If Aristotle described American society’s virtues today, he’d likely replace courage with busy-ness and honor with multi-tasking. Ask Elise, my friend and yoga studio owner in New York City, “How are you?” and she'll invariably reply, “I'm really busy.” The sub-text? I’m important and have a full life.
Saying “I am busy” defines the self and, it turns out, possibly confines the self. New neuroscience research shows that our busy-ness may be shaping--and wearing out--our brains, the core organ that in turn influences how we view ourselves.
Busy Monkeys
No doubt we are an on-the-go culture. Writer Jennifer Pirtle notes that “Americans now work nine full weeks more per year than our peers in Western Europe” (Yoga Journal, November 2005), a sentiment Carl Honore echoes in his fact-filled journey into trying to slow down long enough to enjoy reading a bedtime story to his child, In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed.
What does a multi-tasking, busy brain look like? A brain scan would show that its prefrontal cortices jag with quick rhythms called beta brain waves that move at about 36 oscillations a second. In this frenzied state a busy body pumps excessive amounts of adrenaline and cortisol--two hormones that give us energy surges in fight-or-flight situations. But when our brains and bodies are on the go from dawn to midnight--and possibly into restless nights of troubled sleep--excessive cortisol can debilitate cell growth, and both hormones can eventually fatigue the body and mind.
A busy brain also may become a dead brain or at least a stagnant brain that produces no new neurons. Jonah Lehrer of Seed recently reported on Professor Elizabeth Gould’s latest research in this area.
Gould’s discoveries in neurogenesis (the generation of neurons) offer new meaning to “monkey mind,” a Buddhist term referring to the over-active, un-harnessed ego. Marmosets, a new world monkey, are Gould’s subject in her laboratory at Princeton University. She has been studying how the brains of monkeys in a recreated natural environment actually create new neurons whereas monkey brains in stressful surroundings, without much opportunity for play and natural challenge, don’t fare so well.
Gould created a wave of new synaptic connections for scientists eight years ago when she established convincingly that new neurons appear in primate brains. Her current findings show that environment alters brain structure, particularly the hippocampus. In fact, brains under stress stop generating new neurons. In Lehrer’s words, “The mind is disfigured.” More precisely, the brain is disfigured.
Studies in 1999 had shown similar results on victims of rape, war, and other trauma. Robert Sapolsky of Discover reported that three independent groups working at the Veterans Medical Center, U.C.-San Diego, and Yale Medical School had been studying patients with Post-Traumatic Stress. Their findings show that these people’s left hippocampus--largely responsible for memory--is significantly smaller than average. Part of that size difference has to do with prolonged stress.
When in a stressful environment over several months, your adrenal glands secrete steroid hormones called glucocorticoids. These receptors help our bodies respond to potential gun-toting enemies or cougars on our trail. But after a few weeks, they also might damage the hippocampus’s neuronal branches--responsible for our synaptic firing (that is, responsible for our brains helping us remember where we placed the darned car keys or baby formula).
Some scientists debate whether or not excessive glucocorticoids actually damage the hippocampus for the long-term, but several neuroscientists consider it likely. (Bruce McEwen published a further study in 2003 on stress's harm on the hippocampus: ScienCentral.)
Your Brain on Yoga
You’ve probably wondered why when stressed you can’t think. In part, when you shuffle through your days in beta-brain and in fight-or-flight alert mode, your wrinkled skull organ might stagnate.
If we stay in stress mode for a few weeks, months, or years, we’re probably not thinking. We just act and react, little crazed monkeys pretending to be in control. No new neurons for these monkeys.
New neurons generate new synaptic connections, which in turn, influence how our minds perceive ourselves and others as well as how clearly we conceive ideas such as beauty, truth, love, virtue. When our brain stops generating new cells, our minds stop growing. We define and confine ourselves.
Yoga’s no cure-all, but Western scientists are proving what Eastern yogis have known for centuries: It does alleviate the body’s and brain’s stress. A steady practice of harnessed diaphragmatic breathing slows down brain waves in the left prefrontal lobe. (A study published in the Journal of American Medicine, 2000, demonstrated that this type of breathing was just as effective in alleviating practitioners’ depression as a leading anti-depressant). In 2003, a valid study established that a simple yoga class of physical poses and breathing dramatically reduced and moderated beginners’ cortisol levels.
The next step for neuroscientists? Maybe some of them will demonstrate to what extent and how yoga and meditation practices create new neurons. More than likely the beautiful studios where we glide through poses, turn upside down, and twist into body-boggling shapes affects us the way a jungle setting affects a monkey. Not only with pleasure--but also with a growing brain.
Remember those dismal classrooms we endured in the seventies and eighties? Flickering fluorescent lights. Cinder-block walls. Dark wood paneling or pale hospital-hued walls. We were supposed to learn in that environment? Given Gould’s discoveries, it’s a miracle we can form complete sentences let alone create biodiesel fuels and space rockets.
