A seasoned and well-respected politician went on record recently describing our new century so far as The Biggest Loser. In his opinion, because people lost money, possessions, homes, jobs, and health insurance, it should be scrapped.
Losing any of this is a harsh reality. Losing all of it at once is traumatic. I know, because I did, including and entire family. But I’m still here, and my enthusiasm about what people are creating around me couldn’t be better. I hunt daily for exciting transformations I can jump into and be part of, realizing I haven’t lost my future.
What this politician seems to have apparently lost is his awareness of the historic revolution occurring in our brains. All the inventiveness in cosmology, medicine, health, music, mathematics, physics, biology, environmental science, genetics, business, communication, and social networks is hard to miss. Even more disconcerting is the realization those we voted into office could be so inattentive. For his pessimistic view, there are a dozen optimistic ones to replace it, but the grades lately on the State of the Union seem to be D’s and F’s. Dread, Fear, and now, Failure.
This is one reason why I think many in our new century are so disenchanted and disconnected from their society and the political, governmental and corporate institutions they depended on for health of their country and their survival. Many were born in time to experience the Great Depression, first Global Wars, Ecology and Peace Movement of the ‘60’s, and now the Digital Technology Revolution of the 21st Century. Many could benefit from an upbeat report on our brain’s ability to change, expand, and improve our world in any way we choose.
A Body is a Terrible Thing to Waste
I view our national healthcare crisis a crisis of mental health. The perceived limitations of our body and brain and lack of awareness of the massive scientific accomplishments in the last ten years is a Silent Killer. It has resulted in a self-imposed alienation by a last century mindset that is distancing millions further from society and each other, the majority who will live much longer than they planned on.
Healthcare reform is galvanizing Washington right now, but what for and for whom? People want freedom from pain and disease, but as Deepak Chopra documented, cultures we want to emulate that are over 100 years old with lucid awareness and excellent health got there in ways most are unwilling to do. As long as there is on-demand affordable medical attention to fix the smallest of hurts, what’s the incentive? A video of a 102 year-old woman who never had a healthcare plan, carrying firewood up ten flights of stone stairs and then back down to carry up the great-great-great-grandkids, creates a shockwave of disbelief in many viewers.
The Dolphin Club, swimming out of San Francisco to Alcatraz and back daily are a bunch of “oldsters”, made famous along with others in “Growing Old Is Not For Sissies”. One of my 70-something bicycle-racing friends, who got me into racing, is still racing. He just returned from his annual group tour of 12 days of 80 to 100 miles of 7500 vertical feet daily, riding the best mountain sections of the Tour de France route. When I called him to confirm my estimates weren’t overblown, he was offended and crunched more impressive numbers for me out of his head. He also confirmed the others were younger and didn’t have to wait. His secret is not diet or medical insurance, which he barely uses. He just never gets off the bike.
The Lost Generation
In the ‘60’s, where massive opposition to an older generation ruled, the majority who were disrupting Town Hall meetings on health care reform last year were of “a certain age”. “Boomers” preparing to “retire”, targeted all they had left - their impending mortality and key politicians and lawmakers voted into office on the Internet that are younger and healthier.
Where have these revolutionaries and visionaries been all this time since they fearlessly disrupted their university campuses vigorously enough to risk their mortality and get themselves shot decades ago? Why didn’t they follow through on their altruistic agendas rather than tune in, turn on, and drop out? Are we not cheering them on because the voting majority doesn’t even know their team existed? Why did it take an ecology movement so long to get moving? Does this affect our confidence in their ability to create change? It’s tougher still, when the memorable local news on our influential elders is a 911 response to a retirement community because residents are rioting over other residents pirating their parking spaces. Do we view this as socially relevant? Is this the legacy they plan on leaving us?
When I ask someone why they are “retiring”, which is my version of getting a good night’s sleep after a five hour bike ride, they tell me they want to “stop working”. When I ask what they plan to start, I don’t get much back other than play with the grandkids and get a grip on that landscaping and the lawn. When they ask me what I plan to do, my first thought is I have to check Wiki for the definition of “retire”, because now I’m confused. I don’t plan to stop anything.
Those “retired” and planning to “retire” seem completely disinterested in communing with a younger, politically powerful, brilliantly savvy information rich generation who just might have keys to the car. Their effective lobbyists are “youngsters” right under their nose, who just pulled of a stunning revival of their discarded ecology agenda.
Generation gaps are nothing new. Older people know too much to listen to younger people who know too little. This may have sounded valid in the last century but it doesn’t now. My parents thought this way, and the exceptions are few. Isn’t this getting, uh, old?
In my local bank is a sign “donate a laprobe to the elderly”. My comment to the teller was “I thought it said donate a laptop to the elderly, and I have an extra one”. She told me she was sorry, retirement facilities don’t accept laptops. Somewhere though, R&D money is surfacing for the development of robotic teddy bears to keep company with our elders until their brains wear out, at a time when Alzheimer’s disease is an epidemic. And science has proven an active brain dramatically reduces the frequency of this catastrophic end to life. Nuns live longer and smarter because they just hang out playing complicated card games and doing crossword puzzles for entertainment.
What if retirees pooled some money after they mow the lawn and provide Wifi to nursing homes? Would helping an elder learn how to use my donated laptop to discover the world and socially network with other nursing home residents be one way to contribute to health care reform?
Do It Yourself
Self-advocacy, thanks to our new electronic world and social networks, is the gift we have given ourselves in a new century. Even now, my chosen primary care physician of many years still has the same response after a five-minute conversation. “Well, you probably know more about this than I do. Let me know what you come up with and we’ll go from there”. In no way do I view him as a clueless professional. He’s been around and still does his own research. I view him as a collaborative partner, and he goes with it because he knows I take responsibility to zero in on myself first. He takes responsibility for ruling over the final diagnosis and follows through if more is involved. It’s a win-win. We both learn, and I save a lot of money.
I don’t know anyone in my network community that doesn’t surf the Internet for answers to their illness, injury, and fitness. The load on physicians, surgeons, and diagnosticians is so huge, there is no way we can expect them to be current on everything. The minute they graduate, research as memorialized in a phonebook-sized PDR bought fresh out of med school is obsolete. Primary care physicians have dropped off the radar to make room for specialists in a thousand fields of fresh expertise, resulting in a committee required to figure out what’s wrong with us.
It’s a scientific fact many with disease recover, sometimes miraculously, through self-advocacy. By taking charge, they rocket their immune system into high gear. Refusing to be victimized by disease and not handing all the controls over to others is how humans have survived against tremendous odds. If you visit the Lance Armstrong Foundation website, there’s a miraculous story daily to prove how effective self-advocacy can be. Lance was invited on our training ride just before his disease, and even then, he was self-advocating and fearless. It’s in his blood. When people challenge me about his purported blood “enhancement”, I tell them, all he’s got in him is fearless blood. I think that alone is the key to his survival and success.
How do we patch all this? Maybe we don’t, whoever “we” are now. Too much agenda already. Live and let live. Like dinosaurs, adapt or face extinction. This is the world as we have known it, and many still don’t feel fine, so maybe it’s time for another approach. We’re smarter than dinosaurs. We’ve had some time to enhance our DNA. We’ve learned from lifetimes of experience. We’ve run out of excuses for just sitting this one out.
The Brain That Changes Itself
If decades researching science on the brain and my own experience has enlightened me on anything, it’s that we can change our brain, which is like any other muscle. It needs regular strengthening or it atrophies. Being athletic also helps enormously with the blood flow up there.
Contrary to previous reports, we don’t use part of our brain capacity, we use all of it. Instrumentation shows every millimeter of the brain lights up with activity. We can activate all of it just by choosing to do so. There appears to be no speed limit or cap on the bandwidth of our brain. IQ tests indicate we just keep getting smarter, faster. Brains of all ethnicities, culture, and age, regardless of genetics add 3 IQ points every ten years. Since World War II, statistics add 12 more every ten years for a total of 15. Adding another 6 for being Dutch totals 21. If you live in the US, add about ten more for the heritable influences of a technology revolution approaching the speed of light, and 30 sounds like a brain revolution in action.
People want science to prove anything. We are addicted to the word. It dispels our uneasy feelings about belief, disbelief, and skepticism. It’s the new Comfort Food. “I was skeptical I existed until science proved it to me.“ If people want proof, now they have it in great supply, thanks to piles of data our brain has created through new forms of technology.
In “The Brain That Changes Itself”, Norman Doidge confirms changing how and what we think changes our brain and changes our lives. Our human vehicle is a miracle of science. We have a fully functioning R-complex, limbic system, pre-frontal cortex, and left and right hemispheric processors performing surgical distinction between calculative logic and full virtual perception, all with regenerative plasticity. We are a five dimensional, fully equipped cloud computing organism with renewable software capable of such synaptic orchestration and creative brilliance it will take another ten years for the Blue Brain Project to replicate all of it and potentially replace our brains. It’s making impressive progress, so if we’re slacking . .
As David Wilcock comments “This is not a cosmic ‘light switch’ that you sit around waiting for – it is an elective process where you either reach higher and higher states of inspiration . . . or are further and further shaken to pieces if you cling to the riverbank in fear of who and what you are.”
