ivan pavlov is probably rolling over in his grave as he observes the conditioned responses of our modern culture from the afterlife. (assuming there is such a thing.) i remember the fun in cleverly assigning custom ring tones to my first iphone.
The Sopranos theme song for all work related contacts.
Batman for luke, because at the time that was his everyday uniform. gnarls barkley's
crazy for that certain friend who fit the bill. and so on.
i didn't realize the conditioned responses i was ingraining until that gnarls barkley song came on the radio years later and i felt my chest seize with anxiety. it's been over ten years now and i still feel that twinge when i hear it.
my phone rings a lot less these days and now i find a chirp or a beep or a bell can change my entire disposition in a split second, as the sounds of communication signal connection and connection evokes emotion and emotion...well, emotion is where it starts and ends for me. so, hindsight being 20/20 and all, i question the wisdom of linking common sounds with emotion laden relationships because there's no 'silent' setting for the world around me.
it's funny how a topic will often cross my path many times before it engages me enough to chase, but when someone mentioned neuroplasticity casually in conversation over the weekend and i laid awake trapped in a pavlovian loop to the sounds outside my window, i woke up on a hunt for a related article i skimmed last week. determined to figure out how to break the link between bell and drool, whistle and wince.
it was medical student jerzy konorski, a student of pavlov, who first coined the term neural plasticity in 1966 as an early theory about the underlying neural mechanisms driving classical conditioning. the concept that our brains are physically changed by the way in which we use them was a breakthrough theory at the time, but today it's an essential tenet of modern neurobiology.
we've all heard it. "what fires together, wires together" whether behavioral, environmental, or mental, we have the power to change our brains. norman vincent peale was ahead of his time and his Power of Positive Thinking was largely ridiculed by the medical community; but "brain training" is everywhere you look now. a quick search on amazon for books with that keyword phrase produced 2,319 titles. most of them published in the past decade.
(point of proof: the
google ngram for the phrase as it's appeared in books over the past 50 years.)
note: this wasn't news to me. i've been a student of this brain changing, world changing, manifesting reality school of thought for ages...i first learned of it in '05-'06, by a film that came out in 2004,
what the bleep do we know, probably right before that graph turns steeply north. i suspect the uptick was around the time of The Secret, film debut in '06 and book first published in '07.
but i digress. what i didn't know.. and what i learned in my reading, is that the rewiring that occurs in our brains, enabled by neuroplasticity, happens primarily while in deep, dreamful, REM sleep.
dun dun dunnnn.
well, no wonder. sleep has been elusive over the past several weeks. the nights are haunted by the periodic call of the tracks nearby and the very sound i strain to hear is the sound i most need to silence...the rumble from within evoked by the rumble from without...and the two holding me just above the escape i need.
d: restorative rest
b: visible and vulnerable
g: extinction via escape
