These questions led to Sterling’s core theory that the traditional model of physiological regulation was all wrong. The norm of using homeostasis — accepting a single “normal” set-point for measuring physiological functions like blood pressure for all adults — was not the way to measure health. Instead, he believed that the healthiest people were those whose brains and physiological functions were resilient and adaptive to the demands of their environment. Eventually, this led to his conclusion that the goal is not to set brain functioning to meet a prescribed formula but to achieve variable brain functioning that performs in such a way that the energy expended meets the needs at hand. In other words, someone who is deep in meditation requires a different level of brain functioning than someone who is at a cocktail party.
African Americans experience twice the rate of infant mortality as whites and higher levels of stroke and obesity than the general populace. Native Americans experience higher rates of diabetes and addictions. There are endless and conflicting theories on why these disparities continue to exist, and even more theories about how they can be addressed.
For Gerdes — and a growing legion of scientists — it all begins in the brain. In his view, the disparities are not the result of weakness, recklessness or bad habit. They are caused by a trauma print in the brain that passes from one generation to the next and creates extreme vulnerability to specific human issues and behaviors. “Once you understand that the brain controls everything, you begin to see how illness can afflict groups of people for generations to come.” Gerdes sees how brainwave patterns are altered by trauma, both direct and intergenerational. With a database of more than 3 million brain patterns collected from people around the world, Gerdes is able to extract data and patterns that lead to new discoveries — as well as to many more questions about the nature of the brain and how it affects our behavior.
When working on Native American reservations, Gerdes was haunted by the question of why this group of people — who had come from a strong lineage of respect for the earth, nature, order, and connectedness — were suffering inequitably from diabetes, addictions, lower life expectancy, and suicide.
“Native people have a proud history connected to their land,” Gerdes explains, “and they freely communed with nature — with Mother Earth — for generations. This open, natural communion was the road to find their internal peacefulness and well-being. When they were displaced by warring tribes — the last of which mandated that each individual native tribe was relegated to specific lands or reservations — this displacement caused a certain kind of ‘internal anxiety,’ or an uneasiness internally which is seen as an abundance of high frequencies in neural oscillations. This uneasiness is medicated effectively with alcohol and sugar — an internal medication, but one with major side effects of substance abuse and diabetes.”
“Depressive Symptoms in Urban Population Samples in Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic,” a study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, reported an unusually high prevalence of depression those countries. Rates of depression were 34 percent higher in women than men. The study made a connection between depression and binge-drinking.
“Alcoholism is nothing more than the brain seeking balance with an outside substance,” Gerdes says. “Whenever an internal anxiety exists, alcohol is self-medication which can help mitigate it. Alcohol is also the beginning of the slide to substance abuse, as this medication process requires an increasing amount of use to continue to still the anxiety.”
Why do Jewish people contract higher rates of Tay-Sachs, Canavan disease, Bloom syndrome, and Crohn’s disease? Why is Celiac disease — a gluten intolerance — more common in the Irish and those of Irish descent? Does that gluten intolerance have any connection to the high rate of alcoholism perceived to affect the Irish? What does this all have to do with brain function?
Sterling’s work concludes that vigilance increases among distressed groups, having a pronounced effect on physiology, and that these related emotions and reactions “can be stored for decades within individual brains, but also transferred across generations.”
In the end, these findings raise powerful questions about how we treat illness. While diet and exercise are noble endeavors, can they truly be a solution to obesity and hypertension when the root cause lies in the brain and our engrained physiological response to the brain?
The brain holds the answers. As new technologies make it more possible to see inside the brain, increasingly accessible and effective solutions are emerging. “Perhaps,” says Gerdes, “by getting to the root of the matter — the brain — we will be able to stop the cycle of inherited trauma and illness and become the limitless individuals we were born to be.”
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s Spring 2012 issue.
