Transcriber: Helena Bowen Reviewer: Denise RQ
This morning I went for a bike ride through the green belt by my house
to calm my nerves and clear my mind.
All my life I've loved any kind of activity
that involved whole body movement in space,
like riding a bike, swimming, dance, skiing.
Not only for the movement itself but life overall is just better
in getting to navigate the world on a bicycle,
or spend the day on a mountain.
The thing that started me digging through brain research
looking to understand the experience connection
between feeling and mind and moving in the world
was a defensive Japanese martial art
a friend of mine introduced me to in college:
Shinshin Toitsu Aikido.
Shinshin Toitsu translates as "heart, mind, and body threaded together as one",
and Aikido is "the way of connecting or harmonizing with energy".
In this strictly defensive martial art,
I allow my opponent's attack without blocking it.
For example, in a punch, getting off the line of attack
at just the right moment,
then turning to move with my opponent's force,
I use their energy to unbalance them and lead them to the ground.
That process demands that I be calm and clear-minded,
and that my movement be relaxed and fluid.
Not an easy task
in circumstances more likely to evoke fight or flight or freeze.
So, while aikido trains the self defense arts,
shinshin toitsu explores ways of getting to the calm, clear-minded state
of relaxed engagement at the heart of aikido.
The training uses simple focusing techniques to accomplish this.
One of them is centering:
that is I bring my attention to my center of balance.
Another involves extended awareness to what I think of is a sense of space,
like extending awareness
to the beautiful space we're all in right now.
What triggered my scientific curiosity in the practice, though,
was the use of balance testing as a kind of no-tech bio-feedback.
So, a training partner, a teacher, will push on me
to see how stable I am on my feet.
Surprisingly, when I put my attention at center,
or conversely, extend my awareness,
balance becomes markedly more stable without any physical effort to make it so.
The point, though, isn't just better balance.
Stable posture is considered a bio-marker of the calm, clear-minded,
in the zone response state.
I find it interesting, given my background and my interests,
that balance and space that we move through,
both require attention in things like
riding a bicycle or skiing down a mountain.
On the other hand,
the physical act of walking out and standing here on this stage,
as with moving through most of the environments of our daily lives,
doesn't require attention to either.
But let me tell you,
it makes an incredible difference to my level of anxiety,
it's not gone, but it's better to my mental clarity and memory,
to my ability to communicate.
But why does it work?
And does brain research provide any clues
that unlock the mystery
of the experienced connection of emotion and mental clarity and centering
or sense of space - admittedly, an odd set of connections?
The work of the scientist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington
puts this inquiry into a larger perspective.
Over a century ago, Sherrington,
who is considered one of the founders of modern neuroscience,
described the central nervous system as an organ of coordination
that knits together
out of the many elements a solidarity of the whole.
Sherrington's words echo Shinshin Toitsu:
to thread together as one.
Fundamentally, the brain is an organ of convergence.
Now, Sherrington went on to say
not only is movement a critical thread within the convergent whole,
it's the reason we have a brain.
That is, things that don't move in the world, like trees,
don't have brains because they don't them.
We, on the other hand, have to navigate in the environment
to find resources, to avoid danger, to find our way home.
The complex, problem-solving capacity of the brain allows us
to move in the world to survive and thrive.
Keeping this in mind, I began my search with a more basic inquiry,
or at least what I thought was more basic:
do emotion and cognition interconnect with balance processing in the brain?
A question that quickly took me down a rabbit hole
in what turned out to be
the fascinating world of vestibular research,
as I went looking for clues
in what I've come to think of as the vestibular trail.
So the vestibular sense in the inner-ear is critical to balance,
and while we often describe it as our sense of balance,
it actually senses the inertial motion of the head in all directions,
and also linear acceleration
when we move in a straight line in any direction.
It turns out that this amazing sensory system
- and my friends all make fun of me
for being enthralled with the vestibular system -
not only is critical to balance
but also to the perception and navigation of space.
It is a perfect example of Sherrington's idea
of the integrative action of the nervous system
in that it is always woven together with other senses in the brain,
and it does indeed converge on multiple levels in the brain
with emotion and cognition.
The weird thing about the vestibular sense
is that the only time we sense it is when something is out of whack.
I remember a rumor when I was a kid
that if you twirled around really fast a bunch of times
that when you stopped, you'd be able to see the Earth's rotation.
(Laughter)
So I tried it, and I vividly remember after twirling around
immediately falling down in the grass
and watching the backyard spin around me.
Of course, it wasn't the backyard or the Earth that was spinning,
it was the motion sensors in my inner ear.
I had induced temporary vertigo,
so all the symptoms of vertigo,
the nausea, the dizziness, the unstable balance, the spinning room,
result from distorted vestibular sensation.
These distortions, though, shed light
on what the vestibular system does for us when it is working,
and why it matters to this inquiry.
It helps us maintain, among other things,
a stable sense of balance, and a stable sense of space.
The brain uses vestibular signals to calculate gravitation vertical,
creating a kind of virtual plumb-line
for the stable perception of both balance and space.
While it may seem like sense of balance is just the inner ear,
and that spacial perception for people who are sighted is only visual,
each of these is a multi-sensory perception,
threaded together from vestibular, visual, proprioceptive,
- which is sensation from the muscles and joints -
and tactile input.
Now, the experience that brought home to me what all this meant,
the kind of multisensory oneness of sense of balance, sense of space,
happened when I was in Japan for Aikido training
and I traveled from Tokyo to Osaka on a high-speed train.
At some point, looking out the window,
I saw to my astonishment, an entire town leaning 30 degrees,
built on a steep hillside.
It was perpendicular to the hillside, not vertical with gravity.
As I wondered in amazement, "How did the Japanese do that?"
it dawned on me that I had to be seeing an illusion.
As it turns out, high speed in a curve
will throw passengers to the outside of the curve.
To prevent that, they tilt the train to the inside of the curve.
The gravitational pull cancels out the centrifugal push
and passengers remain stable and upright in their seats.
The illusion happens because the fix also zeros out
any push or pull in the vestibular sensors,
meaning a false perception of gravitational vertical.
So in reality, the train and me with it, are leaning,
the landscape is flat and yes, the buildings are vertical;
but the brain's construction of sense of balance slash sense of space
depicts me as upright in a level environment.
From that perspective,
the landscape slopes, and the buildings lean.
The brain creates a neural canvas of the external world,
inclusive of information about our body in motion in relationship to gravity,
information that is essential to an accurate perception of space.
This multi-dimensional canvas, though, isn't just about perception.
It provides a decision-making platform for spacial cognition,
which is the mental activity of navigating in the world.
So with all of this in mind, let me reframe my original question:
do emotion and cognition interconnect
with this perceptual decision-making map of my body in balance in space?
You got that!
Evidence from the vestibular trail across the brain suggests
that the answer is a resounding yes.
A couple of intriguing examples:
in the brain stem, research on anxiety,
which has long been associated
with problems in both balance and spacial perception,
has uncovered vestibular links to emotional behavior.
The identified areas?
Control system's critical to survival,
tailoring specific strategies to meet survival needs,
so for example, the high mental alertness, the pounding heart,
and uptightness of anxiety,
versus the low mental alertness and slack posture of boredom,
with interested engagement somewhere in between.
But why the vestibular link?
Going back to Sherrington's idea
that we move in the world in order to survive,
researchers describe this intertwining of vestibular and survival systems
as an inherent necessity.
Moving up the trail,
we find vestibular activity in the brain's memory center,
the hippocampus, and surrounding areas of the cortex.
This is a part of the brain that is damaged in Alzheimer's disease,
critical in memory, and strongly linked to emotion.
The hippocampus also helps us navigate space.
Again, why?
What's the connection between memory and spatial navigation?
Researchers believe
that the neural mechanisms behind memory and planning
evolved from the brain's ability to navigate in the physical world.
To quote the researchers,
the neural algorithms underlying navigation in real and mental space
are fundamentally the same.
So these clues, just a few of many from the vestibular trail,
lay a groundwork for understanding
the experienced connection between emotion, cognition, and movement.
Still, they don't explain
why bringing explicit attention to center or space
would cause a change in my emotional cognitive state.
So, a quick detour off the vestibular trail
to look at the action of attention in the brain.
Attention serves to enhance the brain's knitting
by amplifying and synchronizing the signals
that make up the content of attention.
That equates with clearer perception,
as well as better decision-making and performance based on that perception.
When I bring my attention to center, to here,
to my whole body in balance and space,
I bring into focus the multi-dimensional canvas
and everything else and enhancing then everything else that relies upon it.
Perception? Balance.
Memory and decision-making, navigation emotional response.
But taking this one step further
it may be that in bringing into focus these changes in the brain,
also trigger a global change in my response state.
That's the experience people describe with centering:
emotions settle, as does the heart and the breath,
the body relaxes and the mind engages.
That's in contrast, going back to self-defense,
to fight or flight which readies heart, breath, body, and mind
for a defensive action,
like red alert on this starship Enterprise.
But what about sustaining action?
Connection in life, and to other people, matters as much to survival as protection.
Do we have a whole-scale behavior response that like fight or flight
but instead that readies us to connect?
To engage and explore, to learn, to discover?
To boldly go where no one's gone before?
I believe we do.
And that things like centering and sense of space trigger
the global response that readies heart, breath, body, and mind
for sustaining action in life.
That's the power of 'here'.
The conclusion to my inquiry, the age-old wisdom of getting to center
brings us home to the best in ourselves
and to our ability to engage in the world at our best
as we navigate the literal and figurative landscapes of our lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)