Brains On Purpose™

Are you promoting yawning in your mediations? If not, you may want to rethink that

Yawning can affect the way we interact with each other. Read what neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg has to say about that mouth-opened-wide action. From "Yawn: It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain" (Penn Gazette):

Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy. One of those areas is the precuneus, a tiny structure hidden within the folds of the parietal lobe. According to researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London, the precuneus appears to play a central role in consciousness, self-reflection, and memory retrieval. The precuneus is also stimulated by yogic breathing, which helps explain why different forms of meditation contribute to an increased sense of self-awareness. It is also one of the areas hardest hit by age-related diseases and attention deficit problems, so it’s possible that deliberate yawning may actually strengthen this important part of the brain.

For these reasons I believe that yawning should be integrated into exercise and stress reduction programs, cognitive and memory enhancement training, psychotherapy, and contemplative spiritual practice. And, because the precuneus has recently been associated with the mirror-neuron system in the brain (which allows us to resonate to the feelings and behaviors of others), yawning may even help us to enhance social awareness, compassion, and effective communication with others.

Now are you going to invite yawns to your next conflict resolution event?

Conflict coach Cinnie Noble finds that her work is supported by neuroscience

Dr. Tammy Lenski of making mediation your day job recently posted an interview of my friend and colleague Cinnie Noble. The entire interview is worth reading but I wanted to highlight one part for readers of this blog. Cinnie says:

I love that all that I do. I feel quite fortunate that I have found work that is so fulfilling. I have always loved being in the ADR field and have found that conflict coaching is the most rewarding of all the areas I practice. I also love that I discovered that my conflict coaching model is grounded in neuroscience principles. I developed it mostly through research, as mentioned. That involved experimenting with a number of study groups over a few years and as it evolved it seemed to be a practice without a specific theory! The more I learned about how the brain functions, I discovered how the model is grounded in neuroscience principles and that helped explain more about why the model works so well. This has been both fascinating and legitimizing for me.

I was fortunate to spend some time with Cinnie last month at the NeuroLeadership Summit at UCLA. It is fun to talk with members of this stimulating group of people applying neuroscience to their particular niche of conflict resolution.

Neuroscience to be included in upcoming international conference on contemplative practices in law and conflict resolution

Click to read more about this spring conference to be held at a law school in upper New York.

What's attention got to do with it? Quantum physics of the brain in mediation

I often talk about the importance of paying attention to what you are paying attention to in conflict resolution, and in life. Because I think it is so important, the A in the acronym of my CARVE Disputes Model™ stands for Attention.

In case you have not seen CARVE, here it is:

C - Curiosity
A - Attention
R - reflection
V - Value
E - Ensemble

More here.

In fact, I often describe mediation as attention choreography. Why is attention so important? One reason is that it changes your brain. Jeff Schwartz recently sent me a chapter he coauthored that explains how that change occurs in terms of quantum physics; he sent it because he thinks it is a particularly good explanation of attention density and how it changes the brain.

I will quote here the relevant section of the chapter with Jeff's permission and link to the whole article at the end. The topic of the article is pain but the principles of attention being described apply to any state or feeling to which you attend, whether positive or negative. Here's a short lesson in the quantum Zeno effect.

One important and well-verified law in quantum physics called the quantum Zeno effect is a key to understanding how focused attention can systematically alter the brain’s response to environmental inputs. Quantum Zeno effect was first described nearly 30 years ago and has been extensively studied many times since then. One classic example of it is the fact that rapid repeated observation of a molecule will hold the molecule in a stable state. It does this by markedly slowing the rate of fluctuation demonstrated in molecules when they are not measured (i.e., observed) in a repetitive fashion. This is a basic principle of quantum physics — the rate of observation has marked measurable effects on the phenomenon being observed.

The quantum Zeno effect for neuroscience application states that the mental act of focusing attention can hold in place brain circuits associated with what is focused on (e.g., pain versus pain relief). Focusing attention on mental experience maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. What this means is that if one focuses attention on an experience, the set of relevant brain circuitry with which that experience is associated will be held in a dynamically stable state. For example, an expectation of pain relief can elicit a focusing of attention on actual experiences of pain relief that are associated with patterns of activity in a given brain circuitry. When sufficient attention is focused on the experience of pain relief, the associated brain circuitry becomes dynamically stable. This acute effect of focused attention can then enable the well-validated principle of Hebb (1955), namely that repeated patterns of neural activity can

There's a new blog on the neuroscience of social interactions

For those of you not reading idealawg, here's information about a new blog being written by a grad student in social cognitive neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner's lab.

Mediate.com celebrates!

Mediate.com recently published the 300th issue of The Mediate.com Weekly.  The web version of the Weekly is at www.mediate.com/Newsletter.  The Weekly began 13 years ago under the guidance of Founding Editor John Helie.  Over time, the newsletter became a bi-weekly and then weekly
publication under the leadership of Editors John Ford and Jim Melamed. The Weekly offers the latest articles, news, blogs, calendar and resources and is available for free at www.mediate.com/Membership.

Click to learn more about this milestone anniversary.

Congratulations, John and Jim. You are offering an invaluable service to the mediation community. Thank you very much!

Do you tell your clients about neuroscience? A quick poll

I am writing an article about what I call neuroscience transparency. By that I mean how much conflict professionals tell their clients about brain science. Some dispute resolvers give clients much information about the mind and the brain; others believe the science is "just between us mediators" (quoting a presenter I heard last year). I have prepared a short, quick and dirty, and anonymous survey, and would appreciate your taking a couple of minutes to respond. Thanks!

Click for the survey.

Want to know a brain? Don't take it out of context

Brains are changing all the time (when I think of neuroplasticity—brain changing—I sometimes imagine the brain as a verb instead of a noun), and that changing is not in isolation.  Brain changes are facilitated by social interactions such as a dispute, as well as by interactions with the non-people environment and the culture. To highlight the fact that the brain is not a lone ranger, I included "Ensemble" ("all the parts of a thing considered together") in my CARVE Disputes Model™. To think of the brain by itself can lead to some conclusions that are not useful.

If you are interested in how the brain dances with its surroundings, you might want to follow the field of cultural neuroscience. I have for you an article that gives an overview of that discipline. From "The cultural neuroscience of person perception" (Progress in Brain Research) [pdf]:

It seems unassailable at this point that the adult human brain is a place where plasticity is the norm, not the exception. This is a point that has startled some neuroscientists and psychologists, who have generally privileged anatomical and functional fixity. As one neuroscientist said, writing in Science: ‘‘If the neural systems used for a given task can change with 15 min of practice ... how can we any longer separate organic structures from their experience in the organism’s history?’’ The field of cultural neuroscience should answer with a resounding: we cannot! [footnotes removed]

The authors go on to mention the lone-ranger versus dancing-with-environment approach to the brain.

The epistemological stripping of the brain from its environment, social context, culture, and ecology — a notion that pervades the fields of psychology and neuroscience — has provided major challenges for the emergence of a research field dedicated to the study of the interactions between brain and culture, between the neural and the ecological. We hope that by studying how the brain and culture interact, the burgeoning field of cultural neuroscience can move beyond these dichotomies and provide novel insights into psychological processes. This is especially true for the cultural neuroscience of social perception, given the dynamic and interactive nature of perceiving and interacting with others.

Certainly cultural neuroscience will give us good information about minds and brains in conflict with other minds and brains. I will be watching.

Bonus: Here's research by the authors of the above article about what happens in our brains when we interact with someone from our outgroup versus our ingroup. This second article "The Neural Origins of Superficial and Individuated Judgments About Ingroup and Outgroup Members" (Human Brain Mapping) [pdf] cites and is consistent with Jason Mitchell's research I posted about in Brains of a feather: What brains do when thinking about someone in the ingroup versus someone in the outgroup.

Applications being accepted for Penn's annual Neuroscience Boot Camp

Want to learn more about neuroscience? This event being held August 1 through 11, 2010, may be a good fit for you.

What's Neuroscience Boot Camp? From the Web site:

Neuroscience is increasingly relevant to a number of professions and academic disciplines beyond its traditional medical applications. Lawyers, educators, economists and businesspeople, as well as scholars of sociology, philosophy, applied ethics and policy, are incorporating the concepts and methods of neuroscience into their work. Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role. The Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp is designed to give participants a basic foundation in cognitive and affective neuroscience and to equip them to be informed consumers of neuroscience research.

What will happen at the Boot Camp?

Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function.

Attendees from this year's Boot Camp blogged about it and seemed quite pleased. Applications for next year are being accepted until February 1, 2010.

Hear an interview of the author of BUDDHA'S BRAIN tomorrow

Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom is a book I have been reading, enjoying, and recommending to colleagues. This morning the book came to my attention twice (in addition to seeing it on my nightstand). A recommendation of the book came over a listserv for scholarly discussion of mindfulness, and I see that the author Rick Hanson, Ph.D., will be interviewed tomorrow at BlogTalkRadio. From that Web site:

Rick Hanson's latest book, "Buddha's Brain" is soaring through the charts. And for good reason! You are what you think. How can you take control of your thinking to better your business and life? Nothing's hard wired. What steps do you need to take to reprogram your brain to achieve your vision? Listen to PH.D. Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist fill us with practical insights, tools and skills that will help us tap into our own brain center.

The book has some good information about the brain, as well as some exercises for changing that organ. You do not need to be a Buddhist or even spiritual to gain practical insight from the reading.

Click to read the book's Foreword written by Dr. Daniel Siegel. Here are some excerpts from Buddha's Brain.

Some short podcasts from the 2009 NeuroLeadership Summit at UCLA

I got back late this week from the NeuroLeadership Summit with a strong need for a nap. The days were long and the presentations many. I hope to blog about some of the programs soon. Originally I had planned to blog in the evenings while there. Instead, soon after I returned to my room, I curled up in bed with a book and fell asleep minutes later.

People from all over the world were in attendance. I met and talked with a large number of people involved with a myriad of intriguing uses of neuroscience. (I only met one other mediator, though.) All in all, a very well-spent few days!

Now for the podcasts found here.

A snippet from Jonah Lehrer’s Keynote at the NeuroLeadership Summit

Jonah Lehrer, leading neuroscientist and author of the bestseller, How We Decide presented a keynote about decision making at the 2009 NeuroLeadership Summit. Listen to the first few minutes of his presentation here.

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Dan Siegel at the NeuroLeadership Summit 09

Matt Rule from Results Coaching Systems spoke with Dan Siegel M.D., best selling author of The Developing Mind and Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the 2009 NeuroLeadership Summit.

Dan speaks about the importance for leaders and organizations to know about the mind and the brain and what leaders as integrators is all about.

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Jeffrey Schwartz M.D. on neuroscience and spirituality

Lisa Rock from Results Coaching Systems speaks with Dr Jeffrey Schwartz leading neuroscientist and Art Kleiner about neuroscience and spirituality at the 2009 NeuroLeadership Summit.

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David Rock speaks with Warren Bennis at NeuroLeadership Summit 2009

David Rock, founder of Results Coaching Systems and the NeuroLeadership Institute caught up with Warren Bennis, one of the founding fathers of leadership development, after his presentation to talk about giving and receiving respect as leaders.

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More podcasts here.