Who shapes your brain?

In a love relationship, neuroscientists say, the brain of one revises the other. You and your beloved engage in the emotional sculpting of each other’s brains. Without the other’s touch, words or smell, your emotional brains will be different, comparatively dim in terms of the neural bonfires that ignite when you encounter each other in the flesh or as a thought. Bonfires that are habitually sparked in the emotional brain forge a pattern. Your brain has the same size and weight before and after you fall in love but with love, you have been rewired. This is also why it hurts when you lose your love — the pattern is starved of its feedings when your love is gone. Like a book, your brain measures and weighs the same before and when in love but in love, your brain’s contents get reorganized to tell a different story of you.

I think scientists make a good case for how when we are in love, we literally change our minds. But as I was reading about that, I also realized that so many other things could do that because many other things animate us. I refer to passions that we have been deeply engaged in that could also change the way our brains fire and make use of its existing brain parts to forge new connections between them. One thing that has largely marked the life of my mind is science-writing which includes writing these regular weekly columns. This issue marks my 515th column, exactly 10 years since I started writing this weekly piece. Without the benefit of an fMRI, a brain scan that can show my brain parts in action when I do work on the columns — think, research, think some more, write and think of it in a way it has never been thought of before (as far as I know), ask — I will boldly assert that I think I have rewired my brain doing these columns the past 10 years.

Now before you get any notion that I think that my brain has reached some kind of uncommon intelligence, kick yourself. If any, I think I have rewired my brain to be even less sure of things but at the same time achieve a level of comfort with uncertainty that would have sent my former brain to anxiety land. But because I can describe the process of my own brain revising itself, I will use my experience.

My short-term memory or working memory, as in others, is filled with reminders that are useful to my waking hours. But because I have summoned it to work regularly for my science-writing in the past 10 years, it has grown to offer me scientific names, jargon, names of scientists and their matching expertise in no time. However, it takes me more time now to remember the names of my first cousins. Those science terms which used to be so alien to me, now often connect to long-term memories born from my nature trips and probably to a dialogue in a non-science novel or an image from a book that I had brought with me on that trip. Then suddenly I have dots that I could connect, crossing science, inhabited by technical stuff, to the “normal” world of non-scientists like poets, clowns, retired grandmas and grandpas, students, and yes, even lawyers. 

The process I described above could happen to anyone trying to write a science piece but this has been happening to me on a weekly basis not only with increasing definition but also with a diversity of information. I can now think of objects, like electrons that do not exist to the naked eye but are real and I automatically think of metaphors to describe them, maybe as swooshes of a flamenco skirt I once witnessed dancing at dusk. I have revised my brain to always scavenge for connections following a mental trail that I have created and seemed to have strengthened by continued practice. 

This also makes me wonder about what happens to the brain of the one who reads the columns. I have been listening to a podcast of the work of a neuroscientist in Princeton who looks at the storytelling brain and the one who is listening to it at the same time. She wanted to see if one is the echo of the other. She initially found that indeed, there is some kind of echo of the storyteller’s brain in the brain of the listener in the sense that the same parts lit up. If so, we may have come upon what “understanding” looks like in two conversing brains. I wonder if the columns ever give rise to such “echoes” in my readers.

Evidence is stark that what we habitually do shapes our brains. Veteran London taxicab drivers, famous wayfinders, have offered a view of their working brains and they seemed to have larger storage in the hippocampus — known to store visual representations such as maps. Meditators were also found to have thicker insulas — the brain part for paying attention. The brain could be rewired by what we do, especially the ones that we often do. Our brains and our cultures mutually sculpt each other in a fascinating and complex conversation.

The things that you read, the people you choose to love or simply endure, the things you believe in or not believe in, the work that you passionately pursue or the idle life you have succumbed to, literally wire and rewire your brain. You have handed over big parts of your brain to them. They are not just things that you do; they help you become who you are. Alas, who and what would be wiring and rewiring your brain today? 

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