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Are there sports and athletics in Second Life? Never having visited that online virtual world, I couldn’t even venture a guess. But it would be hard to even imagine much more movement than tapping on the keyboard or wiggling the mouse around on your desktop.

Whole body interactions with a desktop computer seems an unlikely topic for almost any discussion. But Jaron Lanier writes a whole column about it in this month’s Discover magazine. Lanier puts it so beautifully at the beginning of the piece:

Computers today barely connect with people. The human body evolved as a whole to sense and interact with the world, but computers sense us only at our fingertips. Even the fingertips aren’t allowed to do all they can: a computer that was designed to interact with us holistically would feel different from moment to moment in order to convey information. For more than two decades, I’ve been working on the grand project of virtual reality to bring the whole body into computing.

Lanier goes on to talk about earlier work on stiff like data gloves, and he sings the praises of the Nintendo Wii, even going as far to say it heralds the beginning of the haptic revolution. But in the end, Moore’s Law hasn’t multiplied enough times to give us the stuff we need for real virtual reality. But instead of virtual worlds, I find it fascinating to think about applying the limited bits of the technology to interacting with the physical world, right now. Especially in sports and athletic coaching.

I mentioned the Ultimate Balance trainer in an earlier post as an example of something that could help orient athletes with the field of gravity and help improve balance and stability.

And it’s not so much that the functions such technology supplies haven’t been around for a while. You could always just use a t square or level, or whatever, which would give you the same information, but it would take a lot of time, probably be cumbersome and impractical, and you’d have to know how to use those things.

The advantage of stuff like Ultimate Balance technology is that it can get the functions portable enough, fast enough and small enough to be useful as we’re performing the actions where we need the feedback to improve balance and stability.

I can see how things like motion detectors and accelerometers can provide important cues much as an accurate vestibular system might. And, hopefully, the accelerometer’s sense of movement in three planes doesn’t get compromised by habit and faulty perception like ours do sometimes.

On the one hand, such technology gives an objective picture of how we are relative to the geometry of effective movement (whatever that is). But on the other hand, it doesn’t learn for us, either. It can only give us feedback that our nervous system either learns or it doesn’t.

But it’s better than nothing. And it involves more than your fingertips, too.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

Technology makes it possible to observe athletic motions in minute detail. Super slow motion video, special motion capture software and that kind of stuff is getting better, cheaper and more portable all the time. And the internet makes it easy for us to look on. For example, have a look at the walking animation at the Biomotion Lab at Queen’s University in Canada. That site lets you play with their BML Walker software right in you web browser, and you can even take part in their research.

But advances in biomechanics observation technologies and ways of sharing them aren’t confined to the words of research, therapy or athletic training. Fans and even weekend warriors are getting into the act. Some of the more serious baseball fans described in a recent Slate article have taken to watching and commenting on the mechanics of players. You can go well beyond arm-chair managing or fantasy general managing your team to be freely comment on angles and degrees of freedom in players performances. According to the Slate article, there’s no shortage of fan instant experts willing to share their observations and prescriptions.

Who knows if these new experts really know what they are talking about? No one needs a credential to post observations of athletic prowess and prescriptions for improving them.

But you don’t have to be a real or imagined expert to want to apply this sort of science to your own athletic endeavors. The technology is getting so much smaller and cheaper that bio-mechanically related products are starting to appear. The UltimateBalance Trainer, for example, is a small device worn on a headband that tells you when your head deviates from a certain angle as you play tennis. The basic idea is that tilting your head excessively during a tennis stroke throws you off balance enough to compromise your swing. That’s probably true for most of us, although I don’t know of any research that would support that.

In any event, it’s easy to while away more than a few minutes reading and viewing videosof this thing in action on the tennis court. And it’s easy to get sucked becoming an instant expert on balance in the back court.

I do like the thinking behind the UltimateBalance Trainers. I’ve only occasionally dabbled in tennis, so I can’t offer an opinion on how well it might work there. What really grabs my attention is the instant feedback the thing offers. One of the reasons these guys developed the trainer had to be because they observed that their tennis students were doing things that they didn’t realize they were doing. Like tilting their heads far enough to throw them off the balance needed to accelerate a swinging motion around their centers.

It’s easy to extend these assumptions to other athletic motions, as any time spent observing golfers hacking away at the local driving range will attest. And I understand a version of the trainer tailored for golfers is in the works.

I can easily imagine using the functions offered by such a device in my practice of the Feldenkrais Method. In fact, many Feldenkrais “lessons” are designed to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of moving from the pelvis and finding a central axis. A device that gives you instant feedback as you’re moving could be quite helpful.

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, memory, plasticity

A traumatic event can really mess with your brain. But the ability to recall such an experience in the future could be useful, even lifesaving, according to an article in today’s Washington Post.

The recovered brain knows to red-tag the notes and retrieve them quickly when needed. In fact, it may retrieve them before you know you even need them, according to Staci Gruber, associate director of the cognitive neuroimaging lab at McLean Hospital, part of Harvard Medical School. The brain frequently senses danger before the individual sees anything potentially dangerous, Gruber says. The individual can then act quickly to escape the danger or minimize its effect.

Not surprisingly, brain plasticity plays a big role here. And that’s a good thing, since the stress of trauma and recalling it can cause the brain to manufacture hormones that kills cells that convert short-term to long-term memories.

You might think it’d be OK to forget such a terrible memory. After all, recalling a trauma over and over can release more of those cell-killing hormones. But erasing all traces of the traumatic event would be throwing away any learning along with the memory.

The trick is to set it up so any re-experiencing happens in a safe, calm environment.

Therapy, more than drugs, helps people recover from PTSD, says Dianne Bradford, professor in the psychiatry department at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. And it turns out, according to (research psychiatrist Norman) Doidge, that all the conventional therapies help rewire the brain by encouraging patients to re-experience bits of the earlier trauma in a safe environment. Research shows that the hippocampus can grow new cells and long-term memory can take shape to be recalled when necessary.

That’s evidently what happened with Liviu Librescu, the holocaust survivor and heroic Virginia Tech engineering professor who helped students escape last week’s massacre. The gunman later killed Librescu.

He was a person whose memories served him well: He must have realized quickly “that sometimes people with evil intent come to your door with a gun, and you have to be prepared for that,” Doidge said.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning, plasticity

Here’s a well-made video explanation of the Feldenkrais Method. If only we had “the feelies” described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World! Thanks to the Feldenkrais Educational Foundation of North America. Way to go FEFNA!

What happens when you can’t use one of your senses to it’s full capacity? You adapt, or rather, your nervous system often adapts itself to the reduced sensing input.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University got a bit of a surprise when they shaved mice whiskers and had them run a maze. In their recent study, the researchers found mice left with a single whisker on one side of their head developed more brain changes, or plasticity, than they had anticipate.(The researchers, not the mice.) .

But they (again, the researchers, not the mice) were even more surprised Surprising finding; mice with full set of whiskers on the other side of the face developed less plasticity.

“These findings show us that a fully functioning set of whiskers on one side of the body dramatically inhibits the ability of a single whisker to remodel the brain,” said Barth. “This finding suggests that we could boost the brain’s plasticity if we ‘turn off’ sensory input from the opposite side of the body.”

Another way of saying this, maybe, is the more plentiful information from the full set of whiskers “interfered” with the mouse’s ability to learn how to use the much more limited flow of information from the one-whisker side. Like you’re trying to listen to your kid telling you about his first ball game on a cell phone in the first row of a Rolling Stones concert. Ain’t gonna work too well.

Feldenkrais Method practitioners often refer to the Weber-Fechner principle when talking about learning or relearning movement patterns. That is, stimulation can be sensed better when the background sensations are less.

This post is from BlogMate, which I’m trying out here. According to the developer:

BlogMate is a free, graphical plug-in for the popular TextMate editor that allows creating and editing blog posts for MetaWeblog-enabled blogs from a floating palette within TextMate.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Looks like it works, although gotta remember to convert markdown into html before posting.

It’s New to Them takes a peek at attention to novel situations. In particular, a group of older adults found cognitive benefits from developing the ability to attend to novel situations in theater training.

Now I’ve never really considered that another kind of training, physical exercise, contributes all that much to keeping the mind sharpened as we age. Sure, exercise and health go together, but exercise and smarts? But a recent Newsweek article linked exercise to boosted brain power. It seemed to say exercise makes kids smarter.

Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich weighs in on the subject from the plasticity perspective. Not so much that he rejects the idea out of hand, but he wants to be more specific on the links between the physical movements and their impacts on the brain:

OF COURSE being physically fit is of substantial importance for growing and sustaining our mental capacities, in kids, and throughout life! So, too, is the continous elaboration of our motor learning repertoires!

He goes on to elaborate:

BRAIN-LESS physical activity is much less useful for your cognitive fitness than physical activity that involves new experiences and continuous learning — that is, that drives continuous brain plasticity!

Now I don’t know if Merzenich knows anything about the Feldenkrais Method. From my (admittedly non-objective) viewpoint, it could really fit his requirements. After all unfamiliar movements done in unusual positions makes you notice and respond accordingly.

But mentioning Feldenkrais and exercise in the same breath doesn’t really work. Besides the fact that Moshe Feldenkrais himself often railed against most exercise as “work for donkeys,” Feldenkrais’ Method is just too different from most of our ideas about exercise to make it a non-starter in most gyms. It doesn’t look like exercise. Doesn’t fit into the usual categories of exercise you find at the typical gym. It’s not aerobic, doesn’t involve strength training, or stretching.

Here’s how it might fit, though. According to Larry Goldfarb, there’s a fourth category in the physical education world — coordination. And Feldenkrais excels in helping to set up situations where we can learn a lot more about how we can coordinate ourselves. You can hit a tennis ball with all the strength, stamina and flexibility you can muster, but you’re not likely to play a competent game with an uncoordinated swing.

It takes learning for that to happen, or as Merzenich puts it, “new experiences and continuous learning … that drives continuous brain plasticity!”

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, mindfulness, plasticity

What do theater training, mindfulness practice, Feldenkrais Method lessons, and one otherwise worn out saying have in common? The short answer is they all involve noticing new things while sustaining attention. But that’s kind of abstract, so let’s take them one by one. The Cognitive Daily blog mentions a 2004 research study that focused on seeing if arts training would have any effect of four measures of cognitive ability in a group of 124 older adults. It did. In particular, the folks trained in theater arts showed significant increases on test scores after their training — and they retained those gains even after the study was over. The research team explained these results this way:

The team argues that their results demonstrate that theater training — even over a relatively short time period — can help prevent cognitive decline associated with aging. They even speculate on some of the reasons why it is effective: Theater, they claim, requires sustained attention to the task in a way that other activities do not. Actors must stay in character for the duration of a scene, unlike studying visual art, where viewers might “rest” in between viewing different images. Also, the participants consistently remarked that theater was “new” to them, and novelty appears to be a key component of brain fitness.

Hm, training attention and noticing what’s new in their environment. That reminded me of reading about psychology professor Ellen Langer’s work in mindfulness. One of the key things I’ve taken away from her books and articles is the idea that mindfulness involves noticing something new in the environment, even when you’re doing something you’ve done many times before. Here’s what she had to say in an interview on PBS:

The essence of having fun is noticing new things. The essence of mindlessness is to engage in a routine manner where the past is over-determining what you’re doing. When you’re mindless, you’re trapped in a single perspective and you behave like an automaton, without any choices, without any uncertainty. When you’re mindful, you’re actively drawing distinctions, noticing new things. So if you were to mindfully practice, you would both learn more about your sport, your instrument, your activity, and at the same time, enjoy what you’re doing.

It’s not always easy to notice new things in familiar situations. Guess that’s why they call it mindless when you don’t. But the Feldenkrais Method gives a boost here, working in the domain of movement. A Feldenkrais lesson asks you to pay attention as you do unusual movements in (usually) unfamiliar positions. Usually, it’s easier to notice new things about how you’re moving, even though you’ve moved you whole life. If you’re curious enough to find out more, you can find a practitioner near you by looking here. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks is the worn out saying that gets retooled here. It’s not so much the old dog needs new tricks. Old Fido can find much that’s new in the old tricks. He just has to take the time and attention to look for them.

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, memory, mindfulness

Brain plasticity gets a lot more buzz now than it has in the past. The idea that activity and awareness can change stuff in the brain seems miraculous. And it is. ItÕs easy to come to the conclusion that plasticity always works in our favor. But it doesn’t, not always.

Take focal dystonia in musicians, for example. Sharon Begley describes how it works in a not so good way in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. Some music demands such fast finger movement that the musicianÕs nervous system can start to lump together the sensory and motor representations of adjacent fingers, so that a finger automatically moves when itÕs neighbor does. The musician in effect loses control of the affected finger, which is not such a good thing.

Begley goes on to describe some activity-based treatments that reactivate the plasticity of these cortices, this time in a positive way. As I recall, the treatment uses a form of constraint-based therapy to get the unresponsive fingers moving and communicating again.

As I wrote this, I just remembered hearing pianist Andrew Rangell talk about his hand problems from overuse, on NPRÕs Fresh Air. It took him seven years to get back to performing. I remember his talking quite positively about working with a Feldenkrais practitioner during his recovery. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a transcript of that interview.

It makes sense to me, as a Feldenkrais practitioner, that activity and awareness can help “rewire” otherwise haywire neural circuits. At least in these sorts of overuse situations. But I hadn’t thought of plasticity as a factor that might influence other sorts of brain problems. I was surprised to read that plasticity might be a factor in some cases of epilepsy.

Instead, as the damaged brain tries to rewire itself Ñ a crucial process called plasticity Ñ misfiring circuitry can form. Injured neurons can make new connections in wrong places, or overly excitable connections. Even the brain’s genes change the way they work after head injury.

“You need the plasticity for recovery. You don’t want to stop it. You just want to structure it in a way that it aids recovery without causing seizures,” Temkin explains.

The article goes on the explain that it’s not clear how to do that.

This idea that plasticity can run amok brought up a fond image. Of all things, it’s one of Mickey Mouse and dancing broomsticks from the Disney classic Fantasia. If you’re not familiar with the scene, Mickey is an apprentice to a wise old sorcerer. While the wizard is away, he somehow gets one of the broomsticks to do one of his chores, fetching a pail of water. Proud of himself for this accomplishment, Mickey doesn’t realize that he doesn’t know how to get the broomsticks to stop fetching pails of water, and the place is soon flooded. Fortunately, the wizard returns to restore order and quell the flood.

Sometimes it makes you wonder where all the sorcerers and wizards have gone, doesn’t it?

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, plasticity