“This trembling web”: The brain and beyond

keep looking. We're told, "Be patient", or "just wait and you'll see it". In this way we're learning to avoid our brain’s predominant tendency to seek novelty. If children are brought up in an atmosphere where parents don't have time to interact with them playing a game, or reading, or even when watching television, then a very important input is missing in the sculpting of the attention systems of the brain.

Griffin: Do you think there's a critical period for that?

Robertson: We know that the frontal lobes of the brain aren't fully in place until the late teens; the synaptic pruning isn't complete. But there's a hugely greater degree of plasticity up until age seven. All the wiring is in place by age seven, but there's still a lot of things happening at a decreasingly accelerating curve until the late teens. So to that extent I think, yes, that the earlier effects will be the more potent.

Griffin: And do you feel that there's more that psychological input from parents and others could contribute to reduce the incidence of ADHD, rather than go the route of treating it massively with Ritalin, as in the United States?

Robertson: Yes, I've no doubt that appropriate, consistent interactions by interested, loving adults who give priority to their interactions with their children and who provide appropriate structure would cause a considerable reduction in the number of diagnosed ADHD children.

Griffin: Your concept of how we can continually develop and nourish the human brain through the types of input we give it also has particular ramifications for elderly people and people who are isolated. If brains, to function optimally, need certain forms of stimulation, it is important to help such people in a way that encourages their brains to stay healthy. Are there any suggestions that you might give to those of our readers who are working with the elderly and people who are isolated?

Robertson: There is a very interesting set of studies done by Gordon Winocur and his colleagues in Toronto. They found that in Canada people often move into semi-sheltered care not because they actually need it at that time but because they anticipate having difficulties with, say, the bad weather in winter and things like that. The researchers found that on average, in these people, you can plot a decline in cognitive function as measured by standardised neuropsychological tests, compared to that in people who stay in their own homes, coping albeit with some difficulty.

They found that the critical psychological variable in those who opted for the semi-sheltered accommodation was a sense of control. Those who had a tendency to perceive themselves as victims of external forces as opposed to having a more internally driven role in their own lives were the ones who were much more likely to show this cognitive decline. So, in terms of people who are looking after elderly people, the British government's policy of trying to keep people as much as possible in their homes and providing supports for them is absolutely the right one from this perspective.

I think, if there is one single critical variable, it is ensuring or fostering a sense of control on the part of the elderly person, even in a tiny way. There was one study by Ellen Langer at Yale claiming that just giving people in an elderly residential home the duty of keeping a certain plant watered had significant effects on the residents' survival and quality of life. And I'd lay money on it that, when you give control like that, what you are doing is forcing activation of the systems in the brain that make plans and monitor and form intentions — namely, the frontal lobes.

Griffin: And presumably there are also implications from the findings in your book for what people should do as they get elderly. Perhaps, for instance, the idea that we've had for so long of retiring early is not such a brilliant one?

Robertson: Ooh, retirement is a terrible thing, unless you are retiring for something. If you are retiring, saying "It's all getting too much for me and I just want to put my feet up", then I think you'd have to be careful or at least you'd have to make plans to be doing something else. I guess in Britain something like 40 per cent of all people over 55 are no longer working — it may not be quite that but it is some enormous number, one of the biggest in Europe — so there are a lot of people who in a sense are stopping work extremely early in their lives. If I had to retire early, I wouldn't call it retirement even to myself. I'd call it my new career. Now that career might not involve money, it might not involve traditional career ideas. It might be that my new career will be walking or exploring or writing or gardening. I think you have to represent it to yourself as something positive.

Griffin: And whatever it is presumably needs to involve mental stimulation. The brain has to be continually resculpting to stay flexible, needing new learnings, new education, new life experiences ...

Robertson: Well, we already know by studying older people's brains as they try and remember that, if they are given faces to remember, they will show less activity in the left frontal lobe than younger people. Now that may be because there's some structural change in the connectivity of that part of the brain, meaning there can be less activity. But it may also mean, and there's some evidence for this, that they are less used to engaging in the act of learning that as younger people we are forced to do, by necessity, all the time. So we do our training when we're young, in school, at university or during an apprenticeship, but then there's a tendency for us to say, "Ah! That's me trained now. I'll get into a job and I will practise this skill." Increasingly we run off well rehearsed routines and we're not learning in the way we had to learn as students.

In my job now, I don't do many statistical analyses on the computers, I don't run many experiments. I'm in a mainly supervisory role, so there are a whole set of cognitive skills that I'm no longer using. There is some evidence that not all but a proportion of age-related cognitive deficits is attributable to the fact that we are not engaging in the learning that we had to do when we were younger. You can't write off all age-related deficits like that, but a proportion is due to being out of the habit of learning new things. And, you know, I think that's one reason you can see judges who are mentally acute at age 68 or 70. Partly it is that they tend to be very intelligent people in the first place, but it may also partly be that they are forced to use their reasoning and memory capacities constantly to their full limits, because every case they hear is different.

Griffin: Then we'll leave that there! Before we draw our conversation to a close I want to come back to counselling. We feel that there is a need to reground psychotherapy and counselling in an awareness of the various levels within which we operate as human beings. For example, we are biological creatures as well as sociological creatures, and sources of information germane to the practice of counselling can come variously from biology, physiology, sociology, anthropology, social psychology and so on. We have to be willing to look at psychotherapy in a more holistic way and also in a more objective way. So we must look at evidence, and move past old ideologies to look for what's actually working.

Robertson: I wish you well because I think that's a brilliant enterprise. I am dismayed at how counselling and psychotherapy practice in many areas has become wilfully divorced from evidence and science, to the extent of becoming self perpetuating cults in some cases. I'm just delighted to hear that there's a movement like this and I don't think there's any alternative to what you're proposing.

Griffin: You yourself, of course, are an example of what we're talking about because you are both a clinical psychologist and a neuropsychologist, actively investigating in both these very strongly connected but often differently perceived domains of activity.

Robertson: Absolutely. I would love to see the curricula and the British Psychological Society regulations about the operating of counselling psychology degrees revised completely in accord with the principles you've just outlined because I've agreed with almost everything you've said today, and particularly the fact that no one has a right to pick and choose a theory as a matter of personal preference and then offer it as a service to someone when there is a possibility that that service might do harm, as you've pointed out. We have to progress towards evidence based practice and get away from cults and ideologies, I really couldn't agree more.

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© Human Givens Publishing Limited, Joe Griffin and Ian Robertson (2000)

This article first appeared in Volume 7, No, 3 (2000) of the Human Givens journal.

PROFESSOR IAN ROBERTSON is professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin, director of Trrinity College Institute of Neuroscience, and is visiting professor at University College London, with a further appointment in Toronto. He was formerly a scientist at the medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and is one of the world's leading researchers on brain rehabilitation, on which subject he has published numerous scholarly books and scientific papers, including Mind Sculpture.

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more about psychosis and the new thinking on its causes at the following MindFields College seminars:

Understanding the mental health continuum

Brief psychotherapy strategies

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more about psychosis and the new thinking on its causes at the following MindFields College seminars:

Understanding the mental health continuum

Brief psychotherapy strategies

Return to top