Dr. Banerji: In this episode of 'Change the Story, Change the World,' Bill Cleveland explores the inspiring journey of Dr. Subhasis Banerji, a bioengineer from Singapore. Dr. Banerji shares how he utilized the interplay between art, science, and the human mind to help brain-injured and stroke patients recover.

After suffering severe injuries himself, Dr. Banerji’s personal tale of recovery through a combination of physical therapy, yoga, and martial arts led him to develop SynPhne—a groundbreaking therapeutic device integrating real-time brain and muscle feedback for accelerated healing. The discussion also parallels the transformative power of creative practices in prison arts programs, highlighting the human capacity for self-recovery and growth. This episode sheds light on the significant overlap between artistic creativity and medical innovation, offering profound insights into the potential of the mind-body connection.

00:00 Introduction to Change the Story, Change the World

00:46 Meeting Dr. Banerji

02:36 From Ignorance to Wisdom

04:54 The Journey of Self-Healing

08:31 Creating Synphne

11:02 A Moment to Remember

19:30 Common Ground

24:51 Final Thoughts and Acknowledgements

BIO 

Dr. Subhasis Banerji: Founder, Inventor Director of SynPhNe. Subhasis has over 20 years of experience in developing cutting-edge technology, 5 years of practicing therapy and

10 years in clinical research. His diverse background led him to invent and commercialize the world's first fully wearable and connected brain plasticity training tool that trains Brain and Body as parts of ONE system. SynPhNe™ is the outcome of his PhD (Biomechatronics) study. He is involved in research in biomechanics, neuroplasticity, movement analysis, learning mechanisms and ageing. He has been a yoga and martial arts practitioner for the past 25 years.

Notable Mentions

After four years of study, collaborative research, prototype building and testing Dr. Banerji and his partners at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University ultimately produced the therapy that he described to me when we met in Washington D.C.

Put simply, SynPhNe accelerates Dr. Banerji’s painstaking visioning and learning process by reading brain and muscle signals, representing them graphically, and then teaching the patient how to self-correct the signals through their thought processes.

The early 1980’s was a building period for the Arts-in-Corrections program. At each of our six pilot sites we had been scrambling to secure the spaces we needed to establish the stable and sustained learning environments that we knew would have the most positive and persistent impact on the prisoners who were flocking to the program. 

Our guide, so to speak in this was the visionary poet and potter M. C. Richards who, in her book, Centering, articulated the transformative power embodied in the simple act of throwing a pot on a spinning wheel.

These breakthroughs, the state Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, calls flow was something we all knew from our own work, but they seemed to be happening with particular intensity in our prison classrooms. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr. Banerji for sharing his story and for the whole Synphne team for their incredible work.

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DR. BANERJI

BC: From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story, Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Now, from time to time, we have a story to tell. This one is called Dr. Banerji, and it's about how seemingly disparate realms of the human journey, art and science, healing and making, body, mind, and spirit can overlap and interconnect in ways that both seem miraculous and make absolute sense.

Dr. Banerji

Part 1: From Ignorance to Knowing

Growing up in, Mumbai, Subhasis Banerji was regarded by his parents and close friends as both precocious and levelheaded. Progressing through school with high marks and good connections, great things were expected. But, after attending college in India, where he studied engineering, Subhasis was involved in a serious auto accident

SB: I was driving to a nearby city called Pune. I was traveling with my wife and my daughter, who was just a few months old. There was a truck coming from the opposite direction, which wandered into my lane. The truck hit the driver's side. I do remember blacking out and then becoming conscious again

Thankfully, Subhasis’ family was okay, but the accident left him with his right leg paralyzed and significant brain injuries that made it very difficult for him to do much more than simple addition and subtraction. After 18 months of intensive physical therapy, his doctors informed him that his treatment had reached the point of diminishing returns and that his condition was not likely to improve much further

SB: I was 34 years at that time, and I was at the peak of my. I was a new father as well, so on a high. A lot of the discussions were, of course, whether I would get back to, you know, leading a normal life. So many months, I didn't really feel it was going anywhere. After about a year, they pretty much told me that this is how it will be from here onwards.

I was extremely uncertain because I had to learn to walk again. I really wanted to get better for her. And I was having these episodes of extremely deep depression, where you end up feeling suicidal.

In desperation, Subhasis turned to the yoga and martial arts practices that he had learned as a youth. After a few months of hard work, there was no discernible change. But still, somehow, he found himself feeling “better.” Working with the doctors had been frustrating. While he had no doubt of their expertise and diligence, he couldn’t’t escape the feeling that he was just a bystander in the medical drama that had taken over his life. First, they had decided on the best plan of action, and then with very little input from him, concluded that it had run its course. Although his approach was not proving much better, taking control of his own therapy gave him a renewed sense of dignity and purpose.

That sense of focus and direction became the defining core of his life. Through it he centered his attention on the complex relationship between his body and brain functions. As this was taking place, the engineer in him pushed him to record what he was experiencing. As the months went by, this accumulating documentation further heightened his awareness of the affect his regimen was having on in his body and mind. When he had been under his doctor’s care, change had simply translated as less paralysis and improved brain function. Now, though, he found he was noticing much smaller increments of change and, most intriguingly, the processes that were contributing to that change.

One of those processes was the relationship between his conscious mind and muscle function. As he repeated his exercises, he slowly learned to distinguish differing states of neural agitation and neural relaxation in his paralyzed limb. Through his meticulous tracking he was also able to correlate neural relaxation with small, momentary, improvements in his symptoms. Over time, he found himself encountering these states both physically, and mentally. He describes this as “experiencing the mechanisms of his condition with his mind’s eye.” In retrospect, Subhasis feels that it was significant that he was both physically and imaginatively engaged in his “self-investigation.”

In the ensuing months, through both conscious exercise and visioning he found that he could induce a state of neural relaxation in his muscles, which continued to produce a corresponding decreased in pain and paralysis. Most importantly, repeating this, over time, produced a cumulative and lasting reduction of symptoms. This discovery helped nudge his newfound sense of purpose into one of hope for real improvement. He was truly engaging his mind and body to restore his health.

Though it came slowly, Subhasis’ healing did, in fact, progress to the point that he could walk without pain. After two years, his physical symptoms had largely disappeared. And, after a long seven years of practice, documentation, and the continued refinement of his physical and imaginative regimen he no longer experienced the impaired cognition that had persisted following his accident.

Subhasis had truly healed himself. But he was only just getting started. He felt he had tapped into something that had the potential to help others for whom standard therapies had failed. But he knew that for most people in his situation, the long, laborious internal process he had undertaken on his own healing journey would not be feasible. Fueled by an intense desire to better understand the processes and mechanisms behind his recovery he went back to school for a PHD in Bio mechatronics. His ultimate goal was to conduct research and design a therapy that produced results similar to his, but much more quickly.

After four years of study, collaborative research, prototype building and testing Dr. Banerji and his partners at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University ultimately produced the therapy that he described to me when we met in Washington D.C. This software/wearable device combination is named SynPhNe which stands for Synergistic Physio-Neuro Platform. Put simply, SynPhNe accelerates Dr. Banerji’s painstaking visioning and learning process by reading brain and muscle signals, representing them graphically, and then teaching the patient how to self-correct the signals through their thought processes. I know this is hard to fathom. It certainly was for me until I watched as an intricately wired patient used his mind to manipulate the images of two out of control uncoordinated monkeys on a tree into a synchronized tandem.

What does that mean? Well, listen to Dr. Banerji describe it.

SB: So symphony captures signals from the brain and from the muscle while somebody is doing a task and allows the patient to self-correct how he uses his brain and how he uses his body.

The patient can actually see right then and there how the two are behaving. Whether they are able to activate the right muscle, and whether they are able to shut down the muscle which needs to shut down. If you're suffering that disability, say, for a month, The brain has already rewired. You need to not just physically recover the movement, but you need to also retrain the mind.

The brain re learns how it used to move…

Part 2: A Moment of Truth

After hearing Dr. Banerji’s story, I began to consider the possibility that the concept of harnessing brain/body feedback had something in common with my prison arts experiences. During one of our exchanges I recounted, one of the many “moment of truth” stories that regularly emerged from our work as a way of exploring this idea.

…bringing your material into center. ... We bring our self into a centering function, which brings it into union with all other elements. This is love ... Then the miracle happens: When on center, the self feels different: one feels warm, …in touch with the power of life… drinking it in and giving it off, at the same time quiet and at rest within it" (p. 56).

At Vacaville Prison, our pilot site, finding suitable space, any space actually, was a constant challenge. Beyond “freedom” (freedom to move, freedom to choose, freedom from fear) space is one of the most precious commodities on the alien planet we call prison. This is as true for the people who work in prisons as it is for those who live there. That said, the setting for this “moment of truth” came in a cramped storage room that we had commandeered to serve as the facility’s first ceramics studio. While it was too small to teach more than a handful of students, we thought of it as a kind of a beachhead, a starting point from which we hoped to establish ourselves as worthy of trust and support from both the administration and our incarcerated students. Needless to say, we had a lot to learn.

Given the environment, these initial classes were designed to give prisoners a taste of the powerful experience of making things with clay. The challenge was as incongruous as it was obvious — to both us and our prospective students. Here we were in the bowels of the “beast”, literally, a basement storage closet, extending invitations to a skeptical and indifferent audience to play in the dirt with artists. In essence, we were asking prisoners to take a risk (no small thing in the joint) on a bunch of hippy potters, who were offering them the rare opportunity of learning how turning a sloppy, wet hunk of mud into bowl or a mug that they would never be allowed to own or use. You may be asking, “What were they thinking.” Well, here’s what!

At the time, we didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about the complex and brutal netherworld that surrounded our closet of a studio, but we did know a few things about art making. One of those “things” was that many of our Vacaville students were having experiences that were literally turning them on.

This was not some woo-woo, artsy magic here. These breakthroughs, the state Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, calls flow was something we all knew from our own work, but they seemed to be happening with particular intensity in our prison classrooms. These are moments when a new artist’s budding mastery just manages to nudge past their inherent clumsiness. These are moments when “I can do this,” begins to disrupt their “I can’t do shit”. In that instant, many of our prison artists were finding themselves kind of tuning in, as though their inner radio had shifted from the static of incompetence to a glorious stretch of clear reception.

Inside this timeless flash, the disparate pieces of the “practice” often fell into place, and, in the words of one gob smacked guitar player, “stuff starts to happen, sort of by itself.” For our beginning actors this was the moment they stopped trying to “remember” their lines and found themselves “inside” their character. For new songwriters it was the first-time rhythm, melody and a meaningful phrase came to them all at once, out of the blue.

For a Vacaville lifer, named Marcus it would come from the spinning lump of wet clay that he had been struggling to “center” on a rotating head of one of our studio’s old-school kick wheels. There was no doubt he was into it, but I could see that it hadn’t been going well. His taut muscles glistened with sweat as his palms pressed in on the viscous mass. Hunched over, with his hands together, he looked like a devout penitent praying really hard. It was too hard, though. He had been schooled about not manhandling the clay, but every time it started to wobble those tendons flexed, with predictable results. He was not smiling, when he glanced up at Jerry Meeks, our ceramics instructor. Jerry placed a hand on Marcus’ shoulder.

“You’re doing fine. Just relax, it’ll come along.”

Marcus shook his head, “Easy for you to say.”

This was Marcus’ second visit to the studio. So far, it had been frustrating for him. It was obvious he had come thinking it would be a snap. He said as much after watching Jerry throw a perfect little bowl in a few minutes. And this morning he announced to us that was why he was back,” to get that thing to happen for ME” But at that moment it was not going according to plan, and he looked like he was tiring.

This was not a not necessarily a bad thing. As his kicking became less frantic, he seemed to reset himself at the wheel. In doing so, he also appeared to reconcile himself to the fact that this was going to be hard work. But not the kind hard work associated with long hours and back breaking exertion. No, what it was going to take to coax that rotating mound into a pot was an almost unnatural combination of intense concentration and mindlessness that would allow his fingers to somehow press and release at the same time— a kind of a loving embrace, an in-between that was equal parts mind and muscle.

As he moved his hands inward the shapeless mound slowly began to rise. He seemed surprised and it was obvious that he was trying to contain his excitement. The center was holding! That thing was happening, but he knew that he could lose it as any moment. As he had seen Jerry doing the day before, he cautiously eased his fingers down into the whirling mass, assiduously trying to keep the inside and outside pressure in balance. In that instant a simple bowl found its form. As his kicking rhythm slowed, a deep sensual moan seemed to rise up from the space between Marcus’ hunching form and the bottom of his newly born pot.

“Oh, oh, oh my God, look at that. It just rose up. That feeling man, I gotta keep doing that. I tell you, I, its a crave. Its a goddamn crave, ”

Marcus’ moment of truth had arrived. A prisoner had become a potter.

I felt strongly that this transformational shift in world view had its analog with prison artists as their persona’s slowly migrated from criminal to creator. Like Dr. Banerji’s patients, many of our participants were convinced that their lives, and future prospects were permanently ruined. For both patients and prisoners, the participatory, self-empowering nature of these encounters had allowed them to transform their personal narrative from victimhood to change agent—from “ignorance” to “knowing”.

You might ask how our prison experience relates to your own initiative. Let me begin with a description of our theory of change. One of the things that distinguishes us as humans is that we are maker-learners. As learners, we are capable of translating our experiences into information, knowledge, and ideas. We also have the ability to communicate and share that knowledge in ways that can both grow it exponentially and, as makers, provoke its manifestation in the material world.

We posit that the imagination is at the heart of this capacity to synthesize information and materialize ideas. One function of the imagination is that it is a laboratory for sorting and amalgamating experience, information, and concepts into what might be thought of as “possibility prototypes”. Another is that it is the laboratory, or rehearsal hall where those prototypes are continually being tested and modified, accepted and/or rejected. In essence, the human imagination is the place where we practice making sense and meaning in the world, as a way of first exploring and then manifesting what is next.

Our institutional experience has provided an extraordinary window into what happens when these imaginative processes are damaged and distorted. It has also provided an opportunity to learn how artistic creative practice can revitalize what I and my colleagues have come to think of as the imaginative musculature.

I believe what you are learning about the brain’s response to trauma and the self-healing capacities of the mind/body electrical continuum resonates with what we are learning about how the creative process can impact people whose brains have been traumatized through psychological abuse, deprivation, and violence. More specifically, I believe that the SynPhNe feedback process has similarities to the mind/body synergies that that are fundamental to art making. By different means, I believe we are both helping people tap into the creative process that exists in the relationship between their minds and their bodies as an empowering a healing force.

SB: At Symphony, we try to give back three things to our patients, dignity, livelihood, and thirdly, passion. With these three elements, we give people their lives back. Somehow the way to make a full recovery was opened out to me.

And just to see how brilliantly the human system has been designed. We’ve always tried to do things which people said was not possible. That's enough to get us up in the morning.

Notable Mentions

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