Stress
“Sixty percent of all doctor visits are directly related to stress issues. Stress is an unbelievable wrecking ball in our society. My rule is: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way as non-stressed brains. What I really want to say is: Stressed brains don’t learn at all. In fact, stress causes brain damage.
“But there are three confounders: Not all stress is bad for learning. Nothing focuses your attention like an AK-47. But under stress conditions, blood flow is diverted to your thighs. You’ve probably heard of fight or flight — well, that’s also kind of a myth. It’s flight, period. We’ll fight if we’re cornered. Stress will focus you for a time to let you get out of Dodge — but not to do a calculus test.
“The second confounder is that what is stressful for one person is not necessarily stressful to somebody else. Some people love jumping out of airplanes; for others it’s their worst nightmare.
“Third, if you looked at the physiology workup of someone experiencing intense pleasure and someone experiencing intense stress, and asked me, ‘John, who is having an orgasm, and who is being chased?’
“Eventually, what allowed us to understand stress was the perception of control. ‘Out of control’ is measured in two dimensions; you can’t control the frequency or the severity of the adverse stimulus. The less you feel in control, the more likely you are to experience the type of stress that can hurt learning. If you feel out of control of your life, you are more likely to experience depression and anxiety disorders.
“The stress response was built for stresses that last no more than five minutes in duration. The saber-toothed tiger ate you, or you ran away from it. If you overlay culture and society on top of this Pleistocene brain of ours — you are in a bad marriage, or a bad job, or are being beaten up at night by a bad dad — you can have a saber-toothed tiger that’s at your doorstep not for five minutes, but for decades. We now know that type of stress causes brain damage.
“If you look at images of some brains, it looks like someone took a shotgun and blew away parts of their hippocampus. BDNF, which is regulated by the hippocampus, can mitigate the effects of cortisol. But if you have too much cortisol, the defenses are overwhelmed and brain damage occurs.
“We now know that aerobic exercise buffers against stress because it increases the amount of BDNF in the brain. That’s why we think aerobic exercise worked as well as Zoloft. But this is the good news: It is only the stressors that you believe you have no control over that cause the damage. You just have to look at those stressors you have no control over, and not focus on anything else.
“The first step is to make a list of the stressful things in your life, and separate the ones you can control from those you can’t. Know thy enemy. If you know what is bothering you, it produces a level of control that you did not have before. It’s just the beginning stage, but you have to know where the battleships are before you can sink them.
“There are two powerful palliatives. One of them is cognitive behavioral therapy — every time you have a self-defeating thought, you introduce a non-self-defeating thought and reward yourself for doing so. If you do it regularly, the self-defeating thought diminishes in power. The other is the unbelievable power of empathy — both delivering it and feeling it. There is a powerful neurobiology of empathy.
“Empathy has three requirements: One, you have to be able to detect an affective change in somebody else. Autistic kids can’t do this. If someone who is usually happy is sad one day, you can detect it. Number two is imaginative transposition. You take what you think that person is experiencing and you put it on yourself, as if it were clothing. Third, you know at all times that that pain belongs to them, not you. You never create a transference response. If you have those three things, you have empathy — or at least the kind we can measure in the laboratory. We even know the neurons involved, what are called mirror-neurons. It’s very useful for teachers, or even as a CEO.
“When somebody’s feelings are intense, you do the Medina two-step. First, you have to verbally describe to the person what they see on the person’s face. You look pissed off. And then you make a guess: I bet you’re pissed off because you got this report late. If you do things like that, you can actually see people’s heart rates go down. They immediately sense that they might be understood. That alleviates stress in a relationship.”
Sleep
“It wasn’t until about six or seven years ago that we had any idea why you needed sleep. It’s not energy-restorative — that’s another myth you can throw out. There’s only one point in the sleep cycle when you’re saving more energy than you’re expending.
“We now think we know why you sleep: memory consolidation. The rumor is, a graduate student made a mistake and turned it into a Ph.D. He was teaching a rat to go through a maze, and had 100 electrodes buried in the rat’s brain. As the rat was learning the maze, the researchers watched what was going on in the rat’s brain. They found a maze-specific signature. When the rat learned the maze, the rat deployed the maze-specific signature. The rumor is, the grad student forgot to remove the electrodes or turn off the equipment. So he gets up the next morning and sees the machines are still on. The rat is still asleep, and it learned the maze. When he looks at the printout, he sees the thing that made his Ph.D.: the maze-specific pattern had been deployed all night long. The rat was replaying what he had learned that day a thousand times at night. All of a sudden it hit him: The rat is sleeping so he can turn off all the sensory input and just pay attention to the psychological interiors — what he needed to learn. So the student decided to see if he disrupted the rat’s sleep, if it would destroy the learning he did the previous day. And that’s exactly what he found.
“If you disrupt somebody’s sleep, you disrupt their offline possessing. So now we know why we sleep: So that we can learn.”
This article was first published in the print edition of Brain World Magazine.
