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	Rabbi
	Amy R. Bernstein
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After Rosh Hashannah services many of you asked for the publication information about the book I used for my talk. I thought I’d do you one better and not only give you the title and author but a few excerpts that I found truly insightful. The book is entitled The Compassionate Brain: How Empathy Creates Intelligence by Gerald Huther (sometimes spelled Heuther because of the accent over the ‘u’), Ph.D.

This excerpt follows his discussion of research findings about brain plasticity. "The brain researchers who found this out were quite amazed to discover how great the use-dependent malleability of the human brain is. If we take their findings to the logical conclusion, the implication is that the brain takes on the form of how it is used. The neuronal connections that we activate especially often and successfully in dealing with the world become more and more strongly developed, and the ones that are employed only quite rarely either stay the way they are or gradually begin to deteriorate... Most....deficiencies have become solidly anchored in the brain through repetition of previously adopted strategies of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and behaving that either have been regarded as right or tha have never been seriously questioned. There is only one way to get your brain abck to the point where you can...smell as well as hear, dance as well as play music, and think rationally as well as sense things intuitively. This way, which has been known to us human beings for thousands of years, is expressed in an ancient Chinese proverb: ‘Not where you have already attained mastery should you exert yourself further, but there where such mastery has still yet to appear.’ (Pp.85-86)"

He writes, "....most people, operating with ego-centered, shortsighted, one-sided, superficial, and thoughtless strategies, have to experience failure or breakdown on some level before" they really look at themselves and commit to changing how they operate. The serious consequences of this are that "in our times, a multitude of individuals has turned into an anonymous mass entity, and the many individuals comprising this mass entity, now endowed with collective blindness, are in the process of bringing the house down around our heads - on a global scale...And as long as all these people manage to ward off and suppress the feeling of deep personal concern, they can and will go on behaving as they have, using their brains in the same old way. (Pp.134-135)"

I have rarely read a more accurate or chilling description of the danger of our times than the following: "It takes no great art to use and influence the human brain in such a way that it eventually loses the capacity to arouse or let in a feeling like deep personal concern...The basic approach is quite simple: All that has to be done is to ensure that nothing else is really important to a person besides living the most comfortable life possible. For this to work, the person must be prevented from developing close bonds with other people, with his home, with nature, and with everything that surrounds him. He must not put down any fixed roots and he must not noticed the fact that with his clipped wings he can no longer fly. He must be kept in a perpetual state of continual excitement with trivial matters, be flooded with useless information, and confronted with so many expert opinions that he can no longer distinguish important from unimportant or true from false. To prevent him from reflecting seriously, it is advisable to keep him rushing about frantically until he loses the ability to sit still for more than five minutes at a time, to say anything meaningful, or even to think about what he is going to do next. You can also overstimulate his brain with lurid and exciting images, loud and shrill noises, and continual sensory input until his ability to perceive has been completely blunted. And if you keep him in a continual state of agitation with fresh reports of catastrophes and images of brutal violence and inhuman crimes, at some point his ability to feel will also die. (Pp.137-138)"

So how do we change this?! According to Dr. Huther, "In order to get out of such narrow, deep ruts, people need the help and support of other people, especially those who think, feel, and behave differently than they do themselves. The more complex the fashion in which a person’s brain is networked with the brains of other people, the less danger there is that his individual user’s errors will go unnoticed...(p. 141)." This is critical because "....a person can change himself and use his brain differently only if he has recognized some decision he has made in the past is an error, and if he has felt deep personal concern as a result. (P.145)"

This new year may we provide for one another different examples of rich and varied ways of thinking and being in the world. And may our connections with each other be serious enough that our own deep personal concern is evoked and strengthened that we may change one another and our world for the better.

Updated October 9, 2006