Translator: Eloisa Zendali Reviewer: Giorgio Fighera
I have to take a breath,
to talk about emotional short circuits.
I could ask you to come here and look at yourself,
and the short circuit would start.
I deal with children who can't make it,
children who struggle with school,
children who struggle with growing up,
children who don't feel understood, children who suffer.
And this has changed my story, my story as a scientist.
So the other day, I was in a learning center,
the place where I help these kids,
and in this learning center
one of the girls was looking at me
because I was worried about how to start today's talk
that in a few minutes will explain you what we do
and why I'm here.
I looked at her and told her:
"You know, I don't know where to start."
She smiled at me and told me:
"You have to start from the beginning,
you always start from the beginning."
And so, here you can see me
this somehow represents my beginning,
my beginning as a scientist
and of my journey to study and to understand - but what?
The thing that, on some level,
has fascinated me for so long,
the relationship between the brain and the mind,
between the brain and the soul.
Between what we feel
and how it is possible that we feel this way.
And so I spent years and years
fascinated by this astonishing structure:
the brain is an extraordinary structure.
In milliseconds, right now,
you have millions of billions of connections
that set in motion a transformation
of what you have been and what you will be.
This transformation is caused by all the incoming information
that, in some way,
sow something new,
and cause pruning
in what you have been until now,
and create new buds.
This miracle
which measures a mechanism called:
"Zone of Proximal Development".
One of the most fascinating processes of life:
it is the thing that makes a living being,
that makes who each one of us, time after time,
chooses to be.
So, after studying hard all these systems,
I came back to Italy.
And what happened to me?
I met a child,
I met him in the green hall of an hospital,
the walls were truly terrible,
they gave the idea of something
that did not cure but oppress.
This child had eight adults with him,
besides his parents, various assistants,
various teachers, the hospital personnel.
The nurse told him that I was the boss.
What I did
was a gesture from afar, from the end of the corridor:
I lowered down and I smiled.
This gesture made he ran to me,
he took me by the gown
and told me that word that you all can read: "help me".
Now, I don't know what happened to this kid,
but what I do know
is that he changed the trajectory of my history as a scientist
because I thought
that if everything we knew couldn't help a child,
and if a whole community, that was giving him eight adults,
was not helping him because he was asking for help
to a stranger in a lab coat, in a green hospital hallway,
this whole system was not helping.
And so I went back to studying.
I went back to study what in terms of science,
and deep science,
is called: "neuroplasticity"
and in educational terms is called:
"Enhancement of the Zone of Possible Development".
I began to study
how we can exercise the cerebral domains
to cause improvements in language,
in the ability to focus, to memorize, to pay attention,
improvements in numerical intelligence.
I became good at it.
Good to the point that children changed,
and from a research point of view I was very successful,
because at the level of experimental research
what we achieved was what is called:
"Improved Potential of the Individual Neuropsychological Structure".
If I can give you an example:
the brain buds in milliseconds
the memories we imprint through the information we receive.
If we want to understand what causes,
for example, life in school to a child,
we just have to do a calculation.
A calculation that I gave to the Ministry many years ago:
let's multiply milliseconds
by hundredths of a second, by tenths of a second,
by seconds, by minutes, by hours,
by days, by months, by years that a child spends in school:
you'll get a number close to infinity.
That number measures
what each of the adults he will meet
determines in his neural connections:
the transformation of his self.
It is an immense power.
And so my son in second grade wrote
that his mother,
when she finished learning how to be a scientist,
started being a teacher for teachers
because I started explaining to teachers
what was going on
with neuroplasticity and human potential.
And I was sure I had made it.
But it was not like that. Why?
Because some time later,
and we are getting to the topic I want to talk about today,
I met another child,
a child with whom we achieved an extraordinary change
in terms of cognitive profile,
because he had recovered a standard deviation and a half
from what it is generically called general intelligence quotient.
And this child at some point told me:
"Now that you have taken the mistakes from me,
will you take away the pain too?"
And I was not prepared to understand the relationship
between the error of the mind and the pain in the mind.
And above all I had not reflected
upon what the mechanism of pain was.
But if now I'd ask you, a thousand adults,
to remember your life and your mistakes,
and I don't mean mistakes in school about reading and writing,
but life's mistakes,
and if I'd ask you: what has left a deeper track in your story,
the mistakes you have made or the pain that they caused you?
And what causes a reaction in you?
I think the answer would be unanimous:
it is pain that determines the reaction.
But what does pain do?
I'll explain it in a few minutes, otherwise they will scold me,
I will ask you some degrees of freedom,
that is, I ask you to do
something that, in some way, will help us understand immediately.
Give yourself a pinch, a strong one.
I'm asking you: what is this, pain or suffering?
It's pain.
Because we have millions of alerts
that from the structure we are hitting,
send us neuroelectric information.
Because the brain sends, through the peripheral nervous system,
this biochemical boiler that produces energy,
many information and says: "Beware! It hurts."
Why does it tell us "it hurts"?
Because we must remember
that we should no longer find ourselves in that situation,
because it will hurt us.
It begins to trace memories, telling us:
"Away from here! It will hurt."
So what are these extraordinary emotions?
Here you can read it:
they are incredible processes on a neurofunctional level.
I teach my students
about this biochemical boiler that produces energy
because we sleep and we produce three Hertz,
we are awake, as in this moment, and we produce nine Hertz.
But it takes just an emotion, a drop of any emotion,
like the one I'm feeling right now,
and although I explain these things even in much more complex contexts,
it's making me far more emotional,
because I have a big goal: that is, to talk with you.
Eventually I will tell you.
And this emotion is so powerful
that, although my brain is very well trained,
my voice makes it explicit.
And I can't control the voice
because the emotion is more powerful than the cognitive system,
it is the great decision maker.
And it's a smart decision maker but it has only two answers,
which are: "it hurts" or "it's good for me".
"It hurts" or "it's good for me".
Emotions exist in our evolutionary system
to tell us: "run away" if it hurts, "keep it and look for more" if it's good.
And how does it tell us so?
It tells us this through an incredible hertzian mechanism.
If we have a moment of joy, we have a hertzian peak
in which the wave that takes place is a wave with a very high intensity
but very very short.
Why are high intensity waves that short?
Because the memory of joy must be traced;
but since joy is good,
as everything that makes us feel good, the brain has to find it again.
And so the moment of joy is short,
because this will trigger the mechanism of the search for joy.
But if instead of joy we feel anguish, anxiety, fear,
then the wave is very different.
Because it is at low intensity, it is below the threshold of conscience,
it remains invisible from the mind, it stays down there.
Because it has to give an alert that says:
"Remember, remember, remember."
"Run away from here, it hurts. Run away from here, it hurts."
Our circuits are pervaded by waves that say:
"Run away, because it hurts."
And the energy we produce is an energy that tells us:
"Run away, because it hurts".
It seems there is no way out.
On the contrary, there is.
I told you, it's not the mind that controls emotions,
It is a great illusion.
As a cognitive scientist, at some point I had to give up.
Make yoursel feel "comfort", for example, as an emotion.
Can you do it?
Make yourself feel "understanding".
Now order yourself to feel a connection between each other.
You can't do it!
But look, we have switches,
and these switches are catalysts.
We can't turn on the light with our mind,
we have to use the right switch!
And we have to figure out the right switch for emotions.
For example, if I ask you,
please, look into each other's eyes with understanding. Go.
Please, hug one another for 30 seconds, come on!
Please, stroke one another a caress, a caress of comfort.
If we measure now the heartbeat,
if we measure temperature,
if we look at markers, such as skin color,
and the acidity of the sweat that has been released,
we would see a change in indexes
because we have activated very powerful neuroelectric circuits.
These are the organizers. These are the switches.
Just think that hugging for 30 seconds
commands the amygdala to produce oxytocin,
the hormone that grants, at the time of birth,
the ability of a woman to resist pain.
30 seconds of hugging.
So, as my son said,
I started explaining to people
that learning to look kids in the eyes,
learning to hug them, learning to caress them,
creates permanent memories in the circuit,
which are tied to emotions that build well-being
and not uneasiness.
It's water and bread.
Science has returned to water and bread.
And in which memories do the emotions go?
Emotions, it's interesting,
because when we put so much effort,
into studying, to try and remember,
in that moment we consume energy.
Instead the memories that are determined by an immediate trace
are the memories that hold emotions.
But then, if we,
at some point in our emotional short-circuit,
we do something like those things which always happen,
that is, for example, I study, I learn, I struggle, I experiment anxiety,
my memory stores what I studied
but also the anxiety with which I memorized that.
And when I go back and take from the drawer of my memory
what I have studied,
I take back not only the information that I put there
but also the emotions with which I traced it.
And so anxiety enters the circuit
and becomes an information that creates a short-circuit.
And if I learn with fear, I will retrieve the fear;
and if I learn with lack of self-esteem I will retrieve the lack of self-esteem.
But if I learn by challenging myself I will recover the challenge to myself.
And this, I told you before, happens for thousandths of a second
up to whole years and years
in which the educating system
can pollute the mental circuits
or cause a pandemic healing.
I am in favour of this pandemic healing,
also because as a person of science what I have to be aware of
are also the sciences that stand close.
And the research on epigenetics made me tremble.
Why? Because by studying what happens to little mice
that during pregnancy are put into ice water,
and then they are made to give birth,
it's been noticed, and this data should make us think
that it doesn't happen only to mice,
that their puppies will inherit the fear-alert
for three generations at least.
As if memories of pain
were not only individual but transgenerational.
This means that we pass on, to protect our children,
the thing from which they should protect themselves.
What are the two most troubling emotions,
those that worry me the most?
Guilt and fear.
I can't talk about these,
but I can tell you which are the antagonist emotions.
To guilty conscience
the great antagonist is the right to make mistakes.
If we are aware of this,
that we should raise our children in the right to make mistakes,
in treating error as a process of change, of continuous improvement,
the level of awareness changes.
We said whispers and voices.
Well, if we say "Good", "Good", Good!"
we give completely different information
because it is the emotion that we send with it,
the indicator we are using,
that goes to the great decision maker and says: "protect" or "don't protect".
Now I'll tell you about the last child,
since I just have 18 seconds left.
This last child reveals to you why I've come here,
doing something crazy, between two conferences,
because I'm leaving for Paris for a conference on the brain
that makes me much more anxious.
So, this is not a good day.
But then, why did I come here?
I'll tell you through the story of Anselmo.
Anselmo is an Asperger child with very high cognitive functioning.
Like "Rain Man", to give you an idea.
I met him some years ago because his parents, two doctors,
told me:
"You help so many children in need.
Help him too. Him who speaks four languages, solves maths problems
as if he's attending his second year of university,
draws the Duomo of Milan in a few seconds without mistakes."
But all it takes to upset him, is looking at him
and he goes into all of those typical behaviours,
prototypical of all major autistic syndromes.
I had never tried before to help a child
in what is the ​​development area of proximal emotions
But I thought that in this extraordinary brain,
if the two structures are structures that collaborate synchronously,
I could help the emotions with the cognition.
And what did I do?
I asked him to jot down on a notebook
all the things that caused him fear or anguish,
or a sense of vulnerability.
And I asked him to find,
for each of those, a strategy to overcome this vulnerability.
This strategy didn't have to be particularly sophisticated.
Most of the time it was a strategy of his own,
like stomping his feet on the ground, clapping and snapping his fingers,
but this made
this flow of anxiety go away.
So he filled notebooks and notebooks
with these kind of solutions,
and he came to present these at a conference with 100 teachers.
We had prepared him, mark my words,
to avoid moments of unfavourable reactions to a big audience
and we trained the teachers to not spook him.
But at some point, while he was talking,
one of the teachers gets emotional, she starts crying,
she stands up and applauds.
So all the teachers,
100 teachers, start to cry,
they stand up and applaud, they get emotional.
So he panics and runs behind a curtain.
I go get him, we stomp our feet, I take him by his little finger,
we take a hot chocolate - and I must conclude quickly -
and he tells me:
"Lucangeli, did you see the multiplier?"
I say: "No, not really. What do you mean?"
"There were 100 teachers, Lucangeli, some young, some not so much.
On average they will work another 25 years in school.
Each one of them will have at least 25 students in class.
So, with this hour of lesson,
I've helped, during my life, 62,500 children."
And I'm here for this.
(Applause)
I'm here, and I want to say it,
so that you'll help me practice a helpful kind of science.
I'm here, and I want to say it, so that you'll help me -
and help us, because we're many people,
to practice a helpful kind of science,
so that we'll become much more than 62,500 people.
Thank you, have a good life.
(Applause)