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There’s this really wacky treadmill in Maryland that might be changing how we understand the brain’s control of walking. Needless to say, this is pretty exciting for offering therapy for brain injured people who’ve had trouble walking. But, at least to my way of thinking, the implications might also extend to athletic and performance instruction.

What makes the treadmill wacky is that it can go forward and backward — at the same time! Instead of one belt turning under a walker, this thing uses two, one for each leg. The belts can turn in different directions and at different speeds. Sounds like patting you head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, but volunteers participating in a study at the Kenney Krieger Institue quickly adapted to it.

In fact, they adapted so well that they couldn’t stop the odd walking pattern the treadmill had required of them, even when they got off of it. It took about 15 minutes for their brains to adapt and resume their regular walking gait.

The odd pattern of the treadmill had disrupted their brain’s walking pattern and put the new one in it’s place. And they weren’t able to consciously override it.

Researchers who conducted the treadmill study concluded that there are different and separate brain systems that control each leg during walking, and each direction, forward or backward. I understand this is contrary to the current theory of walking control.

There are some pretty exciting implications for therapy here. According to the lead author:

“The notion that we can leverage the brain’s adaptive capacity and effectively ,dial in, the patterns of movement that we want patients to learn is incredibly exciting,” said Dr. Amy Bastian, senior study author and Director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. “These findings significantly enhance our understanding of motor skills, effective therapeutic approaches and the true adaptive nature of the brain.”

But I wonder if these findings might also apply to learning or refining movement-based skills, like those in athletics or performance arts. After all, the treadmill effectively completely disrupted habitual walking patterns and put new ones in their place, at least temporarily.

And here’s the key thing — this “learning” happened without conscious thinking from the treadmill walkers. No figuring out how to do a certain step, like you might do in dance class. The new pattern just happened, then went away.

How could this sort of thing be used in skills instruction? By disrupting a habitual way of performing a skill, old ways of interfering with learning new patterns would be removed automatically. Seems to me that this “new state” would be more conductive to learning a different motor pattern.

And though this new state might be temporary, it would still allow a way to actually feel what it’s like to make a certain movement without habitual ways of interfering with it. The key here would be in developing and using enough awareness during the temporary period.

This would go well beyond just getting feedback while learning. And, for sure, it would be a whole lot better than the traditional “demonstrate and imitate” method used by many instructors.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning

It’s fun shopping for a gift for a baby or toddler. Good excuse to “test drive” all those great toys you find in the toy superstores and the like. But sometimes the gift turns out not to be a toy at all, but something “good” for the little tyke. Like maybe an educational video like those from the Baby Einstein line, for example.

Video produced for educating and enhancing babies and toddler has become a big business. Really big, as in billion dollars a year.

And the babies and toddlers are watching at increasing rates, spurred on by well-meaning parents who say they believe the videos teach the kids stuff, are good for their little brain’s development and, besides, the kids giggle and wiggle while they watch the screen.

A new study from the University of Washington has revealed that 40 percent of 3-month olds watch an average of 45 minutes a day, or 5 hours a week. And by age 2, 90 percent are watching an average of 90 minutes a day.

But are these videos really as educational and nurturing as some parents think? Maybe not. Well, definitely not, according to U Dub pediatricians who authored the study.

Such early exposure to screens can have a negative impact on an infant’s rapidly developing brain and put children at a higher risk of attention problems, diminished reading comprehension and obesity, researchers say.

What’s ironic here is the good intentions gone awry. Parents may think they’re helping their kids brain development, but they may be confusing the kiddies’ orienting and survival responses for interest in what’s happening on the screen.

What parents identify as attention and learning, scientists say is a primitive reflex known as the orienting response.

“Yes, the baby is staring at the screen, but it’s wrong to think the child likes it,” says (author) Christakas.

The study authors go on to suggest that excess viewing of the videos will turn the kids into couch potatoes, taking their attention and activity away from more healthy pursuits as they develop and grow

But I wonder. Are these speculations based on research or more on common sense? Has anyone done research over time, following the same kids to actually see what happened to the little heavy viewers as they grew?

I remember hearing an interview with anatomist and body worker Thomas Myers who concisely summed up these sorts of dilemmas. Myers said something like, “The problems we face are using bodies and brains suited to a neolithic environment in an electronic age.”

That seems to be a good statement of the sort of problems pointed to by the study and its authors. What to do about it is more up in the air.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

What do you do when you want to improve on some athletic skill, say putting a golf ball or shooting free throws in basketball? Well, you could seek out a teacher to refine your biomechanics. You might hire a personal trainer of some sort to help improve your strength and flexibility.

Or, you could adjust your eyes to look at particular spots while you’re putting or shooting.

Huh?

Ya, that’s what I thought when I first stumbled on the work of Canadian researcher Joan Vickers. Vickers has studied where people look (where they focus their gaze, as she calls it) in a variety of athletic situations.

Not really that surprising, Vickers found more accomplished athletes use their eyes differently than beginner or the less accomplished.

Vickers uses a computer-based contraption that sort of resembles Darth Vader’s helmet. It’s basically a transparent visor attached to a helmet worn by research subjects. As the subject looks through the visor at the putting green, basketball court or whatever, an attached computer tracks the location of the subjects pupils — it let’s Vickers know where the subject is looking.

If you’re not getting the picture, so the speak, there’s a really marvelous Scientific American Frontiers episode titled On the Ball that you can watch on the PBS website.

Host Alan Alda demonstrates Vicker’s device on camera. Vickers takes Alda through sequences of putting and free throw shooting. Alda improves quiet dramatically by practicing Vicker’s advice on where to focus his gaze:

• In the free throw shooting, it’s focusing briefly on a very specific part of the basketball rim before launching the shot. Alda gets so good that he makes one on-camera shot facing away from the basket and heaving the ball backward over his head. Nothing but net.

• In golf, it’s focusing on the hole, and then on a very specific part of the golf ball, maybe the back of the ball. And when making contact with the ball, keeping the gaze on that same, exact spot instead of lifting the eyes to look at where the ball’s going.

I suspect there’s a lot of eye tracking going on with teams, athletes and coaches. Vickers’ approach is just one.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the work of Australian Damian Farrow, a researcher who’s teaching “field sense” to all sorts of athletes down under. But he’s also using the eye tracking methods:

Farrow spends a lot of time simply trying to determine what it is experts see that amateurs don’t. Among other things, he uses an eye-motion tracker to record where virtuoso players are looking during clutch situations, such as when passing under pressure from multiple defenders coming from different directions. He pulls up a videoclip from an Australian rules football practice that he conducted with the Adelaide Crows, a professional team. The game is essentially football crossed with rugby, and players advance the ball by kicking it to teammates. As the play unfolds, players break left and right. One runs very visibly up the middle. Onscreen, a crosshair flits around. This is the darting sight of the Crows’ kicker: a zigzag that covers the field, with minute pauses at key moments, like when he’s assessing the openness of a potential receiver. Farrow’s frame-by-frame analysis compares where good and bad kickers look and for how long. “We want to know, at what points are the experts doing something differently? When are they looking somewhere that the less skilled players aren’t?” Farrow has found that players who make poor decisions tend to glance at targets, rather than pausing on them. They’re also more drawn to motion. “In a lot of team sports, you’re attracted to the area of greatest movement,” Farrow says. “But just because there’s a person running fast and waving his arms doesn’t mean he’s the best person to kick to.”Wired: Teaching Field Sense

If you want more specifics of how Vicker’s suggests applying her technique to different sports, see a transcript of her interaction with the audience for the On the Ball program.

Perhaps most intriguing is her advice to a mother of an ADHD kid who wants to improve his baseball skills. The secret? Watch the ball, but do it sooner, rather than later.

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, plasticity

I sometimes think of making this a one topic blog, one that focuses exclusively on somatic based practices like the Feldenkrais Method or the Alexander Technique. But it’s not easy to find current news articles about this kind of stuff, at least not on a regular basis.

But today a pleasant surprise was waiting for me in NetNewsWire, the RSS aggregator that I use to collect information from many internet sources each day. Freelance writer Laura Moser provides Slate.com readers with Unnatural Poise: Learning the Alexander Technique, a clearly written piece of first person journalism telling us of her previously intractable shoulder injury, how a prolonged practitioner-assisted bout of the Alexander Technique helped lessen her constant, distracting shoulder pain.

Moser gives us the context that led to her seeking out Alexander practitioner Julie Brundage, provides a concise definition of the Technique and even gives us a few hints for good self-use..

Alexander was not Moser’s first attempt at managing the considerable residual pain from an injury to her right shoulder. (She ran after a connecting flight while carrying 75 pounds of luggage slug over that shoulder in 2004.) Accupuncture and PT seemed promising, but insurance wasn’t much help here, and medical cost was a big issue. Moser wrote two earlier articles about rigging up a medical tourism trip to China for treatment that was partially successful.

But she was about to be surprised by what she discovered about her injury and what she was doing during everyday life.

I grew up believing that success in life, or at least a decent report card, hinged on the ability to silence the body, to ignore its twitches and creaks. And so I seldom stretched when my back ached, or stood when my foot fell asleep. At first, I saw no connection between these habits and the shoulder injury I sustained in late 2004.

A trusted friend suggested she try Alexander. When she did, a surprising connection popped up:

I readily appreciated Alexander’s underlying logic and believed my teacher Julie’s suggestion that the root cause of my injury was my height. I sprouted to 6-foot-2 at age 16 and without realizing it spent much of the succeeding years trying to shrink my way into polite society. Finally, after more than a decade of hunching forward, my poor shoulder gave out. (Short people, who tend to pitch their necks backward and up, encounter a different set of problems.)

I knew that Alexander is more popular in the UK than in the USA, but I didn’t know that AT teachers outnumber chiropractors in the UK. Thank goodness for Slate, eh?

I’ve read many descriptions of Alexander, but the one here seems really accessible:

Since repetition destroys perception, we lose the ability to “feel” what’s right for our bodies. So instead of “fixing” our bad habits, Alexander tells us to simply observe them and think about inhibiting them. Sometimes, this involves little more than imagining the lower jaw moving forward and out, or the elbow rotating at three distinct points. This murky teleology lies at the heart of the Alexander Technique’s allure—and also of its difficulty.

And since this has the flavor of a self-help article, it wouldn’t be complete without a few tips:

She helped me set up an ergonomic workspace, and gave me tips for flying long distances without the usual muscular hangover. (The secret: staying on your feet, schmoozing in the flight attendants’ cubby.)

and

But I have learned to slow down, to think before I move. And having accepted that the world will always be a little short for me, I now pad chairs with dictionaries and phone books to elevate my hips above my knees. I never travel, not even on the subway, without a chiropractic chair insert that elicits envious comments from elderly passengers.

I’ve also tried one of these chair inserts, and they work pretty well. Trouble is, I’m a couple inches taller than Moser; the insert makes me too tall to fit into my car.

Tall isn’t always easy.

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

You don’t necessarily have to be a senior to have “senior moments” — those times that you forget where you left your keys or blank on the name of a relatively new acquaintance. But, of course, the older you get, the more troubling it becomes.

New research from Stanford University might put your mind at ease, at least a little bit. In fact, the study even boldly implies that not only are things not so bad, they’re actually working the way they should:

The findings should also reduce some of the anxiety surrounding “senior moments,” researchers say. Some names, numbers and details are hard to retrieve not because memory is faltering, but because it is functioning just as it should.

Here’s what seems to be happening: existing memories might be getting in the way of the new ones. And the more successful you are at blocking these distracting memories, the better your recall of new stuff is likely to become.

Actually, the research focused more on finding marked decreased activity in the anterior cingulated cortex of those who were able to suppress distracting memories when trying to remember pairs of words they were asked to remember.

So forgetting a password might not be so bad after all:

People blank on new passwords so often because of the distracting presence of old or other current passwords. The better the brain can block those distracting digits, the easier it can bring to mind the new ones, (senior author) Dr. Wagner said.

I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to recall this article in the future. While reading it, I remembered a technique that Moshe Feldenkrais talked about on one of his taped lectures. The idea was to remember something, try to forget it. Probably you’ll fail, and thus will remember the thing. After all, you can’t forget and remember at the same time.

Distracting thought, eh?

Technorati Tags: brain, feldenkrais, learning, memory

Remember the scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker is learning to use his Lightsaber? He’s not doing well, getting hit with small laser blasts from a training device because he can’t anticipate them before they give him a zap. But then Jedi mentor Obi-wan obstructs Luke’s vision and tells him to trust the force. This, of course, makes all the difference, and Luke looks like a pro parrying the laser blasts with his trusty lightsaber. This training comes in handy later in those cool lightsaber fights and in blowing the Death Star to smithereens.

It’s all fiction: after all, there’s no such thing as the Force. Or is there?

Some athletes seem to have something like it with their ability to anticipate their opponents actions or knowing where team mates will be and delivering the ball to them at precisely the right time. Most recently, LeBron James of the upstart Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, seems to know exactly where team mates will be before giving them inspiring assist passes.

LeBron and other talented athletes aren’t using the Force, but they do seem to have something called field sense. Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson. Those guys could beat you, not so much with raw athletic talent, as much as a savvy way of knowing where opponents were, what they were doing, and most importantly, what they were going to do next.

The bad news for the rest of us is that this field sense has been thought to be innate, not teachable. You have it or you don’t. But Peter Vint and Damian Farrow don’t believe that. And they are doing something about it, even using methods that Obi-wan would probably approve of.

Vint is a researcher with the U.S. Olympic committee. Farrow is a scientist at the Australian Institute of Sports. Wired magazine takes a look at what these guys are up to in Wayne Gretzky-style Field Sense May be Teachable.

Farrow started out with his own faltering tennis game. Not especially blessed with quickness, he decided to learn how to anticipate his opponent’s shots. He figured some stuff out, but quickly decided he couldn’t think about all the stuff he’d learned and play tennis at the same time. He suspected that any learning needed to be unconscious to work in the heat of a match.

So he set to work figuring out what expert tennis players were seeing that the rest of us weren’t. And here’s where the similarities with Obi-wan’s methods pop up:

To understand what experts were seeing, Farrow meticulously dismantled the mechanics of the serve. He recruited two groups of players — novices and experts — and outfitted each with earmuffs and occlusion goggles, clear glasses that turn opaque when an assistant on the sidelines flips an electronic switch. He then put the athletes on court opposite an expert server. As the server’s arm went back for the shot, Farrow would black out the goggles, leaving players to swing blindly at the incoming ball.

Farrow used a variety of timing with the vision-obstructing googles. Sometimes he’s blank out the vision just after the ball came over the net toward the googled player, see how that player would react. Other times it was during various stages of the opponents serve.

Not surprisingly, the later the vision was blanked, the more accurately the players could react to the incoming serve. But

What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head

Remember that learning this court sense needed to be an unconscious process. So Farrow told players not to worry about where the serve would be coming from, but to focus on estimating its speed. This indirectly tuned the players into cues that their brains could use to figure out where the ball would be going and to adjust themselves accordingly.

Clever, and a bit reminiscent of the stuff in Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.

There are other examples in the article of Vint and Darrow working with other sports like volleyball and Australian-style football. Vint even suggests perception training for fencing.

I’m assuming it’s with regular sabers, not the ones made out of light.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

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

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

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

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.

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