Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Sometimes you set yourself up for disappointment. Mind Over Matter primed me for information and thoughtful observation about bionic devices, body image and stuff like that. And the first article in the series (A Question of Mind Over Matter) began to satisfy my appetite. That article’s sidebar had a tantalizing teaser: What if bionics get so good that we want them even if we don’t need them? Oh boy!

As one of my favorite bosses used to say, “sometimes you sell the sizzle and go hungry for the lack of the steak.” The scent of today’s article What If Bionics Were Better still wafts in my nostrils as my appetite remains unsatisfied. Not that there wasn’t information in the article: to me, it simply didn’t address the question that made up the title.

Instead, it told us that bionics aren’t better because of the technology and won’t be for a long time. And there are a few who would implant themselves with any manner of artificial stuff today.

What would I like to see instead? Being a Feldenkrais practitioner, that’s easy enough to answer. Mainly, what would a human experience be like with consistent and reliable bionic devices melded into the body image? How would you be likely to experience yourself and your environments — sensory, motor, social, emotional, whatever.

Maybe these sorts of things are addressed somewhere else, and maybe they are more in the realm of philosophy than technology. Might have been better to use a different title for the article.

Mirror neurons get a lot of attention. Mirror Neurons Respond to Sound and Reading> ramps up the wattage even more with brief reports on three new pieces of research published in Sept. 19 issue ofCurrent Biology.

My understanding of mirror neurons rests on the idea that they get activated when we watch someone perform some action. As we watch, neurons in the premotor cortex area of the brain light up as if we were also performing that action. Some have speculated on the role of mirror neurons on learning and developing empathy. See Built to Be Fans for an informative look at how the neurons might be involved in watching sports and rooting for you favorite team or athlete.) What’s most noteworthy about the new studies is they suggest mirror neurons can swing into action by hearing or even reading about an activity.

But the one thing that stood out most for me here is a quote from one of the researchers that could have come from a Feldenkrais practitioner:

Simone Schütz-Bosbach, a neuroscientist at the University College London, said that research on mirror neurons sheds new light on the relationship between sensing and doing. “Research in the last few years seems to suggest that perception and action are tightly linked rather than separated,” she said.

She goes on to talk about the function in social communication, but it’s the sensing/doing quote that’s the take home message for me here.

This intertwining of sensing and acting is a key idea, if not THE key idea, in the Feldenkrais Method. Without paying attention to the sensations of movement, it’s pretty hard to change that movement, at least not easily.

What I’ve found over the years is that imitation, by itself, is not a very productive learning strategy when it comes to learning new motor-based skills. But developing a keener perception of movement can lead to some pretty startling changes.

An often-repeated Feldenkrais quotes goes something like, “if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t do what you want.”

One of the biggies in the practice of the Feldenkrais Method is largely indivisible link between movement, brain, mind and environment. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the idea of brain control of prothtetics and the like has caught my attention. For example, take a look at previous pots here like More on Thought Controlled Movement.

So when Wired posted an article called A Question of Mind Over Matter that surveyed thought controlled prosthetic device it caught my attention. It’s part of a four-part series called Motor Head that explores research and development in the field of prosthetics from different angles. Today’s installment looked at mind-controlled devices.

A well-written informative article, but one device in particular caught my attention. The thing that jumped out at me here was the Power Knee, a leg prosthetic from the Hanger Orthopedic Group. It works with some Artifical Intelligence (AI), a motor-driven knee joint connected to an ankle sensor. But it also uses a wireless sensor embedded in the insole of the functional leg!

This device looks beyond the missing leg to intelligently blend its operation with what’s going on in the person’s whole gait. The idea of helping along the natural synergies, or going for more cooperative and coordinated movement will be familiar to Feldenkrais practitioners:

“For the first time, your left and your right foot are working together in unison. It gives you a much more stable, much more natural gait,” said Dale Berry, Hanger’s vice president of clinical operations. It also reduces stress on the body.

The Power Knee is on the market now, according to the article. But it’s very expensive at $100,000.

I’m looking forward to the fourth part of the Motor Head series, I Want My Bionics. The teaser for that article: “What if bionics get so good that we want them even if we don’t need them?” That makes me wonder when such devices will come into the professional sports arena. And that opens up a whole lot of issues that might make today’s drug enhanced performance problems seem mild in comparison.

You wouldn’t think that nasal spray and investment decisions have a lot in common. But an experiment in a new field called neuroeconomics turned up with some surprising results from the combination. John Cassidy included the description of the experiment and lots of other information on neuroeconomics in Mind Games: What Neuroeconomics Tells Us About Money and the Brain.

Cassidy nicely wraps a lot of descriptions of decision-making research around the idea of loss aversion. Loss aversion is a fancy word for being afraid to risk some money, even in situations when there’s a relatively large potential payoff. For example, would you risk $100 for an even chance at winning $150. Most people wouldn’t, even though the “rational” outcome makes you money, it’s not until the potential payoff reaches $200 that more than some will take the chance.

In Cassidy’s case, he wondered about his decision not to sell a stock that had lost him money over the years. To find out, he spent a couple claustrophobic hours in an MRI machine at NYU playing a phony decision-making game. No word on if he sold or kept the stock afterward.

Neuroeconomics looks at the brain physiology at work while making economic decisions. One of the main ideas is that the rational and emotional parts of the brain don’t coordinate well sometimes, with the emotional part sometimes bailing out of opportunities that might pay off well under the traditional economic rational decision processes. That is, the well accepted assumption is that people will act in their own best interest.

To make these observations, they use brain imaging, in this case MRI. But that’s not without its critics. Neuroscientists see a shortcoming in the sensitivity of the machines to actually and accurately record activity, and some dispute the idea that there are truly separate brain circuits for emotion and reason. That’s not to mention the idea of what’s actually being measured as your inside a very small space playing toy games instead of really deciding whether to save or spend.

The nasal spray idea comes from an experiment Cassidy describes. Some researchers wanted to see if calming the emotional centers would influence this idea of loss aversion. The research participants who used a spray of oxytocin, a calming brain hormone did better in the games than those getting a placebo. And in another study, people diagnosed with brain damage to part of the brain associated with emotion came out ahead in betting on a simple card game.

None of this, of course, suggests drugs and brain damage as tools for the savvy investor. But even if with the cautions and research shortcomings, those in the new field are optimistic about upsetting the applecart of traditional economics:

For now, the new models await empirical verification, but neuroeconomists are convinced that they’re onto something. “We are not going to falsify all of traditional economics,” Colin Camerer said. “But we are going to point to a whole range of biological variables that traditionally have not been included in the analysis. In economics, that is a big change.

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

I used to teach Feldenkrais classes in a senior education center, where the average age of class participants could be 70 or more. Many of them reported easier, more pleasant and effective movement (even increases in alertness) after the classes, and my own observations tended to agree with them.

Aging, as many of us are finding out first hand, can be accompanied by declines in abilities of all sorts. Not only movement and agility, but reduced memory and cognitive abilities. And it’s natural to want to delay these declines as long as you can; better yet, avoid them altogether. Feldenkrais can often help build the awareness skills that can be so helpful in maintaining or restoring movement abilities.

As for cognitive and memory problems, there’s a whole industry growing up to tackle those issues according to Chicken Soup for the Aging Brain in Business Week. With approaches like video games and computer training, the industry hopes to capture the attention of that very large group of baby boomers now entering their senior years. The main premise here seems to be that mental exercises can help stem memory and cognitive decline, and the more the better.

Just one problem though. It’s largely unproven, scientifically speaking. Aside from the two small studies from Posit company specific to their product, evidence of the effectiveness of the approach is scant, almost nonexistent. Probably the same could be said of Feldenkrais. But many people who engage in Feldenkrais or mental exercises say they have benefited. And who can argue with that?

I think we have to be careful here. Going directly after the benefits from such activities can sound a lot like therapy, not education or industry. Promising therapeutic results without scientific proof is misleading at best.

But most of us want to avoid trouble if we can, and spending a little time and money doing it might be worth it. The problem is that it can take lots of time or practice developing awareness or memory skills, time to many probably won’t invest. Quick fixes often turn out neither fast nor effective.

Still, why not give it a shot?

Whether these people will be able to stave off further cognitive decline remains to be proven. (Researcher) Salthouse, at the end of his paper debunking such efforts, wrote that there’s no harm in trying. Even if there is no beneficial evidence, he wrote, engagement in such mentally demanding activities at least serves as proof of existence: “If you can still do it, then you know that you have not yet lost it.”

There are many examples of brain plasticity in action in everyday things. Feldenkrais practitioners see it all the time with themselves and their client. But you also see press reports of plasticity in action.

Cab drivers in London, for example, have been shown to have larger brain regions dealing with directions or navigation than the rest of us. Or violin players who spend hours a using the fingers on the left hand to form precise patterns on the strings have been shown to develop representations of the left hand and fingers than non musicians, or even their right hands. And, some people recovering from strokes or other brain injuries sometimes make remarkable regains in function thanks to plasticity.

But the most unusual example I’ve heard recently came from a train accident. Richmond.com has a brief description of an incident where train runs over a guy, severing his left arm and seriously mangling his right hand. The surgeons who attended to him successfully attached the left hand to the right arm, pay particular attention to connecting the nerves to the correct fingers.

Handedness is in the brain, summed up the doctors. If some forensic investigator found a box filled with 100 human hands, there would be no reliable way to tell if each belonged to a right- or left-handed person. “I still think of myself as a natural rightie,” says J. E. “But I’m an honorary southpaw now. I’m just happy to have a paw.”

Not surprisingly, the story appeared in the “Strange But True” section of the website. Maybe “Unusual But Not Really Surprising” would be a more accurate label, at least for this story.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, plasticity

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.

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.

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.”