Breathe In, Breathe Out

Breathing and Attention: Wide and Narrow

I've written about attention before many times. In fact, this blog has a whole category of writings called brain attention. One of the most interesting sources of information about attention comes from Linda Stone, the researcher who coined the term continuous partial attention.

Photo by nesster, via Flickr (CC license)

narrowing the attention on that tiny screen shuts out everything else in your immediate environment

I recently ran across another of her articles kind of related to that idea: Just Breathe, Building the Case for Email Apnea. Stone points out that we probably all hold our breath when we read email, or do any other screen-oriented task: twitter, blog, read feeds, what have you.

Needless to say, holding your breath isn't very good for you. Not only does it upset the balance of chemicals in your system, but it can throw you into a pattern favoring the fight or flight sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system over the rest and digest parasympathetic branch.

Not to worry: there are ways around this according to Stone:

Some breathing patterns favor our body's move toward parasympathetic functions and other breathing patterns favor a sympathetic nervous system response. Diaphragmatic breathing, Buteyko breathing (developed by a Russian M.D.), some of Andy Weil's breathing exercises, and certain martial arts and yoga breathing techniques, all have the potential to soothe us, and to help our bodies differentiate when fight or flight is really necessary and when we can rest and digest.

OK, I sort of buy into that, but it takes some real discipline to practice breathing exercises. And, let's face it, if you're always reading email or twittering, how much time are you gonna spend exercising?

The way I look at the situation is a little different, more as a problem of attention than inattention. That is, narrowing the attention on that tiny screen shuts out everything else in your immediate environment. And there's lots of stuff there to attend to if you allow yourself to notice. But you don't notice when your focus is exclusively on your address book.

Narrowing a focus down so much that you exclude everything else may be a form of concentration. But in a body and nervous system geared to survival, that may be an easy ticket to fight or flight. No wonder we hold our breath.

Experiment with becoming simultaneously aware of email, the sounds around you, the contact your body is making with the chair, or whatever. Expand attention rather than contracting it. Does that detract from email reading? Do you hold your breath?

What's it Like to Have a Stroke and Recover?

What's it like to experience your own brain? I suppose one answer to that question is something like "it's the stuff of everyday experience; nothing really special."

But what happens when the stuff inside the brain gets altered in a profound way? Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor woke up one morning to the experience of having a stroke. She'd studied brains for a long time, and now the experience of abnormality was happening to her. She recently talked about her experience at the TED conference.

It's a scientific talk that turns delightfully poetic.

Podcast Experiment

Here's an experiment; an iPhone-based podcast. It uses the new Cinch service of Blog Talk Radio. That and an iPhone. Nothing else. Couldn't be easier.

Twitter Explained

Finally recovering from a bout of the flu and (slowly) getting back in the swing of things.

I ran across this video explaining Twitter and thought it was pretty concise. I'm not sure, though, that the most interesting question is "what are you doing." Much more useful to me is "what's got your attention right now?" Like Twitter explanation videos.

BTW, if you'd like to follow me on Twitter, I'm there as @tommy.

On Dedicated Functionality

I've been writing a few notes here in Circus Ponies Notebook about a New York Times article on the shortcomings of Twitter with the younger crowd.

That article identified a technology theme that keeps coming up for me. Namely, why use a complex but flexible tool when a simpler but less flexible tool already provides the functionality you need?

In the article, a mother of three teenagers tries to simplify communicating with all three kids simultaneously. At first, she's getting a slew of text messages from each of the kids, and it's driving her nuts. Then she decides to try Twitter, thinking that it simplify things by centering the messages to and from her in one place.

Photo by kafka4prez, via Flickr (CC license)

the kids are having none of this Twitter stuff

Only the kids are having none of this Twitter stuff. They're quite happy with texting and email, thank you very much. And they don't want to learn Twitter, which they "don't get" and think is too complex. If something already works, does what you want it to do, why get more technical and complex? Why go to the bother, when there's really nothing to gain - at least from the kid's viewpoint?

That's a good question, and one that I keep coming back to in looking for software for researching, writing and posting. For example, I like the simplicity of Notebook for outlining and writing over more complex apps. You can just start jotting things down and worry about rearranging them, shaping a structure, later. Other outlining apps offer more power and flexibility, but they aren't as simple to use.

So I'm not up for reinventing the wheel when it comes to outlining and writing. But if something simpler and easier to use comes along, I'll give it a try.

And, to be honest, I don't really get Twitter, either.

Tools Extend the Body Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A write up on the study itself is here.

Technorati Tags: brain, body_schema, learning

Plasticity and Uncle Albert

Quick. What do Elvis and Einstein have in common? Well, their estates are both making oodles of money from them, long after their deaths. Elvis inclusion on the profitable dead celebs list makes sense, but how did good old Albert find himself along side the king of rock and roll?

Turns out that Einstein's image is plastered all over a best-selling line of interactive videos for babies and toddlers, Baby Einstein. And if you're going to use the image and name of the king of relativity, you gotta pay for the privilege.

Thankfully, Albert's not around to see the current controversy released with a study suggesting watching the Baby Einstein video isn't without a downside.

Now brain plasticity pioneer Michael Merzenich weighs in on the controversy from a plasticity perspective. As I read it, he takes the University of Washington researchers to task mainly for findings that seem little more than a blinding flash of the obvious - at least from a plasticity perspective.

Brain plasticity is driven by whatever it is that we do. And when we spend a lot of time doing one thing, we sacrifice time for doing something else that might also have a plasticity effect. "Fire together, wire together," as they say.

It does make sense that a baby or toddler spending a lot of time with interactive visual and movement material might develop in a certain way and not others:

I suspect that they could also EASILY scientifically demonstrate that Baby Einstein graduates are particularly fond of visual media and are even more avid-than-usual video game players on the statistical average than are non-exposed kids. And I suspect that those later years of time spent away from language and social interactions at passive viewing and active video game playing shall exaggerate and widen the limitations in language and social development initially arising through video exposure in infants and toddlers.

But Merzenich adds a refreshing dose of common sense to all this by concluding with that the videos are both good and bad for kids. It just depends on what the parent wants for the kid.

YOU decide, for your kid, if the expected consequences of such heavy infant exposure are contributing to biasing them in what YOU regard as a positive or negative direction. On the whole, for my own children, thinking forward to the consequences of biasing the infant toward being in love with passive viewing and electronic media in later life, I would vote ‘no’. For YOUR kid, that could be the wrong answer.

It's all relative, I suppose.

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

Video of Forward/Backward Treadmill

Thoughts on Learning Movement Skills described a very non-traditional treadmill that produced some interesting effects on research subjects who walked on it. Pretty thought-provoking stuff, but not the easiest thing to visualize in action.  Fret no more. Here's a video that shows how it works.

Learning Using the Hands

I've always moved my hands around quite a bit while I talk. Other kids made fun of me. I chalked it up to being Italian, since that was a common stereotype of the time that Italians talked a lot with their hands.

I never thought of using my hands as a learning aid, at least not in my early school years. Sure, I could count on my fingers (and toes) to learn simple arithmetic. But when it came to memorizing multiplication tables and such, moving wasn't encouraged. "Sit still and memorize - that's the ticket to learning how to handle numbers."

Good thing they invented calculators, I say.

But it turns out that using your hands may actually help you learn how to handle numbers better. That's at least according to a report on a new study released last week.

When learning to solve simple equations like 5+3+6= __+6, kids who were taught to move their hands under each side of the equation learned better than those who kept still. Actually, 85% of the hand-waving kids retained their ability to solve the equations a few weeks later, while only about a third of the speech-only kids remembered.

So why does the hand movement help retention? Lead author Susan Cook thinks it might help us tie what's in our minds with what we've experienced in the world:

"My intuition is that gestures enhance learning because they capitalize on our experience acting in the world," says Cook. "We have a lot of experience learning through interacting with our environment as we grow, and my guess is that gesturing taps into that need to experience."

Life is just a moving experience, I guess.

The Puzzle of Peer Pressure

We all know some who can resist the pressure of our friends doing this or that, and overtly or implicitly urging us to do the same thing. A recent widely reported study even suggests that obesity gets transmitted this way, from friend to friend. Not any organic thing, but as ideas about what's acceptable body image and behavior stuff. Not really that surprising when you stop to think about it.

But what is it that makes some of us so eager to go along with the crowd? Another recent study looked into what was happening in the brains of kids who described themselves as resistant to peer pressure and those who said they weren't resistant. Turns out the peer-resistant kids had less brain activity, but a more coordinated brain pattern than those who said they weren't peer-resistant. So there is at least some neurological component at work here, at least as far as kids looking at pictures inside an fMRI. That is, until someone comes along with another study that says just the opposite. (It happens.)

What this really opens up for me is a nature/nurture question. If you really can resist peer pressure, is it because of structural things going on inside your brain, or because your environment has provided opportunities to learn to just say no when the overwhelming sentiment is to say yes. Probably it's some combination.

I'm hoping that The Agile Gene will be able to shed some light on this sort of thing. Author Matt Ridley writes with a kind of clarity and flair that makes reading about science and philosophy more fun than you'd think it would be.

Interestingly, I first head of Ridley while driving and listening to a podcast of All in the Mind from ABC radio in Australia. Unable to resist the pressure to get his book, I veered into the parking lot of a Borders bookstore that happened to have it in stock.

I just couldn't say no.

Post with a link

Cool. That worked to post from a mobile phone, even with one html tag. So let me try a link to my main blog.

Some Observations on Imitating to Learn

Demonstrate and imitate. That’s the time honored method of teaching and learning lots of performance or athletic skills. Sometimes it works, and most times not, in my opinion.

But for sure imitation is not going to work for someone who actually lacks physical capacity to perform the movement being demonstrated. If you don’t have arms, it’s impossible to imitate raising your arm.

Only the brain doesn’t really work that way, at least according to a just-released research study. What happens instead has to do with goals rather than just duplicating a given movement.

The researchers ask people without hands or arms to mimic video of various hand movements, as they watched scanned images of what was happening in the aplasic brains. The aplasic brains lit up with activity all right, but it was in areas associated with their feet instead of hands.

The results underscore that the mirror neuron system isn't mindlessly imitating, but working toward a goal, he says. The two people without hands or arms recognized they could lift a cup with their feet--and their brain lit up accordingly.

That’s pretty interesting, and maybe even a bit amazing. But it go me wondering about using demonstration and imitation in learning skills more complex than such simple movements.

I’ve never been a real big fan of the demonstration and imitation approach to learning performance or athletic skills. And especially if you’re paying big bucks by the hour to have some expert show you how it done.

Maybe I’m not alone here.

Music professor Robert Duke offers a kinder, gentler approach:

In teaching, often a student will do something, then the teacher tries to fix it by simplifying it a little, then having the student try again, Duke said. If that doesn't work, we make it a little more simple, and try again. This can keep going: simplify, try, simplify try. Maybe we do it eight times before it's simple enough for the student to accomplish. Then once they get it, we go back to the passage and have them try again.

During this process, with each failed attempt, “the learner is thinking: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong....,” Duke said. “Rather than inch back and then leap forward, we should leap back, and then inch forward,” Duke said. “Leap back to a task that is very accomplishable.” This doesn't always mean to play something slower. It can mean to play it in rhythms, or to work on the fundamentals of the technique involved. Either way, the student needs to be able to achieve success, there in the lesson. “How is a student going to do, ALONE, what you can't get them to do in your studio in 20 minutes?” Duke said. “This principle goes across all levels: set them up in a way that they can do the thing we demonstrate.”

From: http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20076/7046/

So how does this tie into the research study talked about earlier? I’m not really sure if there is any kind of direct tie here. It might be interesting to look at brain scans of students using Duke’s approach. But, hey, it’d probably be hard to get the piano into a scanner.

Probably similar brain patterns are at work, though.

What’s most interesting is the piano students are imitating to learn. Only they are imitating themselves in earlier successful situations.

As Yogi Berra says, “you can observe a lot just by watching.” And you can learn a lot from yourself, if you know what to pay attention to.

posting from iphone

So I'm giving it a go - posting from an iphone, that is. Not the easiest thing I've ever done.

iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot

Something new. I've added an iPhone-friendly template for this blog. No, you don't see it if you aren't visiting on an iPhone. The template and plug in come from iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot.

Content robot's site indicates that they'll release a future version that allows admin access. Wonder how easy it would be to actually post more than just a few words or lines of text from an iPhone?

The Moral Brain

If there's such a thing as moral compass, If It Feels Good to be Good, It May Only Be Natural says that it might lie between your ears. Recent researchers have found that moral decisions they asked their subjects to make while wired up to a brain scanner lit up portions of the ancient part of the brain. This suggests that morality might be more a product of nature rather than nurture.

These sorts of findings help explain why some moral decisions are harder to make than others:

Moral decision-making often involves competing brain networks vying for supremacy, he said. Simple moral decisions -- is killing a child right or wrong? -- are simple because they activate a straightforward brain response. Difficult moral decisions, by contrast, activate multiple brain regions that conflict with one another, he said.

Lots of implications here, and the article is well-written enough to include discussions of them. But the one that really stands out for me is this: If morality is brain-based, what about those whose brains have been damaged in these areas? In fact, the article describes some research that addresses this:

When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers. Damasio said the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when confronted by a difficult issue -- such as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city -- these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.

Whoa! While providing lots of material to keep pulp fiction and screenwriters busy for a while, there are some pretty deep questions here.

"Eventually, you are bound to get into areas that for thousands of years we have preferred to keep mystical," said Grafman, the chief cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully."

Kind of makes you wonder about the idea of a moral majority, doesn't it?

Freedom and Choice in Movement and Technology

Freedom and choice Kind of loaded words, if you ask me. On one hand, it's fairly intuitive to think of freedom as a great thing in any and all circumstances. But when you think of it in terms of some movements we're ask to or want to perform, there can be too much of a good thing.

A person with a relatively healthy musculoskeletal system can move with many so called degrees of freedom, in many directions and in every plane of movement available. But not all movements call for all the degrees of freedom available. Golfers, for example, know that moving to the side more than necessary when they swing makes for untidy shots, at the best. Gotta take all degrees of movement freedom you need, but any more than that gets you into trouble. In fact, many of the learning aides advertised so effectively on those golf channel infomercials are based on the idea introducing constraints to the swing movement so as to limit unnecessary movement.

Oddly, I was thinking about this kind of stuff when I ran across Feature Presentation in the New Yorker magazine. It's odd because James Surowiecki talks about the freedom of available features in many technological devices as not necessarily such a good thing. He calls it "feature creep," the tendency of many companies to overwhelm their customers with features in the electronic devices they sell -- " fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds o mysterious features and book-lengt manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle," that sort of thing.

Confronted with this freedom to go nuts with the features, many consumers find themselves more than overwhelmed, wishing they'd never bought the thing in the first place, and, worse, returning it and washing their hands of the whole thing. And it's not that they don't want all those features:

A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.

The obvious solution is to design a really feature-laden piece of technology with the simplest user interface that will work all that stuff. Like Apple, Inc. has done with the iPod. And now Apple gets to try it all again with the iPhone, set to be released in June. Surowiecki wouldn't be surprised if Apple either hits a home run or strikes out with the device:

In theory, the best strategy would be to make the complex simple, packaging all the power and the options consumers think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use. This is clearly what Apple believes it will be offering with the iPhone: a device with a remarkable range of features, coupled with an uncluttered touch-screen interface. It won’t be surprising if the iPhone succeeds, but it would be understandable if it failed. The strange truth about feature creep is that even when you give consumers what they want they can still end up hating you for it.

For more on how too many choices are not such a great thing all the time, see Barry Schwart book The Paradox of Choice. For more on how we don't know that our choices will necessirly lead to happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness is a good read.

Now, if only Apple would make golf equipment!

Craving Order

A nice big juicy cheeseburger. Ya, sometimes it's the ultimate comfort food, just what you need. Trouble is, my favorite cheeseburger purveyor caters to the "bring the kids along" market. And that can make for lots of kid-based noise, running around and general chaos along with the burger.

Kids, chaos (and cheeseburgers) seem to go together. You gotta wonder how the little tykes ever get socialized and learn anything, since they seem so resistant to order. But at least one approach to education actually bases itself on the idea that kids actually crave order.

That idea belongs to the Montessori method, which celebrates the 100th anniversery of Maria Montessori's first school this year. I had heard of Montessori for years and not known what it is. But The Cult of the Pink Tower on Slate.com does gives us a clue. I was most surprised by the idea of kids going for order:

In many ways, Montessori education remains a cult: No one outside the fold (and lots of families inside it) really knows what exactly it is. The fog of magic and romance obscures the key to a Montessori classroom: It's all about structure and framework and purpose. Maria Montessori might have called the child "an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form," but far more important, in the end, is a different canny insight of hers: Those splendid kids crave order.

If you're also curious about Montessori, the 1,200 word article is worth a read. Now, if only restaurants would figure out how to get kids to crave order while the order.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

Language and the Soul of Culture

I love serendipity, and surfing around on line seems to provide plenty of opportunities for it. Today I somehow came across this quote from author and current world explorer Wade Davis:

Language isn't just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules; it's a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. From: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/06/0627_020628_wadedavis.html

Never gave much thought to language as the soul of culture before, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

But then I ran across more about language in the Survival of Language in the Digital Age. For instance:

It’s an uphill battle to bring African languages onto the Internet. While there are lively communities on Wikipedia preserving European languages like Welsh or Frisian, most of the speakers of minority African languages, like Ewe or Bambara, have little net access and less net expertise. There’s the very real concern that some of these languages may die out before their native speakers start writing online.

And that's troubling, especially if you think about Davis' idea that language is the "vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world." There's a technology angle to all this, however:

But the slow spread of the Internet in many African nations suggests that it may be a while before Wolof speakers are writing in that language instead of in French. And the smaller the language, the longer it takes to establish a community online… and, generally speaking, the higher the chance that most speakers of the language don’t have regular internet access. Some African languages will not survive in a digital era.

Hm, makes you wonder about what gets lost as technology spreads and what happens to cultural stuff that can't keep up with the speed of the spread. Not just now, with the internet, but through all the technological "revolutions" of the past.

Technorati Tags: learning

Happy Now?

Will I be happy if I write a post about Daniel Gilbert and his research into what makes us happy? I feel like I will, but the point (if I’m understanding it) of Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness is that I really don’t know, can’t know. Turns out we really can’t reliability predict what will make us happy or unhappy. And Gilbert has the numbers to back it up.

The book is an entertaining read, and the Royal Society just announced it as it’s prize winner for science books. If you haven’t read or don’t think it will make you happy to read it, there’s a whirlwind video of Gilbert’s talk at TED in 2005. Watch it, savor it, think about it. Happy now?

Tags: happiness daniel_gilbert gilbert psychology

Show’n Tell

Here's a well-made video explanation of the Feldenkrais Method. If only we had "the feelies" described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World! Thanks to the Feldenkrais Educational Foundation of North America. Way to go FEFNA!

BlogMate

This post is from BlogMate, which I'm trying out here. According to the developer:

BlogMate is a free, graphical plug-in for the popular TextMate editor that allows creating and editing blog posts for MetaWeblog-enabled blogs from a floating palette within TextMate.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Looks like it works, although gotta remember to convert markdown into html before posting.

Giving In

Ralph ate donuts maybe once a year; he could easily drive right on by the Krispy Kreme donut shop without even giving it a thought. But then Ralph went on a diet to lower his cholesterol. He was hungry. A lot of the time. Like a lost episode of Twilight Zone, the vivid red, blinking Hot Donuts sign seemed to be calling his name, beaconing him toward sweet dough fried in hot fat. It was all too much to resist. He was led into temptation, taking home a dozen glazed. Well, actually eating three sinkers before he even got out of the parking lot.

What happened? Temptation got the best of this guy, but only when he had exhausted his "resisting temptation muscles" on staying away from his usual snacks.

Or maybe it was his heart. At least that's one explanation put forth in Why We Give Into Temptation, a brief summary into some research focusing on temptation.

Well, not really the whole heart, just a measure called heart rate variability (HRV) that appears to be linked to self regulation. A couple of researchers at the University of Kentucky discovered an apparent tie between the variability and giving into temptation or giving up on doing a difficult task. Interesting.

But here's what really interested me here:

So, will we be wearing a cardiac monitor in the near future to gauge whether we are vulnerable in our self regulating abilities? It's doubtful, say the authors. However, when considering special populations with more serious consequences of self regulatory failure (say, alcoholics) HRV feedback could be helpful to determine when those critical relapses in regulation will happen.

Let's say we buy the tie between HRV and giving into temptation. It might be useful to be able to self-monitor stuff like HRV. But the idea of monitoring "special populations?" The privacy issues alone surrounding that montoring could really open a legal and ethical can worms. But at this stage, it's just academic research. Photo by thievingjoker

Technorati Tags: brain, mindfulness, plasticity

Two Brains Not Always So Useful

Human Brain a Poor Judge of Risk caught my eye this morning. If I'm understanding what author Bruce Schneier is getting at here, there are two distinct parts of the human brain for dealing with risk. The amygdala is an older part that intuits and reacts very quickly to risk and threat. The second part is the cortex, the part that reasons, but is much slower than the amygdala.

Fast, almost instant reactions are great if you spot a hungry tiger or lion eyeing you. No time to think about that, at least not if you want to continue strutting your stuff on this mortal coil. But most of us don't live with the immenint threat of lions, tiger and bears. Still, there are risks and threats to be dealt with. The cortex has figured a way to deal with them: it develops rules of thumb or heuristics, using its ability to generalize situations. This can serve us well. But sometimes, not so well:

The problem is that they can fail us, especially in the context of a modern society. Our social and technological evolution has vastly outpaced our evolution as a species, and our brains are stuck with heuristics that are better suited to living in primitive and small family groups.

And when those heuristics fail, our feeling of security diverges from the reality of security.

That's the last line in the Wired story, and I'm not sure how the story continues. A postscript says this story was adapted from a longer essay, but the link to that essay was broken when I tried it. Too bad; it would be nice to see what else he has to say.

Even so, one piece of the story caught my eye.

Some scary things are not really as risky as they seem, and others are better handled by staying in the scary situation to set up a more advantageous future response. This means there's an evolutionary advantage to being able to hold off the reflexive fight-or-flight response while you work out a more sophisticated analysis of the situation and your options for handling it.

It strikes me that sharpening awareness of our bodily states might be one way to at least partially deal with this. Some argue that mind and body are one. Maybe, probably. But for many of us, how we experience that body, that self, can be ... incomplete or inaccurate. Body awareness practices, like the Feldenkrais Method, can sharpen the connection for many who take the time and interest to do these sorts of practice.

But most of us might not have the time or interest or knowledge to practice such things at a level that makes it useful in everyday life. And that's a risk in itself.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, mindfulness

Learning and Effort

HAMLET: Denmark's a prison. ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one. HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst. ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord. HAMLET: Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

Carol Dweck is a Stanford professor who wouldn't disagree. In fact, she's researched and written a book about the idea that "thinking makes it so." A readable description of her work can be found in The Effort Effect. Dweck's reputation grew on research on intelligence and effort in school settings. But these days, she's in demand as a coach and consultant in success-directed fields like sports, business and personal development. The Effort Effect mentions her work with a professional soccer team. But sports aren't the only way to view her work:

In his 2002 essay that relied on Dweck's work, Gladwell cited one of her best-known experiments to argue that Enron may have collapsed precisely because of the company‚ talent-obsessed culture, not despite it. Dweck's study showed that praising children for intelligence, rather than for effort, sapped their motivation (see sidebar). But more disturbingly, 40 percent of those whose intelligence was praised overstated their scores to peers. "We took ordinary children and made them into liars," Dweck says. Similarly, Enron executives who'd been celebrated for their innate talent would sooner lie than fess up to problems and work to fix them.

Dweck has worked largely with intelligence and learning. Others are extending the concepts to the area of emotions. And I think Moshe Feldenkrais would recognize Dweck's work, since he pioneered some of the same ideas in the domain of movement and development. Dweck doesn't just dispense her advice on effort and learning: she practices what she preaches:

"Just being aware of the growth mind-set, and studying it and writing about it, I feel compelled to live it and to benefit from it," says Dweck, who took up piano as an adult and learned to speak Italian in her 50s. "These are things that adults are not supposed to be good at learning."

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, plasticity

Maintaining the Dream

Who wants to be a millionaire? Probably not just the people who try their luck on the popular (U.S.) television network program, or those who religiously buy lottery tickets or trek to casinos. It's natural to want better stuff that money might be able to buy: bigger houses and the such.

But the bigger, better stuff comes with an often unthought of tariff: that is, you gotta maintain it once you get it. And this maintenance probably costs a lot more than you might think, in both money and time. Kevin Kelly makes the case in Being is All Maintenance. It's not just that the stuff wears as it ages. As Kelly points out, even if you don't use the stuff hard, the things around it are constantly changing:

That is a foolish as expecting your new boat to remain seaworthy as long as you don’t mess with it. But while it sits there “doing nothing,” the weather, the sea, the elements are steadily eroding it away. Even if you change nothing about your boat, or on your website, everything around it is changing. Operating systems and browsers get upgraded. Monitors evolve. Code gets corrupted. Bugs accumulate. Spammers and viruses attack. Rather than just purring along self-sufficiently, a popular website requires something to be repaired or tended to nearly everyday.

Mostly, our image of the cool stuff in the imagined futures of Star Wars, Star Trek don't include maintaining the stuff. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to put my carcass into a Windows-based transporter.

We will be like herders again, engaged in technological husbandry. Or we can see ourselves as techo gardeners, pulling bugs and viruses from our rainforest of gear. It’s not unpleasant work; just more than we thought.

Kind of like blogging?

Audio of this post

Feldenkrais Podcast

Ryan Nagy has taken the leap into Feldenkrais podcasting. You can find the first, an interview with Martin Weiner, on Ryan's blog site, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed or in iTunes. Be sure not to miss the riveting story of how Ryan came to the Feldenkrais Method and what Martin has to say about it, towards the end of the recording.

Wheelchair Plasticity

Research into brain computer interfaces (BCI) is nothing new, and provides hope to people with movement limitations. But such devices use large computers plugged directly into the brain. Better than nothing, but about as invasive as you can get.

Some Spanish researchers, fueled by government money, are working on an interface that uses EEG signals from electrodes placed on the scalp, not inside the skull.

Signals from the EEGs are not as precise as those embedded in the brain. But new decoding algorithms are now making it possible to use the EEG signal patterns to control simple movement patterns.

"You're not going to be using EEGs to control a robotic arm to play the piano or anything," says Dawn Taylor, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University's Department of Biomedical Engineering, who isn't involved in the project. "But you can certainly turn right and left and stop and go using that sort of signal."

The researchers near term goal is to reduce the size of the BCI so that it can be more portable. They expect to produce a working prototype in the next year or two.

Strikes me as an extremely useful application of brain plasticity, particularly the idea of producing big changes from imagining movement. But if there's no possibility of nerve connections, nice to have this alternative. And no nasty surgical side effects to worry about.

Information Everywhere?

I've been noticing the ubiquitous sound track of everyday life. Not in the metaphorical sense, either. You hear background music in almost every eating place, coffee shop, store or other place of business. It's so everywhere that it's hardly noticeable. Except that it is. And the ear isn't the only one being assaulted with ubiquitous information being slung our way. Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Likely to See An Ad adds blank spaces to the endangered list. And a pretty good bit of newspeak from one of the slingers:

“We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

Elevator music and printed ads on air sickness bags are part of what I see as a larger issue - unrequested information. Advertisements, junk mail, telemarketers, spam, or whatever. Now I realize that sometimes advertising is the tradeoff you have to make for so-called free content. But ads printed on on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians’ offices? Come on!

Unrequested information costs a lot in time and money. It's not only distracting, but it takes time and sometimes money to deal with some of it. An entire industry has grown up to deal with spam, and sometimes you have to buy extra software dedicated to that task. Privacy managers from phone companies cost extra and don't always block tele-marketers. Shredders have become a routine part of home offices.

Of course we can ignore all of this. After all, one of the ways our human nervous system deals with low impact stimulii is to ignore them. If you can. Another approach is a bit more academic. In Attentional Economics , the idea is to give you something of value for your attention. Maybe this is what have to expect when the cost of producing and distributing information falls to almost nothing. You're gonna get information, whether or not you asked for it. And you can also make and distribute information )read: content) yourself. Witness blogging, podcasting and the like.

So, the soundtrack plays ever on. If only it were composed by Bernard Herman instead of Hermans Hermits.

What about procrastination?

"Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today."

Procrastination is the bad stuff of broken dreams, or so goes the seemingly common wisdom. A tongue-in-cheek article about a new procrastination study says the problem is getting worse, and all the diversions provided by technology (like idling time away reading and writing blog posts?) is to blame. The study, by the way, was delivered 5 years later than promised.

As much as well all try to avoid putting things off we, well, put things off. A lot. It's a pattern that seems to resist good intentions and time management systems designed to defeat it.

So, is there something else to procrastination than avoiding unpleasant tasks? Maybe so, at least according to authors Eric Abramamson and David H. Freedman. They wrote a book call A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. In it, they take on all the assumptions we generally hold about messiness being a "bad thing." They take on procrastination in a section they call The Seven Highly Overrated Habits of Time Management.

7. Getting it done now. Procrastination isn't always a bad thing. For starters, it can keep you from working on tasks that ultimately turn out to be less important than you thought. Or as Calvin Coolidge put it: "If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure nine will run into the ditch before the reach you." (Not that Coolidge was much good at identifying the tenth trouble. Or at anything else.) The U.S. Marines have a saying, too: Plan early, plan twice. By which they mean, put off planning for an event as long as possible, because if you do it well ahead of time circumstances will probably change and require replanning. In fact, putting off undertaking almost any form of organizing or neatening will likely have some advantage, because it's much more efficient to organize a large set of things at one shot than it is to organize them in pieces as they come along. If you want to organize your e-mail into categories, for example, you'll do a much better job of it when you have a few hundred messages to consider rather than trying to set up categories based on a few dozen messages.

Or maybe, following the study mentioned earlier, organizing email messages is a way to put off something else you might have to do. I think the point of the whole thing here is approaching things in an intelligent way, instead of following convention advice that might really not be in your best interest. Maybe the better saying would be something like: "It's sometimes OK to put off things you might do today until tomorrow, as long as you think about it first."

Practice Makes … Practice

The quest for consistent high level performance goes through the territory of practice. Whether it's athletic, musical, artistic or whatever, we've been told that practice makes perfect. That is, if you want a consistent golf swing or piano sonata, you gotta practice, practice, practice.

Well, maybe ... but only up to a point. At least, that's what a recent study at Stanford seems to say about practicing a simple movement of reaching. Up to a point, the reaching movement became somewhat consistent, but beyond that point results were spotty at best. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that study was done with macaque monkeys who were induced to repeat the reaching with food. I guess it would be hard to get monkeys to practice the golf swing or play a sonata repeatedly.

Like so many such studies, the movement areas of the monkeys' brains were monitored during their practice sessions. The researchers say over half of the movement variations came not from little monkey muscle, but from little monkey brains.

So much for the idea of muscle memory you golf pro tries to drill into you as you hit hundreds of 5-iron shots at the driving range. Grooving your swing might involve a lot more than simply practicing long hours.

Of course, to me at least, the blinding flash of the obvious here is the idea of what you're paying attention to during the practice. If you can become aware of the variability of the movement as you make them, there may be an opportunity to at least influence those movements, if not control them. On the other hand, if you're a monkey in a research cage, you're probably only interested in reaching so that you can get a banana at the end. So mindful practice is probably better than mindless practice.

One of the other interesting things here is the goal of the practice. Minimizing or eliminating variation narrows the widow of influence you can have over the movement, at least to my way of thinking. But awareness of variation might let you do something about it.

Another thing that caught my eye in the article was the notion of understanding movement and how that might lead to treatments for movement-related disorders. I'm not sure what to make of that, because the article stops there and doesn't elaborate on it. I can guess what they might be referring to is that accurate understanding of neural patterns might lead to ways to interrupt or influence them.

I do know that practicing the Feldenkrais Method uses mindful movement variations to influence the quality of movement. It's not that far a stretch, following the study, to conclude that things in the brain change as you do this.

There's lots of anecdotal evidence that mindful movement or awareness can have a mighty influence over quality and variation of movement. But I guess if your hungry enough, a banana's a pretty good reason to practice. Just don't expect perfection.

Work or Play?

Remember the fable of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant? While the ant worked hard to store away food for the coming winter, the grasshopper fiddled around as he liked. But when winter came, the ant ate while the grasshopper starved. This teaches us that work is better than play, right?

Well maybe.It depends when you ask.

According to a study done at Columbia University, we're likely to regret goofing off in the sort term, but actually prefer it in the long term. The study asked participants a week after some work or play situation if they had any regrets. The worker ants had little regret, while the loafer grasshoppers did. But when asked about such decisions they had made 5 years ago, it was a different story.

And when going way back, a group who graduated 40 years ago were even more favorable to the leisure decisions.

The study's designer points out this isn't a license to goof off all the time. After all, the graduates interviewed had done enough work to graduate. And the poor grasshopper wasn't around to comment. Still, it's good to know how to balance work and downtime.

One of Life’s Persistent Questions

Guy Noir tries to get to the bottom of things. Noir is the fictional 1940's style private eye on the American public radio program A Prairie Home Companion. Each episode begins with this set up:

A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions — Guy Noir, Private Eye -- (THEME UNDER)

Ya, there is this thing about life's persistent questions. Noir can take his time looking for answers, but I like a quick simple explanation, or at least a better question.

One of the most persistent of life's persistent questions is what is consciousness? Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran takes a 500 word stab at it in On My Mind in Seed magazine. Not surprisingly, Ramachandran comes up with the idea that the answer lies in figuring out what's going on in the brain.

Not just any part of the brain: it's the parts that helps us make meaning and nuance from the barrage of sensory information coming at us all the time. As these brain structures became part of humans, they let us package sensory goings on into more manageable pieces and start getting use out of symbols and language.

I like Ramachandran's concise ideas on how to answer this persistent life's question. But I like even better how he got there. He first knocks down the idea that understanding consciousness needs to solve the question of how qualia arise before tackling the sense of self. It's two sides of the same coin, he says:

You cannot have "free floating" qualia without a self to experience them and to give them meaning.

Moshe Feldenkrais might have said the same kind of thing when referring to somatic experiences. Better to say "I am hurting in my knee" than "My knee is hurting." The more helpful experience is of the whole, not the isolated parts.)

Ramachandran's ideas come from a neurological perspective, of course. Guy Noir might answer differently.

Ghosts in the Brain

I don't normally mind ghost movies, but for some reason Poltergeist really gives me the creeps. Just the hint of the eerie, otherworldly presences have me checking the shadows and closets for spooks. I don't wanna feel any other presence besides my own flesh and blood as it resides on terra firma.

But of course, people really do report feeling creepy presences in their midst and other weird phenomena. Are there explanations for these sensations, other than paranormal or being an extra in a movie? Out of Body Experience: Your Brain is To Blame offers a rational explanation.

Neuroscientists working with patients prepping for epilepsy surgery found that applying current to certain areas of the brain can produce the illusion of shadowy presences and other bodily illusions. The stimulated area, the angular gyrus, turns out to be responsible for assembling the steams of multiple sensory areas into perceptions. By applying small amounts of current to the angular gyrus, this assembling process gets scrambled a bit. But in the process of trying to make sense of what's going on, the brain can produce some weird stuff. One woman felt like she was hanging from the ceiling:

Because the woman’s felt position in space and her actual position in space did not match, her mind cast about for the best way to turn her confusion into a coherent experience, (researcher) Dr. Blanke said. She concluded that she must be floating up and away while looking downward.

So it turns out to be the brain, and not the paranormal that's playing the tricks here:

When otherwise normal people experience bodily delusions, Dr. Blanke said, they are often flummoxed. The felt sensation of the body is so seamless, so familiar, that people do not realize it is a creation of the brain, even when something goes wrong and the brain is perturbed.

Still, I'm going to pass on any more viewings of Poltergeist - especially so close to Halloween.

Memory Scans and Context

A new bit of research suggests those embarrassing senior moments might just be more than just annoying. They could be an indicator of cognitive impairment or even Alzheimer's to come.

At least that's what the (MRI) brain scans of 120 of the research's participants points toward. Besides a group of 40 people complaining of forgetfulness but otherwise healthy, there were people who had already been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and a lucky group of 40 health folks with no complaints.

The healthy complainer's scans showed grey matter loss similar to the MCI group. Ah oh:

"This is the first study to show this loss in those who merely complain about their memory," said Robert Santulli, a psychiatrist and study co-author, via e-mail. "There is old lore that 'If you think you have Alzheimer's, then you don't,' meaning that people can't really be objective or accurate about their own cognitive abilities. This study appears to contradict that, in that it shows that people's subjective sense of their own decline is often a more sensitive indicator of problems than even our most sensitive battery of neuropsychological testing."

The good news here is these sorts of studies might help lead to reliable diagnostic tests that could be used to treat or even prevent more serious problems in the future. Today it's only the symptoms that can be treated with drugs and such.

As promising as this is, I wonder if there's more here than meets the eye. Besides the differences in the brain scans, what else differentiates the complainers, the MCI and the healthy group? Could anything else account for the reported symptoms?

I bring this up from a partial reading of The Wisdom Paradox by Elkohon Goldberg. Goldberg tells compelling stories of people with MCI or worse who continued to function in their lives. There's even a mention of a group of nuns who function well almost until death, and then autopsies show significant signs of Alzheimer's.

Not to take anything away from research methods currently in use, it kind of makes me wonder if the microscope can focus in too tightly and lose track of the context sometimes.

Technorati Tags: brain, memory, puppy

Driving Miss Stroop

Tests aren't usually much fun, having to remember arcane facts or come up with reasons or analysis for some historical or literary event, or something of that ilk. But the Stroop Test is not that sort of thing. It doesn't require you do remember or construct anything, but just look at words on a screen and say out loud the color they are displayed in. For example, RED. The word and its color are the same, so that's pretty easy. But what about GREEN. The word and its color are different, so if you just blurt out the word, you get it wrong. Need to pause a bit to get your bearings before determining the color to say.

Whatever other purposes it might have, I take the Stroop Test as an example of our ability to inhibit our first idea of some action and then be able to choose some other response. In this case, the ability is kind of frittered on a meaningless activity.

But maybe that ability isn't so trivial after all if you read the abstract of an interesting experiment involving the Stroop and driving performance. In that experiment, those who had done poorly on the Stroop also performed poorly in a driving test. Those who had gotten a gold star on the Stroop seemed to be more aware and aroused as they spotted and tried to avoid an obstacle in the road.

What's most interesting to me here is the idea that a way of perceiving on an arcane psychological test can generalize to something quite useful in the real world. (And, presumably keep your auto insurance rates low.)

These ideas of awareness and choice aren't new, of course. Lots of traditions pass them down through generations. They are the cornerstones of the Feldenkrais Method and Alexander Technique. There, often discovering a pattern of interference with movement and developing options for using the body more effectively can have profound effects.

What would happen if you tried this Stroop Test on one of your pets. Probably nothing, since domestic pets don't have language. But if they did, what sort of language would it be? More on that later.

Computer and Body Image

In a 2003 post I wrote about Andy Clark's different twist on the type of brain plasticity I was used to thinking about as a Feldenkrais practitioner:

Somatic practitioners routinely witness the "plasticity" of the human brain. That is, we and our clients can change the movement patterns and how those movements are experienced, sometimes fairly dramatically. We routinely facilitate the transformation from parts that don't work together well into well-integrated organisms that can live unavowed dreams. But what about when the parts don't belong to the organism, aren't permanently attached? Does the plasticity extend to these relationships?

Andy Clark thinks so and writes eloquently about it in Natural-Born Cyborgs. Clark is the Director of the Cognitive Science Program and Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, where Esther Thelen also did her work. In his book, Clark talks about "cognitive prostheses and how plastic brains can learn to treat well-designed new tools as if they were parts of the person."

Clark was talking about permanently incorporating devices into our brain's image of our body - making them a part of our self use. I have often wondered about if or how using computers in other ways could also change the neural representation of the body for the better. (We all know that sitting and staring at a tiny screen for long periods has its own mostly undesirable effects.)

I understand physical therapy has begun incorporating the idea of virtual reality into its bag of therapy tools. But these computers are pretty expensive and (probably) difficult to master. Now, engineers at Rutgers University have come up with a clever and relatively inexpensive adaptation of the idea. Basically, they adapted a Microsoft XBox gaming system and a gaming glove into a device that helps people recover lost hand functioning.

Clients using the system don the glove and then attempt to use their hand to interact with activities on the computer screen. The system has its limits when compared with its more expensive professional counterparts, but it does seem to promise the virtual reality technique will be available to far more people.

These sorts of tools probably work in ways not so radically different from Feldenkrais ideas. I'd bet successfully interacting with the virtual relatively environment works better by reducing effort to improve sensitivity.

Body image can change function and use, sometimes dramatically and quickly. That computers have gotten into the act seems a natural extension of a not so natural idea.

A Vaster Wasteland

Ding Dong Nursery talked up the idea of television and video as serious learning tools among the very young. I made a glancing reference to television as a vast wasteland in that post, though I didn't cite the source of that term. The phrase "vast wasteland" came from a 1961 speech by Newton Minow, then chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that regulates access and use of the "public airwaves." (Text of the vast wasteland speech is here.) Minow was seriously concerned that the public was getting short-changed in the bargain, and he wanted to wake broadcasters up to the shortcoming.

That was 1961. Television has changed almost beyond recognition in the 45 years since. I was surprised to find that Minow is still around at 81 years old and as articulate as ever about TV. And he seems to like it now.

In Newton Minow and Television Today on NPR's Talk of the Nation, he puts the vast wasteland speech into the context of 1961, talks the mostly favorable TV of today, and still exhorts broadcasters to regulate themselves.

Even with Miss Frances Ding Dong School available, viewing choices were limited to 3 channels or fewer in many places. Minow says he was interested in providing more choice, greater and more constructive options for spending viewing time. Minow says now that the gifts of the then new technology of video were the most important gifts the government could bestow on somebody, and he was taking that very seriously.

45 years later there are more choices - lots more. And public broadcasting plays to large audiences. We see things all over the world, as they happen. There are still issues about meeting the public interest in a consistent way, but Minow urges the industry to regulate itself so that government won't need to get involved.

The vast wasteland will be Minow's epitaph, literally. On his tombstone will be the phrase "on to a vaster wasteland."

Blog Block

It's not always easy for me to come up with blog posts that I'd want to publish. Probably it's that dreaded condition called writer's block. But when I think about writer's block, I usually picture struggling fiction writers - the novel that gets abandoned or never gets started in the first place.

Blog writing, of course, isn't fiction. Well, not most of the time at least. So I was thinking that if I could simplify the whole notion of what a blog post is and isn't, that might help. Part of the problem coming up with ideas is that there are either too many of them or maybe just a narrow one that doesn't really interest me. And writing about something that isn't interesting is, well, not interesting.

So when I think of posting something, there are just a few meta level things involved:

• a general topic I'm interested in exploring;
• something I've read, heard, seen or otherwise been exposed to that might have some interest;

And once the topic's out there in play, what treatment could it get as a blog post?

• a post could be just a link to it and nothing else;
• the post could just summarize the topic or article;
• or it could expand on it;
• or it could take issue with it;
• or some combination of all these things.

So it might not be too hard to narrow down the choices for blogging about something, and at the same time keeping a workable set of options open.

All of this came from reading Writing Hacks: Starting, and trying a few of the suggestions given there. Not good to see that other bloggers can suffer from a kind of writer's block, but at least somewhat comforting.

Ding Dong Nursery?

Television. Sure, there's a vast wasteland out there, but one of the brightest hopes has been and remains for its use in learning - particularly in early childhood. From Miss Frances Ding Dong School to Mister Rogers to Blue's Clues, some of the stuff has actually hit the mark. According to When Toddlers Turn on the TV and Actually Learn, research shows that 3 to 5 year olds who watch Blue's Clues do better in some problem solving tests than those who don't.

But what about the really young, toddlers under the age of 3? Recent research at Vanderbilt University gives a mixed report. Toddlers who watched a video recording mostly weren't able to pick up enough hints to find hidden puppet. But those who watched and interacted with a live, real-time video of an actual person giving clues were able to find the puppet about twice as often. Maybe that kind of defeats the whole purpose of video as a learning tool for the kiddies. I mean, if you need a Buffalo Bob interacting with each little buckaroo in front of his little television, production costs tend to escalate quickly as they say.

This all goes to the heart of a concept known as the video deficit, the idea that toddlers who have no trouble understanding stuff from a human teacher stumble when trying to get the same info from a video screen. Researchers don't really know why, and they want to investigate further.

In the meantime, the Vanderbilt research points to better production values for the little tykes:

The Vanderbilt research offers the possibility that the more socially engaging a video is, the more likely the deficit will disappear. But Dr. Troseth and other psychologists stress that in-person connections with parents are by far a child's best teacher. No word yet on whether that includes those moments when harried parents are so distracted that TV characters are more responsive than they are.

I think it'd be interesting to look into how babies and toddlers learn how to represent 3 dimensional images (like people) in the flat two dimensions of a video screen. And what about teaching more non-cognitive problem solving skills to toddlers with video?

Or we could just wait until they turn 3, I guess.

Flexible Learning Demands Sleep

To sleep, perchance to dream. Sounds great, but not something I would have associated with the idea of helping someone learn how to do something in a more flexible way. I'm talking here about movement-based skills, not the simple memorizing and spitting out facts to get a good test score. I used to think rest and sleep were not aids to learning and perfecting a golf swing, running form, a dance step or any other athletic or performance skill. Practice and more practice would drill the sequences and timing into my brain, forming that precious commodity called muscle memory. Sleep only got in the way of more practice.

Maybe not, at least according to. Harvard neuroscientist Matthew Walker and his colleagues. In a 2003 research project, Walker pitted the idea of unrelenting practice against just sleeping on it. He found that sleep improved the performance of a motor-based task by 20 to 30 percent.

Walker attributes the improvement to the brain's ability to stabilize and destabilize memories. Stabilizing helps retain the idea of how to perform a skill. But to sharpen that skill, destabilizing helps us take the skills apart of reorganize them in new, hopefully more effective, ways. And it's sleeping on it that makes all of this more efficient.

Sleep's not the only thing here. It also pays to forget about introducing a new (different) skill on top of the existing one.

After a night's sleep, Walker thought that such interference would not occur. He had the students sleep on a memory, then quickly gave them another sequence to work on. He was surprised to find that it interfered with retaining the memory he thought had been stabilized and enhanced.

There was only one explanation. On recall, the previously stabilized memory must have reverted to a destabilized state, which was then scrambled by the input of a new memory. "In this third stage of memory, it is plastic enough to be changed by competing learning, or by memories of common elements from other skills," Walker explains. "It's part of a fine-tuning process required to build a well-rounded memory. This had never been demonstrated before in humans."

Not only does Walker's research refute the theories and practices of my high school coaches, it gives support to what often emerges in a Feldenkrais Method lesson. There, plenty or rest alternates with nonhabitual movement sequences. The result is often quite stunning in the ease and quality of movement that emerges. Feldenkrais maintained the rest was as important as the movements themselves.

It would be an interesting piece of research for someone to look into the quantifiable effects of short rest periods during the learning process. Let's sleep on that.

Minimalist’s Creed

Here's a philosophy that I can get behind from the Cool Tools listing for the book Lifting Heavy Things.

As stated in the stagehand's axiom: "Never lift what you can drag, never drag what you can roll, never roll what you can leave." Creativity germinates in indolence, and the cleverest people are often the laziest: they are always looking for an easier way. The easiest way is often the simplest, most direct, and the best way.

Need I say more?

Good Idea for a Chair

I went looking for an office chair recently. Off I went to a store with a large selection, and sit-tested several of them. Some were bad, some OK, but none "just right." I was about to settle for one of the OK ones when I spotted a very odd-looking chair off to the side. As I took a seat in it, it kind of whispered to me "just right." And it was.

The odd-looking chair turned out to have an odd-sounding name, too - HAG Capisco Saddle Chair. I had not experienced the combination of support and comfort the excentric appearing chair offered. Mostly, if chairs were comfortable, they didn't offer much support. Or if the offered support, they could be more comfortable.

The main thing I've found so agreeable about this chair is the way it gets me over my sit bones, making my whole skeleton available to support me in sitting and in movement. Always good to let your bones earn their keep, according to chair expert Galen Cranz in a 2004 interview:

You never want flesh to carry the load, bones should. Deep padding doesn’t allow your fluids to enter and exit your cells properly and you have a build-up of waste material, which is fatiguing. Moreover, I believe one of the reasons we have so much cellulite in this country is because our flesh takes on this load-bearing function that it’s not designed for.

This is great for doing office work, but really helps when using it in my Feldenkrais practice.There, it's vitally important to offer support to a client, and that's not easy if the practitioner isn't supported in the first place. The Capisco helps. (And I understand HAG also offers the saddle treatment in a stool, but I've not experienced it.) Along those lines, I find the Capisco greatly aiding the transition from sitting to standing, so important for lessening strain on the frame as you repeat this motion so many times. This is especially good for tall people, who often find themselves feeling like they are sitting in kindergarden chairs. (Try it sometime.) Cranz again:

But, posturally speaking, we need environments that support change and movement. A good chair allows you to sit in the perch position, which is a stance halfway between sitting and standing — a “sit-stand” where the pelvis rolls forward, the lumbar curve is preserved and the legs are in an oblique angle in relation to the spine. This position promotes circulation.

The Capisco is not pretty, and it's not cheap. But according to Cranz, it's not the only better-sitting alternative:

There are several ways to do it [see illustrations]. People can use their kitchen counter or island so they can be in the sit-stand position to eat, do bills or work. For something inexpensive, you can buy a plain wooden stool that puts you in the perch position. One chair called the “Capisco” has a saddle seat with a space cut out for the thighs so that they can drop away. Rockers and lounge chairs, like the one you’re on, are also good. When you sit in a regular chair, you round your back into this big, C-shaped hump. Lose your lumbar curve [the arch between the tailbone and middle-back] and you get slipped disks.

I'm glad that I decided to try the ugly duckling of the chair store's showroom. It's turned out to be a real swan.