The healing story evolution tells about our brain

Our brains evolved after our nervous systems…yet our educational, medical, and mental health systems work as though our brain came first and has the answers to all our problems.

Recent critique of somatically oriented theorists like Bessel Van Der Kolk and Stephen Porges makes it very tempting to throw the baby (the body) out with the bathwater (the theories about the body.)

Evolution tells a more nuanced story.

The false narrative of “brain first” is why overthinking and stress is such a common agony. We can’t “think” our way out of traumas, or we would have done so already.

Trauma itself, perhaps, is a story about what happens when the signals from our body are overwhelming to, misinterpreted by, or blocked on their way into our brain. Or, when our brain is predicting what happened in the past will happen again in the future, thus flooding the body with alarm.

We can try to stop feeling, but we can’t actually turn off any sense organ or pathway. You can close your eyelids, but that doesn’t turn your eyes off. That sensory pathway is always there, waiting patiently for you to explore it.

Our brain can’t think clearly if it’s not receiving sensory information, blood, and oxygen from our living, breathing, moving body.

Because so many neurons carry messages from brain to body, your body will do it’s best to carry out what’s asked of it; but the conversation can become dangerously one sided.

“Somatic” practices are becoming so prevalent in therapy because they help by restoring sensory flow and connection og body to brain within this unified system. Cognition depends on it.

Therapists can see that in their clients, and they may understand (constantly changing ) theories about those somatic interventions; but in general, there is a lack of understanding about the underlying anatomy and physiology.

That’s why I’m teaching a course on embodying the neuroanatomy of the 12 cranial nerves.

Each nerve has experiential wisdom to offer therapists who want to help their clients restore flow between sensory information (intero and extero-ception), motor activity, and the brain.

If you are a therapist who’d like to learn neuroanatomy that way, watch this week’s video to have an embodied experience that tells the story evolutionary below.

It has 4 parts:

1. generalized awareness of the environment
2. internal sensory awareness of an expandable/contractable self (including digestive system)
3. sensory awareness of self in space (activation of spinal cord/central nervous system)
4. sensory awareness of moving self in environment

Our system needs that flow from body to brain to function well. That’s how we evolved, and that is also how we learn.

Here is an overview of the evolutionary tale.

First, we were eukaryotes floating around in nutrient rich water getting nutrients just by bumping into them.

We had no nerves and no brains. We just had a few different organelles floating around inside our cell wall, and we absorbed nutrients through that wall.

However, life got a bit more challenging, and we had to start looking for food. We made a food-catching pouch to get some.

Second, we became multicellular animals with a digestive system, but still no nerves to facilitate getting food.

There was an opening and pouch for nutrients to come in and be absorbed. Still no brain, no nerves. After this, the story is not yet clear. We don’t know for sure if the outside of the organism became innervated endoderm – a nerve net – that facilitated getting food.

That could be one story! We do know some animals had an external nerve net.

This nerve net could have migrated inwards and become a spinal cord behind the digestive system or pouch.

We do know that the first nerve cells (neurons) evolved to move the walls of the digestive system (cnidarians.)

Perhaps this complex of nerve cells became the enteric nervous system. Scientists today are still learning about it and how important it is. We have at least as many neurons in our gut, in fact, as we do in our spinal cord. Those neurons are intimately connected with our cranial nerves in complex ways we barely understand yet.

Some scientists refer to this nerve net, the enteric nervous system, as the first brain. Some call it the second brain. Still, the brain part came after the body and nervous system. Jeez!

Furthermore, we don’t know if our central nervous system evolved from the nerve net on the outside of bodies (ectoderm or skin) or from one or more nerve cords inside of bodies. But, the story continues anyway.

Third, some animals became bilateral – two sided, with a nerve cord in the middle. (ikaria wariootera, the first bilatarian animal)

Bilateral central nervous system evolution is complicated, and scientists are now looking to molecular biology and genetics for the answers. In the olden days, all eyes were on the fossil record, which didn’t have much to say about these internal matters.

The pouch became a tube, with a mouth end and a butt end. Nerve cells made a basic opening/closing movement possible, starting from mouth and sequencing to the tail end to pull nutrients in, absorb energetic goodness, and expel waste out the other end. This is called peristaltic action:

The central nervous system may have formed a separate nerve cord behind the digestive tube to facilitate more articulate movement within the environment.

Either one of these early central nervous system cords – the endoderm nerve net, or an internal nerve cord, could have preceded and given rise to the brain. Or, it could have even been both. Brains could have developed from two different structures!

Whatever the sequence, we now have two tubes in us still telling this evolutionary story ending with:

1. The digestive tube
2. The central nervous system formed by spinal cord
3. A head end and a tail end
4. A brain evolved at the head end, close to the mouth and evolving sense organs which enable to mouth to get food.

Our brain developed LAST to process all the incoming sensory information from the spinal cord and/or the endodermic nerve net.

Our earlier brains were supplied by 8 cranial nerves, and another set of cervical/thoracic/lumbar nerves. Later, the cranial nerves branched out into 12. These 12 nerves help us:

• Locate ourselves in space
• Gather sensory information about our envirobment via light waves, sound waves, and gravitational waves
• Feel and move our heads and bodies
• Eat, survive, and revel in sensory experience of our environment

So, while trauma may not precisely be “stored” in our body, it results in internal as well as external wounding. It may create some kind of block or misfiring chemical sequence that prevents or disturbs a free flow of sensory information from our body to our brain, and/or from our brain back to our body again.

It’s the restoration of that 2 way conversation that heals, and my way of teaching anatomy uses that two way conversation as a foundational practice.

Each cranial nerve is a potential source of flow either to or from.

So if you are you a therapist that has struggled to learn, retain, and actually use neuroanatomy in your practice, this course is for you.

HERE is a link to information and registration which closes September 31.

HERE is a link to my weekly open classes if you’d like to try something less demanding.