle mightily with, some 50+ years later. Needless to say, this is a diet that is not optimal for heart, brain, mind or body, and I often feel like a junkie with head down and gaze averted in the grocery store when I score a box of Good and Plenty, Sugar Babies, Fudgecicles or Black Crows. One purpose eating high sugar foods serves now is the same one it served then: it works rapidly to help me regulate anxiety, lessen allostatic load. Something the prefrontal connections in my brain apparently aren’t able to easily accomplish on their own. I was apparently saved from an early life of struggling with weight issues due to a process researchers call “
There is more and more research appearing attempting to both explain and remedy this growing epidemic. My favorite is something I call the Big Brain Theory. Michael Power and Jay Schulkin at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists argue in
Lies often work much faster and easier than telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Truth is often complex, subjective and situational. And the truth, researchers are finding, turns out to be 
Finally, what energies or neurobiological processes might have also been at work in the life of
This last shift Evy identifies as actually a product of the other six – and perhaps the most important one. She cites a well-known, 30 year old experiment at Ohio State University by Nerem, Levesque and Cornhill where rabbits were given a “heart attack diet” to demonstrate atherosclerotic changes. One group of rabbits had 60 percent less atherosclerotic changes than the other groups. The only variable discovered was that the researcher for this group regularly took the rabbits from their cages and petted, stroked and talked to them, an experiment subjected to many confirmation studies. “Intimacy at every level – emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical – is the flowering of unconditional love.” Not to mention, a flowering that apparently restores neurological function and optimizes immune systems.
I am further fortunate to teach at a graduate school (
When I think of the 30 years that Eric Kandel spent studying just two neurons in Aplysia, the California sea snail, I marvel and wonder at what I imagine was his own commitment and persistence. The fact that what he was doing was actually fun for him – something he really enjoyed getting out of bed and doing every day – I’m guessing played a big role as well. A fan of Freud, he originally set out to find the neural correlates of the ego, and Aplysia provided him with his own living Tinkering School. Stimulating the two neurons visible to the naked eye in Aplysia, allowed Kandel to devise countless creative experiments fueled by curiosity and wonder. The result: he discovered precisely how learning and memory operate in the human brain and won the Nobel Prize for that work.
Several years back,
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.