The Circle of Willis

The Circle of Willis is the glorious name given to the cluster of arteries that feed the base of the brain.

Although I read a lot about the the mechanics of the brain, and spend time kicking rocks and pondering the proto-human's ball of neurons, the miracle of the brain is airy and antiseptic for me.

I much prefer the iconographic version of the Circle of Willis

to the actual picture.



Because while it is amazing that the connections we make with other people get reinforce a set of connections somewhere in the brain, the brain itself is a three pound pink raisin with the consistency of custard. I've only ever seen sheep brains in person and that in many ways is enough for me.

I'm not sure what additional miracles I could glean by sitting in the presence of an actual brain. Maybe as time goes on I'll change my mind.

Before I go, I wanted to add something. There are probably cooler sounding parts of the brain, but they're mostly faux cool, like heavy metal band name cool. For example: the Nodes of Ranvier. Hair metal all the way. .

... and through the magic of Google we find this. Like I suspected, but really, I just now picked the Nodes of Ranvier because I was reading about how the proto-human's spinal cord is myelinating. Maybe they were too, but there is an almost endless supply of Hård Kör names with the [noun] of [super coool sounding proper noun] format.

The Circle of Willis is just sweet.

This Week in Flappy's Proto-Humanhood

Week 19

The dude/tte is pooping. So that's interesting.

After about 16 weeks the kid is swallowing amniotic fluid. Technically it is called meconium but if a greenish-black tarry excretion comes out of your kid's backside, it is poop no matter where they are.



For the topic of this blog here the big exciting activity is myelination of the spinal cord. Myelin is like that rubber coating on a wire. It keeps electrical activity where it belongs and speeds it along.



Multiple sclerosis attacks the cells that make the myelin. You lose that little bit of infrastructure, the wiring insulation, and you aren't you anymore except in the least important ways.

The Scrap Book

I started an art project where I placed a strip of white out tape on a map wherever I had driven that day. By the end of the week, my commute was ten strips deep, while the route from home to the beach was only one layer deep (I got ice cream instead of heading straight home).

The Artist's Statement: the map is no longer a metaphor of the city, reproducible, generic and static. It was now particular, valuable and evolving. It was a physical record -specific to me and my choices- of my life. Because you don't leave tiretracks behind you when you ride your motorcycle on asphalt.

I was a reading an amazing book after my wife, Mikaela got pregnant. It's called What's Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Professor Lise Eliot.

While reading about the developing proto-human inside my wife, I had this realization that the form of that tangle of neurons inside my kid's head would ultimately take was more than just simply a text, a metaphor of their life. The number and character of the neural connections inside the skull would be manifestations of the number and character of human connections and experiences that existed outside in the world.

On Spitzer

This blog has focused a lot recently on the neuroscience part of the rooting. Because I'm a geek. But, my interest in mucking about with neurons and synapses and dendrititic spines is two-sided. At least.

The motivation for stepping out the door onto this journey was deep curiosity (mixed with gin and fear) about how do that dance with your child that roots them and frees them at the same time.


This kid. Growing in my wife.

Then along comes this implosion of a life, Elliot Spitzer, the first major public figure to go black hole since I became a proto-father, and it captures my attention like the glowing tip of a branding iron.

How were these two people, Elliot and Ashley brought together for their rootless encounter in that hotel?

Spitzer's biography is widely known but crucially incomplete. But from the young woman, beyond some music, she is a a few inert photographs and the crippled biography.

But, my path has not been easy. When I was 17, I left home. It was my decision and I've never looked back. Left my hometown. Left a broken family. Left abuse. Left an older brother who had already split... I have been alone. I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless.

But, I survived, on my own.

- from her MySpace page

Contrast the real life story with the story spun on the emperor's club website:

We specialize in introductions of: fashion models, pageant winners and exquisite students, graduates and women of successful careers (finance, art, media etc…) to gentlemen of exceptional standards... Each of our companions is a product of an exceptionally fine background and a success in her right.

I don't pity her. She made her choices and wears "survivor" like a mantle. But, as an aside, why did she have to survive THIS particular thing?

I reserve my pity for the lost Spitzer boy's self-loathing.

People think it was hubris and that he must have been a fraud, but that’s not right,” another aide said of the former governor. “He was a very good man who lost himself... He couldn’t meet the expectations of the public or the expectations he set for himself.

- from Sifting the Wreckage for the Real Eliot Spitzer in the NYTimes

He was clearly a man who left a trail of alienation and misery.

Two people, together, in that hotel room. Never two people more alone. Did they think this was the best they deserved? A financial transaction and physical coupling? When did he come to believe that this was what he was worthy of? It feels, from what I've read, that it was a long time ago.

And how do inoculate our kid from that lonely ignorance of the goodness in the world?

Walking Hand In Hand- Of Roots & Synapses

When you look at a picture of the synaptic connections of an embryo, and then at a map of the synaptic connections of a two year old and then again at those of a ten year old, they don't look at all like the same species let alone the same being.


Drawings of basal dendrites; a, newborn; b, 3 months; c, 6 months; d, 15 months; e, 24 months; f, adult (from Schade & van Groenigen 1961).



The embryo's neurons wander isolated and alone. They are disconnected. It looks, to me, an interested amateur, like dry sticks scattered on the sand. I have always been fascinated by the intersection of science and art. I understand through metaphor. But in the Cy Twombly scatterings of the embryo's mind I saw not metaphor but actual alien-ness. This is what my child is right now at 17 weeks. And it isn't human.

The mind of a two year old though is an abandoned backyard of weeds and vines. It looks like a conversation in a San Francisco restaurant sounds: vibrant and ever evolving but loud, echoey and disoriented. The neurons that were so close together deep in the womb are still connected, but they can live billions of neurons away now, linked by a hash of long distance connections. The springtime efflorescence of the mind is at its most wildly plastic. But this too is not human. Yet.

By the time a child is ten years old, the scouring is well under way. Things have been tidied up. Synaptic connections that have not been used wither away. A door closes. Behind is the period of near limitless plasticity. But ahead is mastery, rootedness and creation within limits. It is the cull after the wilderness of the neural springtime that ultimately makes us human.

That's where I come in. Because by... sorry, we. Where me and my wife come in. Because by October, I'll be a father. And that child, whoever he/she is, will need to be rooted in this earth and to other people. And we'll be doing it.

And how exactly is that done? How does a child become engaged in life? And how exactly does this brain of ours map that world and re-weave human experience in a fabric of axons and dendrites and synapses?

Let's find out.

Beginnings

Pregnant. So it’s clear, because everyone tells you, that my life will never be the same.

I mean that is generally true, right? Your life is always moving forward. Accelerating it feels like. A river rushing from mountaintops to the sea.

But there are certain moments that feel like rapids you’ll never retrace. We’ve all had moments when we knew if we needed to lick our wounds repeat the third grade, or move back into the basement.

And then there are the moments that make it clear you cannot turn around to create even the simulacrum of your life. You cannot paddle up Niagara Falls. It’s a one way street. When my Mom died. When my kid is born.

So there's this… unbelievably gigantic cataract in the river. When we decided to get pregnant you expect to go over those falls, but you can’t tell when you’ve gone over. It all happens hidden away.

Until one day she pees on a stick and you look back and there is the wall of water behind you and in front of you is the great unknown.

Who will this child be? What will my life be like? What will be important to me? Who will my friends be? What will I eat? How will I connect to the world around me and how will I connect my child to the life of this world.

Will I be a good father? Will my child have solid roots? How do we connect to one another authentically?

That is the inquiry we’re making on The Root System. You can always connect to us at Ben@therootsystem.net.