Last month there was an unbearably sad story in the Washington Post magazine, about parents who forgot their kids in cars with fatal consequences. Read it here.
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article excerpt- The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions. Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw. Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty “works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the ‘1812 Overture.’ The cannons take over and overwhelm.” By experimentally exposing rats to the presence of cats, and then recording electrochemical changes in the rodents’ brains, Diamond has found that stress — either sudden or chronic — can weaken the brain’s higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He’s seen the same sort of thing play out in cases he’s followed involving infant deaths in cars. “The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant,” he said. “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted — such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back — it can entirely disappear.” |
I found fascinating the description the article provides of the brain’s functioning, which I excerptedat left (read that first). It raises interesting questions about attention, brain, mind and self. I’d taken some notice of the work the Dalai Lama, Mingyur Rinpoche, Matthieu Ricard, and other Tibetan lamas have done with the Mind & Life Institute, involving studies demonstrating that meditation can change the brain, but I can’t say I am very familiar with it. The Post story prompted me to revisit the subject.
I soon found an earlier article, also in the Washington Post, stating “over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination.”
It may be inappropriate to draw conclusions about neuroscience from articles as general as these, but it seems to me that perhaps the sort of brain synchrony that breaks down in the case of the toddler deaths is exactly what researchers have found is improved by meditation.
I certainly have an experiential sense that over the last few years of meditating I’ve reordered the workings of my prefrontal cortex somewhat, particularly with regard to how it interacts with my basal ganglia. That is to say, I seem to go on “autopilot” far less than I once did, and when I do I’m much better at “rebooting,” as the article describes it. I used to allow my “thinking mind” to check out completely for long stretches, off on flights of fancy, while my basal ganglia guided me around the city on the reptile tip. I do this far less frequently now. Even when I’m thinking about something, often there is still a quality of engagement with my surroundings that persists.
I find this is all interesting grist for the mill of the classic contemplation of in which aspect of the person the “self” is to be found. I suppose that the modern concept of self involves equating “Self” with brain, but it seems that we could take that a step further and say most people today would probably equate their selves with their cerebral cortexes. I know I do, intuitively at least.
This issue is implicitly at play in the legal prosecutions suffered by the parents, and in their own self-recrimination. If we are our cerebral cortexes, does that make us accountable for mistakes like these? Does it matter that our cerebral cortex was “bullied” out of the driver’s seat by the basal ganglia, which is somehow not quite Self? One parent talks about the difficulty in finding the concepts and language necessary to characterize what happened:
The word “accident” makes it sound like it can’t be prevented, but “incident” makes it sound trivial. And it is not trivial. . . We lack a term for what this is.
Could meditation serve as a preventative measure for this sort of thing? I suspect that it would help, with this and with anything that requires this sort of mindfulness.
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