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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...

The Origami of Re-Membering by Lorraine Hedtke

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 1, 2008 in Uncategorized

A brief essay. A new way of looking at the after-life? [full text available online] What speaks to me in this piece is the title—the juxtaposition—origami and remembering. What speaks to me are certain passages. Like this one. The ancient Japanese art of folding paper has fascinated me since childhood. . . Now as a I speak with people after their loved one has died, I recall the beauty of the folding metaphor. I like to think of each person’s life as having the posthumous potential to become an elaborate folded work of art. With each retelling of the stories of someone’s life, especially when these are being told to a new person—someone who never met the deceased—it is as if the deceased person’s stories are being folded into seams and creases that give contour and texture to the lives of the living. I like to think of each person’s life as having the posthumous potential to become an elaborate folded work of art. A pink lily? A crane? A white swan? There are so many ways, it would seem, of talking about the after-life. What happens after. For me, this one—the after-life as a new shape here—in the process of becoming folded and re-folded through stories—this feels to me like a new way of looking. A way potentially rich with possibilities. A pink lily.A crane.A white swan. And who knows? One shape could be folded and refolded into yet another. Anything could happen.________________________________________________ Of interest:The pink lily and blue crane and how to fold them can be found here. The white swan can be found...

If by Joni Mitchell and Rudyard Kipling

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 24, 2008 in Uncategorized

Lyrics from the final song on Joni Mitchell’s CD, Shine2007[full text available on-line] If you can fill the journeyOf a minuteWith sixty seconds worth of wonder and delightThenThe Earth is yoursAnd Everything that's in itBut more than thatI knowYou'll be alrightYou'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 cowRose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim But the poem as a whole struck me as not quite as inclusive as 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 youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt youBut make allowance for their doubting too, Joni Mitchell's first verse: If you can keep your headWhile all about youPeople are losing theirs and blaming youIf you can trust yourselfWhen everybody doubts youAnd 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 particular 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...

When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 17, 2008 in Uncategorized

A poem on poetry as a place for grief 1989 [full text available on-line] The poem begins: When I am asked How I began writing poems,I talk about the indifference of nature. Ms. Mueller’s poem is set in June. This indifference of nature is felt, we learn, because her mother has died, and because it’s this brilliant summer day. Everything’s blooming. The outside world looking so drastically different from the way the inside world feels. Nothing was black or brokenand not a leaf fell Is it easier to grieve when there’s a streak of black in the landscape?When something in the outside world is broken?Is it easier to grieve what needs to be grieved when the air is gray?Or maybe when the world’s not celebrating a holiday? I went looking for this poem, When I Am Asked, after I wrote about Frost’s poem, My November Guest. And at first I thought, oh, maybe better to save this one until June. But then I started thinking about how brilliant holiday decorations can be—or golden maples—the brilliance of colored lights—and how all of that, for a certain person at a certain time (and all of us have likely been there at one point or another—or we will be)—how all of that could have the potential to feel indifferent. Where can grief find a place during an American Thanksgiving? Where can it find resonance?Solace?Or where in the world can grief find a place when the world all seems to be celebrating Christmas? (They’re not actually. A lot of the world isn’t Christian. And of those that are, many—more than we think—find Christmas a difficult time. But it can seem as if everyone is celebrating Christmas. Everyone else whooping it up.) And all of this complicated by the sensory qualities of the holidays—all the very particular smells and music and the sound of that Salvation Army bell—and the way any one of these might trigger memory and emotion, unbidden. I’m interested in where the speaker of this poem finds her own resonance for grief amid outer brilliance. I sat on a gray stone bench. . .and placed my griefin the mouth of language,the only thing that would grieve with me. Language as good company. I’ve had this notion for a while—certainly not mine alone—that if one person or creature gets it—really gets it—if grief finds its true company and recognition—then it can begin to be carried—and perhaps released. I think any one of us can bear grief—or bear it better—say, with less suffering—if just one creature in the world really gets it well. For Chekhov it was his horse.For Lisle it's language itself—poetry.___________________________________________________ See also: A piece from One Year of Writing and Healing on Chekhov’s story, Grief An interview with Ms. Mueller from 1997, the year that she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry The poem Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden, so memorably and beautifully recited aloud in the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral. A poem that also speaks to resonance. And here is the actor, John Hannah, on YouTube reciting the Auden poem. Good company, I...

My November Guest by Robert Frost

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 10, 2008 in Uncategorized

A poem in which Sorrow appears as guest and companion 1913 MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane. Her pleasure will not let me stay. She talks and I am fain to list: She’s glad the birds are gone away, She’s glad her simple worsted gray Is silver now with clinging mist. The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I have no eye for these, And vexes me for reason why. Not yesterday I learned to know The love of bare November days Before the coming of the snow, But it were vain to tell her so, And they are better for her praise. Sorrow as feminine? A companion with a name? And it would seem that she doesn’t just tolerate the gray dark days that November can bring. She thinks they’re beautiful. She seems to love the grays and silvers. Not just endure. She loves them. She loves the bare days. The bare trees. Even the desolation. She praises it. Seems to even find in it a kind of balm. Not long ago I read a piece in a blog I read regularly, Furious Seasons. The blog is written by Philip Dawdy, a journalist in Seattle who writes critically, and quite well, about mental health issues. In the piece of which I’m thinking, he writes about the onset of fall and winter in Seattle, the beginning of a long gray season. He speaks to what has worked for him in his own ongoing, and periodic, acquaintance with depression. He writes of how critical it is to remember to eat. To remember to sleep. To get outside when he can. To make some time to socialize. And then he writes about this other subtler part—not becoming depressed about getting depressed. Which I think gets at the heart of something. He writes: My experience is if I am not falling into despair over the possible onset of depression then I don't get depressed. Which I suppose proves something about all this mindfulness talk you read in depression recovery circles. Reading this, I found myself thinking of Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher. She has this wonderful image for negative emotions—or emotions that we’ve come to think of as negative or unpleasant. She calls them Wisdoms in Disguise. One place she talks about these wisdoms is in a conversation with the author Alice Walker, a conversation that was recorded and which is readily available (links below). She says this, referring to the work of one of her teachers, Chogyam Trungpa: So when I read Rinpoche what he basically said was, he said there’s nothing wrong with negativity, he said that there’s a lot you can learn from it, it’s a very strong creative energy. The problem is negative negativity—you don’t just stay with negativity, you spin off into all the endless cycle of things you say to yourself about it. . . For instance, in Vajayana Buddhism, they talk about how each of the powerful negative energies such as anger, envy, lust, jealousy,...

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