Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Cat Play Time!
Originally uploaded by Nikographer [Jon]

This is a photo I like that I found on Flickr.

Ever heard of peripersonal space? It’s “the bubble of space around a person’s body that his brain as part of him in its map of his body.”

Body map? Yeah, it turns out that the human brain is filled with representations of the body and the environment it finds itself in. The maps are for both sensing and for moving. It’s these maps that you use to move your arm or leg, and not the muscles that reside there, at least not directly.

Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee beautifully and clearly describe the ideas of body brain maps in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better. I just finished an initial reading yesterday, and I plan to have much more to say about this wonderful book. Lots of very rich Feldenkrais-related material here.

But what reminded me of it was this New Scientist post on an experimental headband that helps its wearers sense physical stuff around them when blindfolded. There are even some video illustrations. And the New Scientist post mentions other sources of information about this sort of contraption.

It’s not hard to predict that these sorts of haptic devices will be widely available, probably pretty soon. What’ll be really interesting is when they hit the consumer market. All sorts of athletic applications, I’d think.

But most interesting to me is what kind of effect it’ll have on kids as they develop. Maybe the term “eyes in the back of the head” will be more than a metaphor in the future.

Quick. What do Elvis and Einstein have in common? Well, their estates are both making oodles of money from them, long after their deaths. Elvis inclusion on the profitable dead celebs list makes sense, but how did good old Albert find himself along side the king of rock and roll?

Turns out that Einstein’s image is plastered all over a best-selling line of interactive videos for babies and toddlers, Baby Einstein. And if you’re going to use the image and name of the king of relativity, you gotta pay for the privilege.

Thankfully, Albert’s not around to see the current controversy released with a study suggesting watching the Baby Einstein video isn’t without a downside.

Now brain plasticity pioneer Michael Merzenich weighs in on the controversy from a plasticity perspective. As I read it, he takes the University of Washington researchers to task mainly for findings that seem little more than a blinding flash of the obvious - at least from a plasticity perspective.

Brain plasticity is driven by whatever it is that we do. And when we spend a lot of time doing one thing, we sacrifice time for doing something else that might also have a plasticity effect. “Fire together, wire together,” as they say.

It does make sense that a baby or toddler spending a lot of time with interactive visual and movement material might develop in a certain way and not others:

I suspect that they could also EASILY scientifically demonstrate that Baby Einstein graduates are particularly fond of visual media and are even more avid-than-usual video game players on the statistical average than are non-exposed kids. And I suspect that those later years of time spent away from language and social interactions at passive viewing and active video game playing shall exaggerate and widen the limitations in language and social development initially arising through video exposure in infants and toddlers.

But Merzenich adds a refreshing dose of common sense to all this by concluding with that the videos are both good and bad for kids. It just depends on what the parent wants for the kid.

YOU decide, for your kid, if the expected consequences of such heavy infant exposure are contributing to biasing them in what YOU regard as a positive or negative direction. On the whole, for my own children, thinking forward to the consequences of biasing the infant toward being in love with passive viewing and electronic media in later life, I would vote ‘no’. For YOUR kid, that could be the wrong answer.

It’s all relative, I suppose.

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

Thoughts on Learning Movement Skills described a very non-traditional treadmill that produced some interesting effects on research subjects who walked on it. Pretty thought-provoking stuff, but not the easiest thing to visualize in action.  Fret no more. Here’s a video that shows how it works.

I’ve always moved my hands around quite a bit while I talk. Other kids made fun of me. I chalked it up to being Italian, since that was a common stereotype of the time that Italians talked a lot with their hands.

I never thought of using my hands as a learning aid, at least not in my early school years. Sure, I could count on my fingers (and toes) to learn simple arithmetic. But when it came to memorizing multiplication tables and such, moving wasn’t encouraged. “Sit still and memorize - that’s the ticket to learning how to handle numbers.”

Good thing they invented calculators, I say.

But it turns out that using your hands may actually help you learn how to handle numbers better. That’s at least according to a report on a new study released last week.

When learning to solve simple equations like 5+3+6= __+6, kids who were taught to move their hands under each side of the equation learned better than those who kept still. Actually, 85% of the hand-waving kids retained their ability to solve the equations a few weeks later, while only about a third of the speech-only kids remembered.

So why does the hand movement help retention? Lead author Susan Cook thinks it might help us tie what’s in our minds with what we’ve experienced in the world:

“My intuition is that gestures enhance learning because they capitalize on our experience acting in the world,” says Cook. “We have a lot of experience learning through interacting with our environment as we grow, and my guess is that gesturing taps into that need to experience.”

Life is just a moving experience, I guess.

We all know some who can resist the pressure of our friends doing this or that, and overtly or implicitly urging us to do the same thing. A recent widely reported study even suggests that obesity gets transmitted this way, from friend to friend. Not any organic thing, but as ideas about what’s acceptable body image and behavior stuff. Not really that surprising when you stop to think about it.

But what is it that makes some of us so eager to go along with the crowd? Another recent study looked into what was happening in the brains of kids who described themselves as resistant to peer pressure and those who said they weren’t resistant. Turns out the peer-resistant kids had less brain activity, but a more coordinated brain pattern than those who said they weren’t peer-resistant. So there is at least some neurological component at work here, at least as far as kids looking at pictures inside an fMRI. That is, until someone comes along with another study that says just the opposite. (It happens.)

What this really opens up for me is a nature/nurture question. If you really can resist peer pressure, is it because of structural things going on inside your brain, or because your environment has provided opportunities to learn to just say no when the overwhelming sentiment is to say yes. Probably it’s some combination.

I’m hoping that The Agile Gene will be able to shed some light on this sort of thing. Author Matt Ridley writes with a kind of clarity and flair that makes reading about science and philosophy more fun than you’d think it would be.

Interestingly, I first head of Ridley while driving and listening to a podcast of All in the Mind from ABC radio in Australia. Unable to resist the pressure to get his book, I veered into the parking lot of a Borders bookstore that happened to have it in stock.

I just couldn’t say no.

Cool. That worked to post from a mobile phone, even with one html tag. So let me try a link to my main blog.

Demonstrate and imitate. That’s the time honored method of teaching and learning lots of performance or athletic skills. Sometimes it works, and most times not, in my opinion.

But for sure imitation is not going to work for someone who actually lacks physical capacity to perform the movement being demonstrated. If you don’t have arms, it’s impossible to imitate raising your arm.

Only the brain doesn’t really work that way, at least according to a just-released research study. What happens instead has to do with goals rather than just duplicating a given movement.

The researchers ask people without hands or arms to mimic video of various hand movements, as they watched scanned images of what was happening in the aplasic brains. The aplasic brains lit up with activity all right, but it was in areas associated with their feet instead of hands.

The results underscore that the mirror neuron system isn’t mindlessly imitating, but working toward a goal, he says. The two people without hands or arms recognized they could lift a cup with their feet–and their brain lit up accordingly.

That’s pretty interesting, and maybe even a bit amazing. But it go me wondering about using demonstration and imitation in learning skills more complex than such simple movements.

I’ve never been a real big fan of the demonstration and imitation approach to learning performance or athletic skills. And especially if you’re paying big bucks by the hour to have some expert show you how it done.

Maybe I’m not alone here.

Music professor Robert Duke offers a kinder, gentler approach:

In teaching, often a student will do something, then the teacher tries to fix it by simplifying it a little, then having the student try again, Duke said. If that doesn’t work, we make it a little more simple, and try again. This can keep going: simplify, try, simplify try. Maybe we do it eight times before it’s simple enough for the student to accomplish. Then once they get it, we go back to the passage and have them try again.

During this process, with each failed attempt, “the learner is thinking: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong….,” Duke said. “Rather than inch back and then leap forward, we should leap back, and then inch forward,” Duke said. “Leap back to a task that is very accomplishable.” This doesn’t always mean to play something slower. It can mean to play it in rhythms, or to work on the fundamentals of the technique involved. Either way, the student needs to be able to achieve success, there in the lesson. “How is a student going to do, ALONE, what you can’t get them to do in your studio in 20 minutes?” Duke said. “This principle goes across all levels: set them up in a way that they can do the thing we demonstrate.”

From: http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20076/7046/

So how does this tie into the research study talked about earlier? I’m not really sure if there is any kind of direct tie here. It might be interesting to look at brain scans of students using Duke’s approach. But, hey, it’d probably be hard to get the piano into a scanner.

Probably similar brain patterns are at work, though.

What’s most interesting is the piano students are imitating to learn. Only they are imitating themselves in earlier successful situations.

As Yogi Berra says, “you can observe a lot just by watching.” And you can learn a lot from yourself, if you know what to pay attention to.

So I’m giving it a go - posting from an iphone, that is. Not the easiest thing I’ve ever done.