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To some, life is like a football game, with all the attendant metaphors about scoring, running interference, going for it, etc. And to a few, life is a football game: players in the National Football League (NFL) don’t need metaphors - they’re used to getting clobbered by very large, very fast men on a regular basis.

But are these guys really the luck ones? A new study of over 2,500 retired NFL players suggests that getting clobbered might not be so good for you later on. The study conducted by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes (at the University of North Carolina) will be published in the Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

The study found a correlation between concussions during playing days and depression later in life. In fact, the depression in the concussed appears at three times the rate of those who were lucky enough to escape that dubious experience.

Even more troubling, this from the New York Times article about the study:

In January, a neuropathologist claimed that repeated concussions likely contributed to the November suicide of the former Philadelphia Eagles player Andre Waters. Three weeks later, the former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson not only revealed that his significant depression and cognitive decline had been linked by a neurologist to on-field concussions, but also claimed that his most damaging concussion had been sustained after his coach, Bill Belichick, coerced him into practicing against the advice of team doctors.

Yeah. Without indicting Belichick or coaches in general, that doesn’t surprise me very much. And it brings to mind an image of Tom Hanks telling players “Crying! There’s no crying in baseball” in A League of Their Own. Sometimes you have to respect the time the nervous system needs to reorganize itself after a shock.

Not surprisingly, the NFL is at best luke warm about research like this, even if it has been peer reviewed. After all, there’s a lot of money riding on these sorts of issues for the league.

It’s unrelated, but this brought up a memory for me. When I was attending my first workshop in the Feldenkrais Method, I was having some problems with a few movements. The workshop leader advised me to do the movements with much less effort so that I could feel what was going on and make adjustments accordingly.

It was at that moment, thirty years after my last football experience, the thought came to mind, “if coach sees me putting in less than full effort, I’ll have to run laps after practice, and I don’t want to do that!”

So these researchers had better be careful, or they might find themselves circling the field double time.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, memory

If there’s such a thing as moral compass, If It Feels Good to be Good, It May Only Be Natural says that it might lie between your ears. Recent researchers have found that moral decisions they asked their subjects to make while wired up to a brain scanner lit up portions of the ancient part of the brain. This suggests that morality might be more a product of nature rather than nurture.

These sorts of findings help explain why some moral decisions are harder to make than others:

Moral decision-making often involves competing brain networks vying for supremacy, he said. Simple moral decisions — is killing a child right or wrong? — are simple because they activate a straightforward brain response. Difficult moral decisions, by contrast, activate multiple brain regions that conflict with one another, he said.

Lots of implications here, and the article is well-written enough to include discussions of them. But the one that really stands out for me is this: If morality is brain-based, what about those whose brains have been damaged in these areas? In fact, the article describes some research that addresses this:

When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with “end-justifies-the-means” answers. Damasio said the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when confronted by a difficult issue — such as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city — these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.

Whoa! While providing lots of material to keep pulp fiction and screenwriters busy for a while, there are some pretty deep questions here.

“Eventually, you are bound to get into areas that for thousands of years we have preferred to keep mystical,” said Grafman, the chief cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully.”

Kind of makes you wonder about the idea of a moral majority, doesn’t it?

Sometimes you have to be able to act and react quickly. Very quickly. Maybe even faster than that if you’re, say, whizzing around at over 200 miles per hour in one of those cool Formula One race cars. You certainly can’t be driving slow in the fast lane in one of those. Formula One sports psych consultant Kerry Spackman puts it this way:

“We didn’t evolve to drive racing cars,” he is saying. “Our brains have developed over millions of years and in some ways they’re incredibly sophisticated, but in others they’re very ill suited to some of the tasks we want them to do. In most sports now, the modern athlete is pushing his brain to the limit. Today’s formula one car does things almost instantaneously, and the brain can’t keep up.

It’s ironic then, that the way Spackman advises us to be able to go so quickly is to go very slowly - at first.

If you physically slow the body down, the brain gets the message that it doesn’t need to be in this highly anxious state. If you take some slow, deep breaths, the process of turning the body down for a moment does actually help to calm the brain down.”

Seems it’s all a matter of learning to make finer and finer distinctions; presumably faster and faster ones. And the way Spackman advises on doing that is to start very slowly. In a sport with lots of assets like Formula One, drivers can use very expensive training simulators to prepare them for almost any situation.

That process can be carried out in the simulator, or it can be reproduced with no equipment at all, creating a virtual reality through a process of verbal reconstruction. Either way, Spackman starts by giving the athlete two versions of the same experience that are initially far apart, so that he can easily recognize the difference.

The important thing here, I think, is this idea of learning to make distinctions. Start with some easily recognized differing situations, and building from there.

“That gives the brain a structure to work from. Then you bring them closer together. If you do it straight away, he can’t learn anything. But if you bring them together slowly and provide him with feedback in a learning environment, gradually his brain will start to build circuits that can take these nuances and store them, building up a mental library of solutions.

What’s important here, in any learning situation (and what isn’t), is to not skip over early stages of learning, and not to make them so difficult that they are not useful. This is learning to learn, in my view. Just don’t start out at 200 miles per hour.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

Technology has given Keith Budge back the foot that had to be amputated when a big piece of steel fell on it a few years ago. Well, not really the foot per se, but the functions that go along with a foot:

The foot has sensors including accelerometers (also used in seat belts) that judge how fast the foot is moving and at what angle, then adapt to it. It checks out the terrain and adapts to that, making it much easier for someone with a prosthetic foot to navigate ramps and stairs, as well. After it sees the first step of a stair, the ankle flexes appropriately. Many prosthetic feet fight that motion, Negri said, making it harder because they’re inflexible. This foot voluntarily adjusts itself.

There are really two remarkable things at work here, at least to my way of thinking. The first is the artificial foot itself, termed the Ossur Proprio Foot. The way the thing adapts to its environment is certainly remarkable, even though it will probably be commonplace as more and more of these type of devices become available. The other remarkable thing is Budge’s nervous system as it has adapted to the new foot.

Together, the Proprio Foot and the nervous system adapt to each other and the environment to provide function. And it’s reportedly much better than older style prosthetic feet. The combination lets amputees like Budge do things they otherwise might not be able to do.

But that makes me wonder about the future versions of such devices. Will they be able to do things they weren’t able to do before? Like make them better athletes, say?

Well, maybe. Disabled or Too Able? looks at the case of South African Oscar Pistorius and his attempt to qualify for the Olympic games. But the thing is Pistorius sprints on two artificial legs. Pistorius is not a recent amputee, having prothetic legs and feet since he was 11 months old. But, as the article dives into, it raises all sorts of legal and ethical issues for the future of sports competition.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

Freedom and choice Kind of loaded words, if you ask me. On one hand, it’s fairly intuitive to think of freedom as a great thing in any and all circumstances. But when you think of it in terms of some movements we’re ask to or want to perform, there can be too much of a good thing.

A person with a relatively healthy musculoskeletal system can move with many so called degrees of freedom, in many directions and in every plane of movement available. But not all movements call for all the degrees of freedom available. Golfers, for example, know that moving to the side more than necessary when they swing makes for untidy shots, at the best. Gotta take all degrees of movement freedom you need, but any more than that gets you into trouble. In fact, many of the learning aides advertised so effectively on those golf channel infomercials are based on the idea introducing constraints to the swing movement so as to limit unnecessary movement.

Oddly, I was thinking about this kind of stuff when I ran across Feature Presentation in the New Yorker magazine. It’s odd because James Surowiecki talks about the freedom of available features in many technological devices as not necessarily such a good thing. He calls it “feature creep,” the tendency of many companies to overwhelm their customers with features in the electronic devices they sell — ” fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds o mysterious features and book-lengt manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle,” that sort of thing.

Confronted with this freedom to go nuts with the features, many consumers find themselves more than overwhelmed, wishing they’d never bought the thing in the first place, and, worse, returning it and washing their hands of the whole thing. And it’s not that they don’t want all those features:

A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.

The obvious solution is to design a really feature-laden piece of technology with the simplest user interface that will work all that stuff. Like Apple, Inc. has done with the iPod. And now Apple gets to try it all again with the iPhone, set to be released in June. Surowiecki wouldn’t be surprised if Apple either hits a home run or strikes out with the device:

In theory, the best strategy would be to make the complex simple, packaging all the power and the options consumers think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use. This is clearly what Apple believes it will be offering with the iPhone: a device with a remarkable range of features, coupled with an uncluttered touch-screen interface. It won’t be surprising if the iPhone succeeds, but it would be understandable if it failed. The strange truth about feature creep is that even when you give consumers what they want they can still end up hating you for it.

For more on how too many choices are not such a great thing all the time, see Barry Schwart book The Paradox of Choice. For more on how we don’t know that our choices will necessirly lead to happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is a good read.

Now, if only Apple would make golf equipment!

A nice big juicy cheeseburger. Ya, sometimes it’s the ultimate comfort food, just what you need. Trouble is, my favorite cheeseburger purveyor caters to the “bring the kids along” market. And that can make for lots of kid-based noise, running around and general chaos along with the burger.

Kids, chaos (and cheeseburgers) seem to go together. You gotta wonder how the little tykes ever get socialized and learn anything, since they seem so resistant to order. But at least one approach to education actually bases itself on the idea that kids actually crave order.

That idea belongs to the Montessori method, which celebrates the 100th anniversery of Maria Montessori’s first school this year. I had heard of Montessori for years and not known what it is. But The Cult of the Pink Tower on Slate.com does gives us a clue. I was most surprised by the idea of kids going for order:

In many ways, Montessori education remains a cult: No one outside the fold (and lots of families inside it) really knows what exactly it is. The fog of magic and romance obscures the key to a Montessori classroom: It’s all about structure and framework and purpose. Maria Montessori might have called the child “an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form,” but far more important, in the end, is a different canny insight of hers: Those splendid kids crave order.

If you’re also curious about Montessori, the 1,200 word article is worth a read. Now, if only restaurants would figure out how to get kids to crave order while the order.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

I love serendipity, and surfing around on line seems to provide plenty of opportunities for it. Today I somehow came across this quote from author and current world explorer Wade Davis:

Language isn’t just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules; it’s a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. From: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/06/0627_020628_wadedavis.html

Never gave much thought to language as the soul of culture before, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

But then I ran across more about language in the Survival of Language in the Digital Age. For instance:

It’s an uphill battle to bring African languages onto the Internet. While there are lively communities on Wikipedia preserving European languages like Welsh or Frisian, most of the speakers of minority African languages, like Ewe or Bambara, have little net access and less net expertise. There’s the very real concern that some of these languages may die out before their native speakers start writing online.

And that’s troubling, especially if you think about Davis’ idea that language is the “vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world.” There’s a technology angle to all this, however:

But the slow spread of the Internet in many African nations suggests that it may be a while before Wolof speakers are writing in that language instead of in French. And the smaller the language, the longer it takes to establish a community online… and, generally speaking, the higher the chance that most speakers of the language don’t have regular internet access. Some African languages will not survive in a digital era.

Hm, makes you wonder about what gets lost as technology spreads and what happens to cultural stuff that can’t keep up with the speed of the spread. Not just now, with the internet, but through all the technological “revolutions” of the past.

Technorati Tags: learning

Will I be happy if I write a post about Daniel Gilbert and his research into what makes us happy? I feel like I will, but the point (if I’m understanding it) of Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness is that I really don’t know, can’t know. Turns out we really can’t reliability predict what will make us happy or unhappy. And Gilbert has the numbers to back it up.

The book is an entertaining read, and the Royal Society just announced it as it’s prize winner for science books. If you haven’t read or don’t think it will make you happy to read it, there’s a whirlwind video of Gilbert’s talk at TED in 2005. Watch it, savor it, think about it. Happy now?