Neuroplasticity
Monday, July 30, 2007
Neuroplasticity: The brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. Previously thought to be a characteristic only of the brains of the very young,...this capacity for rewiring of the neuronal synapses to allow for re-development of entire regions of the brain is present in adults as well as children.
At a reading from Black & White the other night at Stockbridge Booksellers, a cozy little bookstore in Stockbridge Massachusetts, the Q&A afterwards turned into an interesting discussion--who knows why?--about neuroplasticity. A fellow in shorts who was sitting in the rear of the audience asked me in my capacity as a student of the human condition (those were his words) whether I believed adolescence to be the time in life when we are most able to withstand trauma, when our brains are most elastic. It was clear from the way he phrased the question that he believed this to be the case.
I emphatically didn't agree with him. And it got me thinking, both about adolescence, about development in general and about the whole subject of developmental milestones. (I guess this is what we students of human nature do in our spare time.) Do we all grow at the same rate, as if we're on a conveyor belt being stamped with certain criteria for growth at certain precise moments along the continuum? This thinking seems more and more prevalent in this wacky culture we live in. Take the books that mothers of young children read. For instance, What to Expect: The First Year. What To Expect: The Toddler Years. And so forth. I could have saved myself a few gray hairs and a few sleepless nights as a mother of an infant and toddler if I hadn't poured over those books as if they were an owner's manual to my child. Developmental milestones such as stacking blocks, putting two words together, pulling up to stand are very clearly delineated by the authors into categories such as:
Should be able to:
Probably is able to:
Might Even be able to:
Not taking into account the vastness and complexity of human nature, even--or perhaps particularly--as it relates to babies. Not taking into account that there are children who don't talk until they're five (hello, Einstein?) and children who literally never crawl but just get up and walk one day (my own dear boy). This idea that there are markers on the marathon of life that we each pass precisely at the same clip (if at all) strikes me--based solely on my own personal experience--as ludicrous. And I said as much to the fellow in the shorts. Using myself as an example, I told him I had been a late bloomer. That I had been a tremendously screwed-up adolescent. (I even have proof! See my memoir, Slow Motion.) That I didn't come into my own true self until I was past thirty. That--like the wonderful character of Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie--I hit my prime well into my thirties, and that I feel more aware now of my own capacity to adjust than I ever have in my life.
If new age wisdom holds that there are no crises, only opportunities, it seems there are those among us (and again, who knows why?) who are able to grow from their crises at any age, at any point in their lives, regardless of the crisis. And others who fold. Who stop growing. Who ask: why me? I'm thinking now of my mother, who after suffering terrible injuries in the car crash that killed my father, was able to heal physically--in and of itself, a remarkable feat--but never took hold of the life- changing opportunity she had been presented with to become a different (happier, more fulfilled, less angry) kind of person. And I'm thinking of the man I (along with the rest of America) have been haunted by for the past week: Dr. William Petit, the endocrinologist in Cheshire, Connecticut who has just suffered the most unthinkable, impossible, monstrous loss of his wife and two daughters at the hands of murderers. There was a photograph of Dr. Petit in The Hartford Courant yesterday, speaking at the memorial service for his family. He stands gripping the lectern, the gash on his forehead from his own injuries still visible. Dr. Petit exhorted the people in that auditorium to do good in the world. To love one another. To take care of another human being. To reach out to a neighbor. He was able to impart that message less than a week after suffering the worst kind of loss. Neuroplasticity, indeed.
Instinct vs. Impulse
Friday, July 6, 2007
I've been thinking a lot lately--my mind unleashed like a hungry, mad dog--about the roles of instinct and impulse in my life and how to tell the difference. We are creatures of impulse, all of us, and often impulses become habit. For instance: when I wake up in the morning these days, I go straight to the computer and check my Amazon number, as if, perhaps in the middle of the night Terry Gross or Oprah have interrupted regular programming to praise the virtues of Black & White, and I have shot stunningly and instantly to #1. And so, on these mornings, after I check my (so not #1) Amazon number, I type my name into Google. I check book reviews, blogs, you-name-it, for up-to-the-minute news about the state of my book's publication. And given that my book's publication is now three months old, very little news is to be had. There might be a mention of a book club choosing it as their next pick. (Fleeting small surge of pleasure.) Or there might be a blogger tearing it apart into tiny, bite-sized morsels. (Devastation, the certainty that of course this blogger is right and everyone else is wrong.) By the time I have finished this insane sprint through cyber-world, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes have passed, but my mind has become fragmented and buzzy. A cartoon version of me would have my eyes swirling madly and bits of lightning escaping from the top of my head. I know I shouldn't start my days this way, and yet I do. I do, because after three months of doing very little other than publicizing my book, I am used to a certain pace. A fast, exciting pace full of news and people and nice outfits. I am used to getting up in front of audiences and performing. It was hard to get into that mode--but now it's even harder to get out of it. I fight against the idea that it's time to go back into the cave. To start all over again with a single word, a sentence, a page. A glimmer of an idea...so delicate, so easily blown away. So hard to trust or believe in.
When I am following my instincts--rather than my impulses--the inside of my head becomes quiet enough so that I can hear the whispering voice that tells me what to do next. That voice--which of course is my own best self talking--tells me it's time to read, or take a drive, or practice yoga. It's the voice that will eventually tell me what my next novel is about, if only I can be still enough to listen. Writing a novel is a devotional act--Annie Dillard describes it as following the line of words. This devotion, this following, cannot be done in a frenzy. And it most certainly cannot be done in the same hyper-self-conscious universe in which Amazon numbers and anonymous bloggers take up valuable, semi-conscious morning time--time time when the mind is at its softest, most open. It has always fascinated me that some of our finest, most lucid writers have also had some of the noisiest, most painfully cluttered, dare I say damaged minds--and I stand in awe at the sheer courage, discipline, determination that it takes to heave all that noise away as if it's a solid mass, a boulder.
All I know is this: whenever, in my life, I have followed my impulses, it's never led me anywhere good. And when I have followed my instincts--whether in falling in love at first sight with my husband, or realizing, one summer morning, that it was time to have a baby, or hearing the whispering voice through the fog telling me just enough to begin again, and again, I have been rewarded beyond anything I could ever have imagined.
