On our Name

Mirror Neurons Community is devoted to discussing the possibilities of older people coming together and figuring out how to live better lives.

Mirror neurons are neurons that help nonverbal communication and are said to be responsible for empathy and so on. It is in the early stages of research and cognitive scientists are excited about this type of neurons that may one day fully explain how forgiveness transforms the other person in an instant, how deep transformative person-to-person healing processes may not require words or transpersonal “miracles” including the power of prayer.

This site is not about mirror neurons. It’s about older people. The name of this blog is (recklessly) speculative. There is much neural research going on about mirror neurons. I speculate that mirror neurons are either more in older people or work better in them. So a scientific idea is borrowed for a discussion on a family/ societal issue.

While I would like to acknowledge with thanks the neural scientists working in the area, I would like to offer my apologies to those who may unwittingly come here surfing for mirror neurons only to find the name “hijacked” for a cause such as old-age togetherness.

For me personally my recklessness is an effort of integration (of mirror neurons and old age) in a world that is hopelessly disintegrated... an effort of love and hope...

Thank you

Shankar

What is Wisdom?

As we grow older we are able to increasingly connect, in a cognitive and affective sense, apparently disparate things. This is what “good” experience is all about. For a teacher the connection we are talking of would mean, for instance, using the experience gained in getting a low performer to be a high achiever in situation A to be used for another student in a different situation, call it B, to succeed. The educator unconsciously sees a pattern where the two students and their situations, even if completely different to an external observer, are seen as instances of a bigger something. The teacher is able to transcend the apparent differences between the two cases and get to something higher: some cogno-affective whole. This is really abstraction; not in a narrow scholastic sense, but in a living active sense. This kind of abstraction is wisdom.

All of us grew up with some great stories. Here, what comes to mind is the “Prince and the Spider” story where the prince, vanquished and imprisoned, learns the lesson of determination from a spider that keeps rebuilding its broken web an untold number of times to finally get it right to climb out of the cellar. The wise king is able to make a connection between the spider and himself. This is a process of abstraction – the two lives (of oneself and the spider) meeting at a higher plane where determination is that unifying “something”. The two disparate lives are connected at a higher level of “will”, never mind whether those are of the brave prince and a mere spider. After all both are creations of God!

The proof of the pudding lies in eating it. The precocious prince after all escaped the prison and won the war with the lesson learnt from the spider.

All of us grew up with some stories which in our childhood made sense to us in their concreteness. The concrete reality with its theatrical qualities impressed us. As we get older the stories acquire a different meaning. Their concreteness or “reality value” is immaterial. One is almost indifferent to the whether the story was real or not. The story is real even if it has not happened. It’s real for its potential. This kind of thinking is useful and older people have greater capacity for such thinking. According to Elkhonon Goldberg (author of “The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Gets Older”) this capacity is on account of more neural firing in a brain that simply worked longer.

When Hormones turn less Dictatorial

Isn’t it interesting to think of how slavish we are to our hormones? Hormones that mark youth and which we were all proud of carrying around in our youth! In youth we were compelled to act in ways we didn’t want to. As we get older the play of the hormones come to exert less domineering roles.

Take the case of dopomine, a hormone, a neurotransmitter. In his research, Professor Dilip Jeste of the University of California at San Diego, found lesser levels of dopamine in older brains which he found was linked to making older people less impulsive, reflective and wiser. You can read a non-academic article on this at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1289300/With-age-really-DOES-come-wisdom-say-scientists.html

Can we generalize and say that there are some places where we get freer as we get older. Is it that the physical gets replaced by the mental?