07. Is Your Brain Sparking Or Are You Happy To See Me?

Hi friends,

Welcome to the seventh dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive. 

When I first started my research on human flourishing two years ago, I did not realize I was embarking on an awe-inspiring, thought-provoking adventure. This “adventure” is personally fulfilling because it almost always asks me to question the very things I think are “normal” or “natural,” which then inspires me to interrogate where those ideas originated from in the first place. 

For example, last week I had coffee with a new friend. We’d both participated in a panel on the future of AI at the WM Phoenix Open and wanted to continue the conversation started on stage. While blowing on my steaming cup of London Fog Latte, I listened intently as he shared the fascinating details of Neom, an approximately 106 mile (170-km) smart city being built in Saudi Arabia for 9 million residents. With a mischievous glint in his eyes, he asked, “So, what do you think, Melissa? Is Neom an innovative solution or a fancy prison?”

While I usually like to leave philosophical questions to the academics who read Descartes or Sartre for fun, I found the question applicable in my own work. 

For context: during the last few weeks, our newsletter has been digging deep into The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s most prolific trauma experts. In the book, Dr. van der Kolk shares in extraordinary detail, how pharmacological interventions, as well as, research and insurance dollars get to determine which mental health treatments are championed and which are sequestered to the desks of eccentric scientists. 

In a healthcare ecosystem mostly predicated on treating the presence of disease, illness, or injury, he muses, it becomes hard to expand the ecosystem to see patients as participant’s in their own healing process. It’s even more difficult to see the original vision of Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, who saw the body as the major healer, and the physician and patient working together with nature, to help the body activate its own healing capacities.

A few years ago, McKinsey & Company launched their Health Institute, tasked with the goal of adding six years of high-quality life to each of us on this planet, totaling 45 billion extra years.

For some of us, this is an incredibly exciting proposition. For others, it may sound like a trap (or fancy prison)... especially if we’re just trying to get by with the time we’ve already got. 

Consider this– life expectancy for children born today is 20 years longer than those born in the 1960s; however, “for every extra year of life we have added to our life span, half of that may be in moderate or poor health… 69% of people will spend an average of three years using long-term care; 2 billion people experience chronic pain; 33% of men and 45% of women experience sexual dysfunction; 548 million experience symptoms of anxiety or depression…” and the stats go on and on. (McKinsey Health Institute) 

And yet, even equipped with all of this daunting data, the founders of the McKinsey Health Institute still believe:

1. The suffering we endure to achieve longevity is unacceptable and unnecessary.

2. Mental, social, and spiritual health are as important as physical health and are deeply interconnected.

3. Health is mostly about our ability to function, not just about disease and death.

4. Health exists on a spectrum: we can’t achieve optimal health if we don’t define, measure, or strive for it.

5. Most drivers of health sit outside conventional healthcare systems and are modifiable.

6. Achieving great health is as much about what we pursue as what we avoid.

7. People are more than patients; we deserve to be empowered with greater health literacy.

8. History suggests that the societal adaptations required to improve health are feasible; every person and institution on Earth has a role to play.

I have to admit, such a vision is inspiring not just because it moves beyond our current understanding of the healthcare system, but in that it also recognizes interventions that challenge the status quo.

This makes me think of Dr. van der Kolk’s fascination with neuroplasticity, the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience.

In The Brain’s Way of Healing, Dr. Norman Doidge writes, “For decades, the term healing was seldom used in connection with the brain, as it was with other organ systems, such as the skin or the bones or the digestive tract. While organs such as the skin, liver, and blood could repair themselves by replenishing their lost cells using stem cells to function as “replacement parts,” no such cells were found in the brain, despite decades of searching. Once neurons were lost, no evidence could be found that they were ever replaced. Scientists tried to find ways to explain this in evolutionary terms: in the course of evolving into an organ with millions of highly specialized circuits, the brain simply lost the ability to supply those circuits with replacement parts. Even if neuronal stem cells– baby neurons– were to be found, how, it was wondered, would they be of any help? How would they even integrate into the sophisticated but dizzyingly complex circuits of the brain? Because it wasn’t thought possible to heal the brain, most treatments used medication to ‘prop up the failing system’ and decrease symptoms by temporarily changing the chemical balance on the brain. But stop the medication, and the symptoms would return. 

…In 2000, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for demonstrating that as learning occurs, the connections among nerve cells increase. The scientist behind that discovery, Eric Kandel, also showed that learning can “switch on” genes that change neural structure… It turns out that the brain is not too sophisticated for its own good after all. This sophistication involves brian cells being able to constantly communicate electrically with one another, and to form and reform new connections, moment by moment, as a source of a unique kind of healing.” (xv-xvi)

He goes on to describe noninvasive treatments used to rewire the brain’s circuitry. “Most of these types of interventions make use of energy–including light, sound, vibration, electricity, and motion. These forms of energy provide natural, noninvasive avenues into the brain that pass through our senses and our bodies to awaken the brain’s own healing capacities… It may seem odd that ways of healing the brain so frequently use the body and the senses to pass energy and information into the brain. But these are the avenues the brain uses to connect with the world, and so they provide the most natural and least invasive way to engage it… Brains evolved many millions of years after bodies did, to support bodies. Once bodies had brains, they changed, so body and brain could interact and adapt to each other. Not only does the brain send signals to the body to influence it; the body sends signals to the brain to affect it as well, and there is constant, two-way communication between them. The body abounds with neurons, the gut alone having 100 million. Only in anatomy textbooks is the brain isolated from the body and confined to the head. In terms of the way it functions, the brain is always linked to the body, and through the senses, to the world outside. Neuroplasticians have learned to use these avenues from the body to the brain to facilitate healing…” (xvi-xvii)

And just like that we’re back to the ways in which the body keeps score (but most excitingly, we’re uncovering the ways in which the body is an ally in the healing process as well). 

We’ll dig more into neuroplasticity next week. But until then, stay inspired friends.

With gratitude,

P.s. March is fast approaching and we’ll be digging into another insightful read at the top of the month. I want to hear from you– are you still enjoying the exploration of the mind, or should we move onto physical health? Three book options for next month are: 1.) The Brain’s Way of Healing, 2.) Dopamine: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, or 3.) Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. Any preferences? Feel free to respond directly to this email if one of these sounds exciting to you.