Breathe In, Breathe Out

Perpetual Early Adoption

How do things change? Yeah, I know, that sounds like a bunch of metaphysical BS. But it starts getting practical when you add a qualifier statement like change "from what in and to what" and then apply that to a specific field, like, say, marketing.

Every business school student comes across the idea of a product lifecycle: a product or service gets introduced, pickedup by early adopters, then mainstream adopters, and then onto late adopters. There's been a lot of early adopter buzz lately among social media geeks. You know, the people who've been on Twitter since it began.

Robert Scoble, champion of early adopters everywhere, wrote about Early Adopter Angst on his blog today. The take away message here, at least for me, is early adopters are the ones driving change in society. I certainly buy into that; you can follow me on Twitter to prove it. But I came away from Scoble's article with a nagging sense of "something's missing here."

A product, service or idea, if it's to appeal to even the earliest of adopters, needs to be seen as worthwhile. And for that, it has to make sense within the context of the current culture. Ideas too far ahead of their time can wither and die without as much as a whimper, let alone an echo.

And that idea came from remembering something I read a while ago in the book The Wisdom Paradox. I don't recall the specific terms used, but the sense of it is something like you never here about the real geniuses because their ideas are so far ahead, no one at the time can relate to them. Passenger service didn't make sense when there were no railroads, buses or airlines, for example.

Scoble promotes the idea that Twitter will be mainstream in a few years. Maybe. But even if an idea does make at least a little sense, I think it can remain in the early adopter stage for a long, long time.

One of the things I do is something called the Feldenkrais Method. Without getting into specifics here - click on the link in my blog's sidebar to read about it - it's been stuck in the early stage of the early adopter stage for about 40 years. And I don's see it getting out anytime soon.

And I think that's a shame. It has real benefits to offer almost anyone. Yet, today, it's somewhat known within the various flavors of physical therapy, and almost not at all outside them.

One of the things it does well, better and easier than anything else I've experienced, is change the state of tonus in your body. That is, it loosens overly tight muscles and tightens overly loose muscles, result in better posture and ease of movement. And, of yeah, it makes you feel good, and even reenergized. And you can get pretty stiff and tight by, say, staring at a computer screen for long periods of time.

It's been in the early adopter stage for 40 years or so. A related method, the Alexander Technique, has been in the early adopter stage for over 100 years!

Will they ever get out of the early adopter stage? Hard to say, but I'm thinking probably not. But I'm glad I adopted it early, even if no one's heard of it. The challenge is relating it to everyday life of all of us, not just people who need to rehab. It really does have benefits for all of us.

Will maintreamers and late adopters get in on it? I hope so, but I fear the answer is no.

But, hey, we can still Twitter about it, can't we?

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, marketing, socialmedia, change

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.

Learning and Change

Sometimes I think the Feldenkrais Method gets oversimplified in an attempt to explain it to more people. It's easy to get to the point of lumping it into a sort of rehab service or method of improving your posture. Certainly, it does offer those things, but I hold that it's really about developing the ability to pay fine enough attention to a situation so that you can develop alternative ways of going beyond that situation.

Too narrow a definition and it risks losing the focus on learning that goes way beyond posture, quasi rehab or what-have-you.

How can these ideas of learning, particularly the one of developing awareness of current situation before developing alternatives, be applied outside of the somatic realm? Journalist and author Susan Jacoby offers a dandy way when Bill Moyers interviewed her for PBS recently. See the video here.

Jacoby rants on about the dumbing down of American culture here and in her book, The Age of American Unreason.

I mean, for example, obviously the healthcare situation in this country is very important. All of the candidates say it is. But if people don't know, for example, how is healthcare handled in other countries? How many people, for instance, do have the right to choose their own doctors in this country? In other words, without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be. In other words, you can say, "Oh, we don't want a program which will prevent people from choosing their own doctors." Well, are we able to choose our own doctors? I'm not. I have to choose within a managed care network.

I found it refreshing to see these sorts of ideas alive in the conceptual/intellectual terms, with absolutely no mention of anything somatic.

And this idea of establishing a base of knowledge of how things are is getting especially important in this US presidential election season. The term Change seems to be on every candidate's lips. But change from what; change to what?

Jacoby's argument clearly has a liberal flavor, so I was surprised when she took both the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration to task for failing to provide such educational services. They made major policy moves without first educating us on what they mean and why they are important.

As a contrast, Jacoby offers FDR's radio addresses of the 1930's and 40's. Franklin D. Roosevelt urged the pubic to spread out a world map before each chat so that they could follow along, actually see what and where Roosevelt was talking about, and make some sense out of it. Today, one survey shows that only 23% of people with some college can point out important Middle East locations, even when the map is clearly labeled.

Sad comment on our educational system, at least as far as geopolitics goes.

I think the Jacoby interview serves as a good example of taking a universal principle like learning about current situations, and then broadening it to include world politics. The absence of knowing where we are, of having the knowledge and information to locate our starting position hinders our ability to navigate in the world, whether somatically or conceptually.

It's all a learning process.

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

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

Allergic to Sensory Information?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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.

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

Older, Heavier Cyclists

The Bicycling Paradox tells us how and why older and heavier athletes can thrive on the bicycle, but wilt in a pair of running shoes.

I find this interesting because I'm in the second month of a new fitness program. Seems as though the year I took off from working out had caught up with me - girth-wise and stamina-wise. With the help of a wonderful trainer, I'm hefting weights, walking on the treadmill and riding a challenging exercise bike.

I had thought I wouldn't like the bike, maybe find it too boring to continue for very long. But the bike turns out to be kind of a pleasant experience, even when I'm drenched in sweat and furiously pumping the pedals for all I'm worth.

Turns out that I'm not the only older, heavier athlete favoring the bike as fitness machine. And the Times article provides a clue as to why plump codgers like me might find it more forgiving to pedal than to run or even walk long distances.

It's got something to do with how you use your center of gravity in cycling rather than running.

“In running, when you see someone who is obviously overweight, they will be in trouble,” Dr. Hagberg said. “The more you weigh, the more the center of gravity moves and the more energy it costs. But in cycling, there are different aerodynamics — your center of gravity is not moving up and down.”

The difference between cycling and running is like the difference between moving forward on a pogo stick and rolling along on wheels. And that is why Robert Fitts, an exercise physiologist at Marquette University who was a competitive runner, once said good runners run so smoothly they can almost balance an apple on their heads.

And I'm thinking it doesn't matter a heck of a lot if the wheels are rolling or stationary - as long as you can adjust the tension to pedal a little harder.

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

Sensory Integration in the News

When I became interested in somatic practices like the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique, I devoured everything I could read about them. Somatics was one of the first I read, and it introduced me to the work of its author Thomas Hanna. That it’s still in print these many years later suggests I’m not the only satisfied reader.

But it was another of Hanna’s books that really grabbed my attention, The Body of Life. Hanna clearly described a number of case studies using the somatic work he had learned, but the book really opened my eyes to the pioneers of this sort of discipline, in particular Moshe Feldenkrais. But there was also a chapter on Jean Ayers, an occupational therapist who developed a way of working with children whose problems Ayers contended were a result of difficulties in processing sensory information. The idea, if I’m remembering accurately, is that difficulties in integrating sensory information in the nervous system causes perception, movement, coordination and behavioral problems.

Ayers has since passed on, but others have taken up the sensory processing/integration cause, and new generations of frustrated parents seek out their help. That hasn’t exactly been front page news, but two recent articles in the mainstream press have put it back into the spotlight. In Hacking My Kid’s Brain, Mark Woodman tells the story of his son Caleb’s behavioral issues and treatment at the Sensory Learning Program in Boulder, Colorado. And it turns out to be a fairly touching story, with Caleb showing many improvements, even maintaining them three months after the end of his Boulder sessions.

In The Disorder is Sensory we get the New York Times comprehensive overview of the field and a few well-placed anecdotes. Writer Benedict Carey tells us that the idea of sensory integration problems as the root of behavioral problems has started to catch on among parent’s groups and the like at local school districts. And that there’s a strong desire to make this an “official” diagnosis and treatment of mainstream medicine. There’s even a petition in front of the American Psychiatric Association to include sensory processing disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But that decision is years away, and not everyone in the medical establishment is on board with the idea.

Carey cites a few current studies that support the idea that these kids really are different, they really do have problems that could respond to new forms of treatment or therapy. But the research is pretty sparse:

“We don’t have as much data as we’d like, but honestly, I’ve been at this for 33 years, and it’s just nice to see some solid, experimental data,” Dr. Miller said. “We desperately need more, and for that we need money.”

And that’s the rub, one that puts up some pretty stiff barriers for alternative approaches to gaining more than minimal acceptance. That is, you need money to do research to prove your approach is solid, but to get the money, you need solid research under your belt.

It’s frustrating, to say the least. But in the meantime, kids like Caleb are at least getting some of the help they need.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

Life After Football Not Always Good

To some, life is like a football game, with all the attendant metaphors about scoring, running interference, going for it, etc. And to a few, life is a football game: players in the National Football League (NFL) don't need metaphors - they're used to getting clobbered by very large, very fast men on a regular basis.

But are these guys really the luck ones? A new study of over 2,500 retired NFL players suggests that getting clobbered might not be so good for you later on. The study conducted by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes (at the University of North Carolina) will be published in the Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

The study found a correlation between concussions during playing days and depression later in life. In fact, the depression in the concussed appears at three times the rate of those who were lucky enough to escape that dubious experience.

Even more troubling, this from the New York Times article about the study:

In January, a neuropathologist claimed that repeated concussions likely contributed to the November suicide of the former Philadelphia Eagles player Andre Waters. Three weeks later, the former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson not only revealed that his significant depression and cognitive decline had been linked by a neurologist to on-field concussions, but also claimed that his most damaging concussion had been sustained after his coach, Bill Belichick, coerced him into practicing against the advice of team doctors.

Yeah. Without indicting Belichick or coaches in general, that doesn't surprise me very much. And it brings to mind an image of Tom Hanks telling players "Crying! There's no crying in baseball" in A League of Their Own. Sometimes you have to respect the time the nervous system needs to reorganize itself after a shock.

Not surprisingly, the NFL is at best luke warm about research like this, even if it has been peer reviewed. After all, there's a lot of money riding on these sorts of issues for the league.

It's unrelated, but this brought up a memory for me. When I was attending my first workshop in the Feldenkrais Method, I was having some problems with a few movements. The workshop leader advised me to do the movements with much less effort so that I could feel what was going on and make adjustments accordingly.

It was at that moment, thirty years after my last football experience, the thought came to mind, "if coach sees me putting in less than full effort, I'll have to run laps after practice, and I don't want to do that!"

So these researchers had better be careful, or they might find themselves circling the field double time.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, memory

Go Slow to Go Fast

Sometimes you have to be able to act and react quickly. Very quickly. Maybe even faster than that if you're, say, whizzing around at over 200 miles per hour in one of those cool Formula One race cars. You certainly can't be driving slow in the fast lane in one of those. Formula One sports psych consultant Kerry Spackman puts it this way:

"We didn't evolve to drive racing cars," he is saying. "Our brains have developed over millions of years and in some ways they're incredibly sophisticated, but in others they're very ill suited to some of the tasks we want them to do. In most sports now, the modern athlete is pushing his brain to the limit. Today's formula one car does things almost instantaneously, and the brain can't keep up.

It's ironic then, that the way Spackman advises us to be able to go so quickly is to go very slowly - at first.

If you physically slow the body down, the brain gets the message that it doesn't need to be in this highly anxious state. If you take some slow, deep breaths, the process of turning the body down for a moment does actually help to calm the brain down."

Seems it's all a matter of learning to make finer and finer distinctions; presumably faster and faster ones. And the way Spackman advises on doing that is to start very slowly. In a sport with lots of assets like Formula One, drivers can use very expensive training simulators to prepare them for almost any situation.

That process can be carried out in the simulator, or it can be reproduced with no equipment at all, creating a virtual reality through a process of verbal reconstruction. Either way, Spackman starts by giving the athlete two versions of the same experience that are initially far apart, so that he can easily recognize the difference.

The important thing here, I think, is this idea of learning to make distinctions. Start with some easily recognized differing situations, and building from there.

"That gives the brain a structure to work from. Then you bring them closer together. If you do it straight away, he can't learn anything. But if you bring them together slowly and provide him with feedback in a learning environment, gradually his brain will start to build circuits that can take these nuances and store them, building up a mental library of solutions.

What's important here, in any learning situation (and what isn't), is to not skip over early stages of learning, and not to make them so difficult that they are not useful. This is learning to learn, in my view. Just don't start out at 200 miles per hour.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

The Prosthetic Foot Advantage?

Technology has given Keith Budge back the foot that had to be amputated when a big piece of steel fell on it a few years ago. Well, not really the foot per se, but the functions that go along with a foot:

The foot has sensors including accelerometers (also used in seat belts) that judge how fast the foot is moving and at what angle, then adapt to it. It checks out the terrain and adapts to that, making it much easier for someone with a prosthetic foot to navigate ramps and stairs, as well. After it sees the first step of a stair, the ankle flexes appropriately. Many prosthetic feet fight that motion, Negri said, making it harder because they're inflexible. This foot voluntarily adjusts itself.

There are really two remarkable things at work here, at least to my way of thinking. The first is the artificial foot itself, termed the Ossur Proprio Foot. The way the thing adapts to its environment is certainly remarkable, even though it will probably be commonplace as more and more of these type of devices become available. The other remarkable thing is Budge’s nervous system as it has adapted to the new foot.

Together, the Proprio Foot and the nervous system adapt to each other and the environment to provide function. And it’s reportedly much better than older style prosthetic feet. The combination lets amputees like Budge do things they otherwise might not be able to do.

But that makes me wonder about the future versions of such devices. Will they be able to do things they weren’t able to do before? Like make them better athletes, say?

Well, maybe. Disabled or Too Able? looks at the case of South African Oscar Pistorius and his attempt to qualify for the Olympic games. But the thing is Pistorius sprints on two artificial legs. Pistorius is not a recent amputee, having prothetic legs and feet since he was 11 months old. But, as the article dives into, it raises all sorts of legal and ethical issues for the future of sports competition.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

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

Everybody’s Doing the Biomotion

Technology makes it possible to observe athletic motions in minute detail. Super slow motion video, special motion capture software and that kind of stuff is getting better, cheaper and more portable all the time. And the internet makes it easy for us to look on. For example, have a look at the walking animation at the Biomotion Lab at Queen’s University in Canada. That site lets you play with their BML Walker software right in you web browser, and you can even take part in their research.

But advances in biomechanics observation technologies and ways of sharing them aren’t confined to the words of research, therapy or athletic training. Fans and even weekend warriors are getting into the act. Some of the more serious baseball fans described in a recent Slate article have taken to watching and commenting on the mechanics of players. You can go well beyond arm-chair managing or fantasy general managing your team to be freely comment on angles and degrees of freedom in players performances. According to the Slate article, there’s no shortage of fan instant experts willing to share their observations and prescriptions.

Who knows if these new experts really know what they are talking about? No one needs a credential to post observations of athletic prowess and prescriptions for improving them.

But you don’t have to be a real or imagined expert to want to apply this sort of science to your own athletic endeavors. The technology is getting so much smaller and cheaper that bio-mechanically related products are starting to appear. The UltimateBalance Trainer, for example, is a small device worn on a headband that tells you when your head deviates from a certain angle as you play tennis. The basic idea is that tilting your head excessively during a tennis stroke throws you off balance enough to compromise your swing. That’s probab