Recently
I spent a couple of days in San Francisco, where the architecture inspires me. While
sketching the tip of the iconic Transamerica Pyramid, for which artistic
license pressed me to use pink that day, I wondered about the source of
inspiration for the design and what it must have taken to execute the initial
idea. Creating a building like certainly that takes big thinking.
On the way home from the trip I was spurred into thinking
about the architecture of the brain because of a new book I bought at the
airport: The Emotional Life of Your Brain,
by neuroscientist Richard Davidson along with writer Sharon Begley.
Davidson offers six dimensions of Emotional Style that have
arisen from his and others’ studies of neural bases of emotion. They are:
·
Resilience style: how we recover from adversity
·
Outlook style: whether we tend toward optimism
or pessimism
·
Social Intuition style: how we read people’s
body language
·
Self-Awareness style: how aware we are of our
own thoughts and feelings and body signals
·
Sensitivity to Context style: how we pick up on
the conventional rules of social interaction
·
Attention Style: how we screen out emotional or
other distractions
Not all people want or need to change their emotional
styles, says Davidson, but when our styles cause us discomfort – or we notice that
we’re causing discomfort for others – we can use our thoughts to create new
structures in our brains.
The brain was once thought to be rather fixed in form and
function by adulthood, except for being able to learn new facts and skills.
However, it is now well-known that the brain is capable of neuroplasticity – the
“the ability to change its structure and patterns of activity in significant
ways…throughout life” (p. 160). Davidson asserts that “[C]hange can come about
as a result of experiences we have as well as of purely internal mental
activity – our thoughts” (p. 160). In other words, to a great extent, we can use
our thoughts strategically to be co-architects of our own brains.
If we tend to have a negative outlook and want to be more
positive, Davidson suggests that “well-being therapy” can strengthen areas of
the brain and improve our outlook. Exercises he offers include regularly
writing down positive characteristics of ourselves and others we interact with,
expressing gratitude, and complimenting others regularly.
It turns out that a daily mindfulness meditation practice
can be crucial to developing increased self-awareness – but also to turning
down the volume of self-awareness for those who are too aware of internal sensations. Davidson also recommends
mindfulness meditation for increased focus and attention and for greater
resilience.
I’m not surprised that meditation is so often recommended
by Davidson as a way to build stronger connections for emotional well-being. In
my mindfulness workshops I frequently see improvement and relief in the faces
and stories of participants even after just two or three weeks of a mindfulness
meditation practice.
Davidson admits that our brain circuitry is laid down in
our early years by the genes we’ve inherited and the early experiences we’ve
had. But even in our adulthood, there is much we can do to increase our sense
of internal well-being and our interpersonal effectiveness. We might not ever create
iconic buildings like the Transamerica Pyramid, but with some big thinking of
our own, we can be the architects of
positive changes to the structures of our own brains.
.jpg)