"Fear shrinks your brain and makes you less creative." And Rob Hopkins asks: does all this stress stop us from imagining a better climate future?
Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash
Reposted by the redoubtable Rob Hopkins on Twitter, we enjoyed (up to a point) this piece of pertinent neuroscience from Dr Wendy Suzuki, NYU Neuroscientist, professor and author of Healthy Brain Happy Life. The headline above says it all, but Dr Suzuki elaborates in this Forbes.com interview..
An extract:
What is Abundant Thinking?
Abundance really starts with appreciation and gratitude for what you have because everyone has abundance of some kind.
How does gratitude affect our brain?
If you have a mindset of gratitude and abundance, you basically help eliminate the fear that comes in all too easily when you say the words taxes or Washington or any other fear-inducing word.
You are actually protecting your brain if you can come from gratitude and abundance. In neuroscience speak, you are decreasing the activity in an area of your brain which processes fear called the amygdala.
It not only is a sensory area for fear but most dangerously, has motor outputs to those areas that make your heart beat faster, make you sweat and contribute to that feeling of anxiety.
So, you want to counter that activity with other thoughts and activity. Having an “attitude of gratitude” allows you to do that.
Are there any implications of fear and long-term stress?
We have a lot of knowledge about what happens when we are in a constant state of fight-or-flight. And those examples come from syndromes like PTSD, experiencing terrible situations for a long period of time.
Here we come to a concept of brain plasticity, which basically means that what you’re experiencing can change your brain. It can make your brain grow so that it’s nice and fluffy and strong or it can shrink it down.
So, guess what PTSD does? It can shrink the size of your temporal lobe and increase the size of the amygdala structure that is processing fear information. It also shrinks the size of a key brain area that I’ve studied for the last 25 years called the hippocampus, which is critical for long-term memory.
The hippocampus has been more recently implicated in creativity and imagination. Because what imagination is, is taking those things you have in your memory and putting them together in a new way.
So just in the way that the hippocampus allows us to think about the past and memory, it also allows us to imagine the future. Long-term stress is literally killing the cells in your hippocampus that contribute to the deterioration of your memory. But it’s also zapping your creativity.
How can we get out of that feeling of anxiety?
It’s all about flipping anxiety to the positive side. Anxiety is often triggered in science by what we call fear conditioning.
We have lots of things that we get conditioned towards negatively. We worry about someone we don’t like. Just the name of that person will bring up negative feelings. It often comes up when you’re trying to go to sleep. Those are all fear-conditioned situations.
The question we often ask ourselves is: how do we get rid of these negative thoughts? The antidote is love conditioning. We know that the same circuitry that is so powerful in creating these negative associations - the fear conditioning - also exists for love conditioning. But it’s up to us to create that love conditioning.
More here. It’s not that we disagree with Dr. Suzuki’s practices for “love conditioning” - remember the scent and touch of your favourite things; flood your brain with key neurotransmitters associated with good mood (dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline) by means of exercise. Everyone should take the best care of themselves that they can, especially in this moment.
It just that it feels too individualised a response, given the crisis-ridden times we’re in. We are much more taken by Rob Hopkins’ usage of this neuroscientific insight, in his brilliant book From What Is To What If… (profiled here, doing really well all over at the moment).
Rob’s interview with Professor Gordon Turnbull, an expert in trauma, stress and PTSD, lays out more clearly how this assault on the brain has social and political consequences:
Gordon: Being hyper-vigilant means that you’ve had some sort of trigger that’s switched on your survival instincts, and your survival mechanisms, and it’s never been switched off completely, so it actually is triggered off quickly. It’s there, ready, to be triggered off all the time, so you’re on the lookout, you’re on the watch.
It’s often mistaken for paranoia actually. I’ve seen quite a lot of people in my clinical work who I had to give a second opinion on who I didn’t think actually had developed schizophrenia or a psychotic illness where they were paranoid, which is part of that particular condition. And they were paranoid, but they were not really paranoid, they were actually hyper-vigilant instead. It takes a similar form.
But all that adrenaline surging through your system for many, many years afterwards, can actually lead to high blood pressure, heart disease. The things that people try to do to calm themselves down, like smoking and drinking, can lead to their own problems. People develop respiratory diseases and gastrointestinal diseases, and neurological diseases as a result of it.
So populations of people who have got a history – maybe an accumulative history of historical trauma – will actually have bad health records for that reason. If you look at nations of the world who do have these records – highly developed societies, so-called, which have a history of war and conquest and having empires, you do find high incidences of heart disease and high blood pressure, and diabetes and those particular things.
Whereas if you look at tribes of nomads in Africa, where conflict is very rare, they don’t have responsibilities for harvests because they move around, so they’re relatively stress-free, they in fact have very low levels of these particular conditions.
Rob: Might I try a hypothesis out on you? Could it be that the further we get into a crisis like climate change, into an emergency like that, then actually the less able we are to imagine a way out of it, due to how trauma shuts down our imagination? Does that sound logical to you?
Yes. Connecting the hippocampus to that process is actually realistic in populations who are dejected and depressed. They lose the ability to be able to imagine their way out of a situation, because they lose their creative thinking ability.
If you take an organisation which is known to be really under great stress and pressure, like the National Health Service in this country, then you can imagine that the people who work within that community are actually going to have hippocampi which are not working at their optimum.
They’ll be sub-optimally functioning as a result of that, and therefore they’ll be losing their ability to think of new things imaginatively which would create solutions to problems.
So we seem to get stuck with them, and you do see in these organisations the same mistakes, or similar mistakes, being made time after time after time. A repetitive pattern.
And people despair who are outside that organisation who actually think, “Why can’t they think of this?”, and, “Why didn’t they think of that?”
But it’s possibly because they’ve lost the ability to be able to be creative and imaginative in that way. So that would be a process that would go on.