Shortly after the pandemic began, some friends and I got together online weekly and began exploring our Digital Intelligence along with the first of the Six Buddhist Perfections or Aspirations – Generosity Practice. My fear and ignorance around this topic is large, I soon came to discover. I have been adversely influenced to a great degree by my conditioning and my neurobiology – an operating network limitation preventing me from seeing a bigger picture at play (Ignorance is a separate, different daily practice for me). Additionally, I frequently activate neural networks that don’t allow me to factor my heart and gut into the practice. Without putting the strength of my heart and the wisdom of my gut into my generosity practice, as best-selling author, Dr. Gabor Maté observes, I become little more than a genius-level lizard.
It’s not for nothing, I’ve discovered, that wisdom teachers like Christ, Mohammed, and “that profoundest physiologist,” Buddha, put Generosity at the top of their Aspirations list. Or that the so-called “Happiest Man in the World“– a biologist – devoted five years to researching and writing an 850-page (!) book on Altruism. Buddha, looking back from his journey to enlightenment, is reported to have urged his students: “If you knew what I know about the power of generosity, you would not let a single day go by without giving something to someone.” A recent experience has taught me first-hand how challenging such a practice can be, but how it might actually work to change the brain’s circuitry to great benefit.
No Oatmeal for You
Recently, I got up at the crack of dawn to walk the dog and go shopping at our local Goose grocery before any of the Covid crowd could show up. With only a handful of customers in the store I can take my time and browse a bit. When I finally get to the checkout stand there’s a gentleman ahead of me who’s probably close to 80. All he’s buying is a dozen eggs, a bag of celery and a box of generic oatmeal. He looks back at me and sees the hand cart I’m carrying is full and heavy and moves his three items forward to make room for me on the counter. I thank him and think to myself, “That’s pretty thoughtful.”
This early morning shopper pays for the celery and eggs and then asks the cashier if he can use his Goose Eggs to pay for the generic oatmeal. Goose Eggs are what I call the points you get every time you shop – a little less than one cent or “Egg” for every dollar you spend. The cashier checks the amount of Egg credit on the card and says, “Oops, you’re about 200 “Eggs” short (roughly $2).” Observing this exchange, the thought emerges in my brain: “I have at least 10000 “Eggs” on my card. I could easily let him use 200.”
And that thought is as far as my generosity goes. I offer nothing. The cashier takes the oatmeal off the counter, puts in into the “Returns” cart and the early morning shopper leaves with only his eggs and celery.
The Red Pill or the Blue Pill
One of the things I love about neuroscience is its ability to help me make sense of my inaction with such a low risk, low cost opportunity to practice generosity. Neuroscientists hypothesize that we have opposing circuitry in our neurobiology: prosocial engagement circuitry vs. antisocial threat-detection, self-protection circuitry. I love that hypothesis, not because it universally matches my experience – which it does – but because it provides a clear, useful lens to observe my own and others’ behavior about why I act or react with as much or as little response flexibility and fluid intelligence as I have available to me in-the-moment.
As my wife later points out when I tell her the story, unbeknownst to me in that moment – because all I felt was immobilized – I have activated great threat-sensitivity and vulnerability in The Goose grocery store. My parents owned a grocery store when I was four and it was the frequent scene of much conflict: my mother would give groceries away for free to poor people who came in on an increasingly regular basis – to the point of putting the store in the red, month after month, eventually bankrupting the family.
Thus, outside my conscious awareness, early traumatic conditioning lay at the root of that freeze response that morning in The Goose. As it does virtually every time I encounter an opportunity to act generously and fail to.
Response Flexibility
The stress hormones that get generated by early childhood traumatic experiences end up producing dynamic neural networks in the human brain that ebb and flow and can often look like the images on the left below …
The more enriched wiring and enriched connectivity I have available to me in my brain, the much greater the odds are that I will be able to make skillful, fluid, compassionate responses to opportunities in the future. What Buddha apparently knew from doing his own empirical research is that prudent generosity practice provides a robust way of regularly fertilizing our neural gardens. Do your own emprical research. Try it and see how you feel. Or, turn away and see how that feels.
The Flowering Brain 
[…] 1. Brain Guys know the neurogenesis power of Generosity. […]