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The boulder tradition handed us some maxims. Prominent among them are Welcome everything, assume nothing, and Lean into your edge. It turns out that the neuroscience does indeed provide support for these, and this is the topic of todays blog piece. Along the way i am going to start to introduce some bits and pieces of the neuroplasticity puzzle, as well as change the way i think about adrenaline forever.

I will say this right now, that neuroscience isn't for the feint of heart, so as i work through this series of posts, i will start with a one paragraph short version of each blog piece. Here is todays:

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tldr; There is a particular discomfort that arrives when we try to learn something new, or override an old habit. It feels like agitation, strain, or like wanting to stop. That feeling is norepinephrine (a form of adrenaline), it is the brain's signal that something important enough to rewire the brain is happening. It is not a symptom of misdirected effort, it is actually the mechanism of change. Without it, the synaptic changes that constitute learning can not occur. This is why 'lean into your edge' is so important.

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Relating maxims

With the passage of time my relationship to Welcome everything has slowly changed. It began with the obvious appeal of holding space for the person before me with a sense of acceptance, and a minimum of judgment. But sitting silently beside that was this denial and obliviousness to the painful parts of my experience. Later i slowly came to recognise that welcome everything does really mean everything. So it has to mean, can i welcome the parts i don't like, the parts i don't agree with, and do not understand.

This subtext now speaks to not only welcoming discomfort, but in a sense to actually seek discomfort. To lean into my edge. Relationships are not always easy. Our individual past patternings can rub against each other causing friction that can in turn surface resistance and doubt. In the tradition of ice baths and 'do something that sucks everyday', welcome everything invites instead a sense of curiosity. What is my reaction about? I wonder what made this person say or believe that? What happens if we sit with this a bit longer? Two related and i would say ancillary maxims are 'Having positive regard, even if theres dissonance', and 'The humility of naming when i don't show up well' (I want to credit Jordan Allen for these two). By expecting friction, we can be with the friction with some grace and humor.

What learning in the brain looks like

Which brings us to today, as my deep dive into the Neuroplasticity continues to shed new and important light on why we do what we do in relating practice, how it works and why it works.

There is a podcast by Andrew Huberman does a pretty decent job of explaining some of the neural mechanisms involved in learning (or unlearning), in refreshingly not too technical language. Here it is: How Your Brain Works & Changes.

I will quote some passages from the transcript to help unravel the link between practicing at our edge and neuroplasticity.

Firstly, here he introduces the difference between the reflexive habitual autopilot mode that we live so much of our lives from. The reading suggests that this is much more the case than we realise or would enjoy knowing about. You can see my previous blog for a taste of that.

He also introduces the idea that trying to override procedurally determined behavior takes mental effort, and associates that effort with a sense of mild irritation. Ok this is interesting and important so lets go slowly.

Overriding habit requires the intervention of the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC). First we need to understand that the recruitment of the PFC is extremely metabolically costly, it takes massive amounts of glucose and oxygen, and so the brain tries to keep its use to a minimum, for limited and highly specific occasions. Second, his language 'overriding procedures' is just another name for what we call learning. And the other name for learning is neuroplasticity.

In order for neuroplasticity to take place, it requires some special conditions. It is roughly this: salience, attention and motivation. For situations like forest fires, snakes, steep cliffs, these are highly salient, or in other word evolutionarily and biologically important. Threat forms of salience automatically creates alertness and attention, and involves some cortisol. And that is enough for learning. For attractive forms of salience, such as a tree full of ripe fruit, that also creates learning by a different pathway, dopamine. This is, its still hard but it's taking me somewhere. BTW, dopamine is why having a clear sense of purpose and progress to our practice is also a big deal.

But we can also, to various extents, with sheer mental horsepower convince the brain that something is salient, for example by trying to wade through Huberman's podcast. With the addition of motivation, we can force our attention to become more salient.

In all three cases the brainstem releases norepinephrine (NE) in addition to these other chemicals. NE is the brains form of adrenaline. When released by the brainstem into the cortical areas, it helps encode learning. It does this by biasing certain kinds of neuron to fire more strongly. It is the presence of NE that actually enables all kinds of learning. Its a requirement.

This is interesting, because before now i had bundled adrenaline and cortisol into the same cocktail of stress/over-arousal neurotransmitters. But clearly this is not exactly the case. In the presence of NE, and in while not over-aroused, the PFC stays online, so we can still think, regulate, and make sense of the experience, so that our learning aligns with our intentionality.

Huberman adds some detail:

Pretty straight forward. Neuromodulator release is what enables learning. And when neuromodulators release, it feels to us like emotion.

The feeling of agitation, and the gating of learning

In all three kinds of attention, avoidance based attention, attraction based attention and deliberate motivated attention, NE is released into the brain. In all three cases it creates the condition for learning, it creates emotion, and causes some sense of disbalance. The moral of the story is that learning requires discomfort by design. BTW, another way this has been explained is hormesis.

Norepinephrine is the brains alert or strain signal, and its triggered by attention. So the discomfort we feel when trying hard to learn something isn't a sign we are doing it wrong, it's literally the biological precondition for your brain to change. No strain, no NE signal. No NE signal, no rewiring.

Anyway this is what, i take Lean into your edge to mean. Not so comfortable that there is no salience or focused attention, but not too edgy that we become dysregulated and cortisol gets layered into the mix, which prevents more useful and productive forms of learning.

The practical takeaway is this, if practice feels easy and frictionless, it probably isn't doing much. If NE is low, the brain has no reason to change. Comfort is essentially the brain saying this is already handled by a perfectly good procedure, and so no update is needed. Instead the agitation is neuroplasticity's price of admission.

We can make a quick trip to Polyvagal Theory here by saying that ventral regulation permits exactly this degree of sympathetic mobilisation, and as a result includes NE release for the purpose of learning. However once we transgress the corridor of wellbeing and start to recruit sympathetic activation for defence , its a whole different kind of learning that takes place, very much to do with fear based traumatic reinforcement.

Learning consolidation

Acetylcholine when combined with NE, marks the neural connections that were active during the struggle. But it is only when we next sleep, or come to rest when those marked connections get to be physically rewired.

So there is an important takeaway here, that our intentional visits to edgier places in our practice, for the express purpose of learning, must be followed by a return to calm parasympathetic states. In this way we now see the science behind the therapeutic principles of titration and pendulation at work.

To be clear, by deep rest, he probably means no input, no activity, no external sensory data.

Takeaways

Alright lets review, to ease the learning alarm level going off in our brains right now.

The feeling of agitation or strain is felt at the same time as the brain is releasing NE in response to attentional experience. But this is before PFC has fully processed what's happening. Which is why effortful focus has that slightly uncomfortable, activated quality. The resolution hasn't taken place yet.

The person learning to play the piano, the person in a difficult conversation, the person suppressing an impulse to react, they're all experiencing NE as both the enabler of the cognitive stretch and as a tetchy felt bodily state at the same time. Which has an problematic implication for how we interpret that feeling. If i don't know what it is, agitation during learning feels like a signal to stop. But it's actually the signal that the system is primed for learning.

In this light, an equally important takeaway here is that because the PFC is sometimes hard to access in our edgy moments, their is value in creating and sticking to practice structure, as a procedure of its own. This maybe the deepest argument for why structure and routine matter. If the structure says we end on time, then we wont stay an hour over time getting bogged in someones dyregulation. If the structure says we harvest after each exercise, we get to restore regulation, and allow learning to integrate. The value of structures is that they are in themselves procedural, hence automatic. They don't require much cognition to employ when they are ingrained as habits. We have offloaded the self-regulatory decision making to a system that doesn't tire.

What also seems like an implication of this theory is that curiosity is a particularly efficient learning state, it gives the attention, the dopamine, and the NE release, without the cortisol which would degrade the productive learning environment.

Lets wrap up with something that i have long sensed, but here it is said out loud.

When we understand the way neural pathways form, and the way they are pretty much permanent, what he says here is consistent. But the way connections form, unform and reform is for sure a conversation for another day.