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Ode Magazine : This is your brain on change
Email PrintShare This is your brain on change A crash course in adapting to today's increasingly rapid pace of change. Casey Miner | June 2011 issue Christy Svanemyr knows I am cheating. The perky, blond coach with big eyes and a big smile has scheduled an hour to talk over Skype with me, from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, about my problem. I have trouble stepping back from the need to be working. As a reporter, it’s my job to read the news all the time, post my own feedback and keep up with what everyone else is doing—in real time. It’s exhilarating but also exhausting. God forbid that I, say, leave my cell phone at home one day. The thought is both tempting and terrifying. I’ve come to Svanemyr because I would like to change that reflex. I need to figure out how not to feel guilty for putting down the phone. Unfortunately, we’re not off to a good start. My habits have followed me into our session. It’s not that I’m not trying; it’s just really hard to take notes for this article while simultaneously following Svanemyr’s instructions to place my hands on my heart and stomach, close my eyes and take a series of deep breaths. “As a journalist, you’ve got your head center,” she tells me in a soft voice, “sharp, strong, almost overused. We’re looking for your heart center, the center of emotion and longing, where we get in touch with what we most want.” Svanemyr’s goal in this hour is to help me articulate what I most want and then to help me find ways to get it. She is a certified coach who works with people like me who want to change something about their lives but can’t figure out how to do it. Her coaching can span months as clients work through the habits that have prevented them from changing. She tells me to focus on drawing energy up from my feet all the way through my mouth and then exhaling it all the way back down. As I open my eyes, she wants me to visualize all the objects I’m going to see as gently coming to meet me. I look around slowly, trying to imagine the cell phone on the table approaching me politely instead of grabbing me and pulling me in. “How did that feel for you?” Svanemyr asks after a few quiet minutes. I reply, honestly, that the breathing reminded me a little of yoga class (when I remember to go). Worried <a href="http://www.maxnike.com/nikeairmax247-c-160.html"><strong>nike air max 24 7</strong></a> about coming across as snarky, I add that it’s the part of yoga class I really like. Without breaking eye contact, I slowly place my hands back on the keyboard. Svanemyr pantomimes for me, with exaggerated mimicry, the difference between the way I sat when I answered her questions and the way I sat when she told me to be still. The former is frantic, arms waving, leaning forward right up to the computer’s camera; the latter is laid back and still. It’s not that one is better than the other, she says. “Some of this is a cultural influence. This is how we are. We don’t take siestas. And we end up walking around like we’re only heads.” I nod, typing as quietly as I can. It won’t surprise you to learn that change is hard, so hard that entire industries have been built on helping people do it. We collectively pay billions of dollars each year to businesses promising to help us exercise more, eat less, secure raises, change jobs, declutter our offices, green our lives and more. And everyone, even those of us who don’t pay for help, has to deal with life’s constant flux—marriages and divorces, births and deaths, full houses and empty nests, new jobs and layoffs. Life has always challenged our ability to adapt. But the 21st <a href="http://www.maxnike.com/nikeairmax247-c-160.html"><strong>air max 24 7</strong></a> century is different. There are more changes, on a bigger scale, happening more quickly than ever before, facilitated in large part by an explosion in digital technology. The fact that people can communicate so quickly accelerates everything, including the pace of change. If you feel like you can’t keep up, you’re not alone. A 2008 survey found that more than 70 percent of American professionals felt overwhelmed by information; 40 percent felt they were near a “breaking point.” German researchers found similar complaints about information overload, while a British study suggested that too much information could cost people IQ points. This year, a survey of Canadian executives found that nearly half of them felt overwhelmed; worse, close to a third thought most of the information they were bombarded with was useless. Information overload comes with real costs. Several studies have estimated the economic damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars, mostly attributable to the amount of time people spend processing information instead of creating things. But there’s also an emotional cost. Gary Small, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles who has documented the effects on the brain of constant Internet searching and multitasking, found that people who spent much of their time online showed huge increases in activity in the parts of the brain associated with reasoning but hardly any in those associated with qualities like empathy. The research suggests that our rational intelligence grapples with so much rapidly changing information at the expense of our emotional intelligence. Or as Christy Svanemyr might put it, we are at risk of becoming all head and no heart. Given the changes vying for our attention—the electricity grid is vulnerable to cyberattack, our financial system to implosion, our homes to foreclosure, our social welfare systems to bankruptcy, our planet to earthquakes, oil spills and climate change—it is, of course, essential to use our heads to respond. But how do we cope when the scale of change is so huge, and the pace so rapid, that we can barely comprehend it? How do we prevent all that information from just washing over us, rendering us indifferent? And when making small personal changes is hard enough, what happens when what needs to change is not just one person but every person? Here’s a crash course on coping with 21st century change. The first step toward change, big or small, is to acknowledge the need to change in the first place. According to Bruce Wexler, a Yale psychiatrist and author of Brain and Culture, a book about how our brains deal with change, an individual’s personal ability to adapt to new circumstances is what enables society to do the same. Younger brains in particular have more neuroplasticity; they can reshape themselves fairly easily in response to <a href="http://www.maxnike.com/nikeairmax2010shoes-c-32.html"><strong>air max 2010</strong></a> new information and environments. Our brains don’t settle firmly into place until we’re in our twenties, at which point they tend more toward neurostability or the preservation of existing structures. On an individual level, this is one reason why young people adapt more nimbly to new situations than their parents. Wexler cites the example of immigrant communities, where adults often seek out the familiar patterns of their original culture even as their children gradually assimilate into the new one. This dynamic requires personal change, as parents and children navigate their new relationships. But all those small relationships also add up to something big—a whole group of people whose ideas about culture are very different from the previous generation’s. Changes of this magnitude are difficult to process at any time but become more so as we grow older. While our brains retain their ability to make new connections throughout our lives, the tendency toward neurostability kicks in right around the time we start taking <a href="http://demonandangels.fb5.ru/displayimage.php?pos=-91"><strong>Louis Vuitton Outlet Store Online В» Blog Archive В» timberland boots uk</strong></a> on roles in the adult world. When members of a new generation take power—in business, in culture, in politics—they try to make their surroundings match the ideas they developed while growing up. Each generation shifts the culture in a different direction. “The next generation is very good at adapting to intended and unintended changes in the environment made by the previous generation,” Wexler explains. “But the generation that makes the changes—especially unintended, unanticipated ones—has great difficulty seeing, understanding and responding to such changes. Their first inclination is to … ignore and discredit information that does not fit with their internalized world view.” So while young people may adapt easily to the environments their parents have shaped, parents have a much harder time adapting to subsequent changes, even if they themselves caused those changes. Just ask any fortysomething parent who relies on her teenage child to manage her iTunes account. This cycle describes how most change happens—slowly, conservatively, one generation at time. But change is now so rapid-fire that even young people quickly find their ideas obsolete. Generational conflict is nothing new, but in the past that conflict tended to involve one major shift per generation. Now, though, a 25-year-old already has a different relationship to technology than her 15-year-old sister; a recent college graduate has different job prospects from someone who graduated just 10 years before. Social mores have changed quickly as well. One recent study found that even the most politically conservative college freshmen support same-###### marriage at rates much higher than their older political peers. Environmental change, which most of us perceive as gradual, is starting to pick up speed, for example, in the form of more frequent extreme weather events. “If the changes are fast enough, we will always be behind them,” Wexler says. “Not a good posi­tion from which to deal effectively with them.” 1 2 NEXT >> view as a single page Tools: Discuss | Email | Print | RSS | Weekly Newsletter Save/Share: u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.odemagazine.com%2Fdoc%2F75%2Fyo ur-brain-on-change%2F&title=This%20is%20your%20brain%20on%20ch ange" title="Blue Dot">
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