Scripture, Neuroplasticity, and the Post-Adventist Brain – Proclamation! Online Magazine

DEBORAH PRATT | Life Assurance Ministries’ Online Moderator |

When I was two years old or so, the first interstate highway in southern Michigan, I-94, was constructed. The local section was about a mile north of where I lived (and where I live now). I recall my mother visiting a close friend whose home was located just on the other side of the construction. Those friends ended up selling their house to developers who put in a gas station which has been there since then. But before they sold their home, my mother’s friend was babysitting me, and I had the impetus to climb out of her open upstairs window out onto the window sill on the dormer to watch the goings-on of all the bulldozers and dirt trucks as they carved a roadbed out of the landscape. (Of course she snatched me in immediately, but it was fun while it lasted.)

Now, some 60 years later, that road had become a mess. It could no longer be patched and mended; it was clearly time to rebuild it from scratch. Since March, the road I live on, which offers on-and-off ramps to I-94, has been the main route for the trucks and heavy equipment that, layer by layer, peeled and ripped out the old roadbed right down to the original dirt. Trucks hauled away the old materials; some were contributions to the landfill, but crews ran some of them through great grinders down to components that were blended with other materials to create a newer and stronger road base than the original. Those trucks then hauled new roadbed dirt and composites back to the site many times a day, back and forth. They still have work left to complete, but it has taken time and many resources to complete just this one section.

Rebuilding

This whole process reminds me of what it is sometimes like for someone with a brain injury. When I was working in the field of educational psychology, I studied a lot about services for, and the needs of, students who had had TBI (traumatic brain injury). The brain is a marvelous and little-understood part of our bodies; as much as we do know, there is much we still don’t understand. One thing we do understand is that the brain has a characteristic called “neuroplasticity.”

The National Institutes for Health (NIH) define brain plasticity (neuroplasticity) as:

“… a process that involves adaptive structural and functional changes to the brain. It is defined as the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections after injuries, such as a stroke or traumatic brain injury (TBI).”

In TBI seminars, I learned that the brain can rearrange neuronal pathways to compensate for damage in other pathways, making a new road in the brain, if you will. I also learned that over-learning anything made it easier to put that learning into a new matrix of pathways. I often reminded my math students, especially the ones who claimed they “stunk” at math, that it was the repetition and the homework that would make it feel later like they no longer “stunk” at it. If they did the work required to build those pathways, they almost always demonstrated emotional, psychological, and physiological benefits in addition to their cognitive understanding. In addition, they were more reflective about the way they used to think about themselves and their potential to learn math, and they could see growth and progress, which usually brought them joy and encouragement. Often this started a train of success for them as they went into further coursework or applied what they had learned in their next courses.

Sometimes, it isn’t about accidental brain injury or putting new information into new pathways because of ignorance; sometimes rebuilding neuronal pathways involves tearing out the old to make new pathways in the neural network, like tearing out the old, well-worn pathways of Adventist beliefs and walking with the Holy Spirit who guides us into truth. But here’s the thing; putting new pathways of faith in place is not easy, as any former Adventist will tell you. We are spiritual beings living for this life on earth in physical bodies still tempted by sin, and there are long-embedded brain pathways of false beliefs.

Help From Outside

But God! When we are born again, with a living spirit and God’s Spirit put in us, we have the ingredients we need to pursue this joyful “work” of creating new faith pathways in our brains, which are no longer just physical aspects of our lives. The Holy Spirit in us reveals in and to us the truths we need to make new paths for our understanding as we regularly and intentionally invest our time and energy in His word. The regular, frequent, engaged dwelling in the Word of God is as essential to the health of our faith as is food to our bodies. The sheer repetition of the truth eventually breaks hard pathways down and allows new ones to form, but they don’t stick well without continued attention, especially if there are long established pathways of error.

In a recent FAF Bible study, we discussed how much of Scripture addresses the ingredients of gratitude and thankfulness. There are approximately 169 instances of “thanks,” “thanksgiving,” “thankful,” and “thankfulness” throughout the entire Bible. Neuroscience continues to study the effect of developing a persistent habit of gratitude on human well-being and healing. Should it surprise us that gratitude may even affect the quality and rate of healing in many aspects of human functioning and the establishment of new, healthier neural pathways?

But is secular neuroscience missing the point? It’s great to have gratitude, but without bringing that gratitude to the Source of our provision and our very existence, we fail to bring gratitude to its logical, born-again conclusion – giving our God all the glory. Could it be that gratitude to God for His truth and our salvation in Christ and our indwelling Holy Spirit, in ways we don’t yet fully understand, facilitates the depth and permanence of our new understandings in Christ in our human bodies, even affecting our senses of peace, well-being, and reassurance of salvation? That God-given faith in Christ directly changes us physiologically is not a stretch to believe.

Paul tells the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 5:17-18 that

“…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself….”

We are complex creations of a mighty and holy God. When we are born again, in many cases, we have old understandings (or ignorance), old pathways, to tear out and replace with new understandings, the parallel to that new section of I-94 or to learning math. But with God, and frequent, consistent, long-term immersion in His Word, empowered by the Holy Spirit, those old, broken, no-longer-useful pathways can be transformed, indeed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2 NASB).

Soli Deo Gloria!