Readers Write In #756: You can be whatever you want to be!

By Jeeva P

I understand when someone tells me he is naturally good at something. It points to an ability that is largely ingrained in him and in scientific terms, his brain is naturally predisposed towards doing well on a particular activity or a task. But such a condition leads to an obvious conclusion – the state of being naturally good at something means he or she is not so good at something else. 

I have had this issue myself – I have always considered myself good when it comes to learning a particular language of communication and understanding the nuances of its usage and at the same time not so good at learning or understanding certain other ‘subjects’ that necessitate logical reasoning and related skills. 

Whenever I have discussed this with some people, mostly elders, they have asked me either to specifically work more on where I have been largely lacking or to completely discard the ‘handicap’ and continue working with what I have been naturally bestowed with. Over the years, this has led to, much to my misfortune, me developing a hatred or ‘resistance’ towards those subjects that do not love me as much as I would have liked to. And to add to it, those subjects have been the ones that are considered the ‘hottest’ ones in the market or to use a financial term, the most ‘lucrative’ ones – subjects that pay so well only to those who have mastered them.

Whenever the ‘market’ sentences me to learn a new technology in the IT industry I am currently part of, I immediately remind myself that how much ever I try my hand at it, I am never going to do well, since I have been ‘wired’ specifically in such a way as to remain ‘immune’ to it. Over the course of time, this inability to quickly absorb emerging trends and assimilate new technologies has transformed into a ‘spectre’ haunting me especially whenever reports of a newer ‘recession’ or an economic downturn hit the headlines and as a hapless prisoner of this ‘perform or perish’ capitalist job market, I curse my ‘internal wiring’, attributing all these insurmountable problems to this one particular ‘birth defect’.

***

I was reading a book on the human brain, Livewired written by David Eagleman. Eagleman refers to an incident that happens in some Western part of the world in the second half of the 20^th century where a boy in his early adolescence loses almost one half of his brain in an accident. Doctors of those days, inform his parents after the surgery that since every function of the body is controlled by a particular region in the brain, those functions that were controlled and co-ordinated by the lost parts of the brain will no longer happen as they were supposed to, predicting an extremely bleak future for the boy. 

But almost after a decade, doctors decide one day to visit the boy’s family solely out of curiosity to know what happened to him after the surgery. They were shocked to know that the boy was doing pretty well in his life working as a cashier in a local food joint with no conspicuous handicaps or loss of vital functions. After scanning his brain, they were surprised to find that his brain had over the years made up for its lost parts by re-allocating all the supposedly ‘lost’ functions to regions that remained intact and had managed to co-ordinate all necessary functions from within the ‘truncated’ space. This ability to re-tool itself according to changed circumstances and unforeseen contingencies formed part of what was later found to be a highly distinctive feature of the human brain – its almost boundless ‘plasticity’.

Neuroplasticity, the term that found currency in medical circles in the late 1940s refers to how the brain modifies itself to adapt to changing aspects of one’s environment, undergoes ‘neuronal’ change to learn completely alien and new skills, languages and techniques and how it ‘rewires’ itself to face newer challenges so as to enable the individual to ‘survive’ and remain ‘competent’ as part of his ever-changing ‘ecosystem’.

David Eagleman describes how neurons converge and connect to form newer ‘synapses’ and how each channel formed by these synapses assume responsibility for every particular function, say driving or dancing. The first day when you place your hand on the steering wheel, the brain instructs a set of neurons to form a new ‘synapse’. As you continue practising, the synapse strengthens and a new channel of neuronal communication is established over the days. The more you practise driving, that channel in your brain remains alive and vibrant and within a short span, driving becomes part of your sub-conscious and you do it flawlessly without expending too much energy, attention and time towards it. (This theory could be extrapolated to explain Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000-hour idea as well).

Assuming that circumstances have changed now and you no longer are provided with an opportunity to drive a car, the brain observes and makes note of how often you make use of your ‘driving’ channel over a period of time. If you have almost stopped driving for close to a year, the brain decides to shutdown the operations of your ‘driving’ station/channel, issues orders to disconnect the synapses related to it, freeing up those neurons for some other ‘essential’ activity. These qualities also form part of what is known as ‘neuroplasticity’ and it alludes to the remarkable way our brains work like CPUs allocating threads and resources to current and highly critical functions, closing down those that are no longer required and freeing them up for future tasks and responsibilities. This could also be one of the reasons why certain people who have lost their ability to see or hear, are able to sharpen their other senses to the extent of being able to even live out an almost perfectly normal life.

***

I had the opportunity to read some essays written on evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s writings who had propounded a theory on how only a particular species of apes had managed to beat others, eliminating its competitors once and for all to finally emerge at the top of the food chain, transforming into what we call today the all-powerful Homo Sapiens – the modern Man.

The theory goes like this – among various distinctive features this particular ape had possessed, its decision one day to stop walking on all fours marked a watershed in its evolution. Until then, the process of co-ordinating the movements of its all four limbs had taken up a large portion of its brain and its decision to stand and walk upright, freed up at least half the regions its brains had allocated for co-ordinating its locomotion. The freed-up regions were in turn later used for learning newer skills such as tool-making, communicating through vocal language, memorising, thinking, analysing and so on.

From the neurons that were made available to me that evening while reading those essays, I was able to make connections and attribute the evolution and emergence of man from apes to the brain’s remarkable ability to remain ‘neuroplastic’.

***

After reflecting on all these ‘mind-boggling’ stuff, I understood and recognized slowly that I have already been given enough ‘wires’ and ‘tools’ to be able to fend off my worries on ‘survival’ and remaining ‘competent’ on the ever-mercurial job market. The ability of certain people to be naturally good at something has nothing to do with their deficiencies on other counts. Just because you are good at singing doesn’t mean you cannot do well on fixing your loudly ‘humming’ refrigerator. Some skills could be ingrained while a lot others can be practised, programmed and ‘burned on your neural circuits’, to use Eagleman’s favourite turn of phrase. Just because Rahul Dravid was so good in Test cricket did not mean he could not hit three consecutive sixes on his T20 debut. Just because my icon Chiyaan Vikram was so good at ‘performance acting’ in films like Pithamagan and Deiva Thirumagal did not mean that he could not set the screens on fire with his effortless machismo in Gemini, Dhool and Saamy. 

***

Whenever I didn’t get enough marks in Engineering, my now-deceased father (Appa passed away exactly two months back) used to reprimand me attributing my underperformance to a lack of effort on my part. I used to on the other hand, sometimes attribute my failures to the then-assumed ‘fact’ that I was ‘made’ to do something else and not certainly Engineering and had ended up often bemoaning my father’s absolute lack of ‘empathy’, especially with respect to me. Now with Eagleman’s help, I cannot but appreciate how wise and clairvoyant my grumpy old man was!