Breathe In, Breathe Out

Mindfulness: Not Just for Therapy

News items on the subject of mindfulness always catch my attention. When I saw the headline Lotus Therapy, I knew I wanted to read it.

According to the article, mindfulness has become a popular concept and set of techniques in psychotherapy, and it seems to be getting more popular today. Much more formal research is devoted to it than used to be the case. But not everyone in the therapy or research community buys into it. Some even think it will become yet another hot self-help fad before all the shouting dies down.

Image by collagekid, via Flickr (CC license)

Well and good, but you might get the idea that mindfulness is somehow always connected with therapy.

It's not. Here are a few of the others:

• Meditation: Jon Kabot Zinn has for years written and talked extensively about mindfulness meditatiion for a variety of situations. Here's a link to avideo of a Google talk he gave.

• Education: Not surprising to those of us whose younger selves were told to pay attention, pay attention, pay attention in classes. Harvard professor Ellen Langer has written about Mindful Learning. . New-to-teaching professor Howard Rheingold has a couple of videos addressing attention in the classroom, particularly regarding multi-tasking. I also ran across this wiki devoted to mindfulness.

• Sports and Athletics: The classics here were developed and written by author Timothy Gallwey. But others are taking it beyond tennis and golf in stuff like triathlons.

As for me, I'm more interested in mindfulness in everyday life. mainly as a tool to help me figure out why things are the way they are. This comes up a lot in my work as a Feldekrais practitioner. Otherwise, it's always good to figure out what's really going on before you try to change it.

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, mindfulness

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.