This is your brain on books... and other things

I just finished reading Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect by Matthew D. Lieberman today. I mentioned it a week or so ago when I first started it because I found the introduction intriguing, and I ended up really liking the whole book. If you are a brain science geek, you will enjoy it as it is somewhat technical as well as pretty interesting. 

There are a couple of things that I want to discuss about it. Let's start with this:

"Because of the flexibility of the mentalizing system [that would be the part of your brain which enables you to imagine what someone else might know or be thinking], humans are capable of empathizing with events they have not observed or experienced themselves. Your mother might tell you that your uncle didn't get the promotion he was hoping for. the mentalizing system is likely the key to understanding your uncle's experience or even the 'experience' of a character in a novel. Indeed those who read fiction tend to have stronger mentalizing abilities, suggesting that engaging with fictional minds may strengthen the system." (p. 154)

Researchers have found that when we are not engaged in thinking about other things, the vast majority of time we are thinking about relationships between people. They [the researchers] posit that this continual use of thinking about the social aspects of our lives helps us to gain skills for dealing with those relationships in real life. Those who engaged this part of their brains more were more successful in real life relationships than those who didn't. But let's get to the fiction bit. There has always been some evidence that reading fiction helps to make a person more sympathetic towards others. Now, thanks to fMRI technology, neuroscientists have seen this in action inside people's brains. Reading really does help to make you more aware of how other people may feel. 

So when we read to our children, not only are we giving them the gift of time, language, love of story, practice with attention, and imagination, we are also creating people who are better able to put themselves in someone else's shoes. I can't think of a better argument for reading from a broad and diverse group of perspectives. Go read to your children... don't stop reading to your children.

The other thing that is not brought up in the book, but has made me thinking about in terms of this mentalizing function in our brains is that this can give us a chance to reframe what many of us do as not worry, but instead practice. I know I am not alone when I say I spend a little too much time worrying about all the different horrible scenarios that could happen to the people I love. When I have tried to stop the egregious habit, there is something in my head that screams that if I don't worry about every possible contingency, then it will surely be my fault when the not worried about thing happens. It is one thing to know something is ludicrous and an entirely other thing to stop it.

I have read enough brain science to know that if we name something behavior-wise in ourselves, it can go a long way towards disarming that behavior. My guess is that this need to worry about all contingencies is that it is our mentalizing abilities run amok. The mentalizing part is something we cannot help doing; our brains are just wired that way. What if, when we find ourselves spinning out catastrophe after catastrophe, we don't try to stop ourselves (because it just doesn't work, I've tried), but instead remind ourselves that it is our brain's way of practicing social scenarios (which is a good thing), but see if we can move that mentalizing work to having a more positive spin. What if something good happens? Practice preparing for that a while. I have no idea if this will work or not, but it sure seems to be worth a shot trying to work with our brain's natural tendencies instead of against it. (This idea seems to align really well with Piglet's words I wrote about in an old blog post, Dealing with Fear.) 

The other thing is what they learned about inhibition or self-control. Being able to keep yourself under control, to practice delayed gratification, to not do the thing that your reactions are screaming at you to do has some significant positive outcomes. People with self-control tend to do better in school, have more stable relationships, have better jobs which earn more money, and in general feel happier about life. It is a very good thing to not be at the whim of your reactions. It turns out that the physical self-control and emotional self-control are both controlled by the same area of the brain. This means that if you practice physical self-control, you are strengthening your emotional self-control at the same time. 

This little piece of information I found extremely interesting because my gut had been telling me that R.'s inability to stop doing something physical was directly related to a host of other challenges which she has. I like to be right. We will continue to work on her being able to stop doing something. The scissor cutting activity box has been great for this. When we first started, unless I directly told her to stop cutting when she had finished cutting on the line on the card, she would continue to snip, snip, snip away until she had turned the card into confetti. Now, she can cut on the line and stop and wait for the next card to cut again. I thought this was pretty exciting then, and I find it even more exciting after having read about this. I will be working on coming up with more activities which need her to stop an activity after she has begun.

Ideally, we could start playing the children's games which are ideal for practicing exactly this sort of inhibition... Simon Says, Mother May I?, Red Light, Green Light. All of these classic children's games are providing the exact type of practice needed to exercise that part of the brain which helps with physical and emotional self-control. I'm not sure R. is quite ready for them yet, but it is definitely where I will be heading. 

There is so much more in the book, you should just go read it.