Fascinating Brains
07/07/12 05:26
I am fascinated by the human brain. I’m not sure where this fascination began, but it was fueled by my father’s natural curiosity. Just after I began working in my first parish after seminary, my father was diagnosed with brain cancer. His reaction was to learn everything he could about his brain. This was before the Internet granted us instant access to huge amounts of information. He asked his doctors for titles of books and ordered them. He read the books and studied the images in them. I remember those images. In a time before CT scans and MRI, they were mostly cloudy x-ray images, all reproduced without color.
After that time, my studies led me more into the arena of what we do with our brains. I continued to study psychology after completing my formal education and I added to those academic studies my work with people. In the church there are lots of opportunities to wonder about how people think. It is a community of people who are different from each other in the way that we think. We are bound by our commitment to the community, by our belief in God, and by our common practices. That does not make us all the same. One of the wonderful parts of the church is that it is an intentionally multi-generational community. That means that I get to observe babies and infants, young children and teens, young adults and seniors. And I get to see how they interact.
Actually, it is amazing that we get along as well as we do. The presence of disagreement and even conflict in the church should come as no surprise. The wonderful thing is that we are able to resolve most of the conflicts and we learn to live with the disagreements. I’m beginning to understand those dynamics better now than I did at the beginning of my career, but more on that later.
Because my studies were more practical than academic, I didn’t see many brain images as technology made it possible to show more and more of what is going on in our minds. I did get to study some of the early MRI images. Our son was included in a study of the angles of the human brain stem and had several MRI images taken when he was a child. Those images were, however, without color.
A few years ago I took a class from Dr. Jeb Shenck, a biology professor at the University of Wyoming. Because Dr. Schenck is both a researcher and a classroom teacher, he brought to our class some of the latest in brain images. The use of dyes and of computer-assisted coloring to make it easier to distinguish parts of the brain added greatly to our understanding.
They also revealed the incredible beauty of the human brain. The images were striking in their beauty. A little later I obtained a copy of Portraits of the Mind. This hardcover book follows the history of brain images from medieval sketches to state-of-the-art color enhanced medical images. The book fascinates me and I can spend hours and hours studying the pictures. Another book, Pictures of the Mind, illustrates how medical imaging has revealed that our brains are far different than we used to believe. When I was a graduate student, we learned that the brain was fully formed by adulthood and that it had very few regenerative powers. Scientists thought, at that time, that adulthood was a process of brain decline. New medical images reveal that the human brain is amazingly flexible, resilient and plastic.
That is good news. As a student, I thought that if a person was depressed, angry, sad, aggressive or nasty that person would probably remain that way for the rest of his or her life. In most cases, I thought, those tendencies would become more exaggerated. Things would inevitably get worse as the person aged.
Which returns us to the community of the church. If my initial understandings had been correct, work in a church would become more and more frustrating. Our congregations are aging. Even though we are multi-generational, the majority of our members are now seniors. If my initial understandings of the human mind had been accurate, I would be serving a congregation that got more and more quirky with each passing year while my own mind continued to deteriorate.
Fortunately, I was wrong in my initial understanding. In fact, there is significant evidence that rather than experiencing a process of continual decline, there are many ways in which our minds become better as we age. Maturity isn’t just a social construct designed to support elders as they age. It is a reality that offers great benefit to society.
Yes, certain mental skills do decline with age. Our short-term memory is no longer as accurate or accessible as it once was. However a recent University of Illinois study found that special orientation and juggling complex tasks improves with experience. That study focused on aging air traffic controllers and revealed that the older controllers were better at solving potential conflicts and avoiding dangerous near-miss situations.
In the church I have experienced that many people improve in their social skills as they age. They become more tolerant of different points of view. They are better at envisioning and suggesting compromises. They seem to have increased capacity to see the complexity of human dynamics rather than reducing conflict to “either-or” scenarios.
Additional research reveals that older adults become more skilled at managing emotions as well.
These discoveries are good news for me as I age.
That doesn’t mean that the church has less conflict simply because we are aging. We continue to be very complex. There are always power dynamics in churches. These sometimes are made more complex by other factors in the lives of our members. Some men experience insecurity and try to increase their sphere of influence at the point of retirement. They have been used to exercising a significant amount of power and all of sudden they have less. Some act out by trying to take more control in the church. Of course the church is a place with only a small amount of power, so power struggles in the church might not be as exciting as those in business or politics.
Pain is another significant factor in personality in aging people. When you are hurting, it is hard for you to be your best in relationships.
So I keep studying people and their brains. There is so much that is yet to be discovered. Jeffrey Eugenides provided a quote for the conclusion of today’s blog: “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
After that time, my studies led me more into the arena of what we do with our brains. I continued to study psychology after completing my formal education and I added to those academic studies my work with people. In the church there are lots of opportunities to wonder about how people think. It is a community of people who are different from each other in the way that we think. We are bound by our commitment to the community, by our belief in God, and by our common practices. That does not make us all the same. One of the wonderful parts of the church is that it is an intentionally multi-generational community. That means that I get to observe babies and infants, young children and teens, young adults and seniors. And I get to see how they interact.
Actually, it is amazing that we get along as well as we do. The presence of disagreement and even conflict in the church should come as no surprise. The wonderful thing is that we are able to resolve most of the conflicts and we learn to live with the disagreements. I’m beginning to understand those dynamics better now than I did at the beginning of my career, but more on that later.
Because my studies were more practical than academic, I didn’t see many brain images as technology made it possible to show more and more of what is going on in our minds. I did get to study some of the early MRI images. Our son was included in a study of the angles of the human brain stem and had several MRI images taken when he was a child. Those images were, however, without color.
A few years ago I took a class from Dr. Jeb Shenck, a biology professor at the University of Wyoming. Because Dr. Schenck is both a researcher and a classroom teacher, he brought to our class some of the latest in brain images. The use of dyes and of computer-assisted coloring to make it easier to distinguish parts of the brain added greatly to our understanding.
They also revealed the incredible beauty of the human brain. The images were striking in their beauty. A little later I obtained a copy of Portraits of the Mind. This hardcover book follows the history of brain images from medieval sketches to state-of-the-art color enhanced medical images. The book fascinates me and I can spend hours and hours studying the pictures. Another book, Pictures of the Mind, illustrates how medical imaging has revealed that our brains are far different than we used to believe. When I was a graduate student, we learned that the brain was fully formed by adulthood and that it had very few regenerative powers. Scientists thought, at that time, that adulthood was a process of brain decline. New medical images reveal that the human brain is amazingly flexible, resilient and plastic.
That is good news. As a student, I thought that if a person was depressed, angry, sad, aggressive or nasty that person would probably remain that way for the rest of his or her life. In most cases, I thought, those tendencies would become more exaggerated. Things would inevitably get worse as the person aged.
Which returns us to the community of the church. If my initial understandings had been correct, work in a church would become more and more frustrating. Our congregations are aging. Even though we are multi-generational, the majority of our members are now seniors. If my initial understandings of the human mind had been accurate, I would be serving a congregation that got more and more quirky with each passing year while my own mind continued to deteriorate.
Fortunately, I was wrong in my initial understanding. In fact, there is significant evidence that rather than experiencing a process of continual decline, there are many ways in which our minds become better as we age. Maturity isn’t just a social construct designed to support elders as they age. It is a reality that offers great benefit to society.
Yes, certain mental skills do decline with age. Our short-term memory is no longer as accurate or accessible as it once was. However a recent University of Illinois study found that special orientation and juggling complex tasks improves with experience. That study focused on aging air traffic controllers and revealed that the older controllers were better at solving potential conflicts and avoiding dangerous near-miss situations.
In the church I have experienced that many people improve in their social skills as they age. They become more tolerant of different points of view. They are better at envisioning and suggesting compromises. They seem to have increased capacity to see the complexity of human dynamics rather than reducing conflict to “either-or” scenarios.
Additional research reveals that older adults become more skilled at managing emotions as well.
These discoveries are good news for me as I age.
That doesn’t mean that the church has less conflict simply because we are aging. We continue to be very complex. There are always power dynamics in churches. These sometimes are made more complex by other factors in the lives of our members. Some men experience insecurity and try to increase their sphere of influence at the point of retirement. They have been used to exercising a significant amount of power and all of sudden they have less. Some act out by trying to take more control in the church. Of course the church is a place with only a small amount of power, so power struggles in the church might not be as exciting as those in business or politics.
Pain is another significant factor in personality in aging people. When you are hurting, it is hard for you to be your best in relationships.
So I keep studying people and their brains. There is so much that is yet to be discovered. Jeffrey Eugenides provided a quote for the conclusion of today’s blog: “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”