Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Most house cats love to have their heads rubbed, to be petted. But I know one cat who doesn’t like anyone fooling around with his head. He’s cross-eyed and I can only guess that a lack of close-in depth perception makes him sensitive to big hands coming toward him from the front. (Who know what really does on in a cat’s brain?) Nothing else having to do with his vision seems to bother him. He runs, jumps, plays with toys and catches the very occasional mouse like any other cat. Other than not liking petting, his vision doesn’t seem to handicap him.

The cross-eyed condition is not limited to cats, of course. Going Binocular is an NPR segment that tells the story of middle-aged neuroscience professor Susan Barry who was born with crossed eyes, but had that condition resolved surgically when she was two. It turns out that she still saw in monocular vision with a compromised ability to perceive depth and space. She discovered this after one of her old college professors told her that kittens and baby monkeys cross eyed during infancy never learn to see in 3D because the brain cells responsible for depth vision don’t develop. The loss was permanent, according to the professor. Once the brain develops to a certain state, a certain age, there’s nothing you can do to change it, or so it was thought. Barry learned to live with it, figuring she wasn’t missing much.

Then she  happened to bump into famous neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks at a party. (The bump is just a figure of speech, not the result of her mono vision; she was just at the same place as Sacks.) Sacks disputed the idea that not having stereo vision wasn’t such a big deal:

She also told Sacks that she didn’t think she was missing very much, not seeing in stereo. And that’s when Sacks leaned in really close and said, “Do you think you can imagine what it’s like to see the world with two eyes?”

I wonder if Sacks leaning in close was some sort of neurologist trick. At any rate, Susan Barry hooked up with a developmental optometrist who taught her some movement-based exercises. After a while her 3d vision returned! Apparently, if there are still even just a few of the binocular brain cells remaining, they can be retrained to do their thing.

Barry’s old college professor’s opinion that the brain couldn’t change after a certain point turns out to be false, at least for stereo vision and probably lots of other stuff.

It’s interesting to me that it took a movement-based activity to restore the stereo sight ability. I had kind of run across this myself during my Feldenkrais training. (See ViewMaster Vision.)

But despite a compromised ability to see in 3D, most of us can get by ok, driving, playing tennis, tossing ball around or whatever. It’s nice to know the ability can be restored at any age. But the really astounding thing is the ability of adult brain to change things around, to learn or restore even new senses, sometimes in remarkably short time frames.

Who says you can’t teach an old cat new tricks? 

Brains do a lot of different things. But sometimes some of the things the brain does can go wrong; strokes, injuries, birth defects, aging. These kinds of things often leave the that brain’s owner unable to do things they want or need to do. Surgery, medicine, or medical therapy has traditionally been seen as the way to deal with this situation, to the extent dealing with it is possible. And when we think of future ways of dealing with this stuff we often think of new medical techniques like stem cells, designer medicines or gene therapy.

But there are also new therapies based on plasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself. Retraining the brain explores two of them: constraint based therapy and computer assisted memory enhancement. The benefits are to a young person born with cerebral palsy and an elderly couple starting to notice memory deficits. The article also mentions a computer program used by kids with dyslexia. Both of the programs come from Posit Science, a company formed by plasticity researcher Michael Merzenich.

I wonder what would happen if someone researched the possible cross fertilization here: does training plasticity in one area improve the others? Can a movement-based activity influence better memory or cognitive skills. And can a computer program influence movement ability? I suspect the answer is yes, but it would take a lot of research to even come close to demonstrating that.

What’s really behind these ideas is the idea of stimulating the activity of paying attention, mostly from putting people in non-habitual situations that force them to pay attention to how they are doing things, sometimes in very minute detail.

These ideas are not exactly new. Moshe Feldenkrais developed his method based on the idea of brain malleability many years ago. (Thanks to the internet you can try it yourself. For an extensive archive of audio Feldenkrais Awareness Though Movement lessons see the Open ATM project.) Some of applicatons of the plasticity idea are strictly medical, and others can be used in a medical or care setting (or educational setting in the case of the dyslexia thing). But the plasticity idea is also a potential business opportunity.

Merzenich’s company, Posit Science, has begun selling the Brain Gym (the program addressing memory and cognitive skills) computer program and the potential market is huge. By the time they reach age 85 nearly half of Americans will suffer from dementia. Merzenich wants to prove, scientifically, that Brain Gym can help them.

Business schools are also getting in on the idea, but from a different angle. Who’s a large group that needs this stuff. Baby boomers. Boomers on venture capitalists’ list makes it plainly clear this is potentially very big business:

The first of the baby boomers turns 60 this year. And that means some 78 million people, born between 1946 and 1964 present a $480 billion industry for entrepreneurs to profit from by developing new products and services targeted to them. So in true Silicon Valley style, those looking for a piece of the pie gathered at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University on Tuesday for a $10,000 business-plan competition and the Boomer Venture Summit.

I’d bet if Feldenkrais was still around, he’d be no stranger to venture capitalists looking toward the boomer market.

I remember reading a Kurt Vonnegut story years ago that, among other things, dealt with purposefully handicapping elite performers. The idea of that story in the collection Welcome to the Monkey House had something to do with not giving the genetically gifted an unfair advantage over the rest of us. It was all made up of course, a very entertaining work of fiction released in the 1960’s.

But the idea of genetic makeup and behavior surfaces again in That Wild Streak? Maybe It Runs in the Family in the New York Times. What I get from reading it is this: As science has started to link genetic make up with certain behavioral traits, questions rise about the application of these sorts of findings. Do we use them to aid understanding and acceptance of certain things like being chronically overweight, or do we use them to automatically classify people by their genetics?

Armed with the human genome sequence, along with a catalog of genetic variation in the human population, and tools that can inexpensively gauge any individual’s genetic makeup, scientists can now pinpoint the genes associated with inherited traits.

Because tests for the genes that influence personality and behavioral traits are not yet commercially available, there is no way for most people to know which ones they have. And even if they could, the newly uncovered genes are thought merely to influence, not determine, their personalities. Biologists are also quick to emphasize the role environment plays in activating genetic dispositions that might otherwise never be expressed, or mitigating those that are.

A comment to Lehrer’s post says his objection miss the point of the article, that there’s a potential public frenzy brewing here, fueled by more and better studies. The real problem is tempering the flood of research information with showing the public how complex this issue really is and how genetics “actually works.”

Despite current biologists cautions, does the idea of learning and change draw the short straw? I’m not sure that it doesn’t, especially as the research studies increase and news of those studies spread in the mainstream media. How simplified will those write ups and reports become? Will they start a stampede toward blaming the genes and forgetting about the learning and change connection? I hope not.

Jaron Lanier takes collaborative web sites to task in Digital Maoism. What he seems to be saying is that collective information sites leave out individuals, and by extension the personality and responsibility for the information. It’s easy to come up with collective crap. And it’s deluded to think that an anomous collective automatically comes up with the widest choices of those available. It’s easy for a collective to go nuts, since there’s seemingly not one to take responsibility. Lanier cites Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools mention of popurls.com as an example of a site letting us observe what Kelly calls hive mind in action. Lanier ain’t buying it: 

• But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

But Lanier keeps coming back to what seems a pet bugaboo in the essay: Wikipedia. It seems wikipedia’s contributors labeled Lanier a film director, though he made a single film that he’s not proud of. And when he tries to set the record straight, the great unwashed collection of wikipedia contributors are there to reinsert the film director label. Lanier doesn’t like that, and who can really blame him.

Is wikipedia a mega collection of anonymous contributions bubbling up into an unaccountable mass of information and misinformation that you can’t distinguish between? In Growing Wikipedia Refines Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy - New York Times, founder Jimmy Wales takes exception, though there is no mention of the Lanier essay in the Times article. Perhaps the collective is not so mass and anonymous after all:

• The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.
• 
  
• “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence,” Mr. Wales said. “But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community.”

So maybe the collective isn’t so vast after all, at least as far as Wikipedia is concerned. And a visit just now to Lanier’s listing failed to mention the film director bit.  

Whatever. But I think Lanier does have a point about the hive’s wisdom or lack thereof. The value I see in aggregators and such is the novelty they can introduce, not in the consensus they can sometimes seem to spout. There might actually be a sense of nonsense there.

But I think you have to forgo the front page of such sites and subscribe to the feeds that feature raw submissions, before they go through the aggregating process. Granted, there’s a lot of crap in them, but sometimes a gem worth following turns up. In fact, if memory serves correctly, that’s how I came up Lanier’s essay in the first place. 

Jaron Lanier takes collaborative web sites to task in Digital Maoism. What he seems to be saying is that collective information sites leave out individuals, and by extension the personality and responsibility for the information. It’s easy to come up with collective crap. And it’s deluded to think that an anomous collective automatically comes up with the widest choices of those available. It’s easy for a collective to go nuts, since there’s seemingly not one to take responsibility. Lanier cites Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools mention of popurls.com as an example of a site letting us observe what Kelly calls hive mind in action. Lanier ain’t buying it:

But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

Is wikipedia a mega collection of anonymous contributions bubbling up into an unaccountable mass of information and misinformation that you can’t distinguish between? In Growing Wikipedia Refines Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy - New York Times, founder Jimmy Wales takes exception, though there is no mention of the Lanier essay in the Times article. Perhaps the collective is not so mass and anonymous after all:

The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.

“A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence,” Mr. Wales said. “But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community.”

But I think you have to forgo the front page of such sites and subscribe to the feeds that feature raw submissions, before they go through the aggregating process. Granted, there’s a lot of crap in them, but sometimes a gem worth following turns up. In fact, if memory serves correctly, that’s how I came up Lanier’s essay in the first place.

About 15 years ago researchers in Italy discovered a pretty interesting thing about the brain. When one of their research monkeys was hooked up to a scanner they observed a certain frontal brain pattern as the monkey picked up and ate a peanut. No surprise there. But when they observed the same patterns in the same monkey as he/she watched another eat a peanut, that was surprising. The same neurons get excited whether the monkey was actually doing an action or just observing it. The idea that doing or observing produces the same neuronal pattern become known as mirror neurons.

My immediate thought at learning about this turned to sports. If you can learn by observing someone performing an action (and then imitating it), then why don’t you become a scratch golfer just by watching championship golf tournaments? As many a duffer can testify, it doesn’t seem to work this way.

One of the commonly cited examples of mirror neurons in learning is that of a new born baby sticking out his/her tongue after observing a parent do the same. But sticking out a tongue is a pretty simple action, and, let’s face it, the newborn doesn’t have much else occupying his time anyway.

But something like a golf swing or tennis stroke is much more complex. And it probably isn’t an action that you have performed well in the past, or maybe performed at all. This is what I suspect is behind not being able to challenge Tiger Woods just from watching him take a few shots — the action that you’re observing and imitating isn’t familiar to you.

That by itself is not enough to doom your learning and mastery. After all, any action is composed of smaller actions. Tennis involves running, planting your feet, watching a moving object, ect., all things most of us are familiar with:

“When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain,” said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. “Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate,” he said. “But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements. From Cells That Read Minds.

That helps explain the insufficiency of the mirror neuron idea as a universal athletic learning idea. It’s the combination of simple-to-do and familiar movements, coupled with putting them together in the right environment that makes for good athletic learning. At least that’s what I think.

But one of the coolest things about mirror neurons in humans is the ability they give us to feel the emotions of others performing an action, to be relatively familiar with the intentions behind their actions. Of such things are empathy made.

So, though I haven’t become a scratch golfer from watching, I found watching the last round of last week’s U.S. Open a pretty visceral experience. Phil Mickelson was leading the tournament by 2 shots with 2 holes to go. On the last hole, he hit his drive way off target, then hit a tree with his next shot, and then buried his next shot deep in a sand trap with little hope of getting out in the one shot he needed to at least tie and qualify for a playoff. He blew it, big time. In front of millions of people.

Why the visceral experience from me at watching all this? Mirror neurons. I don’t have a neural template for a championship swing; that’s something completely unfamiliar. But I have hit drives way off target, and I have hit trees and seen the ball bounce backward, and, goodness knows, I have been deeply in the sand on more than one occasion. And isn’t embarrassment in front of others a pretty universally shared experience. So I felt for old Phil as he hacked his way out of a major championship.

Motor neurons. The idea will probably turn out to explain a lot about the human condition, about how we got to be where we are now. In the meantime, stay out of those sand traps.

About 15 years ago researchers in Italy discovered a pretty interesting thing about the brain. When one of their research monkeys was hooked up to a scanner they observed a certain frontal brain pattern as the monkey picked up and ate a peanut. No surprise there. But when they observed the same patterns in the same monkey as he/she watched another eat a peanut, that was surprising. The same neurons get excited whether the monkey was actually doing an action or just observing it. The idea that doing or observing produces the same neuronal pattern become known as mirror neurons. 

My immediate thought at learning about this turned to sports. If you can learn by observing someone performing an action (and then imitating it), then why don’t you become a scratch golfer just by watching championship golf tournaments? As many a duffer can testify, it doesn’t seem to work this way.  

One of the commonly cited examples of mirror neurons in learning is that of a new born baby sticking out his/her tongue after observing a parent do the same. But sticking out a tongue is a pretty simple action, and, let’s face it, the newborn doesn’t have much else occupying his time anyway.

But something like a golf swing or tennis stroke is much more complex. And it probably isn’t an action that you have performed well in the past, or maybe performed at all. This is what I suspect is behind not being able to challenge Tiger Woods just from watching him take a few shots — the action that you’re observing and imitating isn’t familiar to you.

That by itself is not enough to doom your learning and mastery. After all, any action is composed of smaller actions. Tennis involves running, planting your feet, watching a moving object, ect., all things most of us are familiar with:

• “When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain,” said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. “Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate,” he said. “But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements. From Cells That Read Minds.

But there are many movements that most of us are not familiar with, especially as we age. The variety of movements that most of us are capable of and the actual movements we choose to make regularly is vastly different. 

That helps explain the insufficiency of the mirror neuron idea as a universal athletic learning idea. It’s the combination of simple-to-do and familiar movements, coupled with putting them together in the right environment that makes for good athletic learning. At least that’s what I think.

But one of the coolest things about mirror neurons in humans is the ability they give us to feel the emotions of others performing an action, to be relatively familiar with the intentions behind their actions. Of such things are empathy made.

So, though I haven’t become a scratch golfer from watching, I found watching the last round of last week’s U.S. Open a pretty visceral experience. Phil Mickelson was leading the tournament by 2 shots with 2 holes to go. On the last hole, he hit his drive way off target, then hit a tree with his next shot, and then buried his next shot deep in a sand trap with little hope of getting out in the one shot he needed to at least tie and qualify for a playoff. He blew it, big time. In front of millions of people.

Why the visceral experience from me at watching all this? Mirror neurons. I don’t have a neural template for a championship swing; that’s something completely unfamiliar. But I have hit drives way off target, and I have hit trees and seen the ball bounce backward, and, goodness knows, I have been deeply in the sand on more than one occasion. And isn’t embarrassment in front of others a pretty universally shared experience.  So I felt for old Phil as he hacked his way out of a major championship. 

Mirror neurons. The idea will probably turn out to explain a lot about the human condition, about how we got to be where we are now. In the meantime, stay out of those sand traps.

Click on the title of this post to see a page devoted to motor imagery as it relates to golf. (Note: This not a scientific research or journalism site, and even sells products related to this theme.) Suggested on a really interesting page on mirror neurons and education.

Testing pasting a blockquote from a text editor. The quote follows:

This is a quote that should appear as a blockquote, a piece of text indented or set off from the other text here. Here is some bold text.Here is italics. 

The quote wasn’t indented, but the bold and italic did show up.