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Here’s an article that appeared on my RSS reader today that some how caught my interest- Acoustic sensors make surfaces interactive - tech - 28 November 2006 - New Scientist Tech from New Scientist. Researchers in Europe have concocted a way to turn any surface into a touch screen type of input device. It works by placing two sound sensors on the surface that track the vibrations of fingers or objects on that surface, then feed it to software the researchers developed to decode the vibrations and convert them into coordinates that a computer (or other device) can use. (There’s another, more cumbersome, way of using a single sensor.)

With this thing, you can make a touch screen type input from anything, any size, and it’d be fairly inexpensive. One of the applications mentioned was in hospitals, where infection and crap can lodge themselves into keyboards and mice. With this thing, a flat surface takes the place of keyboard and mouse, and can be much more easily sterilized.

I’m not sure why this appealed to me, but let me give it a shot. Maybe something to do with touch. Maybe let me follow my own short algorithm for generating content.

After I read about this, I began wondering how this sort of thing might be used to augment or enhance touching humans or animals. What sort of touch information augmented by technology could you generate? Could that be helpful in cases where proprioceptive ability has been somehow compromised?

Of course, probably the most useful touch is still one informed by sensitivity, precision and experience. But wouldn’t it be interesting to see how technology could enhance it even more?

Robots used to be the bad guys most of the time - at least in the grade B sci fi movies I watched as a kid. But then came industrial robots, which upgraded them to good guys from many perspectives. Now the robotic good guy image might get a major boost from an unlikely source - the healthcare field.

Robots Aid Stroke Victims showcases robots as compassionate touch givers in some stroke rehabilitation trials at east and west coast medical centers. And the results are pretty promising.

“We’re able to show consistently better outcome with therapy using robots rather than conventional standard care,” said his MIT colleague, Neville Hogan.

The article goes on to describe robots helping with elderly patients and a planned trial with autistic kids.

Successful rehab trials does seem to be making good guys out of the robots. But I wonder if the robotic capabilies touching humans couldn’t be made a bit more sensitive and thereby provide even more potential benefit.

As it is, the robot use in rehab seems to hinge on it’s ability to repeat useful movements and cues, something you really need if you’re trying to change a damaged sensory-motor pattern. And studies suggest autistic kids like repetetive motion a lot more so than non-autistic kids.

But what about using these newly-minted good guys in non-rehab settings? I thinking of learning or improving sensory-motor based skills like playing a musical instrument or using a piece of athletic equipment. There, guided repetition is certainly has its uses, but what about helping develop the ability to sense and move more accurately or effectively?

Judging by a comment from one of the control group, there might be a ways to go here.

“You can feel it guide you,” Green said. “It feels kind of funny because you’re not in control.”

It’s not always easy to describe the Feldenkrais Method that I practice. I’ve taken a stab at it in my What’s Feldenkrais post, and there are many other sources of information on the web and elsewhere.

The idea the state of the body’s muscular and nervous systems are inseparably bound isn’t new or information about it rare. But sometimes information from other fields comes along that helps make some of the ideas a bit more concrete, easier to grasp.

A Look Tells All in the October 2006 issue of Scientific American Mind describes the work of psychologiest Paul Ekman. Ekman has been developing an inventory of facial microexpressions that zero in on the emotions behind those expressions. This is not to be confused with body language or the type of common sense that tells you someone is mad when his face is red. These microexpressions last a very short time and aren’t apparent unless you’re looking for them.

Ekman has been training law enforcement officials and others to recongnize these sorts of emotional indicators to avoid the so-called “Othello’s error” - taking irreversible, later-regretable action based on misinterpretation of a person’s emotional state. But what I find interesting are some ideas from Ekman that Feldenkrais might have liked:

Ekman discovered another interesting phenomenon after spending the day in his laboratory trying to reproduce a convincing look of sadness: that evening he realized that he was feeling depressed. He then found that if he spent time engaged in imitating the components that make up a smile, his mood lifted. “That was like an epiphany,” he recalls. It contradicted the naive notion that feelings originate solely in the psyche and that the body merely communicates them outwardly.

Ekman and (his U.C.S.F. colleague psychologist Wallace) Friesen were able to demonstrate that the coordinated tightening of certain facial muscles not only affected blood pressure and pulse rate but also could trigger the corresponding emotion. It seemed clear that a feedback mechanism was at work between the facial muscles and the brain’s emotion centers.

Another take on this idea comes from, of all places, dermatology and the use of Botox. Eric Finzi, MD, PhD treated 10 clinically depressed patients from his practice with Botox injections. The Botox affected the facial muscles in a way that made it impossible for the patients to frown or assume a sad expression.Nine of the ten reported they were no longer depressed after two months.

“I think there is direct feedback between the facial frown muscles and the depression center of the brain,” Finzi tells WebMD. “If you can prevent the negative signals that occur when someone frowns, the brain interprets this as meaning that things are better.”

In Feldenkrais work, the effects of working with this sort of feedback usually result in a feeling of lightness and ease of movement, though other sensations and behavioral effects might pop up after a lesson. Interesting to see these sorts of ideas flowering in other places.

Sensory adaptation is a term from psychology that explains why you don’t notice your underpants. Simply put, your brain likes to notice things that are changing, and the sensation of underpants (hopefully) doesn’t change enough to get noticed. Negative Ads and Adaptation is a short post that makes a connection between this and negative political campaign ads.

My hunch is that negative ads failed this year because there were simply too many of them. Our TV’s were saturated with the same cliched allegations, tired montages, and ominous warnings, and so we just tuned it all out. The nasty ads became as noticeable as our underwear.

Who knew?

It’s not easy to describe the Feldenkrais Method, at least not in writing. The experience is essentially nonverbal, but that doesn’t limit specialized terminology and downright jargon from spilling out of the Method sometimes. For example, neural plasticity and, especially, learning how to learn. Plasticity has gotten some excellent journalistic treatment in the past few years in books like Phantoms in the Brain and Mind and Brain, so it’s not so strange anymore. Now, the idea of learning how to learn shows up in the business press in the form of Cross Train Your Brain on the CNN Money site.

The big idea in Cross Train seems to be one of enriching management skills (and opptunities) by doing more than one thing vocationally or even with a hobby. If you can’t look at the forest, at least look at more than one tree, it seems to say. Why does this probably work? Plasticity:

Your brain, it turns out, isn’t a fixed mass that shapes your behavior. Your behavior also shapes your brain. If a gardener takes up a serious interest in engineering, for instance, her neurons form new pathways between previously isolated regions.

Even more interesting to me is the idea of transfer of skills that can result.

Scientists are beginning to confirm this in research on how we learn motor skills. In a study published in 2004 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Rachael Seidler at the University of Michigan cast doubt on the traditional thinking that any motor skill we learn is limited to a particular context and task. She found instead that after having subjects learn five different motor skills using joysticks, “subjects exposed to a variety of motor learning paradigms may be able to acquire general, transferable knowledge about skill learning processes.”

Learning how to learn, in other words. Interesting to see this surface in a business magazine.

Observing how people’s movement patterns isn’t always easy, particularly in walking. There are many variations, but often limited time and space to have a look see at someone’s gait. Learning how to make observations useful and pertinent can take quite a while. But somatic education practitioners mostly need to make such observations.

Biomotion Lab provides an interesting, fun, and interactive approach with the BMLWalker page. The walker starts out as a simple dot-based animation based on motion capture samples from 80 treadmill walkers. But then it gets interesting. A set of slider controls lets you adjust the animation according to morphological traits like male/female, heavy/light, nervous/relaxe and happy/sad. You can combine all of these to see, say, how a light-walking, nervous, happy male might appear from a front view.

And if that’s not enough, the site lets you make your own model based on an attribute you specific - tight/loose for example. Then you watch and rate individual animations and “rate” each on a high to low scale for the attribute you’ve chosen. When you’re done, the page constructs a slider that you can adjust to vary the animated walker’s gait based on your observations. It’s a fun diversion that might just sharpen some observation skills.

Somatic education pioneers Moshe Feldenkrais and FM Alexander both subscribed to the idea that human change involves the whole person. It’s not just a matter of attending to this muscle, that bone, or any specific posture or position. The basic lever for change from this perspective appears to be movement, but also thinking, sensing, and feeling (or emotion) are inseparable parts of the equation.

PsyBlog has started a series that offers a different lever: emotion. Emotional Truth: The Search Starts Here serves up a whopper of a question to start things rolling:

Do we really have any control over our emotions or are they things that just happen to us?

The search for an answer starts with a high level overview from the work of philopsher Robert Solomon:

Consider whether it is possible that certain habitual emotional responses that you have are perhaps, just that, habits. And, thinking prosaically, like your shopping habits, they are constrained by certain factors (e.g. your financial resources), but you still have to take control and responsibility for them.

So, rather than a mysterious force welling up from within, Solomon views emotions as choices for which we have to take responsibility. Emotions are, in fact, strategies

Although there is hopefully much more to come in this series, the answer to that first question seems to a a cautious yes, there can be some control. But I think (and feel, sense and act) it’s worth following the series to see where it goes and how it gets there.

Squeezing and relaxing don’t normally go together, at least I don’t thing of them that way. In my practice of the Feldenkrais Method, the idea is usually to reduce effort greatly so that unnecessary muscular work stands out. (Feldenkrais based this idea on the Weber-Fechner principle.)

But in cases of severe anxiety or autism, squeezing or increasing the stimulus on the body might be just the thing to promote relaxation. At least that’s the idea being put forth and tested by some researchers at the University of Massachusetts school of engineering.

They have engineered a lightweight portable vest containing air bladders that offer a squeeze via an attached air pump. They are other vests and blankets available, working with weights rather than air pressure. But what makes this project unique is the research that goes along with it. While those who sell the weighted vests and blankets offer anecdotal evidence of effectiveness, the UMass team will be testing the vest on people undergoing the (simulated) stress of driving through a tunnel in Boston in rush hour traffic.

But even if the research connects the vest with relaxation in the face of (simulated) anxiety, who knows how or why it works? It’s curious to me that increased and decreased physical stimulus on the body can both produce positive change in relaxation (and presumably the tonus of the muscular system.) Must have something to do with sensing change.