The electrical tape of the brain – Myelin
Back in May, KERA Think’s Krys Boyd conducted an interview with Daniel Coyle who shared a bit about his book The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How. While I highly desire to read this book, and encourage anyone to listen to this podcast there is one aspect of the interview that really slammed home for me.
Narrative therapy assumes that there are many stories we tell ourselves and hear, but there are some which become dominate and play out in our lives. The role of the narrative therapist is to help people hear the absent but implicit story that is not hear or even known. Once these other stories are able to be heard then the individual has a choice to live out the story they want to live out. Narrative therapy does not try to remove the other stories, because those stories are part of the person’s life, but rather give the ability to live a different story.
In the podcast interview, Coyle argues there is this stuff in our brains called Myelin which works like electrical tape in our brains. As different parts of our brain becomes wired together, myelin is a tissue that wraps around these wires and makes the connection stronger and keeps it from connecting to other parts of the brain.
The thing about Myelin is you and I cannot unwrap it. We can only wrap new Myelin.
This connects with the Narrative Therapy approach in that we do not (because we often cannot) remove connections or stories in our lives. But the Good News is, we can create new stories, new realities, new lives.
The Good News is we can can always wrap new tape.
Do you have it all together?
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} catch(err) {}I am sure you have been asked for money from someone who is on the street. I often pride myself of being able to deal with any request which may come from a person in need. If the request is food, I take them to get whatever they would like. Gas? We go to a gas station and get enough to fill the tank. Bus pass? I can get you several.
But I got hit up with a request the other day and I had no clue what to do.
“Hey man, you got any weed?”
It really took me for a loop. I had no idea what to respond with. I had just purchased some milk and oatmeal for my son and my only response was, “I got oatmeal you can have.” To which he said, “Oatmeal! That won’t work!”
Won’t work?
I was confused, felt awkward and continued to walk home with my head down avoiding eye contact out with anyone out of shame.
Reflecting on this incident, I wanted to ask, “have you ever felt like you had all your stuff together only to be confronted with a situation which you never considered and it threw you for a loop?”
What would you have done?
Narrative Theology
Narrative approach is about raising awareness to a story which has gotten lost in the messiness of life.
For instance, a man is in prison and is told they are a criminal and no longer serve as a contributing member of society. A therapist comes along and talks with the individual and then goes back to his office. Three years later, the criminal and therapist talk again and the criminal says, “You changed my life! Our session together made me want to become a better person and seek out parole. I am getting out of prison and going into social work. You are a great and wonderful person.”
The therapist says, “I do not remember ever talking with you. What did we talk about?
“You told me I had a high I.Q.”
The therapist did not do anything at all, he did not make this person have a higher I.Q. All he did was raise to the surface a story which was already there but lost in the dominate story of ‘you are a criminal and have nothing to offer society.’
I think the reason I put so much pressure on myself for lessons and sermons is because I feel a deep need to raise to the surface stories which are down out by a more dominate story. I think there is a great deal of freedom when the another story is given equal footing to a particular (potentially damaging and dangerous) dominate Christian story.
Yes, Jesus died for sin (this is the dominate story) but there are so many other reasons Jesus died that to give those stories voices I think would bring people back to and into the church.
It did for me.
Sermon: Isaiah 40:3-5 (story taken from Tipping Point)
3A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’
A study at Princeton Theological Seminary asked seminarians to prepare a short, extemporaneous talk on a given biblical theme, and then walk over to a nearby building to present it. The students’ anxiety was palpable. Many of the students feverishly prepared images and stories on the parable they were assigned, while others frantically attempted to recall all the information they could from their New Testament classes and made lists of relevant information. Some were so nervous and stressed they found a place of quite and took deep breaths, while others coped with the stress by hanging out with friends cracking jokes. Some of the students prepared a lengthy talk, while others thought a community conversation would be the best approach. Others were concerned that their approach to the task was inferior to the approach of their classmates, and some became so stressed by the idea of talking off the cuff; they rejected the assignment and went home. Along the way to the presentation, each student ran into a man slumped in an alley, head down, eyes closed, coughing and groaning. The question was, “who would stop and help?”
Every year during December I am so busy preparing for what is to come. I line out my schedule, RSVP to parties my family is invited to, run from store to store during my lunch break to buy gifts for my family so they do not suspect what I am buying. This December there is a lot of talk about consumer confidence and the effects of the credit crisis in the economy. The demon of consumerism had taken over so much so that a man was tramped to death at a Wal-Mart when he could not get out of the way of a stamped of people in time. I am stressed to get projects, assignments and obligations completed so that I can take time off from work and not feel too overwhelmed once I return. The conversations dealing with where our family will spend Christmas this year are only complicated even more now that Estee and I have a son who happens to be the first grandchild on both sides of our families. December is a month of being rushed.
The researchers in the Princeton Theological Seminary study included three variables: (1) the background of the subject – whether they had entered seminary as a way of helping people or not, (2) which parable they were to prepare – several were given the Good Samaritan parable as their subject, and (3) a time context, saying either that they were running several minutes late and should hurry up, or that they were early and had some time to spare. The results were interesting. The first two variables had no effect. Whether somebody had devoted their life in service to their fellow man, or even whether they had just been reminded of the value of altruism by preparing a speech on the Good Samaritan, had no effect on whether they stopped and helped. “The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush. Of the group that was rushed, 10% stopped to help. Of the group who knew they had a few minutes to spare, 63% stopped.” In other words, all of one’s attitudes and feelings are over-ridden by subtle clues in the environment, they were rushed and in a hurry.
If December is a month of being rushed from one event to the next; if December is a month of constantly being in a hurry in order to get the best deal on a gift, will I also be overcome and rush past strangers coughing and groaning in an alley? Or will I overcome being rushed and prepare the way of the Lord so the glory of the Lord shall be revealed so all people shall see it together?
National Day of Listening with my parents
StoryCorps. of NPR is encouraging Americans on the day after Thanksgiving to sit with a loved one and record a conversation. You can check it out at http://www.nationaldayoflistening.org/ if you are interested.
I interviewed my mother and father on Thanksgiving Day each for about 50 minutes. I asked the basic, “where did you come from and grow up” questions. Some of the answers I knew but most I did not. My parents and I do not talk all that much about their past and so it was interesting to hear all about what they had to say. We set up a video camera and filmed each session. It was great. I hope to catalogue these conversations each year and put them into a digital format in the years to come so that my children will have stories of grandparents straight from them.
I highly recommend anyone and everyone to take time this season and listen to their stories. But be careful, you may just realize as I did that no one is a self-made person and chance and luck effect life more than I know. For instance my son would not be alive without the good fortune of my fathers name being drawn out of a hat when he was 20 years old (that’s a good story…)
Parable of attending morning prayer
This story was told in the book Singing the Lord’s Song in a New Land. The book uses this story as a way of talking about the importance of going to morning prayer as a Korean American Christian. I think it is good to think about for when we wake up on Sunday mornings…
A man decides that he will get up early in the morning to go up the mountain to pray. The first morning, he gets up and goes up to the top of the mountain and prays. On his way back down to his house, he says to himself, “Why should God only be on the top of the mountain? God must be in the middle of the mountain.” So the next morning he gets up and goes halfway up the mountain and prays. On his way back down to his house, he says to himself, “Why should God only be in the middle of the mountain, God must also be at the foot of the mountain.” The next morning, he gets up and goes to the foot of the mountain and prays. On his way back down to his house, he says to himself, “Why should God only be at the foot of the mountain? God must also be in my bed.” The next morning he wakes up to pray in his bed, but cannot keep his eyes open. So he falls asleep.
Looking out each others bunghole…
Jerry Chism tells this story about a preacher who wanted to illustrate to the congergation that we need to be willing to walk a mile in another’s shoes. Apparently this “walking” analogy was not good enough and the preacher created another.
In the middle of his sermon he feels he is loosing the congergation’s attention or that he is speaking over their heads, so he pulls an image out to help articultate his point. He said we all live in our own barrel and in order to see the world we look out of the hole in the barrel. For those of you who do not know the hole in a barrel which holds liquid is called a bunghole. So we all are living and looking at the world through our own bunghole. What I need to do is get into you barrel and look out your bunghole and you need to get into my barrel and look out through my bunghole.
The preacher was dead serious.
Just a story to share.
