Rewiring My Brain
Neuro-programming, toe yoga, kindness, and how reality comes from the barrel of a gun
I think about my feet a lot. I’ve been a walker all my life. My feet have taken me meandering though a handful of the great cities of the world, they’ve guided me away from danger and chaos, they’ve led me to discover mysteries unseen by those who prefer cars and planes and well-travelled paths.
My feet are important to me.
Neuropathy has left me with patches of numbness on my feet. The condition has left its mark on more than just my feet, but it’s the feet where I feel it the most.
Specifically, it affects my toes. The two middle toes on both feet are nearly fully numb, with my big toe not far behind. When this first happened, it caused me quite a bit of distress. I felt like I was losing my feet, and perhaps my ability to balance, or even walk. With time (it’s been almost exactly a year), I’ve learned—mostly—to accept it as a chronic condition. But the entire time I’ve felt like my feet were floating away from me, receding like small boats on a lake, with the neurological winds pushing them a little farther from me each day.
That’s been the exact image I’ve carried with me for months: my feet slowing drifting away from the shore of my mind, as I lose physical touch with them.
During my summer walks, which can get long and winding, I developed a mild case of plantar fasciitis. I went to a doctor, who sent me to physical therapy. My life changed, in specific, observable ways.
He put me back in touch with my toes.
Amid a number of foot exercises, stretching and strengthening the muscles of my feet, he taught me “toe yoga.” Yes, it’s a thing.
“First, lift your big toe,” he told me.
“I can’t do that,” I replied. “I can’t feel it. It’s frozen.”
“Try.” He smiled patiently.
I tried. Nothing, the first time, the second time. The third time, my big toe moved a fraction of an inch. It moved a bit further the next few times.
“Good,” he said. “Now lift your other toes.”
“I can’t work my middle toes,” I said.
“That’s okay. Try.”
I tried. They didn’t move much, but they moved a tiny bit more than I expected them to. He then led me through his paces. “Move your big toe up as you move other toes down. Good, now reverse it, big toe down, other toes up. Good. Scrunch them all together. Nice! Now, point them all outward.”
My toes felt pretty rusty, but I could, with effort and concentration, move them all.
He put a towel down and told me to scrunch it with my toes. It was really hard, and my toe muscles cramped, but I had modest success. He flung some marbles on the towel and told my to pick them up with my toes. It wasn’t easy, and during several moments I thought, “This is what a recovering stroke victim must feel like.” (Note: I’m sure recovering stroke victims have it much, much worse.)
Impossibly, I was able to pick up all the marbles. It took effort and focus, but I did.
He called these exercises “toe toga.” He said he was trying to retrain my neural pathways. By focusing on my toes, going through the exercises, finding new ways to move my old toes, my brain was rewiring itself. The old pathways that allowed me to move my toes didn’t work anymore. But I could create new neural paths to my toes, and remarkably quickly (like, the very first day). The brain is a marvel, and even my six-decade old brain can find new ways to bring my feet back to me, closer to the shores of my mind.
God bless Physical Therapists.
The more I practice “toe yoga,” the more flexible my feet and toes have become. My balance has improved, and the muscles of my toes are stronger. I visualize new nerve endings growing, reaching out to the ends of my toes, and while I know this isn’t physically happening, it’s a calming notion. I’m retraining my brain.
The idea of neural plasticity has followed me everywhere since. A couple days after the PT appointment where I learned of toe yoga, I was taking my daily walk, listening to the radio. Someone was talking about the physical effects of kindness on the brain. They said that when one person is kind to another person, an observable change in brain structure can be seen, not only in the person committing the act of kindness, but in the person on the receiving end of the kindness as well.
Our brains change when we are kind to someone. Our brains change when someone is kind to us. I’ll admit it sounds a little new age-y, and I don’t know how rigorous their science was. But that conclusion is verifiable in a couple ways. Researchers do find specific, physical changes in the brain as a result of kindness. In addition, the of effects of kindness are something I’ve noticed before, and written about.
Unfortunately, that brain rewiring thing works in both directions.
Sunday, there was a another assassination attempt on Donald Trump. My wife and I were out to breakfast at IHOP when the news broke. The media landscape became immediately overheated, with bullsh*t from all sides filling every available crack. Hateful messages started popping up on social media. And as we talked about the incident, we lowered our voices, and leaned in close to speak, suddenly concerned that people at other tables might hear us. Why? What if they disagreed with us? What if they were angry? We were fearful.
Today, the day after the attempt, I’m asking myself the same questions, with a different lens. What if they did disagree with us? What were they gonna do, beat us up in the parking lot of the IHOP? It seems unlikely. There was no indication from anyone surrounding us that they would react violently, or ever rudely, toward us. Most of them were older couples like us. No red flags from anyone, yet we lowered our voices, and leaned in close.
Here’s my theory. A violent act reprogrammed our brains. Someone tried to shoot a political candidate, and we were suddenly fearful of the old couples sitting next to us at IHOP. The adorable old couples at IHOP! It reminds me of Mao’s old saw about how “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” (and even more, Robert Anton Wilson’s corollary, “Reality grows out of the barrel of a gun.”). The gunman changed our view of reality, and the view of reality of the rest of the country, by sticking the barrel of a gun out of a bush on Trump’s golf course. We suddenly feared our neighbors, for no observable reason.
And that’s the conclusion I’m arriving at, I suppose. The events happening around you are going to change the structure of your brain, simply because you are there, right in the mix, a part of things. You are going to be programmed whether you like it or not, whether through physical therapy, or kindness, or the barrel of a gun. So perhaps it’s worth our while to be aware of the things around us that are seeking to program us. We may not be able to avoid most of negative influences in our lives. But, hopefully we can exert some conscious control over which of those influences make their way crawling onto the shores of our minds.
Peace.