We're Back...

This marks the beginning of the school year for me...getting together budgets and curricula, putting some touches (by no means final) on the art and contemplative programs, and reconstructing a morning routine that is a little earlier and a little more focused than summer requires.

  One of the best things we do at TAS is allow students to relax, let their guard down, and learn. Who would of thought that those things are intimately related:

  Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.

Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.

 Executive decision making crumbles under chronic stress? Repetitive, non productive behavior increases as well? This doesn't sound like humans at all, does it? But the good news is the remarkable re-generative nature of the brain, across the life-span. The brain searches for change and connection, that is, opportunities for growth:

  But with only four weeks’ vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate and lay off the bar. Atrophied synaptic connections in the decisive regions of the prefrontal cortex resprouted, while the overgrown dendritic vines of the habit-prone sensorimotor striatum retreated.

  "...[W]ith only four weeks' vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers...": I like that line. It sounds like how some of students feel after their first month at TAS.