Breathe In, Breathe Out

Attending to Reading: On and Off the Web

I’ve been giving a lot of attention to attention. Well, as far as following a debate about web reading vs book reading goes. The debate surrounding Nick Carr’s Atlantic essay Is Google Making Us Stupid is generating a lot of text. Never mind that it’s on the web instead of in hard print.

The serendipity of reading RSS feeds regularly has brought me another wad of words on the subject, though this time largely from the educational perspective. Literacy Debate: Online R U Really Reading on the New York Times homepage looks at the pros and cons of school-age kids reading text on the web and on paper.

As I expected, one group of experts were all for books and all against web reading. But another group surprised me with the idea that web reading has value for kids.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Carr and others talk about skimming text on the web vs being able to read a whole text off the web. But here the differences are more specifically spelled out.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

When you think of reading from a conceptual view, to gather information and apply those ideas to what’s happening in the flow of life, web reading may even provide an advantage.

Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.

“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.” Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”

And so the debate goes on. But at least now we have an idea that it may not be condemning all of us to a life of virtual illiteracy. Somebody may even figure out how to give War and Peace the blog treatment. And, who knows, Great Books in 140-character installments might just …. Hm, better not go quite that far.

I Love the Smell of Distraction in the Morning

teamaskins, via Flickr (CC license)

there are some software-related tricks that might help damp down internet distractions

Nick Carr's essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? has gotten a lot of play recently. Extended discussions on Edge.org and the Britannica Blog are worth spending some time with, if you can resist distractions long enough to read text that fleshes out concepts and is longer than 140-characters.

Those discussions gave me appetite for more. And, yes, it was a web search (Summize/Twitter, no less) that turned up what I found an entertaining feature on all this in the Times Online. That Times piece kind of summed things up with regard to attention/distraction and broadened the discussion to general informational stuff, not strictly limited to the long books or text works that Carr talked about.

As I was reading it, I had a thought about the usual source of distractions: the internet and by extension the applications and information on our computers or mobile devices. To me, what makes distraction probable in this environment is multitasking. Not our own multitasking, but the computer's. That is, today's operating systems allow you to run multitple programs simultaneously, which allows (encourages?) distractions with programs running in the background. And if those programs are hooked to the web ... well, you know.

You know when an email or tweet arrives because a sound goes off. It's a trivial matter to simply switch windows to attend to it, distracting yourself from whatever you were doing before. But if you had to close the program you were running and open the other program, it might be a different story. Like the iPhone 2.0 apps.

And like operating systems used to be. One application at a time; if you wanted to switch from word processing, you had to close, say, Wordstar and open your communication program. But of course we're not going to go back to MS DOS anytime real soon.

But there are some software-related tricks that might help damp down internet distractions while you're at the computer, and might help you attend to longer amount of text without skimming.

About those networked distractions: if you turn off the network while you're reading or writing something, emails, tweets and urges to look up something on Google disappear. You aren't connected anymore, so it's useless to try reading email, IM, twittering, or whatever. The easiest way is to pull out the network cable or just turn off your system's network settings. But it's just as easy to plug it back in or turn it back on.

If you're on a Mac, you're in luck. Freedom is an application written by a grad student plagued by distraction at dissertation time. You give Freedom the amount of time you want to be unconnected from the web, and it dutifully complies for just that amount of time. And, as I undertand it, nothing short of a reboot can shorten that time. (Disclosure: I haven't tried it myself: too busy getting this blog post out.)

For attending to long pieces of text and resisting the urge to just skim them, I've been using Videocue, a teleprompter application. I simply paste the text of almost any length. It automatically strips out links and formatting so there's no temptation to follow a link. Instead, it forces me to run through the text sequentially, without stopping. I have to pay attention if I want to get anything out of it. I wouldn't want to read War and Peace this way, but it works for Atlantic essays I might stumble across

Finding What You Weren't Looking For

Image: rorris, via Flickr (CC license)

"Pay attention to irrelevant details and follow intriguing but useless connections."

I like attention. No, not being paid attention to at any cost, but the topic of how humans learn to pay attention to the stuff around them. Earlier I wrote about continuous partial attention, the notion that some of us aren't paying anywhere near full attention to stuff because we're too busy looking at email, texting or whatever on our mobile devices. (My wife and I got new IPhones over the weekend, and that's been a festival of continuous partial attention at times. But more on that another time.)

One of the people paying the most attention to paying attention is writer Howard Rheingold. He's doing so in service of teaching social media and other tech stuff to college kids.

Rheingold recently published a draft of a commencement speech he wrote for himself.

A very brief speech as commencement talks go, Rheingold advises the new graduates to "Pay attention to irrelevant details and follow intriguing but useless connections."

Not advice the typical future employer would give, but somehow Rheingold makes it sound like the right thing to do.

But how do you do that?

One way I've found is searching the growing stacks of short updates and brief discussions about all sorts of things in social media sites like Twitter and Friendfeed. People are tweeting and discussing almost anything you can think of. But it's not really possible to follow everyone, so you miss out on a lot of potential irrelevant details and intriguing but useless connections.

Fortunately, search sites like Summize let you retrieve things you may have missed. In fact, that's how I found Rheingold's speech - by following an intriguing but useless connection that turned up in a Summize search.

Stupid from Googling? It Depends

There's been no shortage of discussion around Nicholas Carr's Atlantic essay Is Google Making Us Stupid. Do we really share an unhelpful shortened attention span from reading tweets and blogs instead of philosophical tomes? (Ok, that's an oversimplification, but you get the idea.) Some commenters say yes, some no. One thoughtful post by Kevin Kelly points out we haven't had this much shortened information in the past because it wasn't profitable to print and distribute.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote yet another bit on it in the TimesOnline today. piece today, I had some additional thoughts. Sullivan sees the symptoms in himself, but points out he's writing hundreds of blog posts a week now. He needs the info gathering action offered by right clicking and looking something up in Google or whatever online source. But he longs for long form stuff, too.

All this has got me thinking we'd be better off asking a slightly different question here. Instead of wonder if Google dumbs us all down, maybe we should focus on what it is we're looking for in the first place. And why we're looking. The debate here is not so much about getting stupid from using Google and other internet stuff that it is about how do we go about getting information on what we want and need.

If what we want and need to know is something complex, we may not be able to fulfill our need if all this stuff about Google is correct. Although we might be able to at least find sources of information about the complex subject. And I'd bet there are or will be ways to summarize large blocks of text to see if we want to spend the time with them, or move onto the next item. So, while the internet sources won't replace long form text, it can at least point us in the direction of the one that will help us the most.

But what if our needs are not so complex? If we simply want to know what is the latest on Friendfeed, that's not so complex. If we want to delve deeper and ask about social media's place in internet usage, that's not so bad either, but we'd need to delve a little farther.

If Google is making me stupid, I guess I was already dumb enough not to notice.

The Changeable Brain

I've been fascinated with the idea of brain plasticity - the ability of the brain to alter some of its regions in response to experiences and thoughts. This was a pretty strange and uninvestigated scientific idea as recently as 10 years ago. But all sorts of stuff has happened since. Sharon Begley gives a brief overview in to a newsweek blog.

For more, see her books Train Your Mind to Change Your Brain and The Mind and the Brain.

Magnetic Brain Stimulation Coming of Age

Watch the video below to see how transcranial magnetic stimulation is developing from research-based curiosity into promising clinical applications. It's not just like parlor tricks anymore; it'll be truly useful very soon.

What was I going to write about?

OK, I had an idea for a post, but can't seem to remember it. What was it?

Oh, I know ... it was Exercise Your Brain Or Else You'll ... Uh ..

Less Television, More Media

Image by gbaku, via Flickr (CC license)

With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube.

Much of the useless information I know came from watching television. I know who shot JR, for example. Or, McDreamy and McSteamy used to live in New York, and McSteamy slept with McDreamy's wife.

Yep, I've pissed away a lot of hours in front of the boob tube. But not nearly so much in the last couple of years. There are plenty of other ways to consume media time - blogging, twittering, sharing stuff with friends and family. What? You thought I was going to talk about using the time to read or exercise?)

Oh, we still watch a few favorites, whenever we want, thanks to TIVO. But consuming media - maybe better put as using media like television - isn't the same as it was and never will be, thank goodness.

Author Clay Shirky has made a career out of talking about this kind of stuff. His book Here Comes Everybody will give you a clear view of what's going on with media and society. And a transcript of his speech at the Web 2.0 Conference puts it in a little more perspective.

Society's television viewing bender came not from the invention of television, but was a kind of side effect from adopting the 5-day work week in the 20th century. That change created a big dab of free time, and Philo T Farnesworth, David Sarnoff, William Paley, et al were happy to fill it.

Shirky calls the free time a cognitive surplus, time you brain doesn't have to think about work. With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube. The tube produced, and we consumed; a classic one-way interaction.

But the internet and social media have changed all that. We can still consume media, but we can also produce out own content and share it with whomever we please quite easily and cheaply.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And that's making for a big change that will be even bigger when today's toddlers grow up:

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

That all sounds like the most wonderful thing - and it is. But I think there are going to be some side effects that aren't necessarily good ones.

Increasingly we can consume, produce and share media on the go with mobile devices like iPhones, Blackberries, or whathaveyou. And we've probably all experienced trying to hold a conversation with someone who's preoccupied with reading email or looking something up on one of those mobile devices.

I've referred to this continuous partial attention syndrome previously. I expect it will get a lot worse as things unfold.

But at least we won't spend enormous amounts of time watching and wondering who shot JR.

Attention Must Be Paid

Continuous partial attention and multitasking are subject that have popped up here previously.

Continuous partial attention occurs when someone doesn't pay attention to any one thing continuously, but pays partial attention to lots of different stuff. Most of us have talked with someone who's checking email or texting while engaged in our conversation. Drives me nuts, but that's another story. For more, see Linda Stone on continuous partial attention.

But what if you wanted to educate these multitaskers on the metaskill of paying attention? And I don't mean just forcing them to put down the Blackberry, but really develop a new attentional skill. I think that would be particularly hard with people who have grown up with Internet, WiFi, texting, video games or whathaveyou.

Howard Rheingold, a writer-turned-teacher, took on the challenge with college kids who had signed up for his course on social media. He seems to take it very seriously, having the class delve into the subject of attention before even addressing the class's subject. What I like most about his approach is telling the kids to notice where their attention goes as things unfold in the class.

Were you tempted to check email or read RSS feeds as the video played?

Learning Makes a Difference

Image from jonhanson, via Flickr (CC license)

As long as our nervous systems continue learning, we'll probably be OK.

My post on Learning and Change added a Feldenkrais Method spin on a video rant by author Susan Jacoby. Jacoby goes on about the dumbing down of American culture. For example, in one study only 23% of people with some college could locate Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Israel on a map - and the map was labeled.

So it's a bit refreshing to find some smart and informed examples of people who go against the trend. By now, this is not exactly new, but check out the You Tube video that shows what happens when a reporter tries to put a young Obama supporter on the spot by asking for specifics. Find the video here. And for even more specific stuff on interviewee Derrick Ashong, watch this video.

Then there's the news media and their assumptions about news consumers. Kevin Kelly points out their possible role in the dumbing down scenario and finds a nice counterpoint:

In other words, that's the conventional wisdom about newsy stuff: There's the boring important things on the front page and the frivolous self-help stuff on the rest. What Hirschorn found in his study was different:

Instead, the most–e-mailed lists, despite a smattering of parochial concerns, were a rich stew of global affairs, provocative insight, hot-button issues, pop culture, compelling narrative, and enlightened localism. In short, they were interesting...

So maybe we're not all as dull as some make us out. As long as our nervous systems take advantage of the learning experiences richly available everywhere, we'll probably be OK.

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

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

The Handicap That Isn't

Boredom is bad, idle hands being the tool of the devil and all, right? For the perpetually bored, maybe so. But look at what one bored guy has to say about it:

“I get bored easily, and that is a great motivator,” he said. “I think everybody should have dyslexia and A.D.D.”

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that's a quote from the Dude in The Big Lebowski. But it's actually from Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinkos. He was quoted in an article announcing details of a new study that found a significant number of dyslexics among the dynamic world of entrepreneurs.

Rather than being a handicap or hinderance, it seems the dyslexics come to develop and rely on their ability to work around their problems with written communication and organization. Simply put, they quickly learn how to delegate authority and work with oral communication. And in business, particularly the dynamic world of the entrepreneurial, that's a big asset.

One reason that dyslexics are drawn to entrepreneurship, Professor Logan said, is that strategies they have used since childhood to offset their weaknesses in written communication and organizational ability — identifying trustworthy people and handing over major responsibilities to them — can be applied to businesses.

Two things get my attention here. The idea that a seeming weakness can turn into an unusually useful strength is just, well, refreshing. But the real trick, I think, is that it involves learning. If you have difficulty reading, writing, taking tests, etc. you have to learn how to workaround that. And when you do, the workaround - in this case delegating stuff to others - can be more than just useful.

I don't think ... no, I know ... that learning alternate ways of doing things or all sorts is an asset that's not restricted to the world of business.

I think it's call being human.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Thoughts on Learning Movement Skills

There’s this really wacky treadmill in Maryland that might be changing how we understand the brain’s control of walking. Needless to say, this is pretty exciting for offering therapy for brain injured people who’ve had trouble walking. But, at least to my way of thinking, the implications might also extend to athletic and performance instruction.

What makes the treadmill wacky is that it can go forward and backward — at the same time! Instead of one belt turning under a walker, this thing uses two, one for each leg. The belts can turn in different directions and at different speeds. Sounds like patting you head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, but volunteers participating in a study at the Kenney Krieger Institue quickly adapted to it.

In fact, they adapted so well that they couldn’t stop the odd walking pattern the treadmill had required of them, even when they got off of it. It took about 15 minutes for their brains to adapt and resume their regular walking gait.

The odd pattern of the treadmill had disrupted their brain’s walking pattern and put the new one in it’s place. And they weren’t able to consciously override it.

Researchers who conducted the treadmill study concluded that there are different and separate brain systems that control each leg during walking, and each direction, forward or backward. I understand this is contrary to the current theory of walking control.

There are some pretty exciting implications for therapy here. According to the lead author:

"The notion that we can leverage the brain's adaptive capacity and effectively ,dial in, the patterns of movement that we want patients to learn is incredibly exciting," said Dr. Amy Bastian, senior study author and Director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. "These findings significantly enhance our understanding of motor skills, effective therapeutic approaches and the true adaptive nature of the brain."

But I wonder if these findings might also apply to learning or refining movement-based skills, like those in athletics or performance arts. After all, the treadmill effectively completely disrupted habitual walking patterns and put new ones in their place, at least temporarily.

And here’s the key thing — this “learning” happened without conscious thinking from the treadmill walkers. No figuring out how to do a certain step, like you might do in dance class. The new pattern just happened, then went away.

How could this sort of thing be used in skills instruction? By disrupting a habitual way of performing a skill, old ways of interfering with learning new patterns would be removed automatically. Seems to me that this “new state” would be more conductive to learning a different motor pattern.

And though this new state might be temporary, it would still allow a way to actually feel what it’s like to make a certain movement without habitual ways of interfering with it. The key here would be in developing and using enough awareness during the temporary period.

This would go well beyond just getting feedback while learning. And, for sure, it would be a whole lot better than the traditional “demonstrate and imitate” method used by many instructors.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning

Kid Vid Maybe Not So Good for Kids

It’s fun shopping for a gift for a baby or toddler. Good excuse to “test drive” all those great toys you find in the toy superstores and the like. But sometimes the gift turns out not to be a toy at all, but something “good” for the little tyke. Like maybe an educational video like those from the Baby Einstein line, for example.

Video produced for educating and enhancing babies and toddler has become a big business. Really big, as in billion dollars a year.

And the babies and toddlers are watching at increasing rates, spurred on by well-meaning parents who say they believe the videos teach the kids stuff, are good for their little brain’s development and, besides, the kids giggle and wiggle while they watch the screen.

A new study from the University of Washington has revealed that 40 percent of 3-month olds watch an average of 45 minutes a day, or 5 hours a week. And by age 2, 90 percent are watching an average of 90 minutes a day.

But are these videos really as educational and nurturing as some parents think? Maybe not. Well, definitely not, according to U Dub pediatricians who authored the study.

Such early exposure to screens can have a negative impact on an infant's rapidly developing brain and put children at a higher risk of attention problems, diminished reading comprehension and obesity, researchers say.

What’s ironic here is the good intentions gone awry. Parents may think they’re helping their kids brain development, but they may be confusing the kiddies’ orienting and survival responses for interest in what’s happening on the screen.

What parents identify as attention and learning, scientists say is a primitive reflex known as the orienting response.

"Yes, the baby is staring at the screen, but it's wrong to think the child likes it," says (author) Christakas.

The study authors go on to suggest that excess viewing of the videos will turn the kids into couch potatoes, taking their attention and activity away from more healthy pursuits as they develop and grow

But I wonder. Are these speculations based on research or more on common sense? Has anyone done research over time, following the same kids to actually see what happened to the little heavy viewers as they grew?

I remember hearing an interview with anatomist and body worker Thomas Myers who concisely summed up these sorts of dilemmas. Myers said something like, “The problems we face are using bodies and brains suited to a neolithic environment in an electronic age.”

That seems to be a good statement of the sort of problems pointed to by the study and its authors. What to do about it is more up in the air.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

Eyes on the Ball

What do you do when you want to improve on some athletic skill, say putting a golf ball or shooting free throws in basketball? Well, you could seek out a teacher to refine your biomechanics. You might hire a personal trainer of some sort to help improve your strength and flexibility.

Or, you could adjust your eyes to look at particular spots while you’re putting or shooting.

Huh?

Ya, that’s what I thought when I first stumbled on the work of Canadian researcher Joan Vickers. Vickers has studied where people look (where they focus their gaze, as she calls it) in a variety of athletic situations.

Not really that surprising, Vickers found more accomplished athletes use their eyes differently than beginner or the less accomplished.

Vickers uses a computer-based contraption that sort of resembles Darth Vader’s helmet. It’s basically a transparent visor attached to a helmet worn by research subjects. As the subject looks through the visor at the putting green, basketball court or whatever, an attached computer tracks the location of the subjects pupils — it let’s Vickers know where the subject is looking.

If you’re not getting the picture, so the speak, there’s a really marvelous Scientific American Frontiers episode titled On the Ball that you can watch on the PBS website.

Host Alan Alda demonstrates Vicker’s device on camera. Vickers takes Alda through sequences of putting and free throw shooting. Alda improves quiet dramatically by practicing Vicker’s advice on where to focus his gaze:

• In the free throw shooting, it’s focusing briefly on a very specific part of the basketball rim before launching the shot. Alda gets so good that he makes one on-camera shot facing away from the basket and heaving the ball backward over his head. Nothing but net.

• In golf, it’s focusing on the hole, and then on a very specific part of the golf ball, maybe the back of the ball. And when making contact with the ball, keeping the gaze on that same, exact spot instead of lifting the eyes to look at where the ball’s going.

I suspect there’s a lot of eye tracking going on with teams, athletes and coaches. Vickers’ approach is just one.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the work of Australian Damian Farrow, a researcher who’s teaching “field sense” to all sorts of athletes down under. But he’s also using the eye tracking methods:

Farrow spends a lot of time simply trying to determine what it is experts see that amateurs don't. Among other things, he uses an eye-motion tracker to record where virtuoso players are looking during clutch situations, such as when passing under pressure from multiple defenders coming from different directions. He pulls up a videoclip from an Australian rules football practice that he conducted with the Adelaide Crows, a professional team. The game is essentially football crossed with rugby, and players advance the ball by kicking it to teammates. As the play unfolds, players break left and right. One runs very visibly up the middle. Onscreen, a crosshair flits around. This is the darting sight of the Crows' kicker: a zigzag that covers the field, with minute pauses at key moments, like when he's assessing the openness of a potential receiver. Farrow's frame-by-frame analysis compares where good and bad kickers look and for how long. "We want to know, at what points are the experts doing something differently? When are they looking somewhere that the less skilled players aren't?" Farrow has found that players who make poor decisions tend to glance at targets, rather than pausing on them. They're also more drawn to motion. "In a lot of team sports, you're attracted to the area of greatest movement," Farrow says. "But just because there's a person running fast and waving his arms doesn't mean he's the best person to kick to."Wired: Teaching Field Sense

If you want more specifics of how Vicker’s suggests applying her technique to different sports, see a transcript of her interaction with the audience for the On the Ball program.

Perhaps most intriguing is her advice to a mother of an ADHD kid who wants to improve his baseball skills. The secret? Watch the ball, but do it sooner, rather than later.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

Tall Alexander Tale

I sometimes think of making this a one topic blog, one that focuses exclusively on somatic based practices like the Feldenkrais Method or the Alexander Technique. But it's not easy to find current news articles about this kind of stuff, at least not on a regular basis.

But today a pleasant surprise was waiting for me in NetNewsWire, the RSS aggregator that I use to collect information from many internet sources each day. Freelance writer Laura Moser provides Slate.com readers with Unnatural Poise: Learning the Alexander Technique, a clearly written piece of first person journalism telling us of her previously intractable shoulder injury, how a prolonged practitioner-assisted bout of the Alexander Technique helped lessen her constant, distracting shoulder pain.

Moser gives us the context that led to her seeking out Alexander Technique NYC, provides a concise definition of the Technique and even gives us a few hints for good self-use..

Alexander was not Moser's first attempt at managing the considerable residual pain from an injury to her right shoulder. (She ran after a connecting flight while carrying 75 pounds of luggage slug over that shoulder in 2004.) Accupuncture and PT seemed promising, but insurance wasn't much help here, and medical cost was a big issue. Moser wrote two earlier articles about rigging up a medical tourism trip to China for treatment that was partially successful.

But she was about to be surprised by what she discovered about her injury and what she was doing during everyday life.

I grew up believing that success in life, or at least a decent report card, hinged on the ability to silence the body, to ignore its twitches and creaks. And so I seldom stretched when my back ached, or stood when my foot fell asleep. At first, I saw no connection between these habits and the shoulder injury I sustained in late 2004.

A trusted friend suggested she try Alexander. When she did, a surprising connection popped up:

I readily appreciated Alexander's underlying logic and believed my teacher Julie's suggestion that the root cause of my injury was my height. I sprouted to 6-foot-2 at age 16 and without realizing it spent much of the succeeding years trying to shrink my way into polite society. Finally, after more than a decade of hunching forward, my poor shoulder gave out. (Short people, who tend to pitch their necks backward and up, encounter a different set of problems.)

I knew that Alexander is more popular in the UK than in the USA, but I didn't know that AT teachers outnumber chiropractors in the UK. Thank goodness for Slate, eh?

I've read many descriptions of Alexander, but the one here seems really accessible:

Since repetition destroys perception, we lose the ability to "feel" what's right for our bodies. So instead of "fixing" our bad habits, Alexander tells us to simply observe them and think about inhibiting them. Sometimes, this involves little more than imagining the lower jaw moving forward and out, or the elbow rotating at three distinct points. This murky teleology lies at the heart of the Alexander Technique's allure—and also of its difficulty.

And since this has the flavor of a self-help article, it wouldn't be complete without a few tips:

She helped me set up an ergonomic workspace, and gave me tips for flying long distances without the usual muscular hangover. (The secret: staying on your feet, schmoozing in the flight attendants' cubby.)

and

But I have learned to slow down, to think before I move. And having accepted that the world will always be a little short for me, I now pad chairs with dictionaries and phone books to elevate my hips above my knees. I never travel, not even on the subway, without a chiropractic chair insert that elicits envious comments from elderly passengers.

I've also tried one of these chair inserts, and they work pretty well. Trouble is, I'm a couple inches taller than Moser; the insert makes me too tall to fit into my car.

Tall isn't always easy.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, mindfulness, plasticity

Forgetting to Remember

You don’t necessarily have to be a senior to have “senior moments” — those times that you forget where you left your keys or blank on the name of a relatively new acquaintance. But, of course, the older you get, the more troubling it becomes.

New research from Stanford University might put your mind at ease, at least a little bit. In fact, the study even boldly implies that not only are things not so bad, they’re actually working the way they should:

The findings should also reduce some of the anxiety surrounding “senior moments,” researchers say. Some names, numbers and details are hard to retrieve not because memory is faltering, but because it is functioning just as it should.

Here’s what seems to be happening: existing memories might be getting in the way of the new ones. And the more successful you are at blocking these distracting memories, the better your recall of new stuff is likely to become.

Actually, the research focused more on finding marked decreased activity in the anterior cingulated cortex of those who were able to suppress distracting memories when trying to remember pairs of words they were asked to remember.

So forgetting a password might not be so bad after all:

People blank on new passwords so often because of the distracting presence of old or other current passwords. The better the brain can block those distracting digits, the easier it can bring to mind the new ones, (senior author) Dr. Wagner said.

I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to recall this article in the future. While reading it, I remembered a technique that Moshe Feldenkrais talked about on one of his taped lectures. The idea was to remember something, try to forget it. Probably you’ll fail, and thus will remember the thing. After all, you can’t forget and remember at the same time.

Distracting thought, eh?

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, memory

Learning Field Sense

Remember the scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker is learning to use his Lightsaber? He's not doing well, getting hit with small laser blasts from a training device because he can't anticipate them before they give him a zap. But then Jedi mentor Obi-wan obstructs Luke’s vision and tells him to trust the force. This, of course, makes all the difference, and Luke looks like a pro parrying the laser blasts with his trusty lightsaber. This training comes in handy later in those cool lightsaber fights and in blowing the Death Star to smithereens.

It’s all fiction: after all, there’s no such thing as the Force. Or is there?

Some athletes seem to have something like it with their ability to anticipate their opponents actions or knowing where team mates will be and delivering the ball to them at precisely the right time. Most recently, LeBron James of the upstart Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, seems to know exactly where team mates will be before giving them inspiring assist passes.

LeBron and other talented athletes aren’t using the Force, but they do seem to have something called field sense. Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson. Those guys could beat you, not so much with raw athletic talent, as much as a savvy way of knowing where opponents were, what they were doing, and most importantly, what they were going to do next.

The bad news for the rest of us is that this field sense has been thought to be innate, not teachable. You have it or you don’t. But Peter Vint and Damian Farrow don’t believe that. And they are doing something about it, even using methods that Obi-wan would probably approve of.

Vint is a researcher with the U.S. Olympic committee. Farrow is a scientist at the Australian Institute of Sports. Wired magazine takes a look at what these guys are up to in Wayne Gretzky-style Field Sense May be Teachable.

Farrow started out with his own faltering tennis game. Not especially blessed with quickness, he decided to learn how to anticipate his opponent’s shots. He figured some stuff out, but quickly decided he couldn’t think about all the stuff he’d learned and play tennis at the same time. He suspected that any learning needed to be unconscious to work in the heat of a match.

So he set to work figuring out what expert tennis players were seeing that the rest of us weren’t. And here’s where the similarities with Obi-wan’s methods pop up:

To understand what experts were seeing, Farrow meticulously dismantled the mechanics of the serve. He recruited two groups of players — novices and experts — and outfitted each with earmuffs and occlusion goggles, clear glasses that turn opaque when an assistant on the sidelines flips an electronic switch. He then put the athletes on court opposite an expert server. As the server's arm went back for the shot, Farrow would black out the goggles, leaving players to swing blindly at the incoming ball.

Farrow used a variety of timing with the vision-obstructing googles. Sometimes he’s blank out the vision just after the ball came over the net toward the googled player, see how that player would react. Other times it was during various stages of the opponents serve.

Not surprisingly, the later the vision was blanked, the more accurately the players could react to the incoming serve. But

What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head

Remember that learning this court sense needed to be an unconscious process. So Farrow told players not to worry about where the serve would be coming from, but to focus on estimating its speed. This indirectly tuned the players into cues that their brains could use to figure out where the ball would be going and to adjust themselves accordingly.

Clever, and a bit reminiscent of the stuff in Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.

There are other examples in the article of Vint and Darrow working with other sports like volleyball and Australian-style football. Vint even suggests perception training for fencing.

I’m assuming it’s with regular sabers, not the ones made out of light.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

Whole Body Computing

Are there sports and athletics in Second Life? Never having visited that online virtual world, I couldn’t even venture a guess. But it would be hard to even imagine much more movement than tapping on the keyboard or wiggling the mouse around on your desktop.

Whole body interactions with a desktop computer seems an unlikely topic for almost any discussion. But Jaron Lanier writes a whole column about it in this month’s Discover magazine. Lanier puts it so beautifully at the beginning of the piece:

Computers today barely connect with people. The human body evolved as a whole to sense and interact with the world, but computers sense us only at our fingertips. Even the fingertips aren’t allowed to do all they can: a computer that was designed to interact with us holistically would feel different from moment to moment in order to convey information. For more than two decades, I’ve been working on the grand project of virtual reality to bring the whole body into computing.

Lanier goes on to talk about earlier work on stiff like data gloves, and he sings the praises of the Nintendo Wii, even going as far to say it heralds the beginning of the haptic revolution. But in the end, Moore’s Law hasn’t multiplied enough times to give us the stuff we need for real virtual reality. But instead of virtual worlds, I find it fascinating to think about applying the limited bits of the technology to interacting with the physical world, right now. Especially in sports and athletic coaching.

I mentioned the Ultimate Balance trainer in an earlier post as an example of something that could help orient athletes with the field of gravity and help improve balance and stability.

And it’s not so much that the functions such technology supplies haven’t been around for a while. You could always just use a t square or level, or whatever, which would give you the same information, but it would take a lot of time, probably be cumbersome and impractical, and you’d have to know how to use those things.

The advantage of stuff like Ultimate Balance technology is that it can get the functions portable enough, fast enough and small enough to be useful as we’re performing the actions where we need the feedback to improve balance and stability.

I can see how things like motion detectors and accelerometers can provide important cues much as an accurate vestibular system might. And, hopefully, the accelerometer’s sense of movement in three planes doesn’t get compromised by habit and faulty perception like ours do sometimes.

On the one hand, such technology gives an objective picture of how we are relative to the geometry of effective movement (whatever that is). But on the other hand, it doesn’t learn for us, either. It can only give us feedback that our nervous system either learns or it doesn’t.

But it’s better than nothing. And it involves more than your fingertips, too.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

Trauma and Learning

A traumatic event can really mess with your brain. But the ability to recall such an experience in the future could be useful, even lifesaving, according to an article in today’s Washington Post.

The recovered brain knows to red-tag the notes and retrieve them quickly when needed. In fact, it may retrieve them before you know you even need them, according to Staci Gruber, associate director of the cognitive neuroimaging lab at McLean Hospital, part of Harvard Medical School. The brain frequently senses danger before the individual sees anything potentially dangerous, Gruber says. The individual can then act quickly to escape the danger or minimize its effect.

Not surprisingly, brain plasticity plays a big role here. And that’s a good thing, since the stress of trauma and recalling it can cause the brain to manufacture hormones that kills cells that convert short-term to long-term memories.

You might think it’d be OK to forget such a terrible memory. After all, recalling a trauma over and over can release more of those cell-killing hormones. But erasing all traces of the traumatic event would be throwing away any learning along with the memory.

The trick is to set it up so any re-experiencing happens in a safe, calm environment.

Therapy, more than drugs, helps people recover from PTSD, says Dianne Bradford, professor in the psychiatry department at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. And it turns out, according to (research psychiatrist Norman) Doidge, that all the conventional therapies help rewire the brain by encouraging patients to re-experience bits of the earlier trauma in a safe environment. Research shows that the hippocampus can grow new cells and long-term memory can take shape to be recalled when necessary.

That’s evidently what happened with Liviu Librescu, the holocaust survivor and heroic Virginia Tech engineering professor who helped students escape last week’s massacre. The gunman later killed Librescu.

He was a person whose memories served him well: He must have realized quickly “that sometimes people with evil intent come to your door with a gun, and you have to be prepared for that,” Doidge said.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning, plasticity

Exercise, Learning, Plasticity and Feldenkrais

It’s New to Them takes a peek at attention to novel situations. In particular, a group of older adults found cognitive benefits from developing the ability to attend to novel situations in theater training.

Now I’ve never really considered that another kind of training, physical exercise, contributes all that much to keeping the mind sharpened as we age. Sure, exercise and health go together, but exercise and smarts? But a recent Newsweek article linked exercise to boosted brain power. It seemed to say exercise makes kids smarter.

Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich weighs in on the subject from the plasticity perspective. Not so much that he rejects the idea out of hand, but he wants to be more specific on the links between the physical movements and their impacts on the brain:

OF COURSE being physically fit is of substantial importance for growing and sustaining our mental capacities, in kids, and throughout life! So, too, is the continous elaboration of our motor learning repertoires!

He goes on to elaborate:

BRAIN-LESS physical activity is much less useful for your cognitive fitness than physical activity that involves new experiences and continuous learning — that is, that drives continuous brain plasticity!

Now I don’t know if Merzenich knows anything about the Feldenkrais Method. From my (admittedly non-objective) viewpoint, it could really fit his requirements. After all unfamiliar movements done in unusual positions makes you notice and respond accordingly.

But mentioning Feldenkrais and exercise in the same breath doesn’t really work. Besides the fact that Moshe Feldenkrais himself often railed against most exercise as “work for donkeys,” Feldenkrais’ Method is just too different from most of our ideas about exercise to make it a non-starter in most gyms. It doesn’t look like exercise. Doesn’t fit into the usual categories of exercise you find at the typical gym. It’s not aerobic, doesn’t involve strength training, or stretching.

Here’s how it might fit, though. According to Larry Goldfarb, there’s a fourth category in the physical education world — coordination. And Feldenkrais excels in helping to set up situations where we can learn a lot more about how we can coordinate ourselves. You can hit a tennis ball with all the strength, stamina and flexibility you can muster, but you’re not likely to play a competent game with an uncoordinated swing.

It takes learning for that to happen, or as Merzenich puts it, “new experiences and continuous learning … that drives continuous brain plasticity!”

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, mindfulness, plasticity

Plasticity and Broomsticks

Brain plasticity gets a lot more buzz now than it has in the past. The idea that activity and awareness can change stuff in the brain seems miraculous. And it is. ItÕs easy to come to the conclusion that plasticity always works in our favor. But it doesn't, not always.

Take focal dystonia in musicians, for example. Sharon Begley describes how it works in a not so good way in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. Some music demands such fast finger movement that the musicianÕs nervous system can start to lump together the sensory and motor representations of adjacent fingers, so that a finger automatically moves when itÕs neighbor does. The musician in effect loses control of the affected finger, which is not such a good thing.

Begley goes on to describe some activity-based treatments that reactivate the plasticity of these cortices, this time in a positive way. As I recall, the treatment uses a form of constraint-based therapy to get the unresponsive fingers moving and communicating again.

As I wrote this, I just remembered hearing pianist Andrew Rangell talk about his hand problems from overuse, on NPRÕs Fresh Air. It took him seven years to get back to performing. I remember his talking quite positively about working with a Feldenkrais practitioner during his recovery. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a transcript of that interview.

It makes sense to me, as a Feldenkrais practitioner, that activity and awareness can help "rewire" otherwise haywire neural circuits. At least in these sorts of overuse situations. But I hadn't thought of plasticity as a factor that might influence other sorts of brain problems. I was surprised to read that plasticity might be a factor in some cases of epilepsy.

Instead, as the damaged brain tries to rewire itself Ñ a crucial process called plasticity Ñ misfiring circuitry can form. Injured neurons can make new connections in wrong places, or overly excitable connections. Even the brain’s genes change the way they work after head injury.

"You need the plasticity for recovery. You don't want to stop it. You just want to structure it in a way that it aids recovery without causing seizures," Temkin explains.

The article goes on the explain that it's not clear how to do that.

This idea that plasticity can run amok brought up a fond image. Of all things, it's one of Mickey Mouse and dancing broomsticks from the Disney classic Fantasia. If you're not familiar with the scene, Mickey is an apprentice to a wise old sorcerer. While the wizard is away, he somehow gets one of the broomsticks to do one of his chores, fetching a pail of water. Proud of himself for this accomplishment, Mickey doesn't realize that he doesn't know how to get the broomsticks to stop fetching pails of water, and the place is soon flooded. Fortunately, the wizard returns to restore order and quell the flood.

Sometimes it makes you wonder where all the sorcerers and wizards have gone, doesn't it?

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, plasticity

Body Awareness Plus

Maybe it's just my Feldenkrais background, but when I think about body awareness I almost automatically think about movement. Awareness Through Movement, and all that. But I think there's more to it. After all, there are all sorts of sensations that aren't strictly movement.

What got me thinking about this was reading a blog post about the brain in the stomach. It pointed out how the digestive system is rich in nervous tissue. And it seems this "enteric nervous system" and the central nervous system communicate all the time. What's going on one place can be reflected in another.

Interesting, I thought, but not really that compelling, at least not enough to be blog-worthy. But then as I was reading a comment to a piece on how the brain might sort of truth from untruth (there's not much research to shed light on this), I began thinking about how the two posts might be related. Is there some sort of conceptual tie between the enteric nervous system and the idea of models in the brain put forth by the commenter in the second article?

And that brought up the idea of focusing. Not focusing like with a camera or your eyeball, but a formal awareness-based technique from the world of therapy. My understanding of the technique is that you put your awareness on internal sensations, and then use a specific set of steps to reveal any connection between those enteric sensations and what's going on in your mind. My brief explanation certainly doesn't do justice to the focusing technique, but it may explain some sort of tie between the two nervous systems and a way to tap into that.

I'm wondering if I need to say more about all this here, but my gut tells me that's enough. For now.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais

An Artful Recovery

Wouldn't you think that a medical professional who suffered a brain injury would attempt to regain function by traditional medical means? One doc who didn't but achieved a notable recovery is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She's written a book about her experience and been interviewed on the radio. Sandra Kiume has published an interview with Taylor about her recovery on her Neurofuture blog.

With grittiness, family support and her professional knowledge about the brain and its plasticity, she regained capabilities in innovative ways beyond traditional stroke rehabilitation methods.

One of those innovative ways was creating stained glass brain models. Sounds really beautiful. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any images of those models to post here. But Taylor does offer some insight into how all this helped her along:

1. Balance and equilibrium to stand still in front of a workspace and manipulate the project. 2. Gross motor movement, handling glass is very delicate and dangerous, I was highly motivated to be very careful for both the glass and myself. 3. Fine motor dexterity, cutting glass is a precise activity, grinding glass requires holding my body firm - equilibrium, pushing into the grinder - gross motor and then lining all of the pieces up - fine motor. 4. Cognitive development - this type of a project is a long term project with lots of steps. It helped me in my linear thinking. 5. Cartoon development of the original image required a combination of intuition and sensory organization. 6. Focus and concentration balanced with sleep. 7. Artistry - how does one tweak it all to make it remarkable and beautiful.

I think this is a beautiful example of plasticity in action: engage repeatedly in a challenging activity involving lots of body awareness, and the nervous system adapts to it.

Technorati Tags: brain, mindfulness, plasticity

Mindfulness in the News

Today's NPR story on mindfulness covered some old ground, but also cleared up a couple of points. Folks reluctant to delve into any sort of mindful practice might find the story particularly interesting and useful.

The most important point, to me, is how the story presents the benefits of mindful practice, in this case in a medical setting. I think this a pretty important (and maybe even ironic) point. Lots of people afflicted with one or the other somatic-complaint condition usually only seek some sort of mindfulness practice when nothing else helps. "Nothing else has worked, I'm still suffering, so might as well try this