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In Practice Learning to Get to Carnegie Hall, and in other places, I’ve touted the idea that learning and refinement are especially important in developing and applying complex sets of skills. Talent may be important, but it’s not enough by itself. The sheer number of practice hours put in by guys like Mozart and Tiger Woods are/were what it takes to make the most of their talents.  Must have paid off for Woods, since he won another British Open since the article was posted. (And, well, Mozart’s still a best seller two centuries after he wrote his last big hit.)

The mention of golf practice reminded me of a conversation I once had with my friend Natalie, a championship amateur golfer. Natalie championed the idea that information is the all important thing to have to take your golf to the next level. However he got it, Woods has lots more information about his golf swing and play technique than almost anyone else. 

I was a bit skeptical about this at the time, but since learning means, among other things, developing information and options, I left it to incubate. What I hadn’t really put into the framework at the time was  intelligence as it relates to the fundamental, very basic motor skills that underly complex activities. For example, jumping and basketball. Larry Bird aside, basketball players need to be able to jump to compete, and the higher or quicker, the better it serves their games.

But is something so seemingly innate as jumping a thing that takes intelligence? David Kohn asks that question on an NPR commentary this morning, and gives the jumping intelligence idea some quality air time. 

Though he mentions some of the many theories that go into developing jumping ability, the idea of intelligence , the idea that jumping is learned and developed through practice stands out. 

some experts think that muscles and nerves may somehow have their own neurological intelligence, some way to adjust on the fly with minimal input from the brain.

Kohn talks with high jumper Gwen Wentland, last year’s U.S Indoor high jumping champion. Wentland says she always been fascinated with “doing her best to overcome gravity.” As a kid, she practiced many hours on a pogo stick, and then on a trampoline, refining her ability to “overcome gravity.” Probably paid off for her:

maybe all those hours of pogosticking and trampolining taught her something the rest of us just don’t grasp

 So maybe Natalie was on to something there after all.   

The popular press and the blogosphere are always hungry for information about the next big thing. But when that big thing comes from a specialized scientific field, guys like me can have a difficult time knowing what to make of it all. Then it can help to have someone well-versed in the scientific literature and methods step forward to put their views out there. I guess the real problem has something to do with journalists not being trained in science and most scientists not trained to communicate in journalistic terms.

So I was pleasantly surprised to run across Mirror Neurons, Language and Meaning by a cognitive psychologist. He(?) seems to take exception to the hoopla surrounding the idea of mirror neurons. The subject does appear pretty widely in all sorts of places these days, including right here. 

The first big objection has something to do with expanding a discovery taken from research on Italian monkeys to humans:

What functions, exactly, the mirror neuron system subserves in humans is not really known. Ignorance, however, is no barrier to speculation

 But the thing that seems to produce the most irritation doesn’t come from blogs or skimpy news presentations, but from inside the research community. Researchers who’ve outlined a theory of the role of mirror neurons in how humans acquire language are singled out. 

In short, they’ve given us nothing but a bunch of wild speculation that seems to be based more on the belief that mirror neurons are really cool than on any empirical evidence about what mirror neurons actually do. You can’t solve long-standing problems like connecting arbitrary speech patterns to meanings, and the evolution of language, just by saying, “Look, mirror neurons!”

Thoughtful and well-written posts like this one  are a good find for non-academic readers like me.  Hope to find more in the future.

Someone suffering from nagging and persistent back pain once came to me for Feldenkrais lessons. Several lessons suggested this client was doing something without realizing it — arching her back. In fact (quite without knowing she was doing so), she couldn’t NOT arch her back, so the back arching muscles were way overworking, causing all sorts of nastiness. After developing this awareness of arching, it was a simple matter for the client to actively develop and choose other options for using the body in whatever situation she found herself. (Not that this is easy, but at least the previously almost unconscious behavior had been revealed.)

I’ve often wondered if the same kind of thing happened in things that we traditionally think of as non-motor behavior. Maybe I should say other forms of perception.

This is kind of a cornerstone of the Method, the idea that behavior you’re unaware of can persistently block you from doing what you want to do. One of Feldenkrais’ coolest quotes is “if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t do what you want.”

What You Think But Don’t Say takes this on, kind of. It briefly describes a recent Princeton brain imaging research project. In this case, the activity was how activity in a certain area of the subjects’ brain reacted as they viewed photos of people and objects. The main idea was to investigate whether neurological evidence would support earlier social research that looked into how people evaluate others.

The new study seems to support earlier social research that says we perceive others based on two scales, warmth and competence. The new research suggests the subjects brains processed the images of the homeless and drug addicts as absent of both warmth and competence - seeing them as “something other than human.” The article suggests people can hold these views and not be aware of them. If you don’t know what you think, then maybe any actions based on the thinking may not be what you want, or something like that.

Whether this particular piece of research will be useful remains to be seen. But what I find interesting here is the idea of developing a way for researchers to get around self-reporting when it comes to perception and thinking.

“Nobody’s going to say that they think homeless people are disgusting,” (autor Susan) Fiske said. “We are interested in trying to get at it in a way that gets around issues of self-report and in ways that even people aren’t aware of themselves.”

This may actually be a kind of double-edged sword. Could be very useful in perceptual research and the like, but the idea of technological mind-reading has all sorts of implications, not all of them pleasant to think about.

Memorable creativity in the arts, athletics, or almost anything else for that matter takes a lot of practice, on top of whatever talent might be involved. At least that’s what I was trying to get at in Practice Learning to Get to Carnegie Hall.

Creating, producing  or performing memorable works over time also takes a certain amount of intelligence, probably quite a lot. But could that intelligence, like the kind of creativity talked about in that post, also come from learning and practice, or is it a matter of genetics? Can you become smarter over time, or are you limited to the hand nature dealt? Public policist David Kirp takes that issue head on in After the Bell Curve in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. 

The traditional research view of intelligence has been that it’s largely genetic. Not much you can do if you don’t have the genes in the first place, so why throw money at efforts to iron out the intelligence differences among us? Many adhere to this idea, and there was even a best-selling book about it in the mid-1990s - The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrenstein. 

But Kirp points out reexaminations of the research literature, as well as some new research questions the genetic-determination theory of developing intelligence.  

But what if the supposed opposition between heredity and environment is altogether misleading? A new generation of studies shows that genes and environment don’t occupy separate spheres — that much of what is labeled “hereditary” becomes meaningful only in the context of experience.

I haven’t been been a big fan of intelligence testing: who knows what it really measures? But it’s what we’ve got right now. One of the things I take away from Kirp’s article is the same idea that quality of experience matters enormously in almost everything - including the smarts create, perform, or whatever it is you want and need to do. 

Age, Creativity and Blogging took a look at a clever economist’s investigation of when in their life people we remember as particularly creative produced their most remembered work. David Galenson, the economist, has come to the conclusion that renowned creative works can come early in a career, or later as the artists learns and develops. (And of course, there are all sorts of time frames in between, but the majority of Galenson’s observations fall into the early or late categories.

In Seed: How to Get to Carnegie Hall Jonah Lehrer points out that even those we think of as prodigies early only got to their later renown by practicing. A lot. There is no effortless performance for the gifted, at least not without putting in the practice time. You know already how to get to Carnegie Hall. Practice.

Mozart, by Lehrer’s reconing, began putting in his hours at age two, and probably accumulated over 10,000 hours by the time he was eight. And he didn’t turn out a masterpiece every time that early, or even much that we remember comparted to his later works:

Mozart’s early symphonies are not nearly as accomplished as his later works. John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon has shown that modern symphony orchestras almost never perform or record Mozart’s childhood compositions, and argues that Mozart’s early works would have long ago been forgotten, were it not for his mature masterpieces. In other words, Mozart’s genius wasn’t innate or instantaneous—he learned how to write immortal symphonies by writing lots of mediocre ones.

Even a gifted athlete like Tiger Woods can’t rely on talent alone. He’s devoted his whole life to golf, starting when he was a tiny toddler, and building on that with a merciless practice regimen.
We all know that it’s important to start early in developing skills, building on talent. And the idea of it taking over 10,000 hours to really master something isn’t surprising, though it’s now documented by a well-known psychology study by  Ericsson and  Lehmann. 

What really catches my interest here is the quality that needs to be in all those hours if they are ever going to count for something. It takes learning and refinement to graduate from slogging it out to having a shot at real mastery. Refinement is the key here - being able to generate objective feedback and developing the options needed to work based on that feedback.

Rain or shine, Woods sets out. More importantly, he always makes sure his practice sessions revolve around learning by doing. He analyzes sequential snapshots of himself playing, relentlessly scrutinizes the elements of his swing, then drills these subtle alterations into his nervous system through thousands of repetitions. Of course, more practice leads to more new ideas, which leads to more practice.

The take away idea here, for me at least, is that practice is not the same thing as doing the thing you already know. Doing what you already know how to do is not the same thing as learning. And that’s probably the key to doing almost anything as well as you can.

Do blogs represent creative work? Sometimes, maybe. Are blogs a work of genius? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no. But to my way of thinking, the process of blogging regularly is a kind of experimental approach to creativity: there’s lots of trial and error, starting and stopping, learning and unlearning, in the process of posting stuff day after day. 

 And according to University of Chicago economist David Galenson, this sort of experimental creativity forms one pole on a theory of artistic genius. Writer Daniel Pink takes a look at Galenson and his work in What Kind of Genius Are You in the current issue of Wired.

Now it might seem a bit odd that an economist comes up with a theory of creativity, but Galenson came by it with a combination of curiosity and scholarship. Galenson’s early economics work focuses on how age related to productivity among indentured servants in colonial America and how age related to the price of slaves in the same period. 

The curiosity came from Galenson’s purchase of a painting. The gallery knocked down the price of the painting based on the small size. Galenson wondered why there was a relationship between size and price in art work, since such a relationship ignored most artistic factors that went into creating it

.

He set about a scholarly approach to finding how works of art got their prices tags over time. Being an economist, he naturally came up with a set of graphs. Surprisingly, the graphs showed two sorts of relationship between the age of the artist and the value of the painting.

One one side were what Galenson calls the conceptualists, those artists who thought about their works before setting to work painting them. They tended to be young when they did their best (most valued) work.

On the other side were the experimentalists, the artists that made it up as they went along, relying on trial and error more than concepts to make their works. They tended to be older when the produced their valued work.

So there may be hope for those plugging away, who haven’t made a creative dent - yet.

The idea is that you’re born that way – it’s innate and it manifests itself very young,“ Galenson says. But that leaves the vocabulary of human possibility incomplete. ”Who’s to say that Virginia Woolf or Cézanne didn’t have an innate quality that simply had to be nourished for 40 or 50 years before it bloomed?“ The world exalts the young turks – the Larrys and the Sergeys, the Picassos and the Samuelsons. And it should. We need those brash, certain, paradigm-busting youthful conceptualists. We should give them free rein to do bold work and avoid saddling them with rules and bureaucracy.

Interesting, but pretty academic. But can this idea work in fields other than art?

Although Galenson has limited his analysis mostly to artists, he believes the pattern he’s uncovered also applies to science, technology, and business. Economic activity is all about creation – even more so today, as advanced economies shed routine work and gain advantage through innovation and ingenuity.

If the link between age and creative capacity applies outside the bounds of the arts, then every economic institution – universities, companies, governments – should take note. Galenson’s ideas may yield clues about how to foster fresh thinking in a wide range of organizations, industries, and disciplines. If nurturing innovators is an economic imperative, the real peculiarity isn’t that Galenson is studying creativity; it’s that other economists aren’t.

Let’s keep plugging away at our blogs. Who knows where it might lead?

Learning to See in 3D  reported on one person’s ability to significantly retrain some aspects of their vision, even well into adulthood. I’ve noted this myself and while working with clients as a Feldenkrais practitioner, and even wrote about it here.

One of the main things I often notice is how reducing excess tension around the eyes can lead, by itself, to a sense of lightness and ease of movement that is seemingly unrelated to eye tension. It’s amazing to experience and to see others experience the same thing.

I’ve often wondered which way the influences works. Does tension around the eyes cause excess tension in the rest of the frame, or does the general tension in the muscular system cause more tension in the eyes, which then causes more tension in body, and so on and on in kind of infinite loop. 

It’s Not All in the Eyes is a Seed magazine piece about recent reseach at the Univeristy of Virginia that points to the idea of visual perception being influenced by the environment you’re in and the emotional state you may be experiencing. In particular, it’s the sense of survival that’s tied to this influence, and it works not in thinking, but entirely in perceiving. This is significant because it challenges one of the key assumptions of psychology: the idea that visual perception works the same for everyone and across species. 

In one part of the study, researcher Dennis Proffitt and collegues asked participants to estimate the slope of a hill they were look at. Some participants wore a heavy backpack and some didn’t. The backpack wearers consistently overestimated the steepness of the hill. 

Another part of the study took participants up to the top of the hill and again asked them to estimate the slope they were seeing. But instead of a backpack, Proffitt et al had some subjects size up the angle of the hill while standing on an unstable skateboard pointing down the hill. The would-be skateboarders really overestimated the steepness.

Proffitt points to the workings of perception as they relate to survival:

According to Proffitt, these differences in perception have to do with energy efficiency and, by extension, human survival. In order to survive, we weigh the cost of taking an action, like walking up a steep hill, against the amount of energy gained from performing the action.

 “The basic task of the brain is to support survival, and, as a hunter-gatherer, that means you need to be very good at acquiring energy at a rate that is faster than you’re expending it,” he said. “And this all happens without having to think—it happens in perception.”

I was mildly surprised to read that these sorts of findings challenge one of the field’s basic assumptions:

 According to Maggie Shiffrar, a psychology professor at Rutgers University, Proffitt’s research challenges long-held assumptions about the mechanism behind perception; namely, that it is not influenced by the actions a person plans to take in the future.

From my perspective as a Feldenkrais practitioner, the idea that environment effects perception and the ties to the survival instincts are not very surprising. But in the research world, evidently, that’s hardly the case:

 “[Proffitt’s] work reminds us that the brain is connected to the body,” (Shiffrar) said via e-mail. “I know that sounds pretty simple-minded, but it is surprisingly radical.”

If you closed your eyes, could you quickly recall the title of this blog, or the shape of the graphic in the upper left corner? It’s not a big deal if the answer is no. A limitation of visual memory in such a trivial task just isn’t important. But if you weren’t able to recall an obstacle in the road while driving, that’s not so trivial.

Eye movement, visual memory and peanut butter sandwiches is the unlikely title of weblog post considering such things from the perspective of visual research. The article discusses a recent visual research study that suggests visual information relevant to the task at hand might be retained more easily. This is in contrast to earlier research pointing to visual memory limitations. Be sure to view the video of the first type of study on the weblog post.

 

The new research reported on here involves research subjects making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while wearing a headgear apparatus that tracks their eye movements. Here the visual information was more important to the task at hand and was retained easily.

There are two things that stand out for me in reading about this stuff. 

In situations where the visual information isn’t as relevant to the task at hand, differences matter. In the video of the first type of research, a construction worker asks directions from a passer-by. Then as the visual field of  the person giving directions is briefly distracted, a different person asking directions is substituted. The direction-giver doesn’t notice the switch and goes on offering the directions. 

Is that direction-giver just not paying attention? Or, worse, are all of our visual memories defective the same way? I’m not so sure either is true, but this could easily be tested. The video shows the substituted construction worker looked roughly like the original one - same basic outfit, same race and sex. There just wasn’t enough of a difference between the original and the sub to make a meaningful distinction under the circumstances. But what if the substitute worker was black instead of white? Or female instead of male? Or had on radically different clothing? How much of a difference does it take to make a difference in this sort of situation, a situation unimportant to recall. I’d bet criminal attorneys and such have been asking this question for years. 

The second interesting thing here is the idea the idea explored in the new study described in the post. The idea that research subjects first surveyed relevant visual information and then acted on it much faster than we might anticipate. We remember things that matter. But even more, we remember things that we’re familiar with, like the making a peanut butter sandwich. 

Reading about the study reminded me of reading Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence. Hawkins basic idea, as I understand it, is that intelligence depend on making models of situations and then predicting real-world behavior based on those models. But we’re not likely to model things that aren’t important or at least things we’re not likely to do again.  

Our cat once caught a mouse and then let it go in the house, still alive and running for cover. The cat, of course, had completely lost interest in the mouse, so it fell on me to do something with it. I thought I’d be able to shoo the little fella out the front door intact, but his scurrying around made that difficult. To make a long story short, I ended up inadvertently squashing the little rodent under the wheels of our refrigerator. I felt bad about that, but what are you gonna do?

I’m not the only one with a kind of empathy for mice in distress. A new study points to mice demonstrating empathy for other mice in distress, at least that’s what it says in Message from Mouse to Mouse. NPR also reported on the study in Research Shows Mice Have Feelings, Too. 

Reading and hearing about the study triggered an association with the idea of mirror neurons and the empathy part that I wrote about earlier in Motor Neurons: Learning by Imitating. 

In the recent mouse study, a kind of curious finding emerged. Namely, the mice demonstrated more empathy for mice with whom they were familiar than with relatives or strangers. 

“This is the most striking part to me,” (researcher) Dr. Mogil said, “that simply looking at an animal in one type of pain makes you sensitive to another kind of pain in a different part of your body; that this social manipulation of pain sensitizes the whole pain system.”

The earlier blog article talked about watching the US Open golf tournament, and feeling for golfer Phil Mickelson’s situation.  

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.

But’s it’s also interesting that, though I’ve never laid eyes on Mickelson except on tv, I developed empathy. That might point to the impersonal familiarity television affords us. And that raises questions about entertainment and sports televison as a substitute for contact. But that’s a topic for another day. Besides, it would probably be hard to get tv sets small enough for mice to watch.