Breathe In, Breathe Out

Smoothing Out the Dance of Learning

Sometimes the dance between teachers and learners gets a little awkward. Well, maybe most of the time, to one degree or another. I’m talking here about both formal and informal teaching/learning situations.

And when a movement-based skill is the subject (maybe literally dancing) the problems can seem intractable at times. To me, at least, it's not just a matter of being able to imitate what a teacher has just demonstrated. I want to understand what's going on in my brain, how I might improve the movement in some subtle way to improve it. That might entail adding something to the movement I'm already making, but often it means stopping doing something I'm already doing.
Note that this plays into the brain maps that guide moving and sensing, the ones I've written about extensively before.

Wouldn't it be neat to be able to see how your brain forms new connections or prunes older ones as you learn, making the pattern of the learned action larger and smaller, gross and more finely tuned? I'm thinking that could help understanding and performance.

Now this has been applied to the realm of teaching math to school children in The Secret to Raising Smart Kids. I’m glossing over much of what’s in that article, but what’s most interesting to me is the process is now being developed into an interactive computer program that the kids will be able to use to see how their brain works during the learning process - the same thing the kids who did well in math were exposed to in an interactive workshop.

And it seems to be working:

One teacher wrote: “Your workshop has already had an effect. L [our unruly male student], who never puts in any extra effort and often doesn’t turn in homework on time, actually stayed up late to finish an assignment early so I could review it and give him a chance to revise it. He earned a B+. (He had been getting Cs and lower.)”

I came away thinking there might be some applications of this automated interactive approach to teaching and learning movement-based skills, or to improving them. An interactive model that takes into account brain maps might be just the thing needed to help smooth out the dance of learning all types of things.

Technorati Tags: body_schema, brain, learning

Things Aren't Always What They Seem(ed)

“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

Sounds like something from another time, another place. And in fact it's a quote from Abraham Lincoln, Honest Abe himself.

But Abe didn't know about Photoshop or photo manipulation at all. Hell, photography itself was relatively new and exhibiting it's raw power over the masses at the time

But now even familiar photos can be doctoed so that people who know well theunderlying events in the photo are fooled. The Mind Hacks blog points to a recent study where researchers showed people altered photos of the Tiananmen Square incident and a Rome anti-war demonstration.

Not only did it turn out that their memories of the actual events were inaccurate, reflecting the doctored photos -- they also rated themselves less likely to attend a demonstration in the future.

Even more chilling is a pointer to earlier studies that "suggest that people often believe initial false news reports even when they're aware of them being falsified."

Honestly, Abe, this is troublesome. Things aren't always as the seem(ed).

Small Town Multitasking

Ideas can come from unexpected places. The Autumn of the Multitaskers in the Atlantic magazine looks at the epidemic of multitasking, a thing that plays right into the hands (or, really, the thumbs) of The Thumb Generation.

I haven't yet read all of the essay, but I was struck with the origin of the author's fascination with multitasking. Now, I could think of the idea of multitasking coming from many places or situations. But how about the (seemingly inevitable) boredom and lonesomeness that can come from growing up in a small town?

...a town so small that the phone line on our block was a “party line” well into the 1960s, meaning that we shared it with our neighbors and couldn’t use it while one of them was using it, unless we wanted to quietly listen in—with their permission, naturally, and only if we were feeling awfully lonesome—while they chatted with someone else.

Well, one good thing. You didn't have to use your thumbs to dial one of those phones.

The Thumb Generation

Brain maps, those little pieces of tissue that your brain uses to organize the coordination of your body, change from experience. Now it seems that's having a significant impact on the design of higher education, at least in one part of the engineering program at University of Pennsylvania.

There's even a catchy term for the brain map changes that have been happening in college-age kids (and younger). It's the Thumb Generation:

“The Thumb Generation is kids who use their thumbs for mostly texting with their phones, things like that,” (Penn Professor Mark) Yim explains. “And they do it so much, the thumb has become the dominant finger. So they don’t point with their index finger; they point with their thumb. When they go up to a doorbell, they don’t use their index finger—they use their thumb!”

For Yim, this is an object lesson in how technology is transforming everything, right down to the instincts that govern a person’s hand gestures. “They are literally changing what’s happening with their bodies. And I think the same process is happening with their minds,” Yim says of his students. “Which means we may have to change the way we teach just to keep up.”

What's interesting here is that it's not just the technologies themselves that are having such a big impact, but how we actually use them. Some technologies help us adapt to the changing environment. But in adapting to them, they change us at a very fundamental level.

The Art of Human Movement

When I think of creative acts, I usually think of poetry, drama, film, novels and other fiction, and works of still art. But when reading the introduction to Gabriele Lusser Rico's Creating Re-Creations, I came to realize that human movements (of course, of the body, silly) are also creative acts.

And just as writing can be mindlessly signing your name to the credit card receipt or coming up with a great story that changes literature and culture, movement can be art.

There are a lot of combinations of momvement among the bones of the human skeleton, probably too many to come across in a single lifetime of any individual. And yet, each has some value in that it gets registered in the human brain, in the maps that reside therein, and hence change the life experience of the brain's owner.

And here's where Feldenkrais comes in. He explored many, many of these combinations, coming up with ways to promote the body and brain's willingness to get into them.

And, good news, he somehow left a record of thousands of these, even organizing them beautifully into themes, calling each one a lesson.

Like Picasso haunting art museums throughout his life, these lessons offer their own museum of movement. And the museum of movement offers to change the maps inside the brain. Who knows where that could lead?

Certainly to creative movements, but maybe far beyond that into movement arts or athletics, or maybe just a better life, one of being able to carry out, actually realize what it is you care to do that day.

Not So Personal Genomics?

An article on personal genomics in the New York Times caught my eye earlier this week.

At first, I thought the idea of being able to purchase your very own genetic information might be cool, one more technological service for the early-adopting curious to venture into. Mind you, I don’t think I’d want to invest a grand in finding out things I might not want to know about. But, it was cool that people who did could simply spit into a cup and subscribe to their own genetic information.

But then I ran across Nicholas Carr’s column in the Guardian. Carr talks about one of the companies mentioned in the Times article, 23andMe. What I hadn’t really thought much about was the implications that Carr points out.

23andMe has deep ties to Google. As Carr points out, it’s not much of stretch to imagine the kind of databases that might ultimately collect lots of personal genetic information.

It does kind of follow that commercial data bases will come out of this, and you gotta think the insurance companies, potential employers and who knows who else will be interested in getting their hands on the information. And despite any privacy safeguards that exist now, we’ll have to think long and hard about whether and how we want that to happen. Anybody heard a political candidate addressing this?

Now I realize that a Feldenkrais Practitioner writing the occasional blog post isn’t the first to have these sorts of questions about genomics and policy.

Even the 23andMe website includes a policy forum. And a simple Google search turns up a number more. But as this combination of technologies develops, I’d hope the number of those concerned with the policy implications of all this grows as well.

A Key Learning Tool

Little kids can be very clever and energetic when it comes to entertaining themselves and their playmates. Take my 6-year-old grandson, for example. He can spend endless hours launching his toy cars and trucks into the air from a make-shift ramp. That the ramp is really a story book propped against my left leg is beside the point.

But this sort of cleverness and seemingly boundless energy might not be welcome in a school setting, where some degree of order is usually demanded. Not all kids seem to be able to heed that call. Those who aren't, these days, usually get labeled with some sort of attention deficit designation.

The good news here is that a new study by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) suggests most attention challenged kids will outgrow the condition in a few years. But, barring an unlikely restructuring of the primary educational system, something must be done in the meantime.

The new study, written up in Time magazine as well as the scholarly Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences points to a lack of brain tissue thickness in the attention challenged kids as one big difference between them and the non-challenged.

Fortunately, this is usually not a permanent condition for most of the attention challenged kids. An average of 3 1/2 years later than the "regular attention" kids, the attention challenged kids' brains thicken to match them. In other words, the attention challenged kids mostly outgrow the condition and get with the program with no lasting effects.

But in the meantime, to quote Willie Loman's wife, "attention must be paid." Unfortunately, this can mean drug therapy or behavioral training.

But there's also attentional training, like that offered by the Mindful Awareness Research Center in Los Angeles. Thanks to the plasticity of the human brain, learning to become aware and attentive is a promising alternative that I hope will see much more development and application in these situations.

As doctors continue learning about the ADHD brain, however, more and more alternative treatments, such as attention training and psychotherapy, are gaining traction. Research shows that the brain is not static Ñ that it can physically change with experience. Studies reveal that the brains of some piano players, for instance, are more developed in the areas responsible for finger movement, while in the brains of people who have practiced meditation long-term, the attention centers are physically larger than average.

"We always think that our brain makes our mind, but it may work the other way," says (MARC's Dr. Lidia) Zylowska. "You can have an impact on your biology."

As a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method, I'm delighted to see yet another instance of developing awareness as a key learning tool, no matter what the age or condition of the brain tissue of the learner.

Heartland Roller Rink

Robots and the Comedy of Learning

The processes of learning and comedy aren't that different. Think about it. A number of related situations build up to a punch line - "Do I know it? I wrote it!!!" (see The Aristocrats for the whole joke, or look here - if you like dirty jokes.)

Babies are natural comedians. As they learn some new skill or way of perceiving things, they eventually arrive at the punch line. The comedy of awkward crawling or wobbly first steps gradually gives way to walking. The kid's now actually able to get where he wants to go, do what he wants to do because the punch line of that learning process is walking.

Now robots are doing a similar thing. "No big deal," you say. Well, it actually is big deal, because these robots are learning on their own. Hod Lipson gave a fascinating demonstration as a TED Talk. As you can see in the video below, the robots can actually teach themselves.

Despite their ability to learn and adapt, these robots are not the kind you see in the Terminator or Lost in Space movies. They are primitive and even kind of comical looking. But, as you'll see in the video, they deliver the learning punch lines just the same.

The real fascination for me comes from the robots' abilities to figure things out for themselves as they learn to get around and to replicate themselves.

Who's the Dummy Now?

It's not hard to figure out how ventriloquism works: a performer supplies the movement and speech of a wooden puppet. But knowing why the illusion fools us into thinking the dummy might really have something to say, that's another thing. A recently identified part of the brain might explain it all.

I've been accused of being a dummy. I don't know about that, but I've always enjoyed watching dummy acts, the kind with a ventriloquist attached to the little wooden guy. When I was a kid I'd have sworn the dummy was actually talking, making sound with those wooden lips.

But have a look at this You Tube clip and you can clearly see Edgar Bergen moving his lips to provide Charlie McCarthy's smart assed remarks.

You have to make a little effort to catch Bergen in the act of moving his lips - watch him and not the dummy, for instance. But clearly, the act is an illusion. And it makes you wonder why it works. How can the intelligent human brain be taken in by some glued-together sawdust and a guy moving his lips?

A recent brain study done of monkeys suggests an answer. In a very small and primitive area called the inferior colliculus, the brain processed vision and hearing simultaneously. And it does it before the combined sensory information hits the upper parts of the brain:

"This means that visual and auditory information gets combined quite early, and before the 'thinking part' of the brain can make sense of it," (study team member Jennifer) Groh (of Duke University) said.

It's also interesting to note that Bergen's act wasn't confined to the silver screen. He and McCarthy also had a radio show.

Ventriloquism on the radio seems at first a little odd. But I guess it was like any other voice character show of the time. And you definitely couldn't see Bergen moving his lips.

Radio shows are available here.

Yellow Journalism: Not So Bad?

Yellow journalism generally gets a bad rap, but maybe it wasn't really so horrible. Some of the same factors that gave rise to yellow journalism are with us today. But we might all benefit from it this time, at least according to one journalism scholar.

It seems like everything's reality TV and celebrity gossip, neither of which I have much interest in. But everything isn't, thank goodness.

The hugely fragmented market for TV programming provides a lot of choice, and a TIVO provides the means to capture it and let me view it whenever I want. A lot of crap on TV, but I don't have to see it. No slam against Dancing with the Stars or Entertainment Tonight fans: they can do the same as me. (At least when the writers come back from their strike.)

Same idea with news and other sorts of topical information. The Internet has made for an almost infinitely segmented market where all sorts of regular (and irregular news) can be found. And that trend will expand greatly in the future.

Search engines make finding news and info easy, and distribution technologies like RSS and email bring it to you so that you can do whatever you want with it on your own timetable

This level of choice seems relatively new and shiny, but it's not, not really. We've seen stuff like this before in an unlikely place - the era of yellow journalism about a hundred years ago. At least that's what writer Steve Boriss is getting at in Yellow Journalism: the Golden Age of American News.

Now most of us are used to thinking of yellow journalism as a bad thing, what with Citizen Kane telling his journalists "you supply the headlines, I'll supply the war."

But there's a lot more to it than that. Yellow journalism arose in response to both technology's effects on publishing and distribution, along with population growth. Boriss paints a clear time line of all this:

• expensive-to-publish newspapers appealing to the elites at first;
• then steam driven presses driving down the cost of production;
• then the telegraph and telephone making in all current and relevant.

Suddenly in the late 19th century, technology stood the elite and the unwashed side by side, so to speak. The audience was a mass one, but the media hadn't caught up.

Then Joseph Pulitzer came up with a formula for covering the real news, but doing so in a sensationalist way that also appealed to the masses. The serious news presented in a way appealing across the board, driving circulation and profitability to new heights.

According to Boriss, this lasted until the elite publishers got pissed enough to form a cartel out of the Associated Press, drying up the sources of sensational news treatments and setting the tone of the news business for the next 100 years.

So here we are again. Technology has dealt us a new hand. If you want sensationalized news, it's just a click or two away. If you want the serious stuff, same thing. But now it's really segmented, coming from too many sources to count - for now, at least.

Not everyone will agree with Boriss' ideas. One commenter on the blog that published the post took exception, saying in effect it could promote even more Britney and Paris news than ever before. If Boriss is even remotely onto something here, the answer is yes, it probably will. And there will be people ready to snap up even the most minute gossip nugget. I'd bet saturation determined by advertisers,not news consumers.

There aren't any Pulitzers or Hearsts - yet, though we do have Murdoch. But that's OK. I'll just start to worry when someone like Murdoch owns Fox News and MSNBC at the same time.