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Anatomy of a Workshop is a series of DVDs from a four-day 2006 Seattle advanced Feldenkrais training by Larry Goldfarb. As usual for Larry, lots and lots of clearly-presented useful information. But it was a brief portion in the sixth disc that really grabbed my attention. The Feldenkrais Method isn’t always easy to explain to folks who haven’t heard of it. And Goldfarb addresses that explicitly in the workshop. But in this particular workshop section, he’s talking about things that hold a Feldenkrais lesson together. While talking about how each step can serve the lesson’s main idea, Goldfarb brought in a quote from one of the founders of NLP. Here’s what this guy had to say about what Moshe Feldenkrais did:

He creates situations where people feel what they would feel if they could do that which they can’t.

We can amend that to something like: we give people a way to sense that which they would sense if they could do what they can’t do (yet). Pretty cool stuff. What I particularly like is the way this takes Feldenkrais partially out of the domain of movement and into the domain of sensing (while moving). As Goldfarb puts it: I can’t change how you move, but I can create a situation where you can sense how you move, and then you can choose to move differently. Or something like that. Later that day I was reading RSS feeds in endo, my news aggregator when up popped Mixed Feelings from Wired magazine. Writer Sunny Baines takes the sensing idea and “kicks it up a notch,” making a thought-provoking stew of sensing, brain plasticity and technology. Can we learn to sense stuff that are sense aren’t built to handle? Stuff like:

Direction isn’t something humans can detect innately. Some birds can, of course, and for them it’s no less important than taste or smell are for us. In fact, lots of animals have cool, “extra” senses. Sunfish see polarized light. Loggerhead turtles feel Earth’s magnetic field. Bonnethead sharks detect subtle changes (less than a nanovolt) in small electrical fields. And other critters have heightened versions of familiar senses - bats hear frequencies outside our auditory range, and some insects see ultraviolet light.

You bet we can, at least in some academic research environments that Bains describes. But how can we learn to sense things we for which don’t have the equipment? Turns out it takes technology to register what’s going on in those otherwise unaccessible areas of light, sound or magnetic fields. But how do you get the information from these technological devices and into the brain where learning and plasticity can make them part of our sensory arsenal?

So here’s the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want - the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared ‚- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it’s time to build them.

Bain goes on to describe a few research efforts in these areas. Worth a read if you’re at all interested in this kind of stuff. I just love the delightful interplay of ideas that you sometimes find in unlikely combinations.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

Getting lost. Sometimes it’s no fun to find yourself in unfamiliar territory and have to find your way out. But other times, getting lost provides serious learning opportunities that you might not get any other way. I see this sort of thing all the time in my practice of the Feldenkrais Method. Finding your through a maze of unfamiliar movements and orientations can provide very strong learning opportunities.

Josh Clark muses on wrestling with the unfamiliar, the lure of mystery, in creating art, writing, software or what have you. Clark gives some pretty cool examples of how some use mystery to spur on their creative processes. But it was a couple of sentences about artist Robert Rauschenberg that really got my attention:

You just can’t get there by over-thinking; sometimes it’s more about forgetting. The Centre Pompidou recently had a terrific exhibition of works by Robert Rauschenberg, where I came across this 1962 quote from the artist: “I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I am doing.”

Rauschenberg tried to make his own craft a mystery in order to approach it anew every day. How else to create something unconventional? But it’s no easy trick to step out of yourself like that. You have to come up with ways to lure yourself into a creative state of mind, to unclench your brain. You need a magic box.

I’ve seen different approaches to dealing with creative blocks. When I think about them, though, many of somehow involve this idea of developing unfamiliarity, of approaching the unknown. And then, hopefully, you can find your way out in a creative way. The best part is that if you don’t (find a creative way), you often do learn something in the process.

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning

Ralph ate donuts maybe once a year; he could easily drive right on by the Krispy Kreme donut shop without even giving it a thought. But then Ralph went on a diet to lower his cholesterol. He was hungry. A lot of the time. Like a lost episode of Twilight Zone, the vivid red, blinking Hot Donuts sign seemed to be calling his name, beaconing him toward sweet dough fried in hot fat. It was all too much to resist. He was led into temptation, taking home a dozen glazed. Well, actually eating three sinkers before he even got out of the parking lot.

What happened? Temptation got the best of this guy, but only when he had exhausted his “resisting temptation muscles” on staying away from his usual snacks.

Or maybe it was his heart. At least that’s one explanation put forth in Why We Give Into Temptation, a brief summary into some research focusing on temptation.

Well, not really the whole heart, just a measure called heart rate variability (HRV) that appears to be linked to self regulation. A couple of researchers at the University of Kentucky discovered an apparent tie between the variability and giving into temptation or giving up on doing a difficult task. Interesting.

But here’s what really interested me here:

So, will we be wearing a cardiac monitor in the near future to gauge whether we are vulnerable in our self regulating abilities? It’s doubtful, say the authors. However, when considering special populations with more serious consequences of self regulatory failure (say, alcoholics) HRV feedback could be helpful to determine when those critical relapses in regulation will happen.

Let’s say we buy the tie between HRV and giving into temptation. It might be useful to be able to self-monitor stuff like HRV. But the idea of monitoring “special populations?” The privacy issues alone surrounding that montoring could really open a legal and ethical can worms. But at this stage, it’s just academic research. Photo by thievingjoker

Technorati Tags: brain, mindfulness, plasticity

Human Brain a Poor Judge of Risk caught my eye this morning. If I’m understanding what author Bruce Schneier is getting at here, there are two distinct parts of the human brain for dealing with risk. The amygdala is an older part that intuits and reacts very quickly to risk and threat. The second part is the cortex, the part that reasons, but is much slower than the amygdala.

Fast, almost instant reactions are great if you spot a hungry tiger or lion eyeing you. No time to think about that, at least not if you want to continue strutting your stuff on this mortal coil. But most of us don’t live with the immenint threat of lions, tiger and bears. Still, there are risks and threats to be dealt with. The cortex has figured a way to deal with them: it develops rules of thumb or heuristics, using its ability to generalize situations. This can serve us well. But sometimes, not so well:

The problem is that they can fail us, especially in the context of a modern society. Our social and technological evolution has vastly outpaced our evolution as a species, and our brains are stuck with heuristics that are better suited to living in primitive and small family groups.

And when those heuristics fail, our feeling of security diverges from the reality of security.

That’s the last line in the Wired story, and I’m not sure how the story continues. A postscript says this story was adapted from a longer essay, but the link to that essay was broken when I tried it. Too bad; it would be nice to see what else he has to say.

Even so, one piece of the story caught my eye.

Some scary things are not really as risky as they seem, and others are better handled by staying in the scary situation to set up a more advantageous future response. This means there’s an evolutionary advantage to being able to hold off the reflexive fight-or-flight response while you work out a more sophisticated analysis of the situation and your options for handling it.

It strikes me that sharpening awareness of our bodily states might be one way to at least partially deal with this. Some argue that mind and body are one. Maybe, probably. But for many of us, how we experience that body, that self, can be … incomplete or inaccurate. Body awareness practices, like the Feldenkrais Method, can sharpen the connection for many who take the time and interest to do these sorts of practice.

But most of us might not have the time or interest or knowledge to practice such things at a level that makes it useful in everyday life. And that’s a risk in itself.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, mindfulness

HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison. ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one. HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst. ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord. HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

Carol Dweck is a Stanford professor who wouldn’t disagree. In fact, she’s researched and written a book about the idea that “thinking makes it so.” A readable description of her work can be found in The Effort Effect. Dweck’s reputation grew on research on intelligence and effort in school settings. But these days, she’s in demand as a coach and consultant in success-directed fields like sports, business and personal development. The Effort Effect mentions her work with a professional soccer team. But sports aren’t the only way to view her work:

In his 2002 essay that relied on Dweck’s work, Gladwell cited one of her best-known experiments to argue that Enron may have collapsed precisely because of the company‚ talent-obsessed culture, not despite it. Dweck’s study showed that praising children for intelligence, rather than for effort, sapped their motivation (see sidebar). But more disturbingly, 40 percent of those whose intelligence was praised overstated their scores to peers. “We took ordinary children and made them into liars,” Dweck says. Similarly, Enron executives who’d been celebrated for their innate talent would sooner lie than fess up to problems and work to fix them.

Dweck has worked largely with intelligence and learning. Others are extending the concepts to the area of emotions. And I think Moshe Feldenkrais would recognize Dweck’s work, since he pioneered some of the same ideas in the domain of movement and development. Dweck doesn’t just dispense her advice on effort and learning: she practices what she preaches:

“Just being aware of the growth mind-set, and studying it and writing about it, I feel compelled to live it and to benefit from it,” says Dweck, who took up piano as an adult and learned to speak Italian in her 50s. “These are things that adults are not supposed to be good at learning.”

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, plasticity

Maybe it’s just my Feldenkrais background, but when I think about body awareness I almost automatically think about movement. Awareness Through Movement, and all that. But I think there’s more to it. After all, there are all sorts of sensations that aren’t strictly movement.

What got me thinking about this was reading a blog post about the brain in the stomach. It pointed out how the digestive system is rich in nervous tissue. And it seems this “enteric nervous system” and the central nervous system communicate all the time. What’s going on one place can be reflected in another.

Interesting, I thought, but not really that compelling, at least not enough to be blog-worthy. But then as I was reading a comment to a piece on how the brain might sort of truth from untruth (there’s not much research to shed light on this), I began thinking about how the two posts might be related. Is there some sort of conceptual tie between the enteric nervous system and the idea of models in the brain put forth by the commenter in the second article?

And that brought up the idea of focusing. Not focusing like with a camera or your eyeball, but a formal awareness-based technique from the world of therapy. My understanding of the technique is that you put your awareness on internal sensations, and then use a specific set of steps to reveal any connection between those enteric sensations and what’s going on in your mind. My brief explanation certainly doesn’t do justice to the focusing technique, but it may explain some sort of tie between the two nervous systems and a way to tap into that.

I’m wondering if I need to say more about all this here, but my gut tells me that’s enough. For now.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais

Wouldn’t you think that a medical professional who suffered a brain injury would attempt to regain function by traditional medical means? One doc who didn’t but achieved a notable recovery is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s written a book about her experience and been interviewed on the radio. Sandra Kiume has published an interview with Taylor about her recovery on her Neurofuture blog.

With grittiness, family support and her professional knowledge about the brain and its plasticity, she regained capabilities in innovative ways beyond traditional stroke rehabilitation methods.

One of those innovative ways was creating stained glass brain models. Sounds really beautiful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any images of those models to post here. But Taylor does offer some insight into how all this helped her along:

1. Balance and equilibrium to stand still in front of a workspace and manipulate the project. 2. Gross motor movement, handling glass is very delicate and dangerous, I was highly motivated to be very careful for both the glass and myself. 3. Fine motor dexterity, cutting glass is a precise activity, grinding glass requires holding my body firm - equilibrium, pushing into the grinder - gross motor and then lining all of the pieces up - fine motor. 4. Cognitive development - this type of a project is a long term project with lots of steps. It helped me in my linear thinking. 5. Cartoon development of the original image required a combination of intuition and sensory organization. 6. Focus and concentration balanced with sleep. 7. Artistry - how does one tweak it all to make it remarkable and beautiful.

I think this is a beautiful example of plasticity in action: engage repeatedly in a challenging activity involving lots of body awareness, and the nervous system adapts to it.

Technorati Tags: brain, mindfulness, plasticity

Today’s NPR story on mindfulness covered some old ground, but also cleared up a couple of points. Folks reluctant to delve into any sort of mindful practice might find the story particularly interesting and useful.

The most important point, to me, is how the story presents the benefits of mindful practice, in this case in a medical setting. I think this a pretty important (and maybe even ironic) point. Lots of people afflicted with one or the other somatic-complaint condition usually only seek some sort of mindfulness practice when nothing else helps. “Nothing else has worked, I’m still suffering, so might as well try this,” they might think. But mindful practices aren’t really medical interventions. Instead, any benefits gained from their practice often come as a surprise:

“I think the concept of who does it work for… depends on what exactly we’re measuring,” Magyari says.

Take for example, a small research study with 63 rheumatoid arthritis patients. After two months of mindfulness training, the patients’ physical symptoms did not disappear, but they reported feeling better. Scores of psychological distress dropped 30 percent.

Symptoms don’t get addressed directly, but somehow the ability to cope with them changes, often for the better. And sometimes ….

I also liked the story’s “explanation” of how mindfulness works:

“The point of it is to train our mind where we want it to go,” Magyari says, instead of letting the mind wander into worry or be held hostage by the panic of pain.

It’s not always easy to focus attention on the body, especially for prolonged periods of time. And I think it’s not just due to short attention spans or a multitude of distractions seemingly always available. When you’re not trained to do so, It’s hard to notice things that aren’t changing very much.

But if you can introduce a little bit of gentle movement, changes in how the body contacts its supporting surface can be easier to detect. That’s one of the ways the Feldenkrais Method works in a mindful way.

Definitely a good story from NPR that might be useful to those who might be reluctant to tackle mindfulness.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, mindfulness, plasticity