An awe-filled life waits outside the comfortable ruts | MARK HUGHES COBB
Nerve-touching sounds nasty, phrased like that.
But all touching involves nerves, unless you're speaking figuratively, of an emotional connection, a friction, a spark, a minor flare-up leading to near-conflagration.
Last week's column, about showing up, doing hard things whether the person you're boosting deserves it or not, just because it's the right thing, touched nerves. Dozens of emails, calls and messages came in, all positive, thankfully. A few folks reached out to someone they knew, someone they wanted to re-establish contact with, to remind them that they are not forgotten, to show they are not invisible.
More:If you don't want to become invisible, show up | MARK HUGHES COBB
Amazing, what a few arranged words can do. It reminds me why I stick with this shtick, mostly. And it makes my happy (Not a typo, but a family-friend joke, from when my buddy Ken's then-3-year-old son Patrick was telling everybody about the arrival of Shannon, about how his new "... brother-sister-baby got born, and it makes my happy.") Here's hoping we continue to enjoy rushes of emotions, then act on our better natures.
Despite much evidence of current days, shown by the least among us being elected to the most powerful posts, a psychotic-seeming cultural addiction to serial-killer podcasts, the fact that Ticketmunster still hasn't been broken up, that DC chose its second-worst director to head up the whole shebang, and the way truck/muscle-car drivers choose bookstore parking lots as speedways, still, serious studies indicate humans can regrow brain cells. We can learn. We can add memories, and ideas.
We can, in fact, within structural limitations, change for the better.
You can read more in the 1998 study "Neurogenesis in the human hippocampus," in Nature Medicine, or the 2014 "Evidence of adult neurogenesis in non-human primates and human," or the 2019 "Non-engineered and Engineered Adult Neurogenesis in Mammalian Brains." The last two you can find at the National Library of Medicine site.
Essentially: Human neurogenesis can occur not just in the hippocampus (emotion, memory, autonomic nervous system) and striatum (planning, voluntary movement, cognition, motivation, reward perception) as earlier believed, but also in the amygdala (memory, emotion, decision-making), hypothalamus (hunger, thirst, fatigue, sleep, body temperature, familial attachment behaviors), olfactory bulb (smell, also as related to emotion, memory, and learning), and possibly even the cerebral cortex (chief operating officer for cognition, and the integration of layers of abilities including attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, and consciousness).
At the risk of sparking rampant neurogenesis, recall we possess as many as 32 senses, possibly more. Generally the big five — sight, smell, taste, touch, sound — leap right to mind, thanks to external avatars. Others are a bit less visual, less readily apparent, but no less real.
We carry a sense of time, an internal body clock, which explains — though it's not yet fully understood — why we wake up a minute or second before an alarm, or why I can know what time it is in the dead of night, even with a mask on, so it can't be from seeing any clock, or light, sun or moon (though we can also, apparently, sense light through skin, to some degree). In earlier days, I'd know the time within a minute, because I told someone about this, and she tested me, as that's the kind of person she was. She didn't have that ability, but she would yawn if I said, or even thought, "yawn," so there's that. Sorry if you just yawned, too, but if so, don't go to a hyponotist unless you really trust them.
As I age, I find I'm sometimes off by two to three minutes, rather than one. That sense is probably a function of multiple inputs, of breathing, of heartbeat, and many parts of the brain working in concert.
We can improve interoception, the sense of our internal workings, through meditation or other focused attention. Many could use the knowledge that emotions often derive from physical sensations, or as chemical responses to stimuli. While emotions are obviously real — given the human perception of reality — how we react to them, what we do, remains up to conscious choice, to the striatum, amygdala, and their siblings.
Nearly every one reading this should work on proprioception, or how our bodies occupy space. Who stands in the middle of aisles, hunkers in doorways, clusters in family clumps on a sidewalk, other than people with no idea of their place in the world, and as an extension, no sense of others' movements and presence? That seems a peculiar facet of raging narcissism, but could also be a weakness of muscle-and-joint receptors that feed that sense.
Back when I had knees, proprioception helped me become an adept racquetball player, as you not only have to perceive where that tiny slammed airball's going, as it potentially ricochets off any or all of four enclosed walls, the ceiling, and possibly the floor, but suss out where your opponent is, where they're moving, and rapidly choose your best angle for the next micro-second or two. Back when football was for fun, and not do-or-die macho posturing, I often felt I could careen around defenses with my eyes closed. Kinda like The Force, but with less laser-sword maiming.
Proprioception might contribute to what some think of as auras, or electro-magnetic fields. It probably plays into feelings of "chemistry" — including that instinctive No, which you should always heed, as that's a couple million subtle functions combining to warn you — and could relate to gaze perception, the way we feel attention.
So that's why folks sometimes trail off when talking, as they notice you're bored, perceive your mind wandering. Or speed up, or throw in a joke or an unexpected hook, hoping you'll .... Look! A baby wolf!
Draw your mind back.
So we can grow, but for many, change = hard. Ruts = comfort.
Other studies, easier to follow and swallow, study age stratification, roughly how the times in which when we are born, the things that happen over life spans, effect individuals and populations.
If you've muttered "These kids today" anything but ironically, if you've posted paper-thin excoriations or exaltations about Millennials, or Xers, or Boomers, if you think differently about a person after attaching a number to their name, you're probably an ageist, densely stratified idiot, though that's my phrasing, perhaps not scientific.
Idjit is the proper spelling.
U.S. human lifespan is 77.28 years, so middle age slams down six months after your 38th birthday. Sure, please haul out 40 is the new 30, 50 is the new 38, 60 is the new 13, 70 is the new where did I put my reading glasses? memes, if it helps, though I kinda think thinking your own thoughts about your place in life, rather than copy-and-pasting, the equivalent of writing marriage vows based on a Hallmark insert, might be more beneficial.
"Taste freeze" kicks in sooner, where some stick lifelong with the music — hair, clothes, etc. — beloved in their 20s or 30s. Partly this is selective memory. Everyone boasting the superiority of the '60s is choosing to edit out "Yummy Yummy Yummy," Fabian, the Shaggs, and every spoken-word record that wasn't Jimmy Dean's "Big Bad John." Partly it's recalling being young and strong, seeing forever in someone's eyes, and falling for similar naive fables about knowing all.
But why curtail new waves rolling through your senses, stirring your hippocampus, re-writing your sense of awe? Same reason, I guess, audiences weren't packed for "Best of Enemies" or "10 Blocks on the Camino Real," for any show or music or exhibit that doesn't fill, even given familiarities. Those who won't perceive, who won't show, they must be fully content with every little thing about life, yeah?
We can learn. Sad songs sing true. There's time to grow, until there's not.
Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: An awe-filled life waits outside the comfortable ruts | MARK HUGHES COBB
