Working in Movement | Thomas Landini

New Blog

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 10:48:41 -0400

Be sure to visit Breathe In, Breathe Out, my newest blog.

Eyes (and Other Senses) in the Back of Your Head

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:52:22 -0400

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.

Not Your Father's Nursery School

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:10:53 -0400

“If your goal is to get your kid into an Ivy League school, this is definitely the wrong place to be,” Goldman said. “But we hope the kids will be so well educated that they get into any place they want.”

I’d never have guessed that quote came from one of the founders of the Blue Man Group. But it did, because these three guys have started a nursery school heavily influenced by the Reggio Emilia educational approach that emphasizes kiddie creativity. But they’re also including Blue Man Group stuff:

During a trial run of the center for a group of two- and three-year-olds last year, Goldman and Wink experimented with incorporating actual bits of Blue Man Group business into the curriculum. They decided against teaching their pupils how to catch paintballs in their mouths (“Maybe in second grade,” Goldman said), but they did adapt their spin-art routine, which involves a Blue Man spitting paint onto a canvas rotated by his fellow Blue Men, as an exercise in cooperation. “By the end of the experience,” Wink said, “they got to a tribal place.”

OK, then.

Can’t wait for the Cirque du Soleil school. Might be fun, but gym class could be tough.

Tags: learning feldenkrais

Effects of Mismatched Sensory Information

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:52:33 -0400

Ever get “car sick” when reading in the backseat of a moving car? It’s happened to me ever since I was a little kid, and I’ve always wondered why it happens.

Turns out it’s probably the explanation for out-of-body experiences that you sometimes read about. No, I’ve never had one of those. But if I had, it would be for roughly the same reason as the car sickness from reading.

In both cases, the sensations are produced by a mismatch of sensory information reaching the brain.

Motion sickness, says journalist Scott McCredie in his new book Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense usually occurs when what you see and what your vestibular system senses don’t agree. It’s called the sensory conflict theory.

For example, my eyes aren’t following the motion of the car as I’m reading, although the balance organs on my inner ear are on board with the motion. That’s a mismatch and my gurgling stomach sends me a strong indication that something’s wrong.

McCredie gives other examples. In WWII, it wasn’t unusual for airplane navigators to get sick while the pilots didn’t. Both could sense the motion of the airplane, but the navigator couldn’t see the movement out of a window since he was in the windowless interior of the plane.

The out-of-body experiences were produced in two separate but similar virtual reality experiments. But in both cases, the out of body sensation resulted from a mismatch of sensory information. This time it was between seeing and feeling touch.

The method involved having subjects look at visual projections of themselves through a special set of video goggles. Experimenters then simultaneously stroked the subject and the image they were viewing. When this happened, subjects reported sensing they were outside of themselves and instead inhabiting the observed image.

This was kind of a whole body adaptation of the rubber hand experiment that I first heard of in Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain.

To be sure, this sensory mismatch isn’t the only explanation for motion sickness. There are many structural, chemical or biological sources for the misery.

And who knows if sensory mismatch is the only explanation for the out-of-body sensation?

People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.

What is clear is how easily an illusion can crop up from seemingly innocuous circumstances. And sometimes, it’s done on purpose, as in magic shows. For a well-written and fascinating look at how easily attention can be manipulated, see Sleights of Mind.

Tags: brain feldenkrais senses sensory learning

Uncle Albert and Plasticity

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:33:19 -0400

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 guess.

Tags: plasticity brain learning feldenkrais

Video of Backward/Forward Treadmill

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:44:14 -0400

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.

Thoughts on Learning Movement Skills

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 12:02:44 -0400

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.

Tags: learning brain skills feldenkrais

Learning: A Moving Experience

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 18:17:12 -0400

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 think.

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.

Tags: brain learning movement feldenkrais

The Puzzle of Peer Pressure

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:47:46 -0400

We all know people can easily resist pressure from friends overtly or implicitly urging us to do something. And we know people who can't.

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.

Tags: nature nurture learning brain feldenkrais

Older, Heavier Cyclists

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:45:28 -0400

The Bicycling Paradox: Fit Doesn’t Have to Mean Thin tells us how and why older and heavier athletes can thrive on the bicycle, but wilt in a pair of running shoes.

I find this interesting because I’m in the second month of a new fitness program. Seems as though the year I took off from working out had caught up with me - girth-wise and stamina-wise. With the help of a wonderful trainer, I’m hefting weights, walking on the treadmill and riding a challenging exercise bike.

I had thought I wouldn’t like the bike, maybe find it too boring to continue for very long. But the bike turns out to be kind of a pleasant experience, even when I’m drenched in sweat and furiously pumping the pedals for all I’m worth.

Turns out that I’m not the only older, heavier athlete favoring the bike as fitness machine. And the Times article provides a clue as to why plump codgers like me might find it more forgiving to pedal than to run or even walk long distances.

It’s got something to do with how you use your center of gravity in cycling rather than running.

“In running, when you see someone who is obviously overweight, they will be in trouble,” Dr. Hagberg said. “The more you weigh, the more the center of gravity moves and the more energy it costs. But in cycling, there are different aerodynamics — your center of gravity is not moving up and down.”

The difference between cycling and running is like the difference between moving forward on a pogo stick and rolling along on wheels. And that is why Robert Fitts, an exercise physiologist at Marquette University who was a competitive runner, once said good runners run so smoothly they can almost balance an apple on their heads.<

And I’m thinking it doesn’t matter a heck of a lot if the wheels are rolling or stationary - as long as you can adjust the tension to pedal a little harder.

Tags: fitness cycling feldenkrais

On Imitation as a Learning Device

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 17:21:15 -0400

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.

Tags: learning brain feldenkrais

Kid Vid: Good for Kids?

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:44:33 -0400

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.

Tags: brain learning attention television feldenkrais

Eyes on the Ball

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:28:23 -0400

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 be-cause 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.

Tags: brain vision field_sense attention feldenkrais

A Tall Alexander Tale

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:00:05 -0400

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.

Tags: alexander_technique alexander feldenkrais learning somatic somatics

Forgetting to Remember

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 18:23:14 -0400

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?

Tags: memory learning feldenkrais brain attention

Learning Field Sense

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:41:14 -0400

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.

Tags: learning brain athletics feldenkrais tennis

Sensory Integration in the News

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:01:44 -0400

When I became interested in somatic practices like the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique, I devoured everything I could read about them. Somatics was one of the first I read, and it introduced me to the work of its author Thomas Hanna. That it’s still in print these many years later suggests I’m not the only satisfied reader.

But it was another of Hanna’s books that really grabbed my attention, The Body of Life. Hanna clearly described a number of case studies using the somatic work he had learned, but the book really opened my eyes to the pioneers of this sort of discipline, in particular Moshe Feldenkrais. But there was also a chapter on Jean Ayers, an occupational therapist who developed a way of working with children whose problems Ayers contended were a result of difficulties in processing sensory information. The idea, if I’m remembering accurately, is that difficulties in integrating sensory information in the nervous system causes perception, movement, coordination and behavioral problems.

Ayers has since passed on, but others have taken up the sensory processing/integration cause, and new generations of frustrated parents seek out their help. That hasn’t exactly been front page news, but two recent articles in the mainstream press have put it back into the spotlight. In Hacking My Kid’s Brain, Mark Woodman tells the story of his son Caleb’s behavioral issues and treatment at the Sensory Learning Program in Boulder, Colorado. And it turns out to be a fairly touching story, with Caleb showing many improvements, even maintaining them three months after the end of his Boulder sessions.

In The Disorder is Sensory we get the New York Times comprehensive overview of the field and a few well-placed anecdotes. Writer Benedict Carey tells us that the idea of sensory integration problems as the root of behavioral problems has started to catch on among parent’s groups and the like at local school districts. And that there’s a strong desire to make this an “official” diagnosis and treatment of mainstream medicine. There’s even a petition in front of the American Psychiatric Association to include sensory processing disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But that decision is years away, and not everyone in the medical establishment is on board with the idea.

Carey cites a few current studies that support the idea that these kids really are different, they really do have problems that could respond to new forms of treatment or therapy. But the research is pretty sparse:

“We don’t have as much data as we’d like, but honestly, I’ve been at this for 33 years, and it’s just nice to see some solid, experimental data,” Dr. Miller said. “We desperately need more, and for that we need money.”

And that’s the rub, one that puts up some pretty stiff barriers for alternative approaches to gaining more than minimal acceptance. That is, you need money to do research to prove your approach is solid, but to get the money, you need solid research under your belt.

It’s frustrating, to say the least. But in the meantime, kids like Caleb are at least getting some of the help they need.

Tags: feldenkrais learning sensory sensory_integration brain

Life After Football Not Always Great

Thu, 31 May 2007 15:36:19 -0400

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.

Tags: feldenkrais football depression brain

Brain Morals

Mon, 28 May 2007 17:25:15 -0400

If there’s such a thing as moral compass, If It Feels Good to be Good, It May Only Be Natural says that it's 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?

Tags: brain morality

Go Slow to Go Fast

Sat, 26 May 2007 14:53:06 -0400

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.

Tags: learning racing psychology feldenkrais

Prosthetic Advantages?

Fri, 25 May 2007 17:50:08 -0400

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.

Tags: brain learning plasticity feldenkrais

How many choices are too many?

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:38:27 -0400

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 stuff!

Tags: choice design technology movement

Craving Order (and a Cheeseburger)

Mon, 21 May 2007 11:14:14 -0400

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.

Tags: learning education

The Soul of Culture

Fri, 18 May 2007 22:28:18 -0400

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 else 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.

Tags: language culture

Happy Now?

Wed, 16 May 2007 12:25:22 -0400

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?

Tags: happiness daniel_gilbert gilbert psychology

Whole Body Computing

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:39:39 -0400

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 works with more than your fingertips, too.

Tags: virtual_reality jaron_lanier proprioception balance haptic feldenkrais

Everbody's Doing the Biomotion

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:53:47 -0400

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.

Tags: feldenkrais biomechanics athletic baseball tennis golf

Trauma and Learning

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:15:34 -0400

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.

Tags: brain plasticity

In the Land of the Beardless, One Whisker Makes You King

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:29:24 -0400

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.

Tags: feldenkrais brain

Show'n'Tell

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 14:19:08 -0400

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!

Exercise, Plasticity, Learning and Feldenkrais

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:35:50 -0400

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!”

Tags: feldenkrais exercise learning plasticity

It's New To Them

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:38:43 -0400

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.

Tags: feldenkrais theater mindfulness