Breathe In, Breathe Out

Wii-style Balance Training

I hate leg day at the gym. The every Wednesday series of weight training exercises (leg presses, curls, extensions, and an insidious variety of squats) always makes for sore and stiff Thursdays and Fridays. But somehow I get through them and get a little stronger with more endurance. Ditto for the slow motion jogging on the treadmill. So strength and endurance wise, I think I'm investing my time pretty productively at the gym.

But what worries me is balance. It tends to decline with age; and if I'm honest about it, it was never that great to begin with. Good balance is essential for walking and running more efficiently, as well as sports like tennis and golf. And it helps all of us remain with intact body structures when we don't fall down all over the place.

I've written before about the excellent book on balance by Scott McCredie. Although I know that reading a book likely won't improve my balance, it does suggest some worthwhile exercises and activities to improve the chances of staying upright as long as possible.

I was thinking "what else can I do to improve my balance" when I came across Seth Stevenson's review of the new Nintendo WiiFit on Slate. WiiFit is marketed as a total fitness solution, providing Wii-style exercises to promote overall fitness. According to Stevenson's experience, the aerobics portions of the program aren't all that impressive. You'd probably be better off spending your money and time in a gym if that's all you want.

But the balance and strength portions seem worth the effort; they even reinforce each other:

Balance is an oft-overlooked skill that's a vital asset in any sport. The Japanese are obsessive about it: It's at the heart of sumo, for instance, and it's the secret to Ichiro's unorthodox hitting approach. Sadly, I discovered—after trying out several of these games—my balance sort of sucks. The good news: My failures drove me back to the yoga and strength-training sections of Wii Fit, where many of the drills are designed to address this shortcoming. After doing a round of the more balance-focused exercises, I played the games again to see if I'd notice a difference. I did.

WiiFit seems like it's worth checking out. Wonder if Wednesday is leg day on the Wii?

Technorati Tags: body_schema, wii, wiifit, balance

What's it Like to Have a Stroke and Recover?

What's it like to experience your own brain? I suppose one answer to that question is something like "it's the stuff of everyday experience; nothing really special."

But what happens when the stuff inside the brain gets altered in a profound way? Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor woke up one morning to the experience of having a stroke. She'd studied brains for a long time, and now the experience of abnormality was happening to her. She recently talked about her experience at the TED conference.

It's a scientific talk that turns delightfully poetic.

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

Allergic to Sensory Information?

I'd first read about Sensory Processing Disorder and its pioneering work by A Jean Ayers about a dozen years ago in a book by Thomas Hannah. When a story on Sensory Processing Disorder in popped up in Time Magazine recently, I wanted to know more.

According to the article (prompted by a recent conference on SPD), the disorder is:

As defined by Ayres and others, SPD is a mixed bag of syndromes, but all involve difficulty handling information that comes in through the senses--not merely hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch, but also the proprioceptive and vestibular senses, which tell us where our arms and legs are in relation to the rest of us and how our body is oriented toward gravity. Some kids treated for SPD can't maintain an upright position at a desk; some are so sensitive to touch that they shriek when their fingernails are trimmed or if they get oatmeal on their face. Sounds and smells can be overwhelming. When lawn mowers roar outside the home of Lizzie Cave, 4, a STAR child, she's been known to vomit.

Sensory processing disorder might be a widespread condition affecting the learning ability of lots of young kids. The catch here is that we can't really say that with any degree of accuracy because it's not an "officially recognized" diagnostic condition: its 15 minutes of DSM fame hasn't happened and may not for another 18 or so years. Unfortunately, this renders SPD unlikely to receive the research funding that might help kids, parents and clinicians sort it all out.

In the meantime, kids and parents are coping the best they can.

Treatment is highly individualized, but much of it involves guiding the kids to do more of the things they don't do easily and respond less to the things they can't abide.

Provided the hypersensitivity to sensory input isn't part of an already-recognized condition, I think the idea of formal medical recognition and funding research sound.

But it's this idea of hypersensitivity that got my attention. Normally, when I think of hypersensitivity, I think of allergies. An allergy is nothing more than a hypersensitivity to an environmental substance that effects the immune system. SPD, if I'm understanding it accurately, is also a hypersensitivity. But it's a sensitivity to information, not a substance. And the system affected is the sensory motor one, not the immune system.

Could there be some ties between conditions like SPD and the idea of inaccurate brain maps? Could be a good research topic.

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.

Athletic Balance Help from Technology

Balance is an indispensable ingredient of athletic success, in almost any sport you might think of. Technology can help athletes sharpen their balancing skills with wearable devices.

In Brain Maps: Not Always Accurate I told the story of a golfer who was tilting her head without realizing she was doing so, messing up her sense of orientation and the flight path of her shots.

A slight but unrealized head tilt can cause other problems, too. That is, balance problems. And for any athlete hoping to compete on a high level, compromised balance is not something to ignore.

I had worked with the golfer using the Feldenkrais Method to develop the awareness needed to sense and then do something about the unrealized head tilt. And the same could be done with many kinds of balance issues.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a Feldenkrais Method practitioner available. And, more unfortunately, not everyone would be willing to put in the time, effort and money needed to develop a sharpened ability to sense the body state accurately and then be learn how to do something about it.

But technology may be riding to the rescue of athletes who want to sharpen their balance. These technological rescuer comes in the form of devices that athletes can wear to help them sense balance.

Two such devices are the Ultimate Balance Trainer and a new device that resembles a behind the ear style of hearing aid. It's called the e-AR for ear-worn activity recognition. Both devices provide balance information by the clever use of accelerometer devices.

Ultimate Balance could probably be used in many situations demanding real time balance feedback. But it's marketed as a tennis training aid. The basic assumption is that if your head is tilted off the vertical axis enough, then you're off balance. And that's not good if you're trying to hit the ball forcefully and with enough recovery time to get ready for the next volley.

Players using the Ultimate Balance Trainer wear the device on one side of the head; it's mounted on either a hat or headband. When it detects a tilt forward, backward, right, left, or some combination of these, a synthesized voice informs the wearer of the exact form of deviation.

The e-AR hearing aid-like device works a little differently. By sitting high up on the body in an area without much muscle tissue to absorb force, It senses shockwaves through the skeleton. And it doesn't communicate with the wearer directly. Instead, the e-AR sends signals wirelessly to a computer or PDA for further processing. A video demonstration is here.

These things make you wonder what may be coming next. That might be a premature thought, however. One critic of the e-AR thinks it might not be up to the task of providing accurate information.

Bill Harris, a biologist and amateur ice hockey coach at the University of Cambridge, UK, questions whether the skeleton could transmit enough detailed information to help suggest major improvements in performance. "A device above the ear wouldn’t track nearly enough information," he claims.

It's not hard to imagine that we'll be seeing many more of these sorts of devices. They'll get smaller and more powerful, just like all the other electronic stuff in our current and future lives.

"The trick was to integrate wireless communication with high bandwidth and low power," says (e-AR developer Guang-Zhong) Yang.

And it's not just athletes that will benefit. Accurate balance information can help people in rehab, the elderly, disabled, and all the rest of us.

Balance can be a bad thing to have too little of. It's great that technology can help.

Brain Maps: Not Always Accurate

It's the Things You Don't Know...

I once worked with a professional athlete with an unusual problem. Not a serious injury-related problem, mind you, but one serious enough to limit athletic performance. .

Simply put, this golfer suddenly found it difficult to hit the ball where she was aiming. That's pretty much true all the time for a duffer like me, but for a pro, it's not so cool

As we worked together, it became apparent that she was tilting her head slightly to one side. But she didn't realize it. The tilt wasn't pronounced and most people wouldn't notice it. But for someone needing precision aim and alignment, it was troublesome.

As we worked during a Feldenkrais Method lesson, the head tilting was revealed clearly to her. Once she was able to sense the tilt herself, she was able to use her athletic abilities to incorporate that fact into her movements. The wayward aim became a thing of the past very soon.

Body Schema Out of Wack

It would be tempting to explain the head tilt as a structural problem in need of adjustment. But the problem wasn't so much that she was tilting her head, or that the tilt produced a series of consequences in her skeleton.

The problem was one related to her body schema, the body maps in the brain that represent how we're sensing and moving ourselves. I've been writing a series of posts about the body schema, and this story fits in with it.

As miraculous as these brain maps are at giving humans a sense of embodiment and the ability to use it to sense and move around the environment, sometimes things get twisted around. In one sense, a tilted head sensed as straight is an athletic problem. But looked at another way, it's an illusion, a trick . Trouble is, it's a trick the head's owner isn't in on.

There are plenty of kinesthetic illusions that come from inaccurate brain maps. Some are funny parlor tricks, while others are very serious indeed.

i-eclectica.org gives some examples of both kinds, even offering a YouTube demo of one of the most famous, the rubber hand illusion:

If you'd like to experience this sort of kinesthetic illusion yourself, try this from the post:

I do remember the crossed-hands illusion: holding my arms out in front of me and crossing them over, rotating my hands so my palms face each other, then meshing my fingers together, and slowly rotating my hands up between my arms so I’m looking at my knuckles. Then either asking someone to point to one of my middle or ring fingers or to touch on of them with the tip of my nose and attempt to move it. It is rather hard not to move the wrong one or, in other words, to avoid minor failure of my body schema.

All Will Be Revealed

So what can explain such illusions? In the crossed hands example above, it's pretty simple. We've all looked at our right and left hands millions of times as they reside on their proper sides of our bodies. But in the crossed hands illusion, things get reversed. And not being used to seeing things reversed, the brain gets confused. You think you're moving a finger on one hand when it's actually on the other.

The rubber hand gets placed in a position where it could belong to you. Then the simultaneous stroking combines with the visual sense to produce a kinesthetic illusion. There's even an illusion that leaves you feeling you nose growing longer, as you're touching it, ala Pinocchio.

But Seriously

Those are fun, but illusions connected to the body schema can also be very serious. There are some described at length in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. Body Dysmorphic Disorder and phantom limb phenomena are two of them. (There's even a clearly written book: Phantoms in the Brain)

Even anorexia, usually described as an eating disorder, owes its persistent illusion of the body never feeing slim enough to body schema. For much more on that see The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.

Clearly, we need much more research into how this body schema stuff works, gets out of wack and how we can work with it. In the meantime, though, developing a keener awareness of how we sense and act is a good way to work with many such body schema-based inaccuracies.

After all, you want to hit the ball straight, don't you?

Brain Maps: Your Body Extends Farther Than You Think

Peripersonal Space

Remember telling scary stories around the campfire or at home? One of the ones that scared me most was about a guy who chopped people up. When they found this fellow, it turned out he had hatchets where his hands were supposed to be.

Or did you ever see the movie Edward Scissorhands? Johnny Depp plays the title character who has ornate and elaborate sets of scissors instead of hands.

There aren’t really people with hatchets or scissors in place of their hands. But, fantasy aside, there might as well be. The human brain can and does incorporate all sorts of tools and implements into the body schema, at least according to recent and well-documented research on the body schema. (The body schema, which I wrote about earlier, is the image of the body stored in multiple parts of the brain.)

The explanation of extending the body's parts with tools, implements or just the space around you, is something called peripersonal space — the bubble of space around a person’s body that his brain includes as part of him in its map of the body, according to The Body Has A Mind of Its Own.

Turns out your brain thinks (no pun intended) that the space around you is part of you, and that it’s pretty much up for grabs by you.

How Do We Know?

So, how do we know all this?

Japanese researcher Atsushi Iriki probed monkeys’ brains to identify single cells that responded to what the hand was touching, as well as the visual space around that hand. Then Iriki did something clever by training the monkeys to use a rake to obtain food. After three weeks, Iriki remapped the monkey brain. He found that the previously identified hand and visual space cells now included the rake. That is, the rake might as well be attached to the monkey as far as the monkey’s brain was concerned. And when the monkey no longer used the rake to feed himself, the body schema shrank to its normal size.

I’ve always been kind of interested in this sort of thing as a Feldenkrais Method practitioner. Body maps play a gigantic role in the Feldenkrais experience, and it’s not a great leap to expend the map idea to objects, implements or tools that might be connected to your body as you go about your daily activities.

Philosopher Andy Clark has written about this sort of thing, and I’ve written about him before. I recommend his book Natural-Born Cyborgs. Clark has also been interviewed about the subject:

He agreed it was possible, following up with this faintly unnerving summary that uses Rudy Rucker's term for the human nervous system part of a cyborg. “Any technology that operates robustly and continuously,” he said, “can be factored in by the rest of the mind so as to become as much a part of us as non-consciously operating wetware.”

The Space Can Be Virtual

Even more fascinating, you probably don’t even have to be in “real” space to use the peripersonal touch to incorporate stuff into your body schema. One article quotes Iriki on this:

These neurons may constitute the neural basis of a person's feeling a sense of reality when playing video games, Dr. Iriki said. People say they can feel the joystick touching objects in the monitor as they extend their bodies into far space.

Other experiments at the Human Technology Laboratories at the University of Padova take the concept of peripersonal space into virtual reality. They found the concept holds in the virtual space as well as the real space.

Representations of perceived Peripersonal space (the portion of space is represented by the particles surrounding the dummy) with (on the left) and without (on the right) tool manipulation. Image from HT Labs

Practical Matters

These research-related ideas are fascinating, but is this idea of peripersonal space something that we can use in a practical sense?

It’s not hard to imagine how it could be applied in a rehab setting. Prosthetic limbs are getting more and more sophisticated and useful all the time. The future probably holds some pretty amazing haptic-based tools and strategies for rehabilitating even severe disabilities.

It’s also not hard to imagine athletes and coaches lusting after ways to extend their brains to take in their golf clubs, bats, ball, shoes, skis, or whatever.

But I can’t help but think that connecting a tool to the body schema depends a lot on the kinesthetic sensing abilities of the person connected. In his book on applying the Feldenkrais Method to skiing, the late Jack Heggie tells the story of a client who had such a breakthrough after Feldenkrais lessons:

“We’ll it was in the middle of the afternoon. All the powder had been skied off the trails, so I was dodging into the tree to get more powder there. I was skiing along, and then I guess the tip of my left ski hit something under the snow. It felt like a small branch. I felt it hit the tip of my ski, and then slide all the way down the length of the ski to the tail. The sensation was just as clear as if the branch had scraped along the sole of my foot. It was as if I had suddenly grown nerve endings into my ski.”

Peripersonal space is the explanation for why your body extends much further than you might think. It's fascinating to read about it, but it's even more so to experience it.

Technorati Tags: brain, brain, feldenkrais, learning, body_schema

Brain Maps: What You Might Not Know About Your Brain and Your Body

Am I Cockeyed?

My back is lying against a carpeted floor in a relatively new building. The floor should be level, but it feels like it slants dramatically to the right like one of those optical illusion houses. Only it doesn't. Remember, it's new construction. Put a level down and it would tells us there's nothing wrong with the floor.

Maybe it's me. I feel the slanting sensation very clearly. Could I have a cockeyed back all of a sudden? No, I'm not really cockeyed, but it sure feels that way. What's really going on is not in my body, not literally. I'm sensing myself as cockeyed because of what's happened in my brain as a result of performing half of an exercise in something called the Feldenkrais Method. And that's given me the illusion that the room is tilted.

Ironically, the sense of embodiment that let's you feel like, well, like you is in your brain. More specifically, it's in the maps of your body that reside in the brain. I've had experience working with these maps since I became a Feldenkrais Method practitioner almost ten years ago.

Evidence of these maps dates back to only the 1930s. And science being done today is turning up even more stuff about them and the way they work.to make us who we are, or at least feel like it. I've always wanted to know more about them. But not being academically inclined, material on the subject has been hard for me to find. Until now.

Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee's The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help Your Do (Almost) Everything Better, is a new book that clearly explains what body maps are and how they work.

What are body maps?

The book is too rich with information about the maps to write about in one blog post. So let me spin a helicopter view here: what are body maps and how do they work?

Body maps are representations of the various parts of you in brain tissue and in a number of different brain locations at that. There is not just one type of map. The basic types are maps for touch and movement. Another type sends and received information to the viscera.

Touch maps represent the sensations corresponding to parts of you - one for each hand, arm, leg and so on. When something touches one of these parts or a part moves in space, it activates one or more of the corresponding touch maps in the brain. Your brain kindly puts all this information together to give you a sense of your embodied self that changes as you and your environment change.

Touch maps (or homunculi) were uncovered in the 1930s by brain surgeon Wilder Penfield. To do this, Penfield would probe a part of the brain and then have the awake patient report what they felt. (Curiously, there aren't pain receptors in the brain itself, so the awakened state was possible for this procedure.)

Now days, we have fancy scanners that let us peer into the brain in real time without the need to open up the skull. That makes all sorts of research possible, which the Blakeslees present clearly.

Movement maps send messages to the muscles to have them do your bidding. These movement maps are separate from the touch maps, but work intimately with them.

Body maps are changeable!

The most amazing part of this is the plasticity the body maps repeatedly demonstrate. That is, the maps can change, sometimes dramatically, and not always for the better. (Think of strokes or other types of brain damage.)

But they can also change from experience or practice. Practice playing musical scales long enough, and your touch and motor maps adjust accordingly: your playing become smoother, maybe easier to listen to.

My own sensation of cockeyedness after a Feldenkrais session is another example of plasticity in the brain maps. Only this time it was produced by novel experience, small and highly unusual movements that I was careful to sense as accurately as I could as I was making them.

I think the Blakeslee's book really fills a void for accessible information about this fascinating topic. Check it out.

I plan on writing much more here about brain map plasticity. Look for posts like:

• Why intelligence depends on brain maps.

• How tools can become part of your brain maps

• How some athletic or performance motor skills can go awry and what you (may be able) to do about it

• Your body extends much farther than you think

• Out of body experiences and brain maps.