Resilience has become a buzz-word for a group of behaviors that enable an individual to withstand, or recover quickly from, adversity or difficult conditions. A lot of attention has been paid by researchers to the study of individuals who demonstrate great resilience in the face of trauma, in the hope that a model of resilience can be developed and taught.
In my research into the interaction between behavior, our DNA and the environment I was drawn to the work of neuro-plasticians (scientists who study the brain’s ability to change itself) like Edward Taub and Michael Merzenich, and quantum biologists Pjotr Gariaev and Vladimir Popponin.
While Gariaev and Popponin investigate how our environment switches DNA on or off, Taub and Merzenich have dedicated their lives to understanding how the nervous system responds to signals from the environment, learns new skills, and develops habits.
It seems it all boils down to a dynamic neurological process where the mind creates maps for how it responds to signals coming from the senses. There are maps for everything we do, hear, see, feel, taste and smell. These maps contain the precise sequence and location of neurons (cells) in the brain as they are fired. The more we are exposed to something, and respond in a similar way, the more defined and refined these maps become. And the more of our brain it owns. We have maps for walking, for holding a ball or gripping a cup, and we have maps for our emotions, for what triggers feelings of love, sadness, fear, anger or arousal.
Someone who is good at playing piano will have a bigger map for the movement of their fingers and hands than a soccer player, for instance. While the soccer player would have more of their brain devoted to the nuances of moving the body, legs and feet than would the pianist.
Mind maps draw on abilities we have inherited from our parents, that are the best fit for a particular experience or stimulus coming from our environment. This explains why we can carry a gene for depression and anxiety, but if we do not experience sustained bullying as a child, this gene may not be called on. Meanwhile if we are taught functional ways to handle aggression and conflict, these skills will instead become the basis of a mind map.
If this mind map is reinforced over and over again by practice and experience, there is a good chance it will be laid down in the DNA as an alternative code, which can be passed onto future generations. A parent who copes well with conflict and aggression is also more likely to teach these skills to their offspring, further reinforcing the resilient behaviour. Over multiple generations this reinforcing of a healthy response to aggression and conflict may lead to a dominant trait in descendants, that predispose them to resilience.
This brilliant, new research over-turns both the ‘dominance of the gene’ and ‘brain localization’ theories, proving the dynamic interplay between genetic material and our experience of the world through our senses.
Resilient individuals can be said to have highly functional maps, that provide a strong pattern for the nervous system to rely upon, as well as being able to break these maps down when they are no longer useful and replace them with better response maps.
Positively charged emotions like gratitude, love, acceptance and joy produce dopamine and endorphins that help lay down new mind-maps, as well as oxytocin that helps dissolve old mind maps. This is important because it is only at the point of acceptance in the cycle of grieving that individuals are able to finally let go of what was lost and move on. We now know why, acceptance promotes the production of the very brain chemical that melts away old mind maps and allows new mind maps to supersede them.
Experiencing a reward for new behaviour also triggers more dopamine, helping to reinforce connections between neurons, strengthening a new map. Fear, on the other hand, shuts down the nervous system and DNA, leaving us with only the most primitive maps to fall back on. This explains why fear and anxiety can render us speechless and unable to respond. Soldiers are trained to overcome this through the repetition of skills under extreme pressure, and through receiving rewards for the desired, resilient behaviour.
The amazing thing about these maps is they are three dimensional, and stored holographically within the nervous system and DNA. But even more amazingly they are plastic, and highly susceptible to change. This new evidence is changing the way medicine rehabilitates stroke victims and brain injury patients, leading to a virtual rewiring of damaged brains around dead cells. The key to this new model of rehabilitation is to re-learn skills for the damaged limb, motor skill or brain function as if for the first time, step-by-step, like a baby, and by providing a reward for each incremental improvement. In this way patients with catastrophic damage have regained almost full function of motor-skills, despite a prognosis they would never recover.
Our brains are built to be resilient, they are built to handle changing circumstances and they are built to recover. All that has held us back in the past was an entrenched mindset that dictated the contrary, so we treated people as broken clocks with pieces missing, rather than dynamic organisms with built in redundancy and a great capacity for change.
Educators, work-place trainers, rehabilitation experts and managers have much to learn and much to look forward to from the application of this fascinating science to the real world.
