Reflections inspired by Poem 937

On April 2, 2013, President Barack Obama announced the BRAIN Initiative.

In this context, BRAIN stands for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. According to the White House announcement, the initiative was designed to:

“accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought. These technologies will open new doors to explore how the brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information, and shed light on the complex links between brain function and behavior.”

In Octber 2016, the National Institutes of Health announced a third round of grants, descibing the BRAIN initiative as:

“a large-scale effort to equip researchers with insights necessary for treating a wide variety of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.”

Brain trauma and variations in brain chemistry can cause significant social and/or psychic pain. We are fortunate to live in a time in history when the mystery of how the human brain works can be explored through scientific research and the insights gained can be used to reduce the pain of mental illness. At the same time, I think we have to be wary of labels and diagnoses that may limit our ability to see the uniqueness of “people’s brains.”

This poem prompted me to think about the quirkiness of my own brain.

THE BRAIN ATTIC

As a child, I had much in common with Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BC).

Simonides was a Greek poet, but he is most famous for a system of mnemonics known as the “method of loci (Latin for “places”).” According to some accounts, Simonides was attending a banquet when he was summoned to an urgent meeting. He was told two young men wished to see him but, when he stepped outside, there was no one waiting. At that very moment, the stone roof of the banquet hall collapsed, killing a majority of the guests. When the rubble was excavated, they found the bodies had been crushed beyond facial recognition. Simonides was, however, able to identify the deceased based on where each person had been seated. Allegedly, he drew on this experience to develop a memory technique that uses a mental map to “place” memories in particular imaginary locations so they can be easily retrieved.

To use this technique, you visualize a particular place—a room, a house, a street, a landscape—and you imagine yourself placing a particular thought or idea in a specific spot. Say you want to remember that your new neighbor’s name is Barbara. You walk across the field in your mind to the blue house behind the barbed wire fence and put “Barbara” there. Next time you see her, you are able to dash back to that spot and retrieve her name: “Oh, hi Barbara!”

Greek and Roman orators used this loci technique to memorize speeches. The residual effect of this practice is still evident in rhetorical phrases used in oral and written arguments. “In the first place” and “In the second place” are used today as markers of major points in a persuasive text, but in earlier times they were also places on mental map created by the author as a way of recalling the order of the argument.

This memory technique is dramatized in the BBC television series Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Sherlock’s knack for solving crimes has partly to do with his powers of observation, but it also depends on his ability to travel into what the character calls his “mind palace,” where he locates key details that allow him to connect the dots. Holmes’ mind palace is full of winding staircases of complexity, as befits his genius.

Though Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t use the term “mind palace” in his stories, his detective did describe the mind as a room. In “A Study in Scarlet,” Holmes tells Dr. Watson:

 “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.”

This comment, by the way, is Sherlock’s response to Watson’s sputtering astonishment that the detective does not know the earth revolves around the sun. Holmes considered this fact as irrelevant to his work, so chose to forget it.

Wait, you don’t have a brain attic?

In elementary school, I was not aware of Simonides, Sherlock Holmes, or the practice of mnemonics. However, without consciously choosing to do so, I routinely used the loci approach when I wanted to store a memory, important fact, or interesting idea in my long-term memory.

Oddly, I did picture my mind as an attic full of furniture. It was a long hallway attic lined on both sides with chests of drawers and file cabinets. There were always a few suitcases stacked near the door. Though I do not recall developing a system for what went where, I vividly remember carrying information down the hall and knowing instinctively where to put it away. Phone numbers of friends, directions to places, and “how to” information was stored in a utilitarian-looking trunk. Math facts, hard spelling words, and other important things I learned at school went into a tall file cabinet. Insights associated with favorite books were placed separately in the small labeled drawers of a library card catalog cabinet with aged brass knobs. “Warm fuzzies”—things people I loved had taught me or said to me—were carefully wrapped in tissue and placed in a tall oak dresser just like the one my grandmother had used to store my father’s baby clothes. (I now have that actual dresser in my home.)

I was probably ten when I first realized that not everyone thought this way. I was studying for a test with a friend and I said something about “putting that in the suitcase.” She was confused. “What suitcase?” My reply further confused her: “Oh, whichever one you are packing for this test.” It was soon my turn to be perplexed. As we talked, I realized, with jolt of both embarrassment and panic, that I might be alone in thinking of my mind as an attic. I might be the only person who removed math facts from an imaginary file cabinet and packed them in the corner of the imaginary suitcase that I would open at the same time as I opened the cover of the exam blue book. The revelation that all minds do not work alike was terrifying. I began to worry that I might be crazy.

As it turns out, I may be. As an adult, I have been diagnosed at different times with situational depression and with what is called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD). ADD is a medical way of saying that the only things I have ever stored neatly are the ideas in that brain attic. (Sorry, Keith.) 

Allegedly there is such a thing as “neurotypical brain chemistry” and some of us—due to our genes, not laziness, by the way—don’t have it. I am, however, not alone. Some statistics suggest that 6 to 9 percent of children and 3 to 5 percent of adults in the United States have the atypical neurochemistry that leads to ADD/ADHD behaviors. Oh look, a squirrel!

Let’s set aside, for now, the issue of whether there is, in fact, such a thing as a “typical brain” or whether one type of neurochemistry is superior to another and just go through the science. As a non-scientist, I am going to botch this explanation, oversimplifying and misrepresenting the way the brain actually works. Just go with it. Or, if it really bothers you that I use a simple analogies for complex neural interactions, do your own medical research.

Brain Chemistry, By Analogy

The human brain has a “mail system” that allows its nerve cells, called neurons, to communicate with one another and send information to the entire nervous system of the body. Neurons are separated from one another by spaces called synapses. The brain uses certain chemicals, called neurotransmitters, to carry messages across synapses from one neuron to another. A message can only be delivered if the receiving neuron has receptors that match the molecular structure of the neurotransmitters.

In the “so-called typical” brain, dopamine and norepinephrine, which are neurotransmitters, create relatively efficient connections between neurons and certain brain functions now called executive functions. These executive functions of the brain include attention, concentration, memory, motivation, effort, impulsivity, hyperactivity, organization, and certain social skills.

Let’s play this out using an analogy:

Ann (Neuron A) wants to send a message to Becky (Neuron B).  Ann gives the message to her assistant Nora (a neurotransmitter) who runs across the synapse to Becky’s office to deliver it. Becky’s assistant (another neurotransmitter) unlocks her office door (receptor). Nora is allowed to enter and deliver the message. After a short interaction, Becky’s assistant unlocks the door again, allowing Nora to exit and run back across the synapse to Ann’s office. Becky’s assistant then relocks the door. Since no other messengers can get in until her assistant opens the door, Becky is able to focus on Ann’s message and act on it.

Brain chemistry can totally mess us this mail system. If Becky does not have the right assistant (i.e., not enough of the right neurotransmitters) to unlock the door (receptor), Nora can not enter and deliver the message. Nora has to hang out in the synapse waiting for the door to open. In the meantime, Ann sends dozens of additional messages. Nora and the rest of the neurotransmitters hang out together as the synapse get more and more crowded. Finally, Becky hires the right assistant (her brain releases enough of the right neurotransmitters) to open the door. Nora and all of the other messengers scramble to get in and start fighting in the lobby in an effort to get their news across. Becky can’t decipher any of the messages because they are all screaming at the same time. Welcome to the ADD brain.

The brains of people who are diagnosed with ADD have a higher concentration of certain proteins that affect neuronal receptors, blocking neurotransmitters from carrying messages effectively. To stick with the metaphor, they are like assistants who keep messing with the door locks.

When the doors are locked, the neurons are not receiving the communication that would cause them to activate attention or regulate mood. This shows up as “inattentive” behavior and low motivation to get started on a task or finish a task already started.

When the doors suddenly open, the neurons receive tons of stimulation and start feverishly communicating to the brain that it needs to keep pace. A brain trying to cope with the volume of stimuli all coming at the same time may respond in a couple of ways.

One response is to try to act on everything at once. Trying to manage the flood of messages coming in the door, “Becky” sends a red alert to the nervous system. This shows up as hyperactivity, impulsive behavior, and blurting or interrupting in social situations.

Another response is to focus on one thing. Realizing she can not possibly sort through the influx of messages at the rate they are arriving, “Becky” picks up the nearest message and ignores the rest. She sends a message to the nervous system to act on this one message. This shows up as hyper-focus on a single task, lack of awareness of surrounding activities, and a degree of self-absorption that may be perceived as rudeness or selfishness.

In today’s society, ADD can sabotage a person’s chances for success and happiness. Executive functioning skills have never been more important. The pace of our lives and the nature of our work require consistent, focused attention and the ability to juggle multiple priorities. We pay penalties for lapses of attention, ranging from late fees to job loss. Many people with ADD become so discouraged, so accustomed to failing at what others find easy to do, that they withdraw, lowering their expectations and aspirations.

In an agricultural economy, life moved at a slower pace. Those who struggled with attention issues may not have been under as much pressure to respond to work requests. There would have been more time to work on each task and perhaps greater patience on the part of others, who would not have felt they needed the finished product as immediately. Also, the natural world would have provided reminders and motivation at least as powerful as dopamine. The rhythm of daily life would cue you to practice a set of regular behaviors. There would be no need for alarms or To Do lists because sunrise and lowing cows would remind you of your milking task. Priorities would be easier to identify: the crops need to be harvested before bad weather, assisting at the birthing of a calf takes precedence over mending worn mittens, the fire must not be allowed to go out.

I’m probably romanticizing the past, but I do think that, before diagnostic labeling made every difference in brain chemistry a disorder, people with ADD may have suffered less. In a less fast-paced context, attentional differences may have been less noticeable, making the positive traits of ADD brains more evident.

Research on the brains of people diagnosed with ADD shows that many of the very traits that cause us difficulty can also make us successful. It all depends on how you look at it. The Myers Briggs Personality Test, for example, describes what could be classic ADD behavior in positive terms. Instead of “inability to focus,” being interested in multiple ideas is described as “seeing possibilities.” Similarly, a “tendency not to follow procedures” is characterized as “preferring improvisation.” The MBTI has been discredited as serious science, so I mention it here just as an example of how ways of thinking can be characterized as positive or negative based on the rubric you’re using. It’s all in how you interpret the behavior.

Speaking of which, people sometimes misinterpret the lethargic, withdrawn behavior of people suffering from depression, referring to it as being in a “bad mood.” Depression is a disease with a biological basis which, like ADD, can be related to neurochemistry. When dopamine levels are too low, thinking becomes distorted and there is a susceptibility to depression.

Depression is a Dark Place. I know. I’ve been there.

In the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling brilliantly described depression as being besieged by frightening, ghoulish, hope-sucking creatures she called Dementors.

More often, being depressed is described as a being at the bottom of a dark well. You may be able to glimpse a faint light but it is too far away to seem within reach. There is no point in trying to climb upward, no hope of escape, so you curl up in the dark. People call down to you, telling you how sunny it is, how you should join them for a day at the beach, and their efforts to cheer you up feel like a cruel joke. Others throw down a rope and expect you to hoist yourself up, not realizing all strength has been drained out of you by the fall to this unnatural depth.

I’m lucky. I have been blessed with an openness that has allowed me to form deep friendships. These ties have served as lifelines for me when I needed them. Instead of tossing me ropes, my amazing friends (You know who you are—thank you!) used them to climb down to where I was. They kept me company in the dark until I was strong enough to follow them back to the surface. Trust me—memories of those acts of kindness are stored in that tall oak dresser in my brain attic.

Though I would definitely have preferred to be miserable alone in my bedroom, I did not have the option Emily Dickinson had to withdraw from society. With kids to raise, there was no time for little luxuries like falling apart. You have to get up and get them off to school. But I know the feeling Emily Dickinson described as a “Cleaving” or a break in normal cognitive processing. I remember pain; I remember not being able to follow a train of thought. I remember feeling like something was very clearly broken, as if there were unfamiliar sharp edges in my mind that my thoughts kept getting caught on. It made it impossible to relax and yet I was wholly unproductive. If I had tried to knit, I would most certainly have lost the pattern, dropped stitches, and watched helplessly as the ball of yarn rolled across the floor and tangled itself in knots, just like my brain.

I hope you have not felt this, though you probably have. Grief also does this to the brain and most of us are familiar with loss. When you feel like this, words seem like empty containers—they can’t possibly hold the enormity of what you are experiencing. It’s all just noise.

What is Knowing?

Dickinson has several poems about difficult states of mind including one that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (#304). She says the funeral feels like a pounding in her brain. It’s as if mourners are treading back and forth. The funeral service has no words; it just sounds like a drum beating. In the final stanza, the poet describes losing her ability to reason in an image that evokes a coffin being lowered:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke, 

And I dropped down, and down - 

And hit a World, at every plunge, 

And Finished knowing - then -

I love that last line. Dickinson is a master of suggested double meaning. When reason “breaks,” you finish “knowing.” This could mean that you “lose your mind” but it may also mean you become open to not knowing, to exploring the fullness of experience, not just the parts that can be named. With the cliffhanger last word and dash (“then—“), she hints that

this new capacity of mind might lead to a place of unknown possibilities. Is her brain falling into a dark hole or is she discovering, as she says, one new world after another once she lets go of “knowing”?

I would argue that one of the super-powers of the ADD brain is the tendency to be pretty good at knowing things without knowing them. In other words, it can mean you have strong intuition, which is the ability to grasp an idea or truth without conscious reasoning.

Intuition doesn’t get as much respect as it should. Our society tends to regard it the way a teacher in a traditional classroom views the student who blurts out the right answer but can’t write out the mathematical proof for it. There is a decided bias in favor of brains that climb the ladder of logical connections as opposed to brains that leap and dance among ideas, creating connections that, when they finally stop moving, are revealed as a complex web.

The “so-called typical” brain is good at managing incoming sensory data—sorting it, prioritizing it, coding it based on known categories, and discarding data that does not fit a pattern. Those of us who have more trouble filtering overloads of input may, in paying equal attention to everything, notice things that others perhaps immediately discard as unimportant. When we pay attention to these bits of sensory data and connect them, we sometimes have what we call a “hunch” or “gut feeling.”

We know we know something, but we aren’t sure how we know it. Sometimes it’s a little spooky, especially when you catch on to the likelihood of something happening and then it actually happens.

There are data which suggest people with ADD are especially good at the divergent thinking that leads to higher levels of creativity, perhaps because the ability to see things in different ways is closely correlated with this difference in filtering and interpreting inputs. Research at Northwestern University showed that people with what they call “leaky sensory gating”—that is, greater difficulty filtering out data that is irrelevant to the current area of focus—show a higher capacity for creativity. Sometimes, because we are less good at sorting, we may combine things according to a different schema or pick out new connections among discrete data.

Imagine, for example, that you are sorting laundry instead of ideas or sensory data. You might put all the socks together, all the pants together, and so on. Someone whose brain operates differently might sort laundry by outfit—sport socks, Tshirts, and jeans together; dark socks, dress shirts, and work pants together. Or maybe the sorting would be by color—everything red goes in one drawer.

When you have learned to sort laundry in a particular way, that is the way that makes sense to you. But it’s not the only way it could be done. The

ability to think of new ways of doing things is highly valued outside the laundry room. When the established way of working is no longer effective and creative problem-solving is required, an ADD brain may be a distinct asset.

Author Daniel Pink certainly thinks so. In A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, he asserts that creative thinking skills are becoming more and more essential for success.

“Today, the defining skills of the previous era—the “left brain” capabilities that powered the Information Age—are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous—the “right brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning—increasingly will determine who flourishes and who founders. . . . Professional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind. ”

Though I agree with Pink’s assertion that creative problem-solving is at least as important as other ways of thinking, I’m not sure we all need a whole new mind. The ways “people’s brains” work reflect the infinite variations of neuro-cognitive functioning that make us individuals. Yes, my brain works in quirky ways. Guess what? So does yours. Those differences are what make us human, what make us interesting.

In the 1990s, groups emerged that take this idea pretty far. They see neurodiversity as a civil rights issue. Proponents argue that differences in neurological functioning ought to be recognized as normal variations rather than as pathological disorders requiring treatment. These groups want differences in brain functioning to be added as a category within diversity, just like differences in gender identity, sexual orientation, and physical abilities, so that people who follow the (ungrammatical) Apple slogan “Think Different” are not judged or forced to conform to accepted ideas of “normality.”

Dickinson also speculated on the question of what is normal in brain functioning. One of her most famous poems is #620:

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

To a discerning Eye -

Much Sense - the starkest Madness - 

’Tis the Majority 

In this, as all, prevail -

Assent - and you are sane -

Demur - you’re straightway dangerous - 

And handled with a Chain -

I appreciate the ways in which neurodiversity makes us unique and I take Dickinson’s point that society’s definitions of “sense” versus “madness” may not be finely calibrated enough to describe genius. Throughout history we have often failed to recognize that those who “think different” may be right. The famously unjust trial of Galileo, who supported Copernican heliocentrism in a society that clung to Ptolemaic theory, is but one example.

However, I see limits to the argument that all differences in brain functioning are normal variations. There’s a point at which a brain’s processes are so messed up that the person loses a connection with reality and can no longer independently function safely in the world. We see this sometimes in people with schizophrenia, dementia, or Alzheimer’s.

My sister, who is intelligent, generous, and highly creative, sometimes hears voices. She believes that that those of us who do not see what she sees are being manipulated by a man who puts illusions in our minds using a TV remote control. She sends garbled emails and texts that intermingle facts, fantasy, accusations and paranoid delusions—the contents of a junk drawer in her brain. She once accused me of stealing Brad Pitt’s head. In a recent Facebook post, she references a visit from the CIA and complains about David Axelrod’s intervention in her attempt to buy beta fish. Though she can carry on a conversation in person, none of her writing makes any sense. Once a nurse in charge of the Intensive Care Unit, my sister has not supported herself in decades. Meds are available that could alter her brain chemistry and relieve her of the burden of auditory hallucinations, but her thinking is too distorted for her to realize the potential benefits.

Friends have described to me their parents’ cognitive decline due to dementia or Alzheimer’s. A person who no longer can recall the purpose of a razor or is apt to wander away from the kitchen after turning on a gas stove is at great risk. In addition to memory loss and confusion, restlessness, confabulation, and personality changes can occur. These diseases are like intruders who sneak into the brain attic and dump the contents of the drawers all over the place.

Have people whose brains are in the grip of these diseases finished “knowing”? Or do they “know” differently? Who decides whether or not a brain is working well?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the drawers in my brain attic are jammed full of scraps of writing that raise and multiply questions like these. When the words make my brain feel “Wider than the Sky,” I know that is poetry.