In his new book, "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness," Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick wrote, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." While Noë credits Crick for drawing popular and scientific attention to the question of consciousness, he thinks Crick's conclusions are dead wrong and dangerous.
Precisely. Later on the in Salon interview the interviewer quotes a conservationist as saying "the California Condor is 5 percent feathers and blood and 95 percent its environment". This would not be a bad way to describe what we do at TAS. Why is it that most of our students become more happy and more confident? Why is is that they develop deep interests and a wide range of knowledge? Why do most of them stay so connected to us, when more than a few of them had fallen apart everywhere else? Its not the meditation and its not the academics. I believe those things do contribute materially. But the main thing are the relationships. TAS was established on that principle, that the single most important factor in a young person's life is the quality of his or her relationships.
But what is this quality? At school every day, over and over again- if you listen carefully- we shape a conscious, reflective experience of relationships. Perhaps you read the Dan Siegel interview I posted yesterday. If you didn't, and haven't read his other books, here's the nub: the way that people heal psychologically is a process of going from implicit memory to explicit memory.
What this means is that when an individual is traumatized, there is a period in which the experience is thoroughly sensory. Siegel calls it "perceptually rich, reflexively poor". It is a predominantly right brain experience, a "holistic" kind of memory, where the sensory input is suggested again and again. It is not reflected upon. The material, as it were, is waiting to be analyzed. I'm going to extend this idea logically for a moment. I'm sure Siegel has already done this; I just haven't heard him talk about this yet.
In a relatively healthy person the sensory, right brain coding of the experience- for instance, the sudden death of a close friend- slowly gets shifted over to the left brain for analysis. Different features of the event- time, facial expressions, smells, light, memories of the person, and so on- get sorted out and eventually arranged in such a way that becomes part of the person's "stable, adaptive, and flexible" narrative. A healthy person moves on, eventually.
But someone who has been repeatedly traumatized, or traumatized early in life, or who never formed healthy attachments early in life (due to illness, neglect, war), does not have the connectivity that is the basis for this shift in processing from right brain to left, from the implicit to the explicit. The implicit memories are the intrusive and flooding memories of the trauma associated with emotional dysfunction. In therapy, these are slowly made explicit, graspable, subject to analysis, and finally, a person is able to integrated it into her own story.
Interestingly, the single most powerful predictor of a person's later emotional health is their parent's narrative coherence. If you can relate your life as a relatively "stable, adaptive, and flexible" story, this is evidence of much of the important connection work functioning well on the biological level. And this correlates strongly with one's children growing up emotionally in tune with themselves.
Wonderfully, though, the brain is so adaptive, these connections can be restored throughout life. The brain is always ready to change. But it takes work, and certain conditions need to be in place.
This is what we do best at TAS. High school aged kids are neurologically primed for social connections. Most everybody knows that. Now there is a strong research pointing to why. Adolescence is when a person truly becomes conscious and reflective upon themselves and their relationships. A great deal of trouble can be overcome; the brain is always ready for change.
Precisely. Later on the in Salon interview the interviewer quotes a conservationist as saying "the California Condor is 5 percent feathers and blood and 95 percent its environment". This would not be a bad way to describe what we do at TAS. Why is it that most of our students become more happy and more confident? Why is is that they develop deep interests and a wide range of knowledge? Why do most of them stay so connected to us, when more than a few of them had fallen apart everywhere else? Its not the meditation and its not the academics. I believe those things do contribute materially. But the main thing are the relationships. TAS was established on that principle, that the single most important factor in a young person's life is the quality of his or her relationships.
But what is this quality? At school every day, over and over again- if you listen carefully- we shape a conscious, reflective experience of relationships. Perhaps you read the Dan Siegel interview I posted yesterday. If you didn't, and haven't read his other books, here's the nub: the way that people heal psychologically is a process of going from implicit memory to explicit memory.
What this means is that when an individual is traumatized, there is a period in which the experience is thoroughly sensory. Siegel calls it "perceptually rich, reflexively poor". It is a predominantly right brain experience, a "holistic" kind of memory, where the sensory input is suggested again and again. It is not reflected upon. The material, as it were, is waiting to be analyzed. I'm going to extend this idea logically for a moment. I'm sure Siegel has already done this; I just haven't heard him talk about this yet.
In a relatively healthy person the sensory, right brain coding of the experience- for instance, the sudden death of a close friend- slowly gets shifted over to the left brain for analysis. Different features of the event- time, facial expressions, smells, light, memories of the person, and so on- get sorted out and eventually arranged in such a way that becomes part of the person's "stable, adaptive, and flexible" narrative. A healthy person moves on, eventually.
But someone who has been repeatedly traumatized, or traumatized early in life, or who never formed healthy attachments early in life (due to illness, neglect, war), does not have the connectivity that is the basis for this shift in processing from right brain to left, from the implicit to the explicit. The implicit memories are the intrusive and flooding memories of the trauma associated with emotional dysfunction. In therapy, these are slowly made explicit, graspable, subject to analysis, and finally, a person is able to integrated it into her own story.
Interestingly, the single most powerful predictor of a person's later emotional health is their parent's narrative coherence. If you can relate your life as a relatively "stable, adaptive, and flexible" story, this is evidence of much of the important connection work functioning well on the biological level. And this correlates strongly with one's children growing up emotionally in tune with themselves.
Wonderfully, though, the brain is so adaptive, these connections can be restored throughout life. The brain is always ready to change. But it takes work, and certain conditions need to be in place.
This is what we do best at TAS. High school aged kids are neurologically primed for social connections. Most everybody knows that. Now there is a strong research pointing to why. Adolescence is when a person truly becomes conscious and reflective upon themselves and their relationships. A great deal of trouble can be overcome; the brain is always ready for change.
1 comment:
I am interested in learning more of what Seigel writes and how it could help me understand the emotional issues with adopted children. He has written many books, but I would like to know which one targets ways in which parents can help their kids.
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