Super Brain (38 page)

You accept that you are okay.

There’s a freshness to new experiences.

You enjoy the flavor of your experiences.

You spend each day emphasizing the positive possibilities and countering the negative implications.

These are qualities your brain registers, but it doesn’t create them, for the simple reason that our brain can’t have experiences. Only you can, and therefore you add the qualities of life, whether they are positive or negative.

Eavesdropping on your moods, beliefs, wishes, hopes, and expectations, brain cells are able to detect the quality of life. Neuroscience cannot measure this ongoing process, because it is concerned with the data measured by chemical and electrical activity. Minute as the changes are, over time the quality of life leaves biological markers. Everyone’s brain displays markers of subjective states like depression, loneliness, anxiety, hostility, and general stress. Yet ironically, positive states tend to look rather flat and normal on a brain scan. Only in exceptional cases, such as the brains of long-term meditators, can you view unusual changes. For both sides of the coin, enjoying a low or high level of well-being can be traced back to how experience gets metabolized day by day, moment by moment, second by second.

Metabolizing Experience

The upshot is that you can improve your well-being by attending to subtle subjective cues. How often have you heard someone say,
“This doesn’t pass the smell test”? Why are psychologists now giving weight to immediate reactions as being more reliable than long, rational consideration? This shouldn’t be a new discovery. We’ve been living with human nature a long time. But the subtle instincts that enable you to feel your way through life are easily censored. Your mind leaps in with all kinds of secondary responses that are not good for you. These include

Denial—I don’t want to feel this.

Repression—I keep my true feelings out of sight, and now I hardly know where they are.

Censorship—I only let good feelings register. The bad ones must stay away.

Guilt and shame—These are so painful that I must push them away as quickly as possible.

Victimization—I feel bad, but I don’t deserve any better.

We are all familiar with these psychological mechanisms. Taken to extremes, they send millions of people into therapy. Unfortunately, you can feel basically all right and still be damaging your well-being by tiny degrees. A life of white lies, avoidance, judgment, self-abnegation, and petty illusions sounds harmless enough, but like Chinese water torture, negativity works by droplets. If you see someone leading a bitter or empty existence, it’s usually not some huge melodramatic event that made them that way. Well-being was slowly worn down.

Well-being depends on many things going right in your nervous system. You can’t attend to them one by one; infinitely too many processes are happening in the blink of an eye. Despite this complexity, you can begin to pay attention to subtle cues. In the Indian tradition, there are three classes of subtle cues wrapped inside every experience.

Tattva
: the qualities or aspects of the experience

Rasa
: the flavor of the experience

Bhava
: the mood or emotional tone of the experience

Let’s see how these are packaged into every experience. Imagine that you are on vacation sitting at the beach. The
qualities
of the experience would be your sense of the warm sun, the sound of the surf, and the swaying palm trees—the composite sensation of being on a beach. The
flavor
of the experience is subtler. In this case, let’s say it’s a sweet, relaxing experience that makes your body feel as if it is flowing into the whole beach scene. Finally, the
mood
of the experience isn’t determined by either of the above. If you are lying on the beach feeling lonely or having a fight with your spouse, a beach isn’t the same as it is to someone who is on a blissful honeymoon or is simply soaking up a nice tropical day.

Well-being is created at the subtle level. Therefore, as raw data stream into your brain through the five senses, what turns them into something nourishing or something toxic depends on the quality, flavor, and emotional mood that you add. We aren’t discounting the brain, since of course it is a vital part of the mind-body feedback loop. There are neural networks that predispose you to have a positive or negative reaction automatically. But neural networks are secondary. What is primary is the person who is interpreting every experience as it is happening.

Subtle but Important

Instead of thinking all the time about how your life should be going, try a different tack. Learn to rely on the most holistic power you have, which is feeling. Feeling comprises the subtle underpinning of everything. Let’s take one example from
rasa
, the flavor of life. According to Ayurveda, the traditional knowledge of medicine and overall health, there are six tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty (the usual four), along with pungent (i.e., the spiciness of chilies and hotness
of onion and garlic) and astringent (the mouth-puckering taste of tea, green apples, and grape skins).

Ayurveda takes the concept of
rasa
beyond what the tongue tastes. There is something subtler and more pervasive about the flavor of life. You can see this with the words we use in English.

We say
bitter
greens but also a bitter dispute, a bitter divorce, a bitter memory, and bitter relationships.

We say
sour
lemon but also sour grapes (meaning envy), sour mood, a sour note in music, and deals gone sour.

Each of the six
rasas
seems to have a root experience—they are like a family of flavors that pervade your life. In Ayurveda, if sweetness goes out of balance, the result can be obesity and putting on fat, but there is also a mental link to lethargy and anxiety. This is too vast a subject to cover here (and too alien to Western medicine for easy explanation). But anyone can look at the flavor of their lives and assess the difference, for example, between a sweet existence and a sour one.

In terms of
tattva
, or qualities, a personal connection goes beyond the five senses. Red, for instance, can be measured as a certain wavelength in the visible spectrum of light, but red is also hot, angry, passionate, bloody, and a warning. Green is more than a wavelength along the spectrum from red. Green is cool, soothing, fresh, and reminiscent of spring. What is crucial is to realize that these human qualities are more basic to existence than the measurable ones that science reduces to data. If you faint at the sight of red or feel buoyant at the first greening of spring, it’s not wavelengths of light you are responding to but a complex of qualities, flavors, and emotions that combine to create an experience.

Now, what is the best approach to this wild complexity, which is far too intricate to handle one bit at a time? You can feel your way to well-being by increasing the life-enhancing ingredients that in Sanskrit are called
sattva
, usually translated as “purity.” A
sattvic
life has a holistic effect as you begin to refine your sensations in all departments:

HOW TO FAVOR PURITY

Add to the sweetness in your life, and decrease whatever feels sour and bitter.

Lower the stress between yourself and others—favor respect, dignity, tolerance, and congenial interactions.

Act out of love whenever you can. Be compassionate. (But don’t force yourself into a rigid kind of positivity. Your role isn’t to be a smile robot.)

Find a sense of reverence for Nature. Go out in Nature to appreciate its beauty.

Be calm within yourself. Don’t add to the agitation around you.

Don’t step on other people’s subtle level of feeling. Be aware that every situation has a feeling and mood that you should respect.

Practice nonviolence. Do not kill or harm other life-forms.

Be of service. Let the world be as close to you as your family.

Tell the truth without harshness.

Do what you know to be right.

Seek the presence of the divine.

This is the outline of a simple, well-regulated life that avoids agitation and chaos. As a framework, it allows for a good deal of personal interpretation. You can decide what makes your life sweet, for example. In the Indian tradition, diet is central, and the
rasa
, or taste, of sweetness is preferred. A
sattvic
diet is supposed to give lightness to body and mind. It is primarily vegetarian, focused on fruits, milk, grains, nuts, and other sweet foods.

Life can’t be sweet all the time. The original intent of the Vedic sages wasn’t to call some
rasas
good and others bad. (Every
rasa
, including bitter and astringent, has its place in the metabolizing of experience.) The sages were intent on giving positive signals to the brain and receiving positive signals back. Since the brain is the creation of consciousness,
sattva
begins in your awareness. If you practice purity because you want to and it feels good, your brain will be able to operate with much higher self-regulation. The best self-regulation is automatic, but you need to instill it first. Then more and more you can leave things to your autonomic nervous system, confident that it will support the well-being of your cells, tissues, and organs. The result will be a happier, healthier, and more spiritually enriched life.

RUDY’S EPILOGUE
LOOKING AT ALZHEIMER’S WITH HOPE AND LIGHT

I
t’s fascinating to connect mind and brain, but when the connection breaks down, there is terror. My professional life has been spent researching the dark side of the brain. In the Alzheimer’s Genome Project, my laboratory continues to find the genes, more than one hundred so far, involved in the most common and devastating form of dementia. Writing this book gave me a chance to step back and consider the brain in a wider perspective. The more you know about the mind, the more your research into the brain starts to shape itself into new patterns and possibilities.

Cancer researchers feel tremendous urgency to find a cure, not unlike the immense time pressure that overshadows Alzheimer’s. As life span increases, so will the number of cases. Already more than 5 million Americans and 38 million people worldwide suffer from the disease. By 2040 the United States is projected to harbor over 14 million patients and our planet, over 100 million cases if effective preventive therapies are not developed.

At present, genetic studies offer our best chance to one day eradicate Alzheimer’s disease. By uncovering all the genes that influence risk for Alzheimer’s, we will someday be able to reliably predict a person’s risk for the disease early in life. For those deemed at highest risk, it will probably be necessary to test for presymptomatic detection starting at around thirty or forty years old. Brain changes occur decades before the first signs of memory loss begin to show up. In its cruel progression, Alzheimer’s destroys the areas of the brain devoted to memory and learning. Our immediate hope would
be to empower high-risk individuals with therapies that can stop the further progression of their illness before dementia strikes.

Once we have drugs that can do this, we hope to prevent Alzheimer’s before any clinical symptoms of cognitive decline begin to manifest. This so-called “pharmacogenetic” strategy is based on “early prediction–early detection–early prevention.” If the three can be linked, we will hopefully be able to stop Alzheimer’s before it begins. It’s a broad strategy that goes back all the way to preventing smallpox with a vaccine in infancy but has spread out to preventing lung cancer by not smoking. A similar strategy can be applied to other common age-related diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes.

Does Alzheimer’s have a lifestyle component? That’s a question we can’t fully answer yet, but I want to prepare myself for the possibility. The next horizon is the mind. Any lifestyle change begins in the mind. You have to want to change in the first place, and then you must lead your brain to create new neural networks to support your decision. We already know that “use it or lose it” applies to the brain in general, especially when it comes to keeping memory sharp and intact over a lifetime. Teaming up with Deepak, we looked into the mind-body connection much more deeply. When we came up with our “ideal lifestyle for the brain,” we weren’t implying that it is Alzheimer’s specific. We are also not saying that Alzheimer’s strikes because the patient did not live their life the right way. Genetics and lifestyle combine to cause this disease in most cases. And some genetic factors are too difficult to overcome with healthy living.

Almost all of us inherit gene variations that either increase or decrease our risk for Alzheimer’s. These gene variants combine with environmental factors to determine your lifetime risk for getting the disease. Major risk factors cover a gamut of possibilities, including depression, stroke, traumatic brain injury, obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes, and even loneliness.

The genes that influence one’s risk for Alzheimer’s fall into two
categories: deterministic and susceptible. A small portion of the disease incidence (less than 5 percent) strikes under the age of sixty. It is most often due to mutations in one of the three genes that my colleagues and I discovered. These inherited mutations virtually guarantee onset of the disease in one’s forties or fifties. Luckily, these gene mutations are pretty rare. In the vast majority of cases, Alzheimer’s strikes after age sixty. In these cases, genes have been identified that carry variants influencing one’s susceptibility. Such variants do not cause the disease with certainty, but when they are inherited, they confer either increased or decreased risk for the disease as a person ages.