Breathe In, Breathe Out

This Is Your Brain on Google

Author Nicholas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the most recent issue of the Atlantic magazine.

In a way, yes, but in another way it might be leading the way to some other way of knowing and acting in the world. What fascinated me most reading Carr's essay was his comparing what's happening at Google with the work of early management theorist Frederick Taylor. Technology and the measurements and recording it makes available propels us into the future without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror. The times they are a changin' - again.

Brain plasticity is another interesting point. We've only recently discovered how profoundly changeable the brain is to our experiences. If we don't read longish texts that influence our brains to make connections and imagine new things, then the brain adapts to that. Spend you time reading enough 140-character tweets, and you get good at doing that. But don't expect a lot of joy when you have to read and digest something long and complex. I suppose our brains could learn to adapt back, though.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

Remembering When You Forget

Image by teclasorg, via Flickr (CC license)

Ever have trouble putting a name with a face? Maybe someone at an annual conference comes up and says hello. You recognize the person, but can't really recall the name. It can be embarrassing, but there's an easy explanation for it.

Neuroscience writer Jonah Leher recently published What's That Name on the Boston Globe's site. Leher tells us that memories are stored in different parts of the brain, so to recall a complete memory, you have to assemble it from the many places it's stored in the brain. The tip of the tongue moments occurs when one piece gets lost or at least delayed.

The one thing I found really interesting here is the idea that giving hints of words starting with the same letter or somehow related to the word can help recall it. It just doesn't make much sense that a word completely unrelated to the word you're trying to recall would be a good clue. That is, unless you know that word stuff is stored in the same area of the brain:

A similar fragmentation is at work in the production of language. Lise Abrams, a psychologist at the University of Florida, has demonstrated that, in many cases, the key to remembering a word that has been on the tip of the tongue is to encounter another word that shares a first syllable with the one we are trying to remember. For instance, when subjects are trying to recall "bandanna," they are much more likely to come up with the solution if they are given "banish" as a hint. "Banish" and "bandanna" mean very different things, but they activate the same network of brain cells devoted to the sound of the words.

The connections can be even more indirect. Abrams has shown that showing people a picture of a motorcycle can help them remember the word "biopsy." Because the idea of a motorcycle is connected in the brain to the concept of "bike," which shares a first syllable with "biopsy," the seemingly irrelevant cue becomes an effective hint.

Technorati Tags: brain, memory

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.

Three-armed monkeys learn to feed themselves

I've written previously about experiments where monkeys learned to control an artifical arm. A new study takes it even farther:

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill. The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

link: Monkeys Control a Mechanical Arm With Their Thoughts - NYTimes.com

The most interesting thing here is the monkeys learned to incorporate a detached mechanical device into their body maps. Researches had to open the monkeys' skulls to imbed stuff in their brain, though. Still not ready for primetime, but a promising step.

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 ..

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.

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.

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

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

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

A Kiss Is Just A Kiss - Or Is It?

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

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

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

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

Tools Extend the Body Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A write up on the study itself is here.

Technorati Tags: brain, body_schema, learning

Hey, I Know That Guy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always, well worth a listen or read.

Book Learnin' Don't Always Work

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning

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

Wii: Good for Exercise, Good for Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Art of Human Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Quitters Can Be Winners

In (the original)  Rocky movie, Sylvester Stallone plays a fighter who never gives up - even when the champ is beating the crap out of him. The Rocky character's dream was to "go the distance" with the champ, and seemingly gave everything he had to get there.

But is it always a great idea to never give up, no matter what? Probably not, according to some psychological research cited in Psychology: Why Quitting is Good for You  - Newsweek Mind Matters - MSNBC.com .

The study divided its subjects into Bulldogs (who never give up) and Quitters (who ... you know.) It seems the Bulldogs run into more problems with stress and health than the Quitters.

But is giving up really the bugaboo that society sometimes makes it? Writer and blogger Wray Herbert puts a different spin on it:

It’s said that depressed people have a more realistic view of the world, and in fact some evolutionary psychologists now believe that depression may have had survival value when we were evolving on the savannahs. Depression is what told our bodies to slow down and take stock of the situation, be cautious, don’t dis the silverback. Today a little melancholy might help us give up on that Olympic gold, and in the long run avoid killers like diabetes and heart disease.

Don't get me wrong here; taking on a challenge is usually a good motivator. But when the goal becomes realistically unattainable, it may be time to reassess. That doesn't alway make for a great story though.

Eyes (and Other Senses) in the Back of the Head

Ever heard of peripersonal space? It's "the bubble of space around a person's body that his brain as part of him in its map of his body."

Body map? Yeah, it turns out that the human brain is filled with representations of the body and the environment it finds itself in. The maps are for both sensing and for moving. It's these maps that you use to move your arm or leg, and not the muscles that reside there, at least not directly.

Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee beautifully and clearly describe the ideas of body brain maps in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better. I just finished an initial reading yesterday, and I plan to have much more to say about this wonderful book. Lots of very rich Feldenkrais-related material here.

But what reminded me of it was this New Scientist post on an experimental headband that helps its wearers sense physical stuff around them when blindfolded. There are even some video illustrations. And the New Scientist post mentions other sources of information about this sort of contraption.

It's not hard to predict that these sorts of haptic devices will be widely available, probably pretty soon. What'll be really interesting is when they hit the consumer market. All sorts of athletic applications, I'd think.

But most interesting to me is what kind of effect it'll have on kids as they develop. Maybe the term "eyes in the back of the head" will be more than a metaphor in the future.

Sensory Mismatch

Ever get "car sick" when reading in the backseat of a moving car? It's happened to me ever since I was a little kid, and I've always wondered why it happens.

Turns out it's probably the explanation for out-of-body experiences that you sometimes read about. No, I've never had one of those. But if I had, it would be for roughly the same reason as the car sickness from reading.

In both cases, the sensations are produced by a mismatch of sensory information reaching the brain.

Motion sickness, says journalist Scott McCredie in his new book Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense usually occurs when what you see and what your vestibular system senses don't agree. It's called the sensory conflict theory.

For example, my eyes aren't following the motion of the car as I'm reading, although the balance organs on my inner ear are on board with the motion. That's a mismatch and my gurgling stomach sends me a strong indication that something's wrong.

McCredie gives other examples. In WWII, it wasn't unusual for airplane navigators to get sick while the pilots didn't. Both could sense the motion of the airplane, but the navigator couldn't see the movement out of a window since he was in the windowless interior of the plane.

The out-of-body experiences were produced in two separate but similar virtual reality experiments. But in both cases, the out of body sensation resulted from a mismatch of sensory information. This time it was between seeing and feeling touch.

The method involved having subjects look at visual projections of themselves through a special set of video goggles. Experimenters then simultaneously stroked the subject and the image they were viewing. When this happened, subjects reported sensing they were outside of themselves and instead inhabiting the observed image.

This was kind of a whole body adaptation of the rubber hand experiement that I first heard of in Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain.

To be sure, this sensory mismatch isn't the only explanation for motion sickness. There are many structural, chemical or biological sources for the misery.

And who knows if sensory mismatch is the only explanation for the out-of-body sensation?

People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.

What is clear is how easily an illusion can crop up from seemingly innocuous circumstances. And sometimes, it's done on purpose, as in magic shows. For a well-written and fascinating look at how easily attention can be manipulated, see Sleights of Mind.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

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