I wasn’t really looking for wonderment and surprise when I stumbled onto brain science. Mostly I expected I might occasionally come across an intriguing fact or two that would hustle me up against the short end of the believability spectrum – some wild neuroscientist or other making a deep, left-field declaration that I can’t quite fathom.
And they don’t disappoint. Instead they send me scurrying around the Internet or over to the library looking for “further confirmation” – actually more often looking for dis-confirmation.
The fact that a piece of brain tissue the size of a single sugar grain contains 100,000 neurons making nearly a billion connections was one such you’ve-got-to-be-kidding claim that turns out to be true, pretty much. Depends on what part of the brain the tissue is taken from. My wonderment: how can we even begin to accurately study something so infinitesimal?
Darkness, Darkness, Be My Pillow
Another similar hard-to-believe claim that seems to be true is University of Virginia’s Timothy Wilson’s assertion that 99% of what our brains apprehend in any moment, we grok below the threshold of conscious awareness. Isn’t that astonishing as well as terrifying? What are the implications for a long and happy life if we’re all spending only 1% of it awake? Might the world be better off if more of us spent even more time deeply asleep? We’d produce a lot less procreation, consumption and hydrogen sulfide (Did I mention that we already spend up to 2 hours a day functionally blind? Every time we turn our head, our eyes stop seeing – our brain simply fills in the space between the stop and start of the head turn!).
Next, John Medina’s Brain Rule No. 4 – that healthy brains have a hard time concentrating on a continuous activity for much more than 10 minutes – was a great relief for me to discover. It made it clear that it wasn’t me or ADHD that sent my body fleeing from the boredom of more high school and college classrooms than I care to remember – it was my healthy brain’s natural response to ignorant teaching methods! Big sigh of relief there.
Re-build Foundations Under Castles in the Air
One more claim I found quite compelling was Allan Schore’s assertion that because of the nature of the brain’s early architecture, the developing right hemisphere by necessity becomes the default repository for neuron assemblies retaining and storing traumatic memories. That fact has a lot of implications for any number of human arenas, especially creativity. It would be great though, if Allan would team up with a popular writer who writes aimed at my adolescent brain. Weighty titles like Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self don’t exactly set my learning neuron networks aquiver.
Louann Brizendine, MD
Probably the most confusion-clearing-up revelation for me came from Louann Brizendine. In her book, The Male Brain, she details how puberty finds my testosterone production increased 20-fold to massively toxic levels! And which areas does testosterone attack in the 15-year-old brain: Broca’s and Wernicke’s, home of speech and language production. So, I wasn’t simply a sullen teen; I was a testosterone-poisoned teen! Like many men, I’m still trying to recover from that early wipeout.
Finally, Jill Bolte Taylor’s observation of what a lying sack of bat guano our left hemispheres turn out to be more often than not, was mostly confirmation of any number of contemplative teachings that repeatedly make that claim: a mind generating painful thoughts is a terrible thing to trust. It was affirming though, to have it confirmed by a Harvard neuroanatomist using stroke-induced self-observation. It was also of great consolation to receive her warning about how devious Lefty is in all the ways it then goes about trying to make me forget that it’s constantly lying through its glial cells.
So that’s a pretty interesting collection, I think. Next week I’ll write about the most mind-boggling brain science claim I’ve come across yet. In fact, I had it here at the end of this collection, but I want to take the week to further confirm the truth of it before I post it. Stay tuned.
End Note: I research and write about social neuroscience because I believe knowing how the brain works can profoundly reduce suffering here on planet earth. It has for me. I’ve recently put together a four-session Webinar that one or two of you may find interesting: Life, Art and Neuroscience which explores suffering reduction in depth. Click HERE if you’d like to find out more information. We don’t know what we don’t know until we know it.
The human brain/body is so beautiful in all its mystery it keeps revealing to itself.
Hi Mark,
You said, “I’m shortening my Sunday Blogs . . . to respect peoples time and to combat the TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) impact on the brain.” I for one always find your Blog posts to be intriguing and well worth reading to the end, every time.
And you said: “I’m also going to work on shortening these periodic invites.” When you first switched to not sending a weekly e-mail reminder that your Blog had been posted, I stopped reading your Blog. Not that I didn’t want to read it, and much as I always benefit from it, still my brain did not remind me to go look for it.
A few months ago, at the urging of your readers, you sent an e-mail suggesting people might want to read the Blog you had posted that week, and you pointed out that people can hit a button on the Blog that then sets them up to receive the Blog directly each and every Sunday. As a “low-tech chick” that was a pleasant surprise to me. I probably should have known that all along, and you probably mentioned it initially, but my brain didn’t catch on until it finally “got” that reminder. I’m happy to say I now receive your Blog in my inbox every Sunday and I benefit greatly from every word you write.
If sending a periodic invite is not something you want to do, I wonder if you might point out, once again, that there is a button on your Blog that allows people to sign up to receive your Blog. You know how those brains of ours are slow to catch on sometimes-:)) I’m thinking if you sent an announcement to that effect once a week for 4 or 5 weeks enough brains that reside in the people who are interested in what you have to write will finally see the light!
Big thanks for all you write,
Kathy
I love your blog and read it to the end. Please dont shorten., The world,needs your informaton and wisdom. our culture is full of 30 sec media bites. We need digestable words like yours hugs Ellen from Middle TN ITP graduate
I agree with Ellen – we don’t need more bumper-sticker/sound-bites in our lives. I’ve never found your posts to be bloated in any way.
I agree with you in principle that we’re inundated with information, but IMHO, the issue is more about the number of different sources, not the length of the articles.
When I find a trusted source, I will preferentially read it BEFORE anything else in my e-mailbox. You posts always intrigue; I never feel like, ‘oh that was a bit of fluff…’
I used to read every progressive political mag, blog, and what have you. But I pared back to only one that is so good I can’t bear to part with it – Tomdispatch.com.
Your blog is in that ‘can’t bear to part with it’ category for me.
Mark,
Always glad to receive your blog in my mail once again! Thank you! My experience is the same as Kathleen’s below.
Mark
It seems, from feedback, that your blogs may become an example of blog-length variability. I value them for their almost poetic, thought-provoking quality (as in ‘thought for the day’) yet also the connections between various bodies of knowledge. There no longer seem to be giants upon whose shoulders we may stand, but instead, knowledge lattices which we ignore at our peril.
Blessings
Your posts always send me scampering around the web to read your links. More importantly they stretch my understanding of big truths, often casting a brighter light over dark areas of my own life. Don’t shorten!