The Mountain Logs Day 6A - The Critical Period

The Char Dham means “The Four Stations”. Why “The Four Stations” is because it is not just a reference to the four places in Geography. It is also a reference to the four stations of artha, kama, dharma and moksha. The four stations of a well lived life namely acquiring of prosperity or means, fulfillment of desires and passions, living a life of coherence with Nature, Nature out there and one’s own nature, and finally the station of transcendence where you get established in your own sense of being. 

On this pilgrimage, the four geographical stations of Gangotrti, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, the pilgrimage seeks to get insight into the truth of these four stations of life through a combination of physical and mental effort, emotional aliveness, openness to the spirit and surrender to Nature. 

It’s quite beautiful, profound, intense and transforming. It’s unique as a pilgrimage, as an experience and breathtaking in its conception. 

In the following Episodes, Dr. Bharat Thakur takes you along this pilgrimage over 10 days, sharing the daily logs and some insightful blogs that will have you want to experience the Yatra for yourself.  

Transcript

Day 6   Mountain Logs - A journey into the void

The Critical Period

Open .. open eyes 

A child’s dream 

We dip .. in the 

sky blue stream 

Emerge .. as primal 

Sound of the river

Higher .. than 

Mighty mountains 

Older .. beyond 

The white glacier 

Dear Friends 

Sipping sweet milky tea, smelling the air, no  agendas, doing nothing.

How nice it would be if we could live this life back home, even as we live our lives intensely and work inside a concrete jungle, how nice it would be?

Can’t I not feel like this all the time? Back home, at work, in front of my desk?

What does science have to say about how to carry this feeling of gladness all the time wherever we are?

SCULPTING THE BRAIN 

They say, our brains are soft, malleable. They have plasticity.

That in the course of our growth, we acquire many new faculties and capabilities which enables the helpless baby stuck to its mother’s bosom in total dependence to one day scale mount Everest.

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life in response to new situations or to the changes in the environment.

We can learn all our lives because of this quality of the brain called plasticity, the ability to be reshaped in a different way from what it was.

When we say, we want to drop an addiction or to completely overcome depression or to learn a new language, it is this plasticity of the brain that says, “yes, definitely possible”.

THE WAY WE ARE BORN

Brain cells are called neurons and the connections that form between neurons are called synapses.

We are not born with even our normal ability to see, hear and speak. Our brains aren’t hardwired for these tasks at the time of our birth. Every structure in the brain is there but the connections called synapses are not there. It is like we have bought all the equipment for a home theater but we have not connected them yet.

How do we make those connections? Those connections happen when we begin to use our eyes, ears, speech and all our other faculties.

THE WIRING PROCESS 

When we do a particular task repeatedly, synapses or connections form between a bunch of neurons and the learning is retained by these bunch of neurons and synapses that becomes the physical structure underlying our skill, ability or memory.

There is a saying attributed to the eminent neurologist from Harvard and Stanford universities, Carla Shatz, “cells that fire together, wire together”.

A child touches fire for the first time and it hurts. What happens in the brain is, the cells in the visual cortex that register the fire and the cells that register the experience of pain. They switch on at the same time because both the sight of the fire and the touch experience of pain happen at the same time and when these neurons from different parts of the brain switch on together, a synaptic connection is made between the two areas.

When the child has many such experiences and the two bunch of cells in different areas of the brain have fired together many times, the strong synaptic connections between them running across the brain, get reinforced. It becomes a learning.

So the next time the child sees fire, the brain says “that will be painful to touch”. So when the two areas of the brain get connected through synapses, the learning is established in the physical structure of the brain. This is how through every experience each of our brains develops its own unique structures  based on how we respond.

INITIATING THE BRAIN 

In the formative years, if we do not use parts of the brain, the synaptic connections are never made.

For example, human beings have binocular vision. Which means that we have two eyes but we see one image which is an integration of the images of the left and right eyes.

When we are born, we have two eyes but there are no neurons in the brain to process the signals from the left and right eyes and integrate them as one image. In the period of the first eight months, these cells called the binocular neurons get formed because of the baby’s constant effort to see one image through both the eyes.

In 1981, Harvard neurobiologists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for having researched these processes of the brain.

They found that. For example, the baby has cataract in one eye and the cataract is not removed within eight months, the child may never develop binocular vision as binocular vision cells will never get formed in the brain. At the same time, an aged person who has cataract can easily have her vision restored by just getting a new lens put through a cataract procedure as her binocular vision cells have formed in her infancy. It's only her lens which needs to be changed.

So in our growing years, the way we use our faculties will actually determine the finer structures of the brain, the synaptic structures, if we use them well, the brain areas assigned to them develop, if they are ignored, those areas of the brain remain underdeveloped.

The eyes are in fact not even connected to the brain in the womb. The nerve cells in the eyes have to select the right part of the brain and to do that, Dr. Shultz says, “the eyes start dialing the brain by sending electrical impulses” and that is how the initial connections are made.

During our birth time, the brain does not have the neurons and synapses to support vision or language or hearing.

The connections and learnings happen in what is called the “critical periods”. 

THE CRITICAL PERIOD - USE IT OR LOSE IT 

Here in the mountains, the scenery is so rich and varied in form, color, texture, pattern. So many of us are here together yet each one sees a different scenery and much of how we see was decided in the early months of our infancy.

Hubel and Wiesel found that there are critical developmental stages when rich sensory stimulation actively shapes the brain. In the early months of infancy, the visual part of the brain for example is best developed by providing the infant with a rich and varied range of patterns, colors and forms and if in this period the child is deprived of rich stimulation, the eyes will be fine but the visual area of the brain will remain permanently impaired.

This period is called the critical period.

A critical period is a specific period in our lives, a window of opportunity that opens up during which certain areas of our brains become extra sensitive and receptive. In this period, the environment can have a huge impact on the functioning of an area of the brain.

We saw that the critical period for the development of vision is in the first eight months, when we learn how to see.

A new born baby’s sense of smell is well developed. In the first few hours of its birth, the people it smells are the ones it feels really close to.

Similarly, our brain learns to process the sounds we hear, to speak languages, to give emotional responses .. how to think .. during different critical periods in our childhood and adolescence .. 

During the critical period, the brain is very malleable. It is very sensitive to all experiences and once this window closes, once the critical period ends, the level of vulnerability to experiences, the ‘mouldable-ity’ level of that area of the brain reduces  and a process of pruning ensues.

During the pruning process those synapses which are weak because the experiences they represent were not reinforced get chopped off. It’s like in our garden, we let our plants grow wild and then we prune them, snipping away the unwanted parts so that what we are left with is those skills, learning, memories, behaviors that are reinforced in the critical period. That is why sometimes, we learn a skill but lose it because it wasn’t reinforced.

HOW DO WE CREATE CRITICAL PERIODS 

When we talk of changing in any way, of getting over stress responses, overcoming depression of addictions, dysfunctional behavior, of getting happy, we are asking the question, is it possible to re-open critical periods in our adult lives, so that we can learn new things, all aimed at making us happy.

Researchers definitely point towards it. One research showed that GABA, a very important neurotransmitter triggers the onset of critical periods.

In another study, injecting certain enzymes into the visual cortex opened up a critical period.

But what is heartening is certain other research that has been done that have become part of mainstream therapy. In one controlled lab experiment, a person with his right leg paralyzed due to brain stroke was chosen. He was made to walk on a specialized treadmill called the split treadmill. It is like a normal treadmill cut into two in the middle and both are placed close to each other so that when you walk on them. It feels like a normal walk on a regular treadmill.

So the left leg moved naturally at a good speed on the left treadmill, the right leg which was paralyzed was stabilized with straps and the whole body was stabilized with a chord that was tied to the roof and the right treadmill moved at the same pace. So the right leg too moved as if it was normal.

Because of the equal movement of the treadmills the paralyzed leg was forced to move like it is normal and after many weeks of training, the paralyzed leg started responding.

The important factors were found to be stability and comfort of the paralyzed leg as it moved in a rhythmic, consistent manner which induced the illusion of correct walking as if it was not paralyzed, so the brain got cues as if the leg was normal and the brain responded by creating a whole new bunch of neurons and synapses to support the leg.

INVOKING THE CHILD

The major insight in brain plasticity is that stability and steadiness along with a level of challenge that is not too easy or too daunting, creates the conditions for opening up the critical period.

The Yatra is an ancient art of creating the critical period. It’s a chance for the brain to rewire to form new connections because while the childhood period is a very important one, we can also induce these periods and create huge learning and unlearning opportunities.

What the Himalayas do to us is to create in us a very child like state called awe. We could say that it is along with innocence and trust one of the defining qualities of a child that in most of us gets watered down as we become adults. The ability to get awed is one of the important qualities of a deep learner, the feeling of awe can trigger off a huge window of change which means a lot of rewiring for the brain.

The other quality of the child is innocence, how do we revisit that innocence? As we go from one dham to the next, the ancients lived in the mountains, immersing in the ice cold waters, learned to live like children. The whole elemental way of life of the barely clothed, ash smeared babas is a way of exposure. It is in fact aimed at living in extended critical periods. There is a lot to be researched and validated about their science.

We live in close proximity to them, tuning in to them, in their natural habitat, looking at them we too begin to shed layers of our personality, until we are completely exposed.

SEEING IS DOING

Because neurobiologists have also observed that when you see an action being performed with your full attention to the brain, it is as good as you are doing it, that learning is yours too.

The ancients taught a skill in this way; first they taught attentiveness and when you needed to learn a skill, say classical music, you first just saw, listened with attention, in that stillness. The challenge here is to be attentive for long periods by just seeing, listening, the brain just learnt the music. After many years, the student by sheer attention would have gained a high level of skill.

The child learns in this way, by modeling, copying what you do and in our most exposed moments, when we are in intimate company, when we are surrendered, we become children.

Exposure is a powerful cue to our brains. It’s like being naked like the child. It is time to heal, time to water all the untouched parts and to fire up the most important circuit of all, innocence.

We are en route GuptKashi.

Let's close with a few clues.

Ancients say,

Listen to the sound behind the words 

Move into the breath behind the sounds 

Fall into the silence behind the breaths 

Now be still 

Humming the hymns of the free

Lots of Love 

Bharat Thakur