Lewis Mehl-Madrona - Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story

This book is dedicated to the beautiful ones
who live and have lived the experience.
You know who you are.

And to Stephen Snow, Joanabbey Sack,
Melanie Nesbitt, Mary Moncrieff,
and the women of George Herman House.
To my mother, Susan;
my sister, Sarah;
and my brother, Nicholas
thank you for everything.
B.M.

To my son, Takoda Mehl Madrona,
a fabulous artist and a lovely human being.
L.M.-M.

Remapping
Your
MIND

In this superb contribution to the field of self-transformation through story, Dr. Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy present important scientific research in approachable language as they demonstrate the intrinsic therapeutic value of story at all levels of our being. The authors have all the qualities of true medicine peoplethey heal, they bless, they give thanks, they teach, they respect those who approach them for helpand so join the ancient lineage of storytellers who ensure the continuity of life-giving, universal healing wisdom.

JACK ANGELO, AUTHOR OFSELF-HEALING WITH BREATHWORK:
USING THE POWER OF BREATH TO INCREASE ENERGY AND
ATTAIN OPTIMAL WELLNESS

Our life is a storied life. Where we may have been thrown into an unhappy or even hostile story, we have ways to remap and re-story our lives. I have read each of Dr. Mehl-Madronas books, shared them with clients and students, and witnessed how his words help transform the inner and outer landscapes of our lives. He shows us how we can experience transformation and transcendence by being able to story our life differently. Remapping Your Mind satisfies in every way.

JULIE TALLARD JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF THE ZERO POINT
AGREEMENT: HOW TO BE WHO YOU ALREADY ARE

Acknowledgments

We want to thank all of our teachers, our elders, the writers, and the researchers who have profoundly advanced our understanding of being human and what it might mean to help people in a good way.

Our bibliography speaks to our fascination with this line of inquiry and to the dedication of the science and academic worlds to the pursuit of discovering the nature of narrative mind. Raymond Mar was a graduate student in cognitive science at the University of Toronto when Barbara was an undergraduate there and first heard his work on the importance of story. We follow his work at the Mar Lab at York University and eagerly read his new writings on the neuroscience of story. Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland, who wrote a landmark account on the origin and importance of fiction, is a source of inspiration, as are Charles Whitehead, Jerome Bruner, Hubert Hermans for philosophy and the dialogical self, Lisa Barrett for understanding emotion, and Roger Schank and Robert Abelson for understanding thought and story. The placebo researchers help us to see the power of our minds in self-healing. The narrative, dance, and movement therapists; Barbaras creative arts therapy work; and my experiences lead us to those whose work takes us to an outer edge of the therapeutic model where acts resist scientific explanation.

Mostly, we are grateful to our clients, those who reach for change, experiment with new ways of being, bring honor to their suffering, and allow us to bear witness.

In all this we find ourselves knowing that the best teaching has come to us around fires, under the sun and stars, in the back of pickup trucks (or under the hood), and stacking chairs and making coffee in community with the elders who drop us a casual line that has us thinking for years. We especially acknowledge John Charles, Sonny Richards, Joe Tione, Marilyn Youngbird, Lloyd and Gracie Elm, and Vern Harper. As one of our friends said, as we burbled excitedly on about brains and minds and plasticity, Isnt it great that neuroscience is finally catching up to the Lakota.

To all the stories and storytellers, Hau Mitakuye Oyasin (we are all related).

Introduction

My books can be seen as logs of my journey as a healer and the discoveries I have made along the way. The first, Coyote Medicine, was reluctantly autobiographical. I didnt set out to tell my story. I wanted to hide behind the stories of others, but an editor at Scribners pulled me out of the background and made me foreground. Coyote Medicine became my story of making sense out of being a bicultural person, out of coming to medicine and health care from indigenous origins. It tells the story of how I realized that the indigenous world of my youth, which I had taken for granted, actually had much to offer contemporary, mainstream medicine.

From there I wrote Coyote Healing, the book I had initially intended to write, which was about medical miracles I had witnessed and amazing patients I had met. In that book I speculated about the nature of miracles through telling stories about the people who had experienced them. Then, in Coyote Wisdom, I started my journey into the world of stories in earnest, for I had realized that story was a common element in all the healings that I witnessed. I wrote about how indigenous healers used story to help people heal.

That led me to Narrative Medicine, which told about my discovery that the nonindigenous world was catching up to the Lakota and had also come to recognize the power of story. I wrote about the importance of story in medical practice and how I used story to work with my medical patients. I took this further into psychiatry and mental health in the next book, Healing the Mind through the Power of Story.

This book places healing with story in the context of the latest research in neuroscience, which reveals that our brains coevolved with our narrative abilities. Mark Turner, a neuroscientist in the U.K., situates the roots of human mental functioning in story. We stop events from disappearing by placing them into stories, by consciously incorporating the separate events of our lives into a single unit called a story. The stories we tell repeatedly to an audience become those that are remembered without difficulty. Stories are the way we preserve events in memory that would otherwise be lost, and they are how we connect these events into a unified whole that can be readily remembered.

One of the fascinating discoveries made by modern brain researchers regards the default mode of brain functioningwhat our brain does when it is on idle. Experiments conducted by neurologist Marcus Raichle at Washington University School of Medicine, and by other groups, demonstrate that the brain is constantly active at a high level even when we are not engaged in focused mental work or focused on the outside world. In fact, the brains energy consumption is increased by less than 5 percent of its baseline while performing a focused mental task. Raichle coined the term default mode in 2001 to describe this resting state brain function.

Research thereafter focused on finding the regions responsible for this constant background activity level. It is deactivated when we focus on external sensory signals.

Current neuroscience research is thus affirming what we have already been discovering through our work. We need to understand story, because story is our default mode: it is intrinsic to who we are. Story is what we use to explain our world. Story is what we use to create identity. More than that, increasingly it seems apparent that the stories we tell ourselves literally impact our health.