Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Research into brain computer interfaces (BCI) is nothing new, and provides hope to people with movement limitations. But such devices use large computers plugged directly into the brain. Better than nothing, but about as invasive as you can get.

Some Spanish researchers, fueled by government money, are working on an interface that uses EEG signals from electrodes placed on the scalp, not inside the skull.

Signals from the EEGs are not as precise as those embedded in the brain. But new decoding algorithms are now making it possible to use the EEG signal patterns to control simple movement patterns.

“You’re not going to be using EEGs to control a robotic arm to play the piano or anything,” says Dawn Taylor, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, who isn’t involved in the project. “But you can certainly turn right and left and stop and go using that sort of signal.”

The researchers near term goal is to reduce the size of the BCI so that it can be more portable. They expect to produce a working prototype in the next year or two.

Strikes me as an extremely useful application of brain plasticity, particularly the idea of producing big changes from imagining movement. But if there’s no possibility of nerve connections, nice to have this alternative. And no nasty surgical side effects to worry about.

“You can’t teach old dogs new tricks” used to be more than a folk saying. For many years, the idea that mature adult brains could change significantly wasn’t well accepted or even investigated. Old dogs were stuck with old tricks, and had to be happy with them.

Moshe Feldenkrais’ work in movement education used the idea of the malleability of the nervous system in making some pretty impressive changes in people’s functional patterns. As far as I know, the old guy was spouting a theory. In those days, it wasn’t very practical to look inside people’s heads to see what was going on.

But today, the adult nervous system’s plasticity is getting some pretty impressive evidence to back up the ideas. And technologies like functional magnetic resonance lets us peek into functioning brains with open the heads containing those brains. How the Brain Rewires Itself in Time magazine is an accessible introduction to the subject, but also raises some questions, at least for me.

A starting piece of evidence supporting plasticity came from practicing piano players. The pianists practicing fluidly two hours a day to a metronome, then sitting under a fancy brain scanner showed motor cortex changes. Activity changed something in their brains. But it turns out that just thinking about playing the same music without actually doing so produces the same sort of motor cortex changes.

Activity can change brain patterns, but so can thinking about activity. And it doesn’t even have to be what we traditionally think of as motor activity or movement. Investigators looking into obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression found thinking could change those patterns. They used a type of thinking known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where patients learn to recognize, dispute and change negative thoughts.

All of this sounds pretty cool, but I began wondering about how long the changes would last, how hardy the new brain patterns were to the environmental and habitual patterns that are part of everyday life. There was no mention of follow up studies with the OCD or depressive patients.

My own idea from my Feldenkrais practice is that changes need to be reinforced frequently to have much of an effect. You can get some pretty dramatic results from a Feldenkrais lesson, but the weight of habit can erase them pretty quickly. But continuing the lessons and doing them mindfully over a long period does seem to make a difference for many. They don’t call it a practice for nothing.

The Time article described a study that tackled the idea of change durability. This one involved experienced Buddhist monks and students who were taught the rudiments of meditation and practiced a bit. If I’m reading the article right, the students showed some small brain changes. But the monks showed really strong patterns, presumably from their many years of meditation practice.

So old dogs can learn new tricks, and now we’ve got the (scanner) pictures to back it up. And we’ve got some evidence that it takes lots of practice to make the new tricks stand up to old habits and environmental influences.

Wilson White and Jack Rudolf are in deep shit.

Their fictional American television network broadcast a news segment with one of the seven forbidden words. The FCC, regulator of broadcasting on the public airwaves, is pissed enough to fine the network many millions for the swear word. Unless the network apologizes. The network’s corporate parent, being good conservative corporate parents, wants them to apologize, too. Or maybe they just want to avoid paying hundreds of millions and getting a bad image with the conservative masses. And all this over one little four letter word.

White and Rudolf aren’t real people: they are characters on the NBC series Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. But the fictional dilemma does kind of make you wonder about the fuss about swearing in general.

Psychologist Steven Pinker is writing another book about language that looks into swearing, among other things. An article in the Toronto star covers a lecture Pinker’s giving about it in Canada this week:

Pinker cautions that his work looks at what swearwords across languages have in common rather than the swearwords of any one language.

The most common denominator is taboo words that arouse strong negative emotions. Hearing or reading these words triggers activity in the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain believed to invest our thoughts with aggression, fear, threat recognition, and other negative emotions.

But why does the amygdala light up, why do we get upset when someone swears at us, and why do societies pass laws against swearing on the airwaves?

“People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like.”

So I guess the bottom line here is that swearing scares the shit out of us. But just don’t say that on the regulated airwaves, or you might join White and Rudolf.

Cell phones, steering wheels and rapidly rotating tires don’t go together. At least that’s the first thought that comes when someone follows me too closely with drivers seemingly vacantly chatting away on their cell phone. The idea of multi-tasking, doing more than one thing at a time, seems pretty wide spread in these ever-quickening times.

But you know what? There isn’t really any such thing as mutitasking. And now we have the pictures to prove it! That is, a recently published research study at Vanderbilt University turns up images of brain activity during multi-tasking that visibly shows a frontal lobe bottleneck. So my frequent shouts of “put down the damn phone and drive” aren’t so far off at all.

Researchers René Marois and Paul Dux asked people to do two simple things at the same time, pressing a key on a computer keyboard in response to a verbal cue, and saying their response as they did it. Marois and Dux watched brain activity from an fMRI machine as this was happening, using a technique that let them sample activity over a period of time.

They found a bottleneck in processing. It turns out the mutitasking is really rapid sequential processing instead.

“Neural activity seemed to be delayed for the second task when the two tasks were presented nearly simultaneously – within 300 milliseconds of each other,” Marois said. “If individuals have a second or more between tasks, we did not see this delay.

I suppose this is not a big deal when taking part in a university research study. But what about activities when a second is more time than you might have to respond? For example, when driving 65 or so miles per hour?

“While we are driving, we are bombarded with visual information. We might also be talking to passengers or talking on the phone,” Marois said. “Our new research offers neurological evidence that the brain cannot effectively do two things at once. People think if they are using a headset with their cell phone while driving they are safe, but they’re not because they are still doing two cognitively demanding tasks at once.”

Embodiment provides us with the ability to act in real time to the environment around us. But we have to be realistic about what real time means, at least in terms of having a chance to safely perform the activities we need to do. Phoning and driving probably ain’t such a good idea. We have the pictures that suggest it. (Hopefully, there isn’t a research project where people drive and talk on a cell phone while inside an MRI machine.)

What makes spendthrifts spend and tightwads not spend? Adam Smith, common ancestor to economists, would say it’s the “impartial observer,” the sense that people spend or save based on a rational weighing of what’s in your best interest. Kind of a dry academic approach, but it is, after all, the dismal science. But even Smith conceded that the observer needed to watch out for “the passions.” And sure enough all these years later, we have evidence that he was on to something. In fact, “the passions” might just account for the tightwad’s not spending, as much as the spendthrift’s spreading around the cash.

The evidence comes from fMRI scanners at Stanford University that looked into brain activity as people decided whether to spend or save on items offered to them at the time. Writer John Tierny gives a first-person account in today’s New York Times. If I’m understanding what happened in the study, different areas of the brain activate during spending or deciding not to spend. It turns out the brain scans demonstrate that both kinds of shoppers are guided by instant emotions, according to a researcher. And the scientists conducting the study seemed to have a good time observing:

The good news, for behavioral science, was that the researchers saw telltale patterns, which they report in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Neuron. “We were frankly shocked at how clear the results were,” said Brian Knutson, the Stanford psychologist who led the experiment. “It was amazing to be able to see brain activity seconds before a decision and predict whether the person would buy it or not.”

These guys evidently knew ahead of the actual purchase decision whether or not the “shoppers” would spend. That reminded me of Benjamin Libet’s work on movement decisions. Libet found that his subjects brains showed movement decision-making activity before they were aware of making such a decision. Granted, moving a finger is different than buying something, but it’s interesting that an observer can see the activity before you make it.

What I got from reading Libet is the idea that we at least have veto power over an action, a kind of “free won’t” if not free will. That was a big part of the work of FM Alexander with his technique: saying no to a movement stimulus might eliminate problems at their source. Moshe Feldenkrais added the idea of developing more useful alternatives.

So I suppose you could use free won’t while your shopping, maybe at least damping down the instant emotions a bit. But even giving the “impratial observer” a voice isn’t always enough to tame “the passions.” I’d still jump at the chance to get an iPhone.

I’ve been noticing the ubiquitous sound track of everyday life. Not in the metaphorical sense, either. You hear background music in almost every eating place, coffee shop, store or other place of business. It’s so everywhere that it’s hardly noticeable. Except that it is. And the ear isn’t the only one being assaulted with ubiquitous information being slung our way. Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See An Ad adds blank spaces to the endangered list. And a pretty good bit of newspeak from one of the slingers:

“We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

Elevator music and printed ads on air sickness bags are part of what I see as a larger issue - unrequested information. Advertisements, junk mail, telemarketers, spam, or whatever. Now I realize that sometimes advertising is the tradeoff you have to make for so-called free content. But ads printed on on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians’ offices? Come on!

Unrequested information costs a lot in time and money. It’s not only distracting, but it takes time and sometimes money to deal with some of it. An entire industry has grown up to deal with spam, and sometimes you have to buy extra software dedicated to that task. Privacy managers from phone companies cost extra and don’t always block tele-marketers. Shredders have become a routine part of home offices.

Of course we can ignore all of this. After all, one of the ways our human nervous system deals with low impact stimulii is to ignore them. If you can. Another approach is a bit more academic. In Attentional Economics , the idea is to give you something of value for your attention. Maybe this is what have to expect when the cost of producing and distributing information falls to almost nothing. You’re gonna get information, whether or not you asked for it. And you can also make and distribute information )read: content) yourself. Witness blogging, podcasting and the like.

So, the soundtrack plays ever on. If only it were composed by Bernard Herman instead of Hermans Hermits.

“Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today.”

Procrastination is the bad stuff of broken dreams, or so goes the seemingly common wisdom. A tongue-in-cheek article about a new procrastination study says the problem is getting worse, and all the diversions provided by technology (like idling time away reading and writing blog posts?) is to blame. The study, by the way, was delivered 5 years later than promised.

As much as well all try to avoid putting things off we, well, put things off. A lot. It’s a pattern that seems to resist good intentions and time management systems designed to defeat it.

So, is there something else to procrastination than avoiding unpleasant tasks? Maybe so, at least according to authors Eric Abramamson and David H. Freedman. They wrote a book call A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. In it, they take on all the assumptions we generally hold about messiness being a “bad thing.” They take on procrastination in a section they call The Seven Highly Overrated Habits of Time Management.

7. Getting it done now. Procrastination isn’t always a bad thing. For starters, it can keep you from working on tasks that ultimately turn out to be less important than you thought. Or as Calvin Coolidge put it: “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure nine will run into the ditch before the reach you.” (Not that Coolidge was much good at identifying the tenth trouble. Or at anything else.) The U.S. Marines have a saying, too: Plan early, plan twice. By which they mean, put off planning for an event as long as possible, because if you do it well ahead of time circumstances will probably change and require replanning. In fact, putting off undertaking almost any form of organizing or neatening will likely have some advantage, because it’s much more efficient to organize a large set of things at one shot than it is to organize them in pieces as they come along. If you want to organize your e-mail into categories, for example, you’ll do a much better job of it when you have a few hundred messages to consider rather than trying to set up categories based on a few dozen messages.

Or maybe, following the study mentioned earlier, organizing email messages is a way to put off something else you might have to do. I think the point of the whole thing here is approaching things in an intelligent way, instead of following convention advice that might really not be in your best interest. Maybe the better saying would be something like: “It’s sometimes OK to put off things you might do today until tomorrow, as long as you think about it first.”

The quest for consistent high level performance goes through the territory of practice. Whether it’s athletic, musical, artistic or whatever, we’ve been told that practice makes perfect. That is, if you want a consistent golf swing or piano sonata, you gotta practice, practice, practice.

Well, maybe … but only up to a point. At least, that’s what a recent study at Stanford seems to say about practicing a simple movement of reaching. Up to a point, the reaching movement became somewhat consistent, but beyond that point results were spotty at best. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that study was done with macaque monkeys who were induced to repeat the reaching with food. I guess it would be hard to get monkeys to practice the golf swing or play a sonata repeatedly.

Like so many such studies, the movement areas of the monkeys’ brains were monitored during their practice sessions. The researchers say over half of the movement variations came not from little monkey muscle, but from little monkey brains.

So much for the idea of muscle memory you golf pro tries to drill into you as you hit hundreds of 5-iron shots at the driving range. Grooving your swing might involve a lot more than simply practicing long hours.

Of course, to me at least, the blinding flash of the obvious here is the idea of what you’re paying attention to during the practice. If you can become aware of the variability of the movement as you make them, there may be an opportunity to at least influence those movements, if not control them. On the other hand, if you’re a monkey in a research cage, you’re probably only interested in reaching so that you can get a banana at the end. So mindful practice is probably better than mindless practice.

One of the other interesting things here is the goal of the practice. Minimizing or eliminating variation narrows the widow of influence you can have over the movement, at least to my way of thinking. But awareness of variation might let you do something about it.

Another thing that caught my eye in the article was the notion of understanding movement and how that might lead to treatments for movement-related disorders. I’m not sure what to make of that, because the article stops there and doesn’t elaborate on it. I can guess what they might be referring to is that accurate understanding of neural patterns might lead to ways to interrupt or influence them.

I do know that practicing the Feldenkrais Method uses mindful movement variations to influence the quality of movement. It’s not that far a stretch, following the study, to conclude that things in the brain change as you do this.

There’s lots of anecdotal evidence that mindful movement or awareness can have a mighty influence over quality and variation of movement. But I guess if your hungry enough, a banana’s a pretty good reason to practice. Just don’t expect perfection.

Like me, seal meat probably isn’t your idea of a good lunch. But then again, we’re not polar bears. But maybe some of the seals are resting a bit easier now that polar bears have officially made the endangered list. The bears’ environment is melting - literally. And since that’s the environment that suits them best, their chances of surviving long term are melting too. The furry guys’ long suits are size, speed, strength and all that macho bear stuff. But when it comes to environmental adaptability, they fall a bit short. Like a poor hockey team, they are just not adaptable outside their home ice. But humans are. Politics of global warming aside, we adapt ourselves to almost any environment on earth, sometimes even fierce ones. And we can even uproot ourselves to from one place to another and do OK - or better. I’m sure this amazing adaptive ability comes from many sources. The one that I’m most interested in as a Feldenkrais practitioner is movement, or more specifically the combination of sensing and moving ourselves around in our environment. Now, it makes sense that the ability to move would be a big factor in surviving or thriving in almost any condition. Polar bears sense and move, too. So why aren’t they able to adapt (in the wild) to life off the ice? A couple of unusual ideas about movement and human adaptability come from an unlikely source. The online science magazine Edge recently ask a long list of scientists and writers what they could be optimistic about in 2007. In their answers, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier and philosopher Andy Clark touched eloquently on the idea of movement and adaptability, though not in those specific terms. Lanier is optimistic that the nature of human communication can take a giant leap as big as the one it took when we began using language. Lanier calls this “post-symbolic communication,” and would become possible when many of us begin to feel at home in virtual reality worlds.

Suppose you’re enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today.

That’s pretty dramatic, but what’s most interesting to me is his reasoning about how this might occur:

Some of the most interesting data from VR research thus far involve Homuncular Flexibility. It turns out that the human brain can learn to control radically different bodies with remarkable ease. That means that people might eventually learn to spontaneously change what’s going on in a virtual world by becoming parts of it.

That aspect of the brain which is optimized to control the many degrees of freedom of body motion is also well suited to controlling the many degrees of freedom of a superlative programming and design environment of the future. It is likely, by the way, that the tongue would turn out to be just as important in this type of communication as it is in language, for it is the richest output device of the human body.

Fascinating. The one problem I have with it, though, is the notion of degrees of freedom of body motion. While it’s absolutely true that the range of possible movements is huge, the reality is that most of us don’t bother exploring these degrees of freedom - at least when we grow out of childhood. In fact, as adults our range of actual movements becomes pretty miniscule when compared to the possible. Would this somehow effect our abilities to move about virtual spaces, or would being in virtual spaces open up more degrees of freedom for us that being in the physical world? Philosopher Andy Clark is optimistic that we’ll be able to find ways of not just adapting, but of enhancing the ways that we think, reason and feel. I’ve written about Clark previously, and if I understand where he’s coming from, he’s more rooted to the idea that our brain’s self-image is malleable enough to incorporate the the stuff technology provides for us, and to make it seem like our very own.

The patient using a brain-computer interface to control a wheelchair will not typically know just how it all works, or be able to reconfigure the interface or software at will. But in this respect too, the new equipment is simply on a par with much of the old.

Though he doesn’t mention sensing and movement explicitly, in my mind it is through them that we build and maintain our self-image that’s so adaptable. The idea that sensing and moving wire our brains to make us so adaptable is not new. Moshe Feldenkrais talked about it long ago, and developed a still-innovative approach to learning and development using just these capabilities. Sensing and moving are connected with everything we do. The self image alluded to by Clark and the communicative adaptability put forth by Lanier touches on this. We possess this incredible adaptive ability, in no small part due to the dance of sensing and moving that wires and rewires us from start to finish. That’s a pretty wonderful thing. Still, I wish the polar bears well.