Brains On Purpose™

Apples and oranges? Apples and PCs? Eastern brains and Western brains? Another look at cross-cultural conflict

 
The culture in which you live helps to sculpt your brain. I have blogged about that sculpting before because of its importance to conflict resolution. From A key to cross-cultural conflict resolution: Around the world in almost 80 (0,000,000) brains:

Neuroscience research is showing us that the brains of people in different cultures are not the same. Because brains differ from culture to culture, so will resistance to change. Also varying will be how conflict is viewed—and resolved.

Also see What's universal about mediaton? Confidentiality? Ownership of the dispute? Anything?.

When I observe cross-cultural conflict, I remind myself often (and still forget) that brains and the ways they perceive are not universal. To assume homogeneity can be foolish.

The field that researches differences in brains across cultures is cultural neuroscience. The author of an article in Tufts Magazine describes some of the research in this new field. I urge you to read the article because the research is extremely interesting, and highlights some of these brain differences.

The author also interviews researchers about how brains differ from culture to culture. From "The Brain in the World":

While it makes sense to think that people from different parts of the world will think about the world differently, we are only beginning to understand how deeply entrenched those differences are—right down to the way our brains themselves function.

Barely two years old, the field of cultural neuroscience is transforming the way scientists think about the brain. “Some of our most basic understandings of the mind and the brain might be really about Western industrialized minds and brains,” says Jon Freeman, a doctoral student in Tufts’ psychology department and the lead author of a chapter on cultural neuroscience for the annual journal Progress in Brain Research. After all, he notes, the vast majority of psychological research has been done in Western

Are mediators "Mr or Ms Beige"? A BBC article about neuroscience of conflict resolution (and another plug for telling your clients about their brains)

Although the article may have some contradictions, I suggest that you read "Can our brains help us solve conflicts?" (BBC News Magazine).

An example of a possible contradiction is when Baroness Susan Greenfield is quoted as saying:

[I]n  conflict resolution, the parties should avoid "highly arousing" environments that could lead to irrationality. Instead, she recommends a familiar, unchallenging, and bland atmosphere - such as a beige hotel room.

She also says a neutral third party, such as a friend, arbitration service, or statesman, can act as "Mr or Ms Beige" and guide the conflict resolution.

Later in the article, her co-speaker lawyer and mediator Jeremy Lack was quoted about the environment in which US and Soviet representatives negotiated.

He ... says that the environment can have a positive effect on creativity. For instance, US and Soviet disarmament negotiators famously went on a "walk in the woods" to help them devise new plans.

The woods are not bland. But, if the trees facilitated communication, the walk among them is likely a good example of Attention Restoration Theory (ART). (My past posts on ART: here and here.) One dispute resolution environment is not going to be the best fit for all clients; this is another instance of one size not fitting all.

Before I sign off so you can read the article, let me point out one study that Lady Greenfield mentions, although not specifically. I recognized which research she was describing because I have long thought the study is probably an indication (yes, I know I am extrapolating) that we should be teaching our clients about their brains.

Lady Greenfield says that simply telling children about the brain's plasticity - proving their ability to learn - can drastically improve their educational performance.

I think (and have only my experience to back this up) that telling clients about their brain's (and mind's) ability to resolve conflict, and about the obstacles the brain throws up to resolution, will improve resolution "performance." Here is the study [pdf] to which I believe Lady Greenfield is referring.

Attention choreography: Revisiting the key role of attention in conflict resolution (and just about everything else you do)

I sometimes say the role of the mediator is attention choreographer or attention conductor. Where people are putting their attention is going to powerfully influence the conflict, and any resolution. Attention is key.

To help with attending to attention, I point out to you excerpts from two different books. The first is from the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. From the excerpt:

If you could look backward at your years thus far, you’d see that your life—what you’ve confidently called “reality”—has been fashioned from what you’ve paid attention to. You’d also be struck by the fact that if you had paid attention to other things, your reality and your life would be very different.

Attention has created the experience and the self stored in your memory; looking ahead, what you focus on will create the life and person yet to be. Psychology has mostly examined our pasts to explain and improve our lives. If you think in terms of the present and future instead, you might encounter an intuition lurking in your mind, as it was in mine: If you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create—not a series of accidents, but a work of art.

Click to read the rest of the excerpt (Utne Reader).

The second excerpt is from the book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. From the excerpt:

Can attention be trained? To [Alan] Wallace, who has

Mindfulness training can improve mood and working memory: Conflict pros, are you taking advantage of mindfulness benefits?

More research by neuroscientists has shown some possible benefits of mindfulness training.  These benefits detailed below could be helpful to mediators and other conflict professionals.

Do you have a mindfulness practice? I would appreciate hearing from those of you who do—and those of you who do not. Please e-mail me with your comments, including why you do or do not have a practice. After I hear from some of you, I will create a survey to learn more about the attitudes held by conflict professionals about mindfulness.

Now, on to the research. From "Building Fit Minds Under Stress: Penn Neuroscientists Examine the Protective Effects of Mindfulness Training" (Office of University Communications at University of Pennsylvania):

A University of Pennsylvania-led study in which training was provided to a high-stress U.S. military group preparing for deployment to Iraq has demonstrated a positive link between mindfulness training, or MT, and improvements in mood and working memory. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware and attentive of the present moment without emotional reactivity or volatility.

The study found that the more time participants spent engaging in daily mindfulness exercises the better their mood and working memory, the cognitive term for complex thought, problem solving and cognitive control of emotions. The study also suggests that sufficient MT practice may protect against functional impairments associated with high-stress challenges that require a tremendous amount of cognitive control, self-awareness, situational awareness and emotional regulation.

To study the protective effects of mindfulness training on psychological health in individuals about to experience extreme stress, cognitive neuroscientist Amishi Jha of the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Penn and Elizabeth A. Stanley of Georgetown University provided mindfulness training for the first time to U.S. Marines before deployment. Jha and her research team

Upcoming conference on Zen and the brain

This conference being held in Santa Fe in July and August features a couple of neuroscientists I'd like to hear. From the Upaya Institute Web page:

ZEN BRAIN: Zen Practice and the Emerging Science of Alleviating Suffering

Description:

In recent years, neuroscientific research involving experienced Buddhist practitioners, and clinical science studies of interventions derived from Buddhist meditative practice, have motivated new skillful approaches to reducing suffering. In this retreat, Roshi and leading scientists in this emerging area will discuss recent advances in application of these approaches in the alleviation of suffering. Talks and discussion will be embedded within Zazen practice throughout each day.

Presenters and their topics:

James Austin, M.D. (University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and University of Missouri School of Medicine) “Selflessness, Wisdom, and Compassion: Neuroscientific Reflections on Zen Practice and the Transformations of Consciousness”

Susan Bauer-Wu, Ph.D., R.N. (Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Emory University, and Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School) “Contemplative Practice, Mind, and Body in Cancer Care”

Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D. (Upaya Zen Center) "Being with Dying: Zen, Science, and End- of-Life Care"

Amishi Jha, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania) "Driven to Distraction: Attention, Meditation, ADHD and the Brain"

Al Kaszniak, Ph.D. (University of Arizona) "Impermanence Made Visible: Alzheimer's Disease Caregiving from the Perspectives of Neuroscience and Zen Practice"

Shauna L. Shapiro, Ph.D. (Santa Clara University) "From the Cushion to the Clinic: Research on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Health-Care Professionals"

Are any of you planning to attend?

Note: You can listen to the podcasts from the last Upaya conference on Zen and the brain. Click to hear all 11 Zen Brain talks from January, 2010.

I will be away for several days

I'm looking forward to writing more posts when I return.

Learning and the Brain: Some conferences for all of us who are teachers and learners

Conflict resolution is about learning. From Learn, baby, learn: Resources to help facilitate brain learning and mind changing:

Resolving conflict typically requires our learning much, including the parties' positions, interests, and stories. Growing as a conflict professional requires that we be learning about ourselves, too, both in the room and away from sessions. We are not the only ones who need to be learning: When parties are able to move towards resolution, they too have learned. Learning causes changes of both brain and mind. Neuroscience is giving us a growing body of knowledge to help us facilitate that learning.

Here are two conferences that will have some good information for you as conflict professionals, both offered by the Learning & the Brain Society:

• Focused Minds: Enhancing Student Attention, Memory & Motivation, May 6-8, Washington DC
• Making Connections: The Art & Science of Teaching, June 22-25, Groton, MA

Note: The Learning & the Brain Society is also offering two more conference this year. More here.

Neurososcience "evolved from an interdisciplinary specialty to a full fledged scholarly discipline"

Using new methods of analysis, researchers have tracked 10 years of neuroscience. One member of the team was quoted in a release.

"We wanted to map changes in science over the past decade. To do so, we started with more than 35 million citations between the articles in over 7000 scientific journals. This network of citations represents the flow of information between researchers in the world and the results show that significant changes have occurred in the life sciences. Neuroscience has gone from being an interdisciplinary research area to being a scientific discipline in its own right, ranking alongside physics, chemistry, economics, law, molecular biology and medicine," says Martin Rosvall, Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics, Umeå University. This analysis has resulted in some striking images (featured in the article), which elegantly demonstrate the change in the discipline over time.

Click to download the article "Mapping Change in Large Networks" (PLoS ONE).

Note (added January 29, 2010) - Here is the e-mail Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz sent me in response to this article (posted with permission):

Statistical researchers who specialize in the use of network mapping tools are generally careful to stress that a lot of value judgments about what is important can get hidden in these kinds of analyses  ... this paper REALLY shows that's true ... of course the media piece just parrots the scientific establishment's view that what this paper reports is all just wonderful ...

This paper clearly shows the obvious, that a big chunk of what was called molecular biology is now called neuroscience.  It also seems to claim the whole field of neurology has become neuroscience, which is a dubious claim.

"studying the citation pattern between about 7000 scientific journals over the past decade, we find that neuroscience has transformed from an interdisciplinary specialty to a mature and stand-alone discipline."

A lot of non-molecular biologists with a memory of what the NIH once represented think the days of interdisciplinary specialty were much better ... they were certainly more conducive to seeing human beings as intrinsically different from snails and fruit flies.

Brain talk: How to talk with your clients about neuroscience

Last November, I posted a poll in a post titled Do you tell your clients about neuroscience? A quick poll. I appreciate the time and thought taken by those who responded.

The first question I asked was

How much information do you typically share with your clients about neuroscience? 1=Not Much, 5=Everything I Know

The responses:

1 - 5.6%
   
2 - 22.2%  

3 - 38.9% 

4 - 16.7%

5 - 16.7%

It appears that only about a third of respondents are discussing neuroscience with clients higher than at a mid-level.

The responses to the rest of the questions were helpful. Some of the comments indicated confusion between psychology and neuroscience. The ideas about neuroscience were certainly not monolithic; people have varying notions of what brain science is and what it can (and cannot) tell us.

As one who shares what I know about neuroscience not only professionally, but also with my friends and family, I recommend brain talk as a facilitator of communication. Talking about neuroscience also increases self-awareness. But I am not, today, going to continue listing benefits. Instead I want to recommend a resource.

Do you want to improve your ability to discuss the brain with clients? Then I have an excellent course for you being taught by someone for whom I have much respect. I have before blogged about Bonnie Badenoch at BonP. Now I am happy to report that you can take from her a class via distance education in February.

Our hidden brain: How much of an influence does it have on our decisions?

For those of you always happy to learn more about the decision-making process (isn't that true of all conflict professionals?), here's a new book for you: The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives.

Right now you can click to listen to an NPR interview of the author Shankar Vedantam; it is the 11:00 segment.

And here are two reviews and an excerpt for you below.

From The Washington Post's review of the book:

In "The Hidden Brain," Vedantam reviews this new science and applies it speculatively to practical circumstances in which our subconscious leanings might mislead us. How investors choose stocks, how soldiers obey leaders in battle, how spouses respond in arguments -- these consequential behaviors can be shaped by automatic mental routines that preempt our reason. ...

From the book review "The Out-of-Sight Mind" (New York Times):

Invisible forces that control our behavior have inspired our best story tellers, from Euripides to Steven Spielberg. Whether we’re yanked around by jealous gods, Oedipal urges or poltergeists, the idea that we feel powerless to direct our own actions has a visceral appeal, one exploited by Shankar Vedantam in “The Hidden Brain,” his exploration of the unconscious mind.

Most previous popular treatments of subliminal forces haven’t been data driven. Vedantam, who until recently wrote

After reading this interview of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who wouldn't want to increase mindfulness in mediations?

In this interview from Shambala Sun, Dr. Kabat-Zinn talks about the neuroscience of mindfulness and meditation. He then goes on to talk about some of the new frontiers mindfulness has entered recently.

The mindfulness work is spilling into areas way beyond medicine and healthcare and also beyond psychology and neuroscience. It’s moving into programs on childbirth and parenting, education, business, athletics and professional sports, the legal profession, criminal justice, even politics. For instance, Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, has become a major advocate of greater support for mindfulness research and program implementation in both healthcare and education, based on his own experiences with ongoing practice. In so many different domains, it’s becoming recognized as virtually axiomatic that the mind and body are and always have been on intimate speaking terms, at least biologically. We need to learn to be much more tuned in to the conversation and participate actively if we are going to function effectively and optimize our health and well-being.

I would add alternative dispute resolution to Dr. Kabat-Zinn's list of arenas where mindfulness in enjoying increased attention.

Congratulations to Mediate.com

Well-deserved recognition for Mediate.com! Here's the press release:

Mediate.com Receives Prestigious American Bar Association (ABA) Award

Eugene, Oregon - Mediate.com, the leading mediation web site in the world, has received the 2010 American Bar Association (ABA) Lawyer as Problem Solver Award.  The award is for the use of “legal skills in creative, innovative and often non­traditional ways.” The award presentation will be on April 9, 2010 in San Francisco. 

In awarding the Problem Solver Award to Mediate.com, the American Bar Association provides the following statement:

“Mediate.com has been at the forefront of making the power of the Internet accessible to lawyers, mediators and dispute resolution practitioners. Mediate.com has been developing digital products and resources that have advanced the presence and depth of the field of dispute resolution in immeasurable ways and fundamentally altered the practice of mediation by making online strategies practical and available.

“Mediate.com offers the field one of the most used information resources, replete with blogs, cutting edge articles, news of mediation and negotiation practice, as well as a place for interactive dialogue. The website is a practical tool for practitioners and helps them become more effective problem solvers.

“Mediate.com applies the technology of the internet directly to lawyers and dispute resolution practitioners. The founders of Mediate.com had the foresight to see the importance and applications of the Internet and bring them to bear on a developing field of practice. This groundbreaking website has given tools and resources to the public and to ADR professionals to do their own problem solving in virtually every field of law.”

James Melamed, CEO of Mediate.com, responded to news of the award saying that, “If ever there was