The Power of Nature

I find it inevitable that at some point during each day of reading about neuroscience, I stop and begin to daydream about the amazing beauty and intricacies of nature. Some see this complex system as a sign that there is a God, but in fact I see it quite the opposite. This neural system we rely on so heavily for our survival speaks to how much we have yet to learn about nature.

Babies... Ah the pressure!

Well I have been putting this off long enough. I happen to be a perfectionist so I find the idea of blogging a little stressful. I kept putting it off because I didn't feel I had the perfect thing to write about. Today I am ignoring my nagging ego and writing about babies! (I know at the end of the last post I mentioned the Polyvagal Theory but I'm still working that out so that post will come at a later time.)

A close friend of mine has an eight week old beautiful baby girl. As I hold her and watch her eat, I can't help but wonder what is happening inside. If I keep smiling at her, what fires in her brain? As her eyes search my face is she making connections between food and people, food and comfort, food and smiles? Maybe I should stop smiling. In this case, she is probably just looking at a new face, if she makes any connections at all its likely they are not reinforced because i am not in her life on a daily basis. On the other hand if everyone smiles at her while she eats, perhaps she could associate the feeling of being satisfied with smiles, or any of a million other possible connections that could be made there... It's amazing that we make these connections with no consciousness of making them. Babies are the perfect example of our susceptibility to our environment. Babies have a million things going on in their brains every second. Neurons assigning tasks, or perhaps realizing tasks (it has yet to be proven if neurons come assigned with specific tasks or if they are blank slates which are triggered based on their location which assigns them that task). As we get older, we still have millions of connections being made all day long, but the majority of them are being influenced by connections we have already made in our lives: memories. As a baby we don't have memories yet to tell us what to keep and what to throw out, we can't understand that Mom or Dad or whoever the caregiver may be is having an off day. Basically rational thought is what's missing... obviously. We all know babies don't have rational thought, even most adolescents haven't figured that out yet, but do we really understand what that means? Clearly we don't because we wouldn't put children in jail. The more I learn about our brains and their development, the more terrified I am to become a parent!

Conflict Resolution... Re-learning.

Speaking of plasticity. I've been working on my defense for my masters in conflict resolution and I keep thinking about this reaction many of us have in response to conflict. Through long-term potentiation (when several neurons fire together repeatedly they form a stronger connection that makes that same pattern of firing between those same neurons more common... "neurons that fire together, wire together") we learn to react to conflict. Whether we get angry or we avoid, most of us have created this negative response to conflict. By the time students are learning conflict resolution skills it's more of a re-learning process than it is a learning process. Conflict resolution education is about acting instead of reacting, and the difference lies in this long-term potentiation process. Changing a response requires recognizing ourselves having the response and instead choosing to do something else. But how do you teach that to children?

I'm starting to think teaching mindfulness is key to re-learning conflict resolution skills. As Daniel Siegel says Reflection is the fourth 'R' of education. As we learn, through mindfulness, to observe the things around us as well as our own internal state, we are able to reflect on it. When someone misunderstands me I notice my heart rate starts to rise, my thoughts become frantic as I search for ways to re-explain myself. If I don't stop to recognize this occurrence, I may snap or get defensive. If I recognize these as symptoms of this perceived misunderstanding, I can understand the situation, control my heart rate through my breathing thus calming myself and my thoughts so that I can correctly respond. I recognize my current neural connections (aka reactions) and decide I'm going to make a new connection fostered around mindful reflection of the moment. Through practice, I will re-learn how to act in conflict.

This is the key, in my opinion to constructive conflict management... Reflection... or maybe Mindful Reflection is more accurate. Although I'm not sure if reflection can be mindless.

Stay tuned for thoughts on Conflict Resolution and the Polyvagal Theory...

Knowledge is Empowering

I recently finished Norman Doidge's "The Brain that Changes Itself", a book all about brain plasticity (which is the idea that our neural connections can change and grow in relation to our life experiences). There is something so empowering about this book, actually it's more the entire idea of neuroplasticity that is empowering. We aren't bound or trapped by our previous life experiences or genes; they have helped to form who we are today, but they don't determine who we are tomorrow. Every choice we make, and person we allow into our lives changes us. Even memories are plastic, each time we recall something it's changed by the person we are when we recall it.

There are so many points I could ramble on about here in reference to what plasticity means but recently I've been thinking about it in terms of music. My mom has been singing her whole life. Recently she has been having trouble with a few notes in her higher range and it has been causing a lot of frustration. Imagine something you've been doing well your entire life... now imagine not being able to do it to your standard and having no idea why. Frustrating right? One day I randomly mentioned the studies I had been reading about in Doidge's book. Doidge talks about people who had strokes or lost functioning of some area of their body, and through neuroplasticity, they were able to re-train themselves to do that action that had been lost. I told my mom about it, and said I was curious what would happen if she listened to a song, and then tried to replay the song on the piano, without singing, just listening. I felt like there could be some disconnect between what she hears and what the actual note is. I would imagine that's the cause of being off-key right?

Later my dad sat down with her and played notes on the guitar, which she would try to copy on the piano. Sure enough, there were a few high notes she was not able to accurately play at first. After a few tries she was able to hear the correct note but it took some practice. I'm wondering now if these are the notes she finds herself going flat on because she doesn't hear the correct note at first. Wouldn't it be amazing if over time of practicing hearing those notes, she was able to sing them exactly on key?! Neuroplasticity isn't only about learning, it's about re-learning. She used to hear those notes perfectly. Now she hears one note, and associates it with a different one. Through practice, she will re-train her brain to associate the note with the correct note in her head. Hmm.. that sentence seems a little confusing. Hopefully you're following my logic here. As the title of this blog clearly states, I'm a rookie with this whole brain thing so I have no idea if this is actually what's going on here but it seems pretty logical to me.

It's an obvious correlation but one I had never thought about in terms of what's happening in the brain! It just seems more do-able when you think about it in terms of neuroplasticity. Instead of thinking about your singing coach saying "just do it" you can think "okay, how do I change the neural connections in my brain so I'm hearing the right note?"

Stay tuned for more on re-learning.

It seems perfect to start this blog with my experience on Friday of dissecting a sheep's brain. To start, thank you little sheep for your wonderful life and amazing brain, I am ever grateful for this educational experience.

In an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) class I'm taking called the Science of IPNB, our final class consisted of brain dissections. This is my fifth IPNB class and I would say I am officially addicted to learning about the brain! Throughout these classes I have studied the basic anatomy of our brain, some of the major functions of these different locations and how those grow and/or change based on our life experiences. The culmination of actually touching the brain and seeing these areas in a real brain is unreal! I am one of those people who is completely disgusted by blood and organs. I turn my head while watching CSI. If someone is telling me a story about a surgery in their foot, or a pain in their side, within seconds I start to feel pain in that same area. So, it's fair to say that I was a little worried about this brain dissection.

Which is why I was so surprised when I was not phased by it at all! I had no problem touching the brain, with gloves of course, or cutting it, or dissecting it to find the corpus callosum, which is an amazing body of fibers connecting our left and right hemispheres of our brain. It seems impossible that something I held in my hands could perform so many functions. It's this plain gray color, yet it holds memories, emotions, the regulation of our entire body, and on and on. It's pretty beyond comprehension for me. In my life, things that hold information contain words, that I can see, or hear. Or have pictures that I can interpret. You can't read the story of our lives by looking at our brains. So frustrating!

Besides the beautiful corpus callosum, I was shocked by the strength of the 3 layers of tissue covering our brains. It is so precisely fit to our brain and once it comes off it retains the same shape of our brain. It's density is that of a swimming cap, or snake's skin. It's amazing how our brain differs to fit the needs of our lives, they adapt for survival. This sheep had hardly any frontal lobe while it's cerebellum was huge in comparison with the size of the entire brain. The size of the olfactory nerves was amazing as well. If we think about how adaptive the brain is to different species, it's no wonder that it would be adaptive within the species.

So the point is that our brain ROCKS and I am completely obsessed. Stay tuned.