Tom’s Wordpress Blog

A clever approach to learning to draw is in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. One of the ones I remember best is upside down drawing. For a non-artist like me, it’s downright daunting to attempt to draw something exactly as you see it. “There’s no way I can do this” I usually think. But when I turn the original drawing upside down and simply draw the lines I see(and the relationship between them), a passable copy of the drawing begins to appear.

The instructions have you change the context you’re approaching drawing in. Rightside up, my brain can’t seem to figure it out, but upside down, a very different context, it’s just a bunch of lines, and I can draw lines.

We use this sort of approach in Feldenkrais work, changing the context of movement to offer outselves and our clients new options for movement. Often, the outcome is pretty creative and useful. Sometimes dramatically useful for us or our clients.

I don’t normally think of this context-changing approach when I think of comics. But one of the most widely distributed comic artists does just that when faced with losing his speaking voice permanently.

Scot Adams writes about discovering a clever learning approach to a condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia after a doctor told him no one ever recovered completely from the condition. Adams somehow came up with the idea, in his words, of remapping his brain. Changing the context of his speaking has done the trick, at least so far.

Adams first began experimenting with the voice he had left, changing pitches, looking for patterns, singing some words. Then he disovered a kind of jumpstart that really got him going with his natural voice - speaking rhyme.

But the best part of Adam’s description of his process was what he calls reestablishing the connection between his brain and his speech:

When I say my brain remapped, that’s the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn’t get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn’t just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned.

Adams blog post is worth reading: it’s not only very well-written, but really conveys the passion of someone left with only learning as an option to the life he wants to lead. That’s a big change in context.

Most of us love to learn but hate to fail. Unfortunately, they come together: it’s rare to learn something without making a few mistakes. Getting It Wrong takes a small journey around some of these idea, particularly as they relate to schools. It offers some seemingly simple explorations of how schools might deal more effectively with failure, mainly by providing an environment that makes it unimportant.

I liked the things said about schools here (and learning in general), making them places where we make it OK to be wrong so that you can learn because of, and not despite of, occasional failures. But I’m not sure that the current political environment would support that on anything but an experimental scale.

What is appealing here, though not explicitly stated, is the idea of equating learning more with exploration than getting to some rigid educational goal. Seems to me that there’s really no failure in exploration; it just means exploring another path instead of the one you just came down.

Of course, it helps have a guide, hopefully a gentle one, to help point the way and help make sense out of the explorations. That’s probably the real challenge in taking these ideas further.

Something troubled me when I started presented public workshops build around my Feldenkrais Method® practice. The classes at a local hospital wellness center were well attended. Written evaluations from those attending were generally positive, except in one glaring area. Most of those filling out the forms couldn’t see how they could use what they’d learned in the Feldenkrais workshop in their everyday lives. That had me puzzled. Almost everyone enjoyed the experience, but the experience evaporated in a short time. What’s with that, I wondered.

Good communication goes to the gut, but only after or maybe during the time it goes thru the thinking part of you. At least that’s what Aaron Swartz seems to be laying out in The Greatness of College Lectures. Citing three of the most celebrated presenters out there right now, Swartz paints a picture of these guys as thinking teachers. But as they’re providing fodder for the old noodle to wrap around, they’re also infusing their presentations with what he calls emotional density. You learn something listening to these presenters, but what drives it mostly is their passion for the thing they’re talking about in the first place.

That sounds pretty good. But as I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that the emotional density Swartz talks about can’t arise without a receptive audience. In my experience, the audience needs something from the presenter, or they wouldn’t be there and ready to respond to that emotional density, not matter how deep. (I’m referring here to voluntary lectures or presentations. With things like high school assemblies and weekly staff meetings your mileage may vary.)

And all that got me thinking about those Feldenkrais workshops and the evaluations. Could building in an environment that injected “emotional density” help out here?

Probably. My experience since then tells me building emotional density into the information presented in a lesson needs well thought out presentational skills and a passion for whatever the current lesson addresses. And it needs class members with the potential to care about those things. But that’s another topic.

(Non Feldenkrais folks who are curious about Awareness Through Movement® lessons can find a large number of audio (mp3) lessons at the Open ATM Project.)

One day not long ago, I was paying for gasoline inside a convenience store. During the half minute it took to process my charge card, I noticed the store clerk staring out at the street, eyes kind of glazed over, paying attention to nothing in particular. I thought, “wow, I bet she’s not seeing a thing going on inside or even outside the store. Anybody could do whatever they wanted in here and she’d be none the wiser.” But then the charge went thru and it was back to business as usual.

The clerk has not been asleep or even dozing, but her lack of eye movement during that short interval might indeed have obscured some of the goings on around her. And now that idea gets a positive nod from the research community in More Than Meets the Eye.

A couple of investigators at the Salk Institute in California looked into the idea that eye movement helps us make sense of the visual world. In particular, visual situations that involve partially hidden or moving objects.

“If you think of the video stream as a bunch of pixels coming in from the eyes, the real challenge for the visual system is to decide which pixels belong to which objects. We wondered whether information about eye movements is used by the brain to solve this difficult problem,” says Hafed, who is an NSERC (Canada) and Sloan-Swartz post-doctoral researcher at the Salk Institute.

Using images on a computer screen, they found people could not identify a partially obscured moving object when they stared at one part of the screen. But when they moved their eyes, the object became readily apparent. The article goes on to point out that artificial intelligence developers encounter difficulty getting robots to see these sorts of partially hidden moving objects that we pick up so easily with our eye movements. So maybe we’ll be seeing shifty-eyed robots sometime in the future.

I don’t think that partially obscured vision is the only consequence of non moving eyes. The connection between how we use our eyes and freedom of body movement shows up a lot in my Feldenkrais practice. And I think this has some pretty important personal safety implications. Not being able to easily and quickly identify moving objects in your environment and just as easily respond to them with your movements, could be really significant safety hazards. So stop staring at the computer screen and get moving!

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.

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.