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While Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical School research group have at least – and at last – finally told us the facts about how early brain development can be altered from extreme early child abuse, I can find no one who talks about what this altered brain feels like from the inside.
I am living with such an altered brain. Every day I discover how that changed brain impacts on my ability to life anything like a quality life.
Since my return from Alaska, and since my decision to actually write a book rather than simply pouring all my words down the hole (whole) in the cup of my blog, I find that I cannot do it. I think I know part of the reason why. Perhaps if I articulate what this seems like I can move past what it is that is stopping me?
As Jill Bolte Taylor describes it in her book ‘My Stoke of Insight’, the right brain does not process anything like a sequence of time. It also cannot write a book by itself. Taylor describes how her thoughts operated in words even though she lost the ability during her left brain stroke to either verbalize or to comprehend others’ spoken words. I wonder how a brain allows us to speak to ourselves within our skulls in word-thoughts even at those times that we cannot use language to communicate outside of ourselves?
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When my brother described how writing a book is like forming a shape from carving a block of wood, my right brain understood exactly what he was saying. Yet I am now stuck with the dilemma of knowing that a book is a tangible, physical THING. That means to me that my creative right brain efforts must become directed to the formation of an object. That must require a multiple level of word-thinking, goal direction and focus that I don’t seem able to do – at least not right now until I LEARN how!
My experience with making anything creatively is that I enter what I understand is a right brain creative space that does not require words. Some might call this FLOW. In fact, only during brief periods of needing to organize specific actions (like getting materials together, or actually deciding how big to make something, etc.) do words ever enter my ‘making’ process.
How, then, do I creatively write a book? My brain seems stuck in this dilemma. Blogging is writing. It is not about making a tangible, physical object. I can evidently utilize my familiar brain circuitry and patterns while blogging that do not seem remotely available to me if I try to force my brain to make the switch to ‘writing the book’.
How interesting! And currently, how impossible! I suspect that an ‘ordinarily formed’ brain can enter FLOW space and not lose its orientation and organization in the process. Based on my current experience, I don’t think my ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain can do that!
I understand that it is the higher cortical areas of the brain that are designed to direct the entire show of how we use our brain-minds to BE in the world. Teicher’s group and other infant brain development specialists talk about how extreme early child abuse alters the development of BOTH brain hemispheres, of the corpus callosum that lies between them and sends information back and forth between them, and also changes how the higher cortices develop (causing early atrophy rather than normal development). And these are certainly not the only regions, circuits and operations that are affected!
Great! And we are supposed to live an ordinary, normal life with THAT brain? Or write a book with it! I can make jewelry, crochet rugs, make mosaics, draw a picture, make a clay pot, spin wool, weave, make a garden – in short, do all kinds of creative things with this brain because ‘making things’ has always been a part of who I was born to be. But the process, or the FLOW of making things seems dissociated for me in certain ways from being able to set a concrete goal toward a specific concrete expression of that FLOW.
Throughout my childhood my mother berated and belittled me for being a stupid child because I sat in the middle of the living room floor making and remaking necklaces out of pop beads before I was two years old. I doubt that as a young child I had any plan as my tiny fingers ‘worked’ with those beads. I could interact between process and objects in the material world so that some ‘thing’ came out of it. It was a natural, nonarticulated process that could happen without any higher cortical goal in mind, without self-censorship, and without any ‘attachment’ to outcome.
How do I do that with words? Taylor has a lot to say in her book about how silent her brain became as her left brain lost its ability to ‘run the show’. She applauds the benefits of finding ways to access that silence for ourselves as a good thing even when our whole brain is in operation. (After eight years of focused and dedicated effort Taylor repaired her brain after her stroke at age 37.)
I say that along with thousands of other suggestions given by people who had safe and securely attached childhoods and were thus able to build ‘ordinary’ brains, that those of us with these malevolently-formed changed brains need to be very careful about taking what an ordinary brain person says about how THEIR ‘ordinary’ brain works and applying it across the board to ourselves.
I can assure you that having a silent brain caused by disconnection with the left hemisphere, and having predominantly right brain experiences without correct cooperative processing of information with the left brain, and being denied ordinary-kind supervision and direction from an ordinarily-formed higher cortex is NOT a blissful experience. It is unsettling, difficult, challenging, disorienting, disorganizing, and SCARY!
Again, I highly recommend reading My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor. It at least gives us a clear language and frame of reference to BEGIN to understand – from deep within our own altered experience – how an ‘ordinary’ brain works in contrast to how our ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain does!
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Enough words about this for the time being. I do not have a co-writer or a publisher or an invested editor to help me write my book – or to act in place of the higher cortex I need to complete this task as I wish to accomplish it. I have to find a way to argue this out for myself. If I cannot do this, the blog will remain as my continual FLOW repository for words that seem to stream out easily in this format, but flee into invisibility if I try to direct them toward a final, finished, tangible, physical object – a book!
The silence that Taylor describes as her left brain shut down was in part about the vanishing voice of judgment and criticism that the left brain seems so prone to offer us. Blogging is not about being right or wrong, not about succeeding or not, not about approval or any of the operations and expectations that the left brain sinks its teeth into.
If my efforts at ‘making a book’ are being sabotaged by my left brain’s critic, does it have to respond by holding its ability to process language at bay where my right brain can’t get to it? Does it have to seal my words off from my writing, creating right brain that needs them? “Come on, you two! Let’s do better than that! Cooperate, already!”
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Speaking of books, I am in the process of reading my way through two of them:
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin
I am not reading them for any particular insight into music, per se. Levitin mentions that the word for song and the word for dance are the same in many world languages because singing involves body movement. I know that we had both abilities, and their corresponding brain networks firmly implanted within us long before the 140,000-year-ago benchmark when our FOXP2 gene became activated and we evolved to speak.
It seems obvious to me that we evolved ways to express ourselves and to communicate through song, dance, drama, pantomime and all sorts of gestures from our earliest beginnings. It was only after those brain regions and circuits were very well formed that we were able to use them – MUCH LATER in our development – to talk and think in words!
I am reading this book because I am looking for ways to think about how screaming, shouting, yelling and all forms of verbal violence and auditory assault in the world of the unborn and the very young child affect the development of sound (and language) processing in the developing brain.
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Stop the Storm 
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