Breathe In, Breathe Out

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

[From Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense ]

A Kiss Is Just A Kiss - Or Is It?

Who says there's no romance anymore? Not Scientific American:

Of the 12 or 13 cranial nerves that affect cerebral function, five are at work when we kiss, shuttling messages from our lips, tongue, cheeks and nose to a brain that snatches information about the temperature, taste, smell and movements of the entire affair. Some of that information arrives in the somatosensory cortex, a swath of tissue on the surface of the brain that represents tactile information in a map of the body. In that map, the lips loom large because the size of each represented body region is proportional to the density of its nerve endings.

[From Affairs of the Lips: Why We Kiss: Scientific American]

See, even a quick peck or a long, deep kiss involves body maps. They're everywhere. Well, actually, everywhere is there, in the maps.

Tools Extend the Body Map

I've written a lot about body maps and brain plasticity here, and it still never ceases to amaze me. A new study reenforces the idea that tools can become an extension of the body maps. Nicholas Carr, an IT guy, wrote a bit about it the other day.

Carr pointed out how human intelligence might prevent us from adapting technology-based tools into our body maps. (The study involved monkeys using pliers to grab food. Guess they don't make monkey iPhones for ordering out - yet.)

But it was a comment to Carr's post that got my attention:

The example that immediately comes to mind is that of a highly proficient musician, or even a chef for that matter. Ever watch the best guitar players, or a top chef, use their 'tools?' I would certainly say that a guitar in the hands of [insert your favorite guitar play here] or a knife in the hands of [insert your favorite chef here] would certainly qualify as an 'extension of the body.' In fact, it's at this point that you would begin to define someone's skills as 'transcendent,' where the inspiration flows right through them, independent of the 'tools' that they happen to be using at the time. Perhaps we're just not there yet with 'technology' as I think that you're describing it. Picture Tom Cruise manipulating the graphical interface of the computer he's using in the opening scene of the film 'Minority Report' and you'll get an idea of what might be possible in the future as our technology becomes more of an extension of our bodies. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck at the 'people walking around airports talking to themselves on blue-tooth headsets' stage at this point.

This is not really all that surprising when you really think about it.

The thing about sensory motor plasticity, the ability of the body maps to adapt, that I've come to appreciate, is that it takes intense practice to engrain a new skill to the point of "transcendence." And it doesn't even have to be that much of a motor skill; think of meditating monks.

There are shortcuts or tricks like the rubber hand illusion that will make quick changes in the body maps. But fortunately, these sorts of changes are short-lived and there's no incentive to practice them over and over - I hope!

A write up on the study itself is here.

Technorati Tags: brain, body_schema, learning

Hey, I Know That Guy!

Sometimes you get an unexpected surprise when reading your RSS feeds. Today it was a link to a story about phantom limbs on NPR. Being interested in anything to do with brain plasticity, I surfed over to the NPR site to take a look and listen. But in addition to a story call A Famous Hallucination: Ahab's Phantom Leg was one called A Blind Man Sees.

It was interesting from a sort of plasticity perspective, focusing on Charles Bonnet syndrome, in which blind people "see" vivid but nonexistent scenes. That is, they hallucinate. The plasticity, or changes in the brain that produce this phenomenon, involved sensory information from inside the brain, not from the senses themselves:

"The brain is doing a mash-up of stored visual memories," says (University of Michigan ophthalmologist Jonathan) Trobe. When visual cells in the brain stop getting information — which happens when your rods and cones stop working — the cells compensate, he explains. If there's no data coming in, they make up images. They hallucinate.

[From NPR: A Famous Hallucination: Ahab's Phantom Leg]

These sorts of stories usually fall into the "coldly clinical" category, but not this one. Not much coldly anything when you've been acquainted with the subject of the story. I had known David Stewart many years ago as a colleague. David's sight was deteriorating even then, but I did not know that it had reached the stage of complete blindness now.

But what didn't surprise me was David's flair for making an engaging story out of the situation. I always found him an eloquent public and private storyteller.

As always, well worth a listen or read.

The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us - Really

If you want cut yourself some slack, take a little time to read Kevin Kelly's Christmas essay on the This I Believe portion of the NPR site. Here's just one eloquently-put piece of it to whet the appetite.

We are at the receiving end of a huge gift simply by being alive. It does not matter how you calculate it, our time here is unearned. Maybe you figure your existence is the result of a billion unlikely accidents, and nothing more; then certainly your life is an unexpected and undeserved surprise. That's the definition of a gift. Or maybe you figure there's something bigger behind this small human reality; your life is then a gift from the greater to the lesser. As far as I can tell none of us have brought about our own existence, nor done much to earn such a remarkable experience. The pleasures of colors, cinnamon rolls, bubbles, touchdowns, whispers, long conversations, sand on your bare feet – these are all undeserved rewards.

[From NPR: The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us]

Or as Monty Python puts it (not quite as graciously as Kelly) in The Galaxy Song:

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Breathing, Attention and Exercise

I've changed my mind about how much attention to pay to my breathing patterns and how important it is to remember to breathe when I'm using a computer, PDA or cell phone.

I've discovered that the more consistently I tune in to healthy breathing patterns, the clearer it is to me when I'm hungry or not, the more easily I fall asleep and rest peacefully at night, and the more my outlook is consistently positive.

I've come to believe that, within the next 5-7 years, breathing exercises will be a significant part of any fitness regime.

[From Linda Stone:THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 10]

I'm not sure about this. Not that I don't believe in breathing or all the benefits of it that Stone points out. Yep, breathing is good.

But it's the word exercise that slows me down here. It's been my experience that if you want to see people holding their breath, visit any gym and watch people working out. Lots of strain, excess effort, faces turning red, that sort of thing.

Strain is the keyword here. Strain and exercise kind of go together for many of us. Extrapolate that to straining while breathing, and you have to ask how much that would contribute to health.

Of course, aerobic or cardio exercises actually force you to breathe more if you want to stay upright. But you can still observe people breathing in a strained way as they walk, run, climb, cycle, what have you.

My own view on this falls into line with what seems to be Stone's topic: attention. Only I think of it more of awareness than attention. Giving more awareness to bodily processes like breathing can be beneficial.

But habits of attention (or, more precisely inattention ) can get in the way here. The Feldenkrais Method® that I practice combines non-habitual movement with awareness. Often, one of the side effects of a Feldenkrais session is more optimal breathing.

And - this is important - the more optimal breathing pattern emerges by itself from the new movement and self-use patterns that can emerge from a session. That's a lot different from "exercise."

brain, feldenkrais, learning

Where New Television Comes From

One of the perks of working in broadcast television is, well ... you can watch TV while you work. Usually it's video that you're working on for later broadcast. But sometimes it's easy to stray into other territory. So in 1976, I got somewhat hooked on a cutting-edge satirical soap opera, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

So why bring up a 30-year-old show that was at best a cult favorite even when it was first run? Well, it was mentioned today in a film.com review of a new series that may push the envelope in at least on of the ways MH,MH did: the show's format. The new show is In Treatment, and it's on HBO.

The history of the half-hour nighttime serial pretty much begins and ends with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman 30 years ago. That program had plenty of black humor, but In Treatment, which premiered on HBO last night and will run every weeknight for nine weeks, falls in the same humorless vein as Tell Me You Love Me. On that show, the therapy sessions were a way to kill time when the characters were wearing clothes. Here, it's the entire shebang.

OK, first of all, I don't agree with the depiction of Tell Me You Love Me. I found the therapy scenes key to the whole thing. The sex scenes were jolting not so much for their shock value, as for adding a new kind of dramatic voyeurism to the serial dramatic television form, putting the fourth wall into a new room. If drama is about characters grappling with obstacles, then aren't sexual situations a natural fit for some stories? I thought Tell Me incorporated some of those situations into the characters stories, not making them the whole story itself.

But I digress.

Where In Treatment most differs is in the 5-day-a-week format. Not everyone likes that.

The problem that In Treatment is going to have is that the number of viewers willing to commit enough time to really begin caring about these characters isn't likely to be large.

Well, so what, I say. After all, we're talking subscription-based television, not advertising supported. If Treatment flops badly, will it drive down the number of HBO subscribers? If it succeeds, will new subscribers flock to HBO?

You can bet the advertiser supported networks executives will be keeping an eye on this. If it does garner much in the way of viewers, you can look for a lot more daily serial programming. Increase the frequency of viewing, as a successful daily serial would, and the advertisers will sit up and take note. You can expect more of this format if that happens.

Only it might not be well-written and acted serial drama. That's expensive. Heaven help us if crappy reality TV packagers ever adopt this format.

The other thing worth saying about this is the kind of new idea incubator the premium subscriber service offer. They're the places trying out cutting edge stuff.

Thank goodness for that.

hbo, television

Book Learnin' Don't Always Work

Here's one idea about why it's so difficult to learn or master physical skills for most of us:

In a way, “Just do it” is profoundly counter-cultural. Westerners are used to learning from the outside in. Our motto would be "Explain it first, then attempt it." Or, "Don't do it, yet." Get the abstractions right, then try to apply them. Become a knowledgeable expert, then impose your knowledge on the body. Learning from the Inside Out

OK, let me see. At the top of the backswing, the wrists should be cocked how many degrees, did you say? And precisely 62.4 percent of my weight should be on my right leg? Let me check the illustrations in the book again.

Yea, right. You can substitute your own sport or performance skill here, but the principle is the same. It's difficult, if possible at all, to learn or advance this way.

I discovered this quote in a very interesting website that I discovered while researching for a longer post on vision and balance that will be forthcoming. As part of that research I looked up the website that accompanies Scott McCredie's excellent book Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense. Among the resources McCredie lists is Go Animal where I stumbled upon the quote above. I'm looking forward to exploring it.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning

Thinking and Feeling Out of Kilter

Like most of us, blogger Dave Winer finds lots of discomfort in the plunging stock market. He wrote a nice bit about it on his blog today. In particular, I like what he says about the unsettling difference between knowledge and emotion:

No matter how many times I've been through it, I've always known that it's cyclic, that the outlook will likely improve, but knowing isn't the same as feeling. The feeling is much stronger, it can't be counteracted with logic.

Clearly, the thinking and feeling about our economic future are out of sync here, and by a not insubstantial amount. It isn't enough to just know about business cycles and the like: that ain't gonna make us feel better in the long run.

But the Feldenkrais practitioner in me wants to ask "what about sensing and acting in addition to thinking and feeling?" I mean if the worried feelings keep us from acting, doing the things we want and need to do, that's serious business indeed.

It couldn't hurt to get on the floor and do some Feldenkrais lessons, get into an activity that offers at least the opportunity to think, sense, feel and act in concert with each other. And, who knows, maybe we'll feel better afterward -- even with sour economic news.

Kindapple?

Here's John Gruber's take on Apple CEO Steve Job's comments on the Kindle:

So, either (a) Jobs think the Kindle is a bad concept; or (b) Apple is working on a portable e-book reader.

Probably (b), wouldn't you think?

The Opportunity Offered by Mad Men

Roger Von Oech likes Mad Men, the AMC series that centers around advertising guys in 1960. Me, too.

One of his comments refers to something like nostalgia:

I was twelve in 1960 and it was interesting to re-enter that world again: people watched Twilight Zone and Leave It to Beaver.

It can seem like nostalgia, but to me Mad Men offers something like toddler/adolescent voyeurism. Now that you're an adult (at least age-wise), wouldn't it be interesting to put yourself back in that environment that you were present for, but hardly aware of. Be able to fend for yourself against all those big, serious adults; maybe get to know that redheaded secretary a little better. Know what I mean?

Technorati Tags: learning, memory

Monkey See, Robot Do

One of the cool things about the human nervous system is that we can learn to manipulate objects as if they were part of our own bodies. Stuff like shovels, rakes, skis, tennis rackets, golf clubs, what have you.

And this is not some pie in the sky theory: experiments on primates have demonstrated how objects get incorporated into those little monkey brain's body maps. Science writers Matthew and Sandra Blakeslee include a description of at least one such experiment in their book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.

Now in a stunning new experiment involving a small monkey and a large further demonstrates how potentially useful that idea might become. In Monkey’s Thoughts Propel Robot, a Step That May Help Humans - New York Times Blakeslee describes the experiment.

The monkey learned to control the walking motions of a robot half a world away, using thoughts. It seems the monkey actually formed body map areas in her brain that represented the robots leg movements. Amazing what a bribe of raisins and Cheerios can accomplish!

It's not hard to extrapolate this idea to prosthetic-like devices that would have all sorts of therapeutic, athletic or military uses. The Times article discusses some of them, and it's well worth reading.

But there's one big problem here. The whole model hinges on electrodes being implanted inside the brain's body maps. Opening up the skull and putting in things that weren't there before always has its risks, even if technology is shrinking the electrodes and connecting them wirelessly.

I'm still quite amazed with the whole notion of body maps and how quickly and profoundly they can change.

Technorati Tags: body_schema, brain, feldenkrais, plasticity

Kindle, Anyone. Anyone?

Steve Jobs, as quoted in the New York Times, joins many other pundits in saying the Amazon Kindle bookreader is doomed. But it's got nothing to do with anything technical.

Nope. There's not much demand because people don't read! Jobs says only 40 percent of the people in the U.S. read even one book last year. "The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to writers.

Sarah and Dr. Kimble

The Sarah Connor Chronicles Pilot: Gnothi Seauton - Film.com goes on about a new TV show based on the Terminator film franshise. Seems there may be certain issues about how this show's plot and characters mesh or not with the movies' plots and characters.

Well, who cares? I think the Sarah Chronicles is beholden to one of the golden oldies of episodic television than the Arnold-making film. That is, it reminded me of The Fugitive - the 1960s TV show, not the 1993 movie.

Think about it: people changing their identities and moving on every so often to avoid getting clipped.

And the actors aren't nearly as cool and aloof as David Jannssen.

Wii: Good for Exercise, Good for Learning

Visiting twin 7-year-old boys can really shatter the peacefulness of a quiet home. But not so much if you have a Nintendo Wii around to laser focus their attention and keep the little buggers occupied for hours on end.

You’d probably have to have been hiding under a rock for the past two years not to know that the Wii isn’t like other video game consoles. Players interact with the Wii using their whole bodies, not just their fingertips. So they move around — a lot.

In what can only be termed a blinding flash of the obvious, a recent study determined that kids playing Wii games burned more calories than those playing traditional video games. But they didn’t burn as many as they would have by playing, say, a real tennis match instead of a virtual one.

I’m not making this up: someone actually pays people to find this stuff out.

That aside, as I watched the boys play virtual baseball I couldn’t help noticing how at least one the characteristics of the Wiimote actually changed the way kids could play baseball. The Wiimote uses accelerometers and motion detectors to let physically interact with the virtual action on the screen. And of course the game filters those motions through an algorithm to translate the real action into the virtual world.

What fascinated me the most was the home run power of one of the twins. Pitch after pitch, he was clouting them out of the park. Now remember, this is a scrawny 7 year old kid, not a muscularly enhanced mature athlete. Well, of course it was the very rapid acceleration he was producing with those short, pencil-thin arms of his. To the Wii, all that mattered was the speed imparted to the wiimote.

And all of this was happening with a motion that didn’t even vaguely resemble a proper baseball swing. I couldn’t help thinking that playing a real baseball game was going to be a bit more challenging for the kid.

The characteristics of the technology involved strongly influences and constrains how we can interact with a virtual environment of any sort. Another blinding flash of the obvious!

This doesn’t imply that the Wii isn’t useful for learning “real” games. It may or may not be. But whatever it lacks in requiring authentic athletic movements, it more than makes up for in its learning potential. A couple of scientists had this to say about the Wii:

The games that come with the system do all sorts of good neuro-work: eye hand coordination, motor timing, motor sequencing, motor planning, and spatial problem solving. There's bowling, golf, baseball, boxing, and tennis in Wii sports, but of course lots of add-on games to buy or rent.

These systems will be great for many kids with mild motor planning /sensory integration / "clumsy child" issues, visual-motor difficulties, and some dyslexics. Oh, and it might be pretty good for some of us couch potatoes, too.

The Wii’s benefits run deep for people who take wiimote in hand to do battle with virtual games. Kids get exercise and learning. And, come to think of it, so do adults.