8 Serious Ways 4 U 2 B the Boss of U

Many of the ideas for this column come out of my experiences and interactions week to week with the people (and plants and animals) who work and live in the world around me. Often my intention is to offer guidance from a brain perspective that might make all our lives a little easier – “Oh, it’s not me, it’s my brain causing the difficulty.” This past week I have been inspired by a few instances of me showing up as an unskillful corporal executive. Corporal executives are different than corporate executives, of course, but not by much. One is in charge of organizing and directing a body of people and the other is the boss of their own body, brain, heart and mind. Presumably. Too often, however, I find I’m not in charge of any of it; and my actions would be decidedly more skillful if I were.

Executing Executive Function

Dr. Gerard Gioia

Where the difficulty seems to lie for me is in something Dr. Gerard Gioia and his colleagues at the National Children’s Organization call Executive Function. I’ve written about it before, but briefly, here are eight abilities that often end up compromised in healthy brains, especially under stress …

Inhibition – This is the ability to stop one’s own behavior at an appropriate time, including curbing actions, speech and thoughts. The flip side of inhibition is impulsivity; if you have a compromised ability to stop yourself from acting on your impulses, then you are “impulsive.” America’s prisons and corporations are full of people unable to stop from acting on impulses like anger, fear and greed.

Shift – This is the ability to transition freely from one situation to another and to think flexibly in order to respond skillfully to new situations. As a child I was never deliberately instructed in ways to restore calm when moving from one known situation to another unknown. Transition sensitivity shows up too frequently in my adult life as avoidance and reclusiveness.

Emotional Control – The ability to modulate emotional responses by bringing rational thought to bear on feelings, simply put, is emotional control. Too often in my world, my feelings run the show. Rational thought seems to become buried in some neuronal traffic jam deep in the bowels of my neural No Man’s Land. Feelings make good trail guides but horrible masters.

Initiation – This is the ability to begin a task or activity and to independently generate ideas, responses, or problem-solving strategies. I’m always puzzled by the fact that so many of us are willing to work at a job provided by someone else, rather than start our own business and work for ourselves. Turns out that poor Executive Function is often the culprit.

Working memory – This is the capacity to hold information in mind for the purpose of completing a task. This is a particularly challenging one for me, especially with taking all I know and am continually learning about brain science, and creatively applying it in the real world. It’s like there’s a lack of information pathways that should enable me to transfer learning/knowing into doing.

Appreciating Beauty – According to this study by Professor Semir Zeki at the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at  University College London, our ability to appreciate beauty is enhanced or diminished according to the amount of energy and information we can process through our Executive Function structures. Sometimes a rose is a rose is a massive collection of orbitofrontal neuronal connections! Which means that my beautiful rose is almost certainly different than yours.

Organization of Materials – Here we have the ability to impose order on work, play, and storage spaces. Even though every neuron in my brain knows the importance of order and organization, it is an ongoing daily struggle for me from my truck to my tool shed to my office space, disorganization continually creeps in and has its way with me.

Self-Monitoring – This is the ability to monitor one’s own performance and to measure it against some standard of what is needed or expected, with discernment and without undue harsh criticism that triggers internal emotional reactivity and poopy self-talk.

Minding Mindsight

Each of these abilities are part of what UCLA neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel associates with “mindsight.” And they all have one thing in common: they are the result of many different brain parts sending neuronal fibers to congregate and connect at the front and center part of the brain: the orbitofrontal cortex.

The good news is that we can all do things to increase the connectivity of our brain parts to this central area. Studies in meditation and contemplative practice by people like Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin and Andrew Newberg at Princeton show positive results and benefits in as little as five weeks!

Even better news is that once we realize any of these eight areas might not be so well-connected, we can apply The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience and find other people in our lives willing to serve as External Operators in those areas. So, for example, we can ask people who are easily able to plan and organize to help us with that; other people can also help us identify and initiate important goals, process feelings and calm down. In essence we can build a personal corporate structure to help us with our personal corporal structure. It’s what healthy community is all about, actually.

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Like it or not, you’re in the brain change business!

“No matter what business you’re involved in, first and foremost you’re in the brain change business.” So asserts Houston neuro-psychiatrist, Bruce Perry. In line with that premise, it makes great sense to know at least a few of the basics about how your own and other people’s brains grow and change in ways that could possibly help make them work like Einstein’s, Michelangelo’s and Mother Teresa’s all rolled into one!

Is it a Universe? Is it an Endocrine Collection?

The brain is perhaps best thought of as a collection of interconnected endocrine glands – roughly 52 indiv- idual parts controlling different actions. They all must work together to “process energy and infor- mation.” Thinking about the brain in such terms – as a network of organs that must optimally process the energy and information of our daily lives – turns out to be a very useful template to help us understand our own and others’ reactions to the world, and to make good decisions in response to them. Ideally, we only want ourselves and our family and friends involved in activities that their brains are developmentally suited to handle, and perhaps a little bit more. It’s the “little bit more” that can become tricky, which is how we build resilience in ourselves and our kids. I’ll be discussing resilience often in these columns.

Sounding Off

As you might suspect, timing plays a significant role in the kinds of energy and information our brains can process at any given point in time. So does the source of that energy and information. It can come from outside us, as well as from inside the body (exogenously and endogenously). Timing also determines the quantity and quality of energy and information our brain can process. An obvious example is that for the first few years, children’s brains cannot process language very well. However, they can process sound, and children are particularly sensitive to the loudness, frequency and cadence of the mother’s voice. This is known as prosody, and in future columns we’ll talk a lot about prosody’s extraordinary capacity to not only grow and change children’s brains, but also an adult or a spouse’s brain as well!

Divine Complexity

The human brain is purported to be the most complex structure in the known universe. Princeton neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Gene D’Aquili, in their book, Why God Won’t Go Away, argue that inherent in that complexity lives a biological need for meaning, spirituality and truth. It’s encoded into our cells. Scanning the brains of Buddhist monks, catholic nuns, along with practitioners of the Pentecostal faith and assorted other denominations, these researchers found that specific neuron firing patterns correllate across the brains of longtime practitioners.  Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, writing about the neurobiology of mystical experience as experienced by Carmelite nuns in their book, The Spiritual Brain, suggest that not only do such experiences change lives, but they also change our neurological landscape as well. Much of this work is further confirmed and elaborated upon by the work of Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon in their lovely little book, A General Theory of Love.

Associations Make it Happen

Another important way to think about our brain is as an associating organ. By that, I simply mean that it learns a lot by putting things together. Things like words and pictures, up and down, hot and cold, thoughts and feelings. By pairing things that make the brain feel good with things that we want ourselves or our children to learn, the neurons in the brain become richly connected. A variation of this is sometimes known as “Grandmother’s Rule: You may do what you want to do – when you’ve done what you need to do.” By pairing preferred actions with less exciting necessary duties, like brushing teeth and going to bed at a set, regular time, reinforced learning takes place. It is such associations, repeated frequently over long periods that produce what we generally think of as learning. One interesting finding about such learning by Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist, Eric Kandel is that learning involves five pulses of serotonin, “The Happy Molecule.” Therefore, it begins to make perfect sense that we learn more when we are happy than when we’re not. Thus, learning and play go hand in hand, and not only during childhood, as a number of us old fogies have finally figured out!

Plastic is as Plastic Does

One last thing to realize and remember about the brain and the business of trying to change it, is that the brain is exquisitely “plastic.” What I mean by that is we can do a lot of things less than perfectly with ourselves, our children and our friends, and the possibility for later improvement and correction remains not only strong, but something we can almost always count on the brain to try to accomplish. In future columns I will be addressing many of the ways that new scanning technologies – machines like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulators (TMS) and SQUIDS (Super-Conducting Quantum Interference Devices) that can make us briefly brilliant and let us see parts of the brain at work in real time – are offering us clues to some of the best ways we can begin to take advantage of neural plasticity. TMS has even been used to raise the “dead,” and I’ll refer to that research too, in future columns.

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