Diane Morrow

A New Brain for a New Season?

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 15, 2008 in Uncategorized

More from Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain One of my favorite passages from Sharon Begley’s book has to do with birds. Bird brains. She’s writing about a scientist, Fernando Nottebohm, now at Rockefeller University, who has made the study of bird brains his passion. She writes: Many species have the biological equivalent of a broken record: they sing the same song their whole life, warbling a single melody to attract mates and warn off rivals and claim territories until they die. The songbirds to which Nottebohm was drawn have quite different habits. Canaries and black-capped chickadees and zebra finches adopt and shed new tunes with the fickleness of a teenager turning over her iPod inventory, erasing the previous summer’s repertoire and literally singing a whole new tune with the arrival of each new spring. How do they manage it? Well, it turns out they undergo neurogenesis—they make new neurons. By using radioactive labeling to mark new cells, Nottebohm discovered that canaries generate a reservoir of neuron precursors and these precursors then divide and move to song-control regions of the brain, becoming fully developed neurons as they migrate. New neurons can be created. In adult birds. Not only in baby birds and child birds. Nottebohm went on to publish a paper on this discovery, “A Brain for All Seasons," in which he highlighted two observations. Male canaries learn entirely new songs each spring. And the part of their brains devoted to creating these melodies is up to 99% larger in the spring than it is in the fall. The point here—aside from the sheer wonder of it—is the potential implications of this process occurring in humans. Much of the remainder of Begley’s third chapter, “New Neurons for Old Brains,” looks at some of these implications. One that I find especially fascinating has to do with work of Fred Gage, one of the scientists presenting his work at the Mind and Life summit. Begley writes: Emerging evidence suggests that people who are suffering from depression are unable to recognize novelty. ‘You hear this a lot with depressed people,’ Gage said to the Dalai Lama. ‘ “Things just look the same to me. There’s nothing exciting in life.” ’ It turns out these individuals have a shrunken hippocampus. It may be that depression is the inability to recognize novelty. And this inability to see things as new, as fresh, as different, this is what elicits the feeling of depression. That may be why you want this reservoir, this cache of young cells in the hippocampus. It’s able to recognize novelty, to recognize new experiences. Without that, you will have these fixed connections unable to recognize and acquire new information.’ There is also evidence, he said, that ‘if you can get someone with depression to exercise, his depression lifts.’ Neurogenesis may be the ultimate antidepressant. When it is impaired for any reason, the joy of seeing life with new eyes and finding surprises and novelty in the world vanishes. But when it is restored you see anew. Neurogenesis may be the ultimate antidepressant. When it is impaired for any reason, the joy of seeing life with new eyes and finding surprises and novelty in the world vanishes. But when it is restored you see anew. The how of neurogenesis is...

Jamesland by Michelle Huneven

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 8, 2008 in Uncategorized

A divine comedy? 2003 This is one of those books I came across by chance in the library. I read the back cover. Saw that the central character, Alice, was a descendant of William James. Saw that the San Francisco Chronicle called the book “joyous” and “good for what ails you.” The Atlantic Monthly said, “This divine comedy offers a glimpse of transcendence that’s refreshingly believable.” And thought, hey, why not? This was a few years ago. I liked the book quite a bit. Then last month I read it again and was delighted to find that it still holds up. The reviewers got it right. This is such a good novel. Such wonderfully quirky and likeable characters. Alice and Pete and Helen. If I could, I’d invite them all over for dinner, together. I’d ask Pete if maybe he’d consider cooking. Pete’s an excellent cook—a professional chef. (Think dishes like lamb tagine with dried figs. Or plum tart with lemon sorbet.) But he’s also a chef very much down on his luck. He’s lost his restaurant, his wife, and visitation rights with his young son. He’s had some anger issues. A suicide attempt. Now he’s forty-six years old and living with his widowed mother, a nun, who has been given a leave of absence from her convent in order to help him get back on his feet. Here is the passage in which Ms. Huneven deftly introduces us to Pete at the beginning of Chapter three. Pete Ross overslept. When he came into the living room, his mother was already on her knees at the neatly made sofa bed. Knuckles pressed to her forehead, she was conversing with her second husband, Jesus Christ, from whom she was temporarily and amicably separated. Not wanting to disturb his mother, Pete decides not to make coffee before setting out on one of his long walks through Los Feliz, along the river, asking the question he asks over and over throughout the novel: How do people live in this world? Pete has issues. But he’s working on them. This is Pete trying to sit still. After his mother left for work, Pete set the timer on the stove for ten minutes to meditate. A blocky sofa cushion took some weight off his legs, but within thirty seconds his knees were burning, his heart was pounding like a tribal tom-tom and spontaneous combustion seemed imminent. What did he expect? He’d only recently begun his exercise routines, and his blood pressure was still sky high, his heart flabby as cheese. Sitting in silence, he was indeed face-to-face with what is—or, rather, with what he is: a system near its breaking point. His meditation teacher Helen Harland, had told him to breathe through such anxiety, but he wasn’t confident this anxiety was passable. More likely, his body had been waiting for precisely this attention, as if all it wanted was a spectator for its final, lavish explosion. A full half hour of meditation and he’d doubtless be nothing but an oily sheen on the walls, a few flakes of greasy ash. Meditation with a light and realistic and terribly human touch. Now that I like. Thankfully, Pete’s meditation teacher, Helen Harland, a Unitarian Universalist minister, is not one to take herself too seriously either. We’re...

If by Joni Mitchell and Rudyard Kipling

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 24, 2008 in Healing Poetry

If you can fill the journey Of a minute With sixty seconds worth of wonder and delight Then The Earth is yours And Everything that’s in it But more than that I know You’ll be alright You’ll be alright. Just one minute. Sixty seconds. That’s all. But first, for just a moment, a note on a poem I didn’t choose. It’s November, not long before Thanksgiving, and I was trying to think of a poem that speaks to gratitude. The first poem that came to mind was the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins about dappled things. I was thinking how naming might have something to do with gratitude. Naming being the first step. I found the poem. It’s called Pied Beauty. And it’s a nice poem with truly lovely images: Skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim But the poem as a whole struck me as not quite what I was looking for— And then I was listening to music the other day and came upon this rendering of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If, which begins as he does but with a few slight changes. Rudyard Kipling’s first stanza: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you But make allowance for their doubting too, Joni Mitchell’s first verse: If you can keep your head While all about you People are losing theirs and blaming you If you can trust yourself When everybody doubts you And make allowance for their doubting too. So the men in the first stanza of Kipling’s poem become everybody. And the line breaks change, and some punctuation. I went looking for something that might speak to Ms. Mitchell’s thoughts in adapting Kipling’s poem and found a nice piece at the library on her website. About this song, If, she writes: My friend called me up and read this Rudyard Kipling poem to me over the phone. As soon as I heard it, it resonated with me, and I wanted to set it to music. I love the opening line: ‘If you can keep your head/While all about you/People are losing theirs and blaming you.’ So, I wrote down the words, went to my house in Vancouver and made a song out of it. It’s the only song that I wrote up there on the guitar.The poem is written from a soldier’s perspective, so I rewrote some of the poetry. Kipling wrote, ‘If we can fill the journey/Of a minute/With 60 seconds worth of distance run/Then you’ll be a man, my son.” I disagree with him, philosophically speaking, that endurance gives you the inheritance of the earth. My experience tells me that the earth is innocence, with wonder and delight, which is renewable. The blue heron on my property flies overhead, and I’m a 3 year old. I’m filled with wonder and delight. So I rewrote that part of the poem as ‘If you can fill the journey/Of a minute/With 60 seconds worth of wonder and delight.’ Kipling’s version is macho; I wanted to get the feminine principle into the poetry. This morning I’m grateful for many things and one of them is poetry, this poem in particular. I’m...

Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 3, 2008 in Uncategorized

A journalist’s memoir of his son’s addiction 2008 My favorite thing about David Sheff’s book is his ability to hold two entirely different thoughts in the same paragraph—even in the same sentence. There’s nothing to be done, we have to do everything we can do. We have done everything we can do, we have more to do. Vicki and I agonize over it. Paradox is at the center of this book. And agony. The catalyst for this paradox? Nic, the author’s son, a kind of golden boy—bright, privileged, a surfer, a gifted writer, who, as a young teenager begins trying drugs and who, by his late teens, is trapped in a horrific and destructive addiction to crystal meth. This can be agonizing to watch, even as a reader. Especially agonizing when the bursts of recovery don’t last—when Nic relapses. Again. And again. (I have this memory, years ago, working with addicts, sitting at a meeting, after one of the best and brightest, a young man a full year sober—he’d just relapsed. I remember his friend standing to speak, saying how easy it would be to be furious at him. But then he remembered—his own relapses—how long it took—how long the process took. And he recited one of those lines that people in recovery sometimes use: It takes what it takes. That line has always stuck with me. Recovery as a process. Not just getting sober once. But again—and again—and again. It takes what it takes, even if part of what it takes is another relapse.) Beautiful Boy is about recovery as a process. Not just one treatment facility but several. For this particular family, insurance and other resources allowed them to make repeated treatment a reality. And it’s hard, while reading, not to think of all the families in similar situations who are without such resources for recovery. But that, I think, is another book. In this book, David Sheff, a skilled journalist and an eminently readable writer, is able to give us a feel of the process, his process, as it is happening. In the middle of it. How many times have I promised myself never to do this again, never again live in a state of panic, waiting for Nic to show up or not show up, to check himself in. Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. I will not do it again. I am doing it again. It’s this kind of immediacy that makes the book powerful. And I see this book as good company for any parent who has ever agonized over how much to help when an older child is in trouble. Or for any person who has ever been called an enabler, and who has said now, hey, wait a minute, what’s the difference between enabling and helping, how do you know? And when do you know? Isn’t it sometimes, well, kind of complicated? This book is, among other things, about such complications. Can it be of use to the next person in some kind of similar situation? Maybe. A little. In the introduction, Sheff writes: Why does it help to read others’ stories? It’s not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others’ experiences did...

The Enchanted Loom

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 27, 2008 in Uncategorized

More good newsfrom Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley A little over ten years ago now, when I was teaching writing at a drug rehab facility, I remember one of the young men, Rusty, a creative and gifted writer, telling me about a visit he’d had just had with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had begun him on a medication (I can’t now remember which one) and the psychiatrist went on to tell him that he was going to have to be on it for the rest of his life. He told Rusty that he’d destroyed a part of his brain with the drugs he’d taken and that the destruction was permanent. This is the first story that came to mind as I was thinking about why a book like Sharon Begley’s book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, might be important. What happens when any one of us begins to think—for whatever reason—drugs, genetics, early traumatic experiences, early deprivation—what happens when we begin to think that our brains are permanently and irrevocably damaged? What kinds of decisions might we make as a result of that model? And what might happen—what different choices might we make—if we were to begin to imagine the brain as an enchanted loom? The metaphor is one first used in 1917 by a British neuroscientist, Charles Sherrington. He described the brain as an enchanted loom, ‘where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one.’ It’s such a fluid metaphor. The brain as a kind of frame—wherein different patterns arise and fall back, constellate and dissolve. Meaningful patterns but not abiding. Not indelible. Not etched in stone. To extend the metaphor some: it used to be thought, and it was taught, that once the frame got built—sometime, say, in early childhood—that was the frame you went through the rest of your life with. And if it got dented along the way, which it inevitably would, then that dented structure is what you were stuck with. The implication also being that a dented structure would be likely to weave a rather misshapen fabric—and even perhaps the same fabric, over and over. Not a particularly encouraging model. Neuroplasticity offers something different. A different model.The loom can change.The actual frame can change.The loom is, well—enchanted. Begley builds a story for neuroplasticity by tracing its early history in Chapter 2 of her book. First, she cites the psychologist William James, who wrote as early as 1890 that ‘organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity.’ Then she outlines a series of studies, performed by a series of scientists, including the aforementioned Charles Sherrington, who early in the last century began to question whether our brain maps were fixed maps. (Brain maps, first laid out in the late 1800’s, are what they sound like they would be—maps of the brain cortex which lay out which parts of the brain are handling what—including both incoming signals—the sensory signals—and outgoing—or motor—signals. Thus, for instance, a specific portion of your brain receives sensory signals from your fingers when they touch a keyboard. Another portion of your brain is associated with moving those fingers. Yet another section of the brain allows you to process what you see...

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