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An Enriched Environment

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 5, 2009 in Uncategorized

Yet Another Healing Image from Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain I tend to think of two times of the year as good times for new beginnings. September when school starts. And January, the beginning of a new year. I tend to think not so much of resolutions, but of new beginnings. And it strikes me that this image of an enriched environment might be a useful one with which to fashion a new beginning. First, where the term comes from. Back in the 1940’s, a scientist by the name of Donald Hebb began taking some of his lab rats home with him in the evening to keep as temporary pets. The other rats remained in the lab in their bare cages. And Hebb began to notice something. The rats he took home with him began to act differently than their mates. They were less fearful, more curious and they showed “more exploratory behavior.” Later, in the sixties, at Berkeley, a team of scientists formalized this notion by raising some rats in bare cages and other rats in what they called “enriched environments”. These enriched rats had access to toys and mazes and frequent handling. And it turned out that their brains grew in response to this enrichment—about 5% more cortex, by weight, than their mates without enrichment. Interestingly, these studies were instrumental in the development of Head Start, the program for pre-school children. And a number of follow-up studies have been done since. In one, it was shown that mice provided with an exercise wheel will tend to run about four to five hours a day—and in turn will produce about twice as many new cells in their brains as sedentary mice. A key finding here is that the exercise needs to be voluntary to be beneficial. If the exercise is forced in some way—for instance by using a negative stimulus—then the new cell growth doesn’t occur so lavishly, presumably because the stress of punishment outweighs the benefit of the exercise. It’s fascinating—this notion that not just exercise but voluntary exercise grows new brain cells. (So—it’s good to find a way to exercise but even better if we don’t stress out about it or beat ourselves up over the whole deal.) Here’s Fred Gage talking to the Dalai Lama: We think voluntary exercise increases the number of neural stem cells that divide and give rise to new neurons in the hippocampus. . . But we think it is environmental enrichment that supports the survival of these cells. Usually, 50 per cent of the new cells reaching the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus die. But if the animal lives in an enriched environment, many fewer of the new cells die. Environmental enrichment doesn’t seem to affect cell proliferation and the generation of new neurons, but it can affect the rate and the number of cells that survive and integrate into the circuitry. The voluntary exercise stimulates the new cells. And then the enriched environments leads the brain to find a place for those new cells in the circuitry. So. . . an exercise wheel in the center of the living room? And an enriched environment radiating out from it? Hmmm. A new beginning for January?______________________________________________ See other pieces on this book: An Overview The Enchanted Loom A...

Joy?

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 22, 2008 in Uncategorized

I went looking for the word JOY in an anthology I have on my shelf–Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times. And found this: There are days we liveas if death were nowherein the background; from joyto joy to joy, from wing to wing,from blossom to blossom toimpossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. Ah–the possibility of blossoms in December.Wishing you some of those kinds of days. The full poem, From Blossoms, is by Li-Young Lee and can be found here. The graphic for JOY, as well as one for lots and lots of words, can be found at Visuwords, a free online graphical...

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...

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...

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