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.
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.
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.
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| Image by collagekid, via Flickr (CC license) |
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
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| Image by luc legay, via Flickr (CC license) |
But what can you do if you’ve been curious about social media or social networks like Twitter or Friendfeed or whatever, but you don’t know much about how to go about participating?
You might start with 5 Great Ways to Contribute to Social Media. Sharing can be as simple as one simple click to indicate you like something someone else has shared. Or you might just share information about a new application you've tried and liked. It doesn't have to be complicated at all.
Here's why I never liked school that much. It's from a blog post titled You Say That Like It's a Bad Thing.
I never knew much about the workings of Wikipedia before I read Clay Shirky's description of it in his book Here Comes Everybody. Rather than being launched fully-hatched, a Wikipedia article can start as a very simple sentence or so. Then, given the collaborative nature of the site, others chime in adding to it, editing it, vetting it. The simple entry can grow into a full-blown, useful, accurate article in a short time.
In Betcha's post, a kid gets an assignment to write a paper, only he can't find much information about it.
Here’s what he did. He created a Wikipedia entry using the limited information that he did know. Over the next few days and weeks, the Wikipedia entry on the topic was edited, amended, added-to and improved by many other people. All of their individual little bits of knowledge gradually built up the topic until there was quite a comprehensive article written about it. The student then used this article to submit for his research project.
The teacher gave the kid an F! Other teachers the posts author talk to mostly supported the idea of failing the kid, some even talking about "cheating" by doing the Wikipedia thing.
So who would you rather have solving problems for you? Someone who searches for innovative solutions or someone who follows the rules?
I think it's really cool that you can take a first approximation cut at knowledge, and then other, more knowledgeable people contribute to fleshing it out. And it's even cooler that a kid can use it to his advantage.
There's a big gap here somewhere.
Technorati Tags: learning, socialmedia
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
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| Image by gbaku, via Flickr (CC license) |
| With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube. |
Yep, I've pissed away a lot of hours in front of the boob tube. But not nearly so much in the last couple of years. There are plenty of other ways to consume media time - blogging, twittering, sharing stuff with friends and family. What? You thought I was going to talk about using the time to read or exercise?)
Oh, we still watch a few favorites, whenever we want, thanks to TIVO. But consuming media - maybe better put as using media like television - isn't the same as it was and never will be, thank goodness.
Author Clay Shirky has made a career out of talking about this kind of stuff. His book Here Comes Everybody will give you a clear view of what's going on with media and society. And a transcript of his speech at the Web 2.0 Conference puts it in a little more perspective.
Society's television viewing bender came not from the invention of television, but was a kind of side effect from adopting the 5-day work week in the 20th century. That change created a big dab of free time, and Philo T Farnesworth, David Sarnoff, William Paley, et al were happy to fill it.
Shirky calls the free time a cognitive surplus, time you brain doesn't have to think about work. With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube. The tube produced, and we consumed; a classic one-way interaction.
But the internet and social media have changed all that. We can still consume media, but we can also produce out own content and share it with whomever we please quite easily and cheaply.
And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.
And that's making for a big change that will be even bigger when today's toddlers grow up:
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
That all sounds like the most wonderful thing - and it is. But I think there are going to be some side effects that aren't necessarily good ones.
Increasingly we can consume, produce and share media on the go with mobile devices like iPhones, Blackberries, or whathaveyou. And we've probably all experienced trying to hold a conversation with someone who's preoccupied with reading email or looking something up on one of those mobile devices.
I've referred to this continuous partial attention syndrome previously. I expect it will get a lot worse as things unfold.
But at least we won't spend enormous amounts of time watching and wondering who shot JR.
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?
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| Image from jonhanson, via Flickr (CC license) |
| As long as our nervous systems continue learning, we'll probably be OK. |
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.
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.
Did you know that it's best not to pull the choke in a motor boat if the motor was running within the past 20 minutes? I didn't, and in fact would have no reason to even seek out such knowledge. But if I ever find myself adrift in a powerless motor boat, it might come in handy.
The choking advice above is one of the many "rules of thumb," kind of informed guessing strategies, contained on the Rules of Thumb site. The site is based on the out of print books of the same name. I ran across it on the Cool Tools site; one site that certainly lives up to its name.
You'll find the lots of categories of rules, which you can select from a menu or a word cloud. Just for grins I selected the writing category and found these:
Read your work out loud to locate problems. If you run out of breath, the sentence is too long. (Or hopefully, you don't have a lung problem.)
When in doubt, use the semicolon; the average reader won't understand its use and will give you credit for erudition. (See the last sentence of the second paragraph above.)
When writing, if you're searching for a final sentence, you've probably already written it.
Did I mention the motor boat thing?
If you want cut yourself some slack, take a little time to read Kevin Kelly's Christmas essay on the This I Believe portion of the NPR site. Here's just one eloquently-put piece of it to whet the appetite.
We are at the receiving end of a huge gift simply by being alive. It does not matter how you calculate it, our time here is unearned. Maybe you figure your existence is the result of a billion unlikely accidents, and nothing more; then certainly your life is an unexpected and undeserved surprise. That's the definition of a gift. Or maybe you figure there's something bigger behind this small human reality; your life is then a gift from the greater to the lesser. As far as I can tell none of us have brought about our own existence, nor done much to earn such a remarkable experience. The pleasures of colors, cinnamon rolls, bubbles, touchdowns, whispers, long conversations, sand on your bare feet – these are all undeserved rewards.
[From NPR: The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us]
Or as Monty Python puts it (not quite as graciously as Kelly) in The Galaxy Song:
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
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.
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.
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.
The processes of learning and comedy aren't that different. Think about it. A number of related situations build up to a punch line - "Do I know it? I wrote it!!!" (see The Aristocrats for the whole joke, or look here - if you like dirty jokes.)
Babies are natural comedians. As they learn some new skill or way of perceiving things, they eventually arrive at the punch line. The comedy of awkward crawling or wobbly first steps gradually gives way to walking. The kid's now actually able to get where he wants to go, do what he wants to do because the punch line of that learning process is walking.
Now robots are doing a similar thing. "No big deal," you say. Well, it actually is big deal, because these robots are learning on their own. Hod Lipson gave a fascinating demonstration as a TED Talk. As you can see in the video below, the robots can actually teach themselves.
Despite their ability to learn and adapt, these robots are not the kind you see in the Terminator or Lost in Space movies. They are primitive and even kind of comical looking. But, as you'll see in the video, they deliver the learning punch lines just the same.
The real fascination for me comes from the robots' abilities to figure things out for themselves as they learn to get around and to replicate themselves.
