Honoring and Supporting the Wisdom of Grandmother’s Brain

“There won’t be peace on earth until the voices of the grandmothers are heard.”

~ Native American Teaching

Lately, I’ve been binge-watching the Smithsonian Channel series, Air Disasters. Every aviation accident the world over gets investigated for causes and conditions. After doing a deep dive into the FDR (Flight Data Recorder) and the CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) investigators are almost always able to piece together the (often) unpredictable, perfect storm of events that unfolds to bring about a crash. They then write up their findings with recommendations for engineering, training and procedural changes that continue to make air travel safer and safer.

Every episode of Air Disasters underscores the thousands of hours the pilots who crash have previously flown. That’s not a metric I’m particularly interested in. Quantity of flying hours is not quality of flying hours. I’d prefer to know how many life-threatening incidents pilots have been able to surmount, how many times they’ve had to think fluidly and flexibly in the face of unexpected, stressful challenges. I want to know how many crash landings they’ve previously survived.

Wise-end Democracy    

Similarly, in this democracy I live in, I want to know how many “disasters” or near-disasters candidates wanting my vote have survived. How often have they faced moral quandaries, self-interested seductions, or personal failings and managed to come through them with flying colors? In other words, I want the candidates I vote for to be … grandmothers. Or at least have “Grandmother’s Brain.” Unfortunately, our current political system provides few deliberate, constructive growth and redemption opportunities for politicians or voters.

I think of Grandmother’s Brain (if it hasn’t been adversely affected by compromising health conditions) as being unique in the human species. Not only have Grandmothers had the embodied experience of growing and bringing life into the world, but they have had to face and overcome decades and decades of real world challenges. It’s inevitable that a majority of them would acquire some degree of wisdom along the way.

Not to mention the contribution Grandmothers have apparently made to human evolution. A team of scientists from UCSD and Princeton published a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution showing that grandmothering might well have been an important driver of the evolution of certain genes that contribute to a healthy immune system, along with resistance to cognitive decline with age.

Much like the way Grandmothers “burnish a child’s development in unique and valuable ways”, they would bring similar engagement to the political process. Their capacity to think and feel their way into and through complex real-world circumstances would be unmatched – certainly by any 18-year-old whose brain doesn’t become fully mature until roughly age 25 (I’m guessing no wise Grandmother would pass laws allowing 18-year-olds to vote, drink or buy guns!).

Wisdom Practice

In order to safely face unexpected, stressful challenges and crash landings, pilots spend many hours of their training in cockpit flight simulators. Simulators are exact replicas of the same plane instrumentation pilots fly regularly. In the simulators they get to experience all kinds of things that can go wrong, from engine failures to stall warnings to retracted and stuck landing gear. The purpose of such training is much like learning the multiplication tables: they build brain networks over and over through practice and experience so that under stress, a pilot doesn’t have to think about what proper actions he or she should take. It’s embedded in the brain and muscle memory.

Through the long courses of their lives Grandmothers of the world have had similar training. While perhaps less structured, deliberate and intentional, nevertheless, going through childbirth and motherhood, no matter how many crash landings and aborted takeoffs a Grandmother may have had with her own children, she has inevitably gained learning and wisdom that can be obtained in few other ways.

If We Build It, They Will Run      

Healthy neural networks spend lifetimes moving in the direction of greater and greater connectivity and integration (learning). Greater connectivity and integration is able to process energy and information with increasing capacity for complexity. Grandmothers generally have access to a wider and deeper well of life’s complexities. They can see a much bigger picture than many of us. Many, simply as the result of a long life, possess neural networks steeped in The Six Transcendent Perfections of Buddhism: Generosity, Morality, Joyful Energy, Patience, Contemplation and Wisdom.

Who, in their right mind, would not champion and support such human beings serving as our elected representatives?