Brains On Purpose™

The brain and culture: "The mind's great conflict spills over onto the world stage"

Do the hemispheres of the brain influence culture? Do cultures favor, or even represent, either the right or left brain? Can the hemispheres cause conflict? Iain McGilchrist has a novel take on these questions, plus a warning. Take a look at his essay "The Battle of the Brain" (Wall Street Journal) adapted from his new book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

Excerpt:

Why is the brain divided? If it is about making connections, why has evolution so carefully preserved the segregation of its hemispheres? Almost every function once thought to be the province of one or other hemisphere—language, imagery, reason, emotion—is served by both hemispheres, not one.

There is nonetheless a highly significant difference in how the two hemispheres work, giving rise to two wholly distinct takes on the world. Normally we synthesize them without being aware that we are doing so. But one of the two hemispheres can come to dominate—and just as this may happen for individuals, it may also happen for a whole culture.

Click to read the rest.

Click to read Review of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

Retreat: "Zen Brain: The Self and Selflessness in Neuroscience, Buddhism, and Philosophy" (plus some neuroscience articles)

From the Upaya Web page for the retreat:

Buddhist practice involves the cultivation of the realization of selflessness and interdependence and, as well, powerful insights into how we create the illusion of a separate and unchanging self. In recent years, philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience have contributed new and important perspectives on these core teachings of Buddhism.  In this retreat, prominent scientists and scholars will explore Buddhist, philosophic, and neuroscientific perspectives on the self and selfless, and the implications of these areas for Zen practice. We as well will look at how we apply the research in neuroscience in the areas of identity, causality, and mental function.  Talks, discussions, and explorations with participants are embedded within Zazen practice throughout each day.

Some of the links found at the Web page (all pdf):

• Suggested reading list
• "Metamemory Experiments in Neurological Populations: A Review" (Neuropsychology Review)
• "Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation" (Trends in Cognitive Sciences)
• "Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation" (Psychosomatic Medicine)
• "Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference" (SCAN)

Details about the instructors are found at the Web page. Their names and topics:

Video of magicians discussing attention, perception, and memory at Neuroscience 2009

From the Society for Neuroscience Web page:

On Saturday, Oct. 17, 2009, internationally known magicians Apollo Robbins and Eric Mead joined attendees at Neuroscience 2009 for an interactive discussion on Magic, the Brain, and the Mind. As the featured Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society lecture, the magicians explored how attention, memory, and perception inform the art and practice of illusion and magic. View video of the dialogues below.

Click to watch the video. H/T: Dana Foundation Blog.

Being strong and silent, or meek and mild, may turn you weak and wild

Is it good to suppress or hide your feelings? Perhaps sometimes, but certainly not always, because voicing them seems to activate the brain's braking system and calm down the emotional response. I have blogged about labeling the affect in the past, but was reminded of that process's value when reading the article "The Brain’s Braking System (and how to ‘use your words’ to tap into it)" [pdf].

In the article, neuroscientist Matt Lieberman takes a look at self-control of several kinds: emotional, motor, perspective-taking, cognitive, and financial. He says all these kinds of self-control involve the same part of the brain, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), which he calls the "brain's braking system." An interesting point: Because of the RVLPFC commonality, when we engage in one kind of self-control, that braking system may cause other kinds of self-control to kick in, too.

Lieberman then writes that naming your feelings (labeling your affect) can regulate your emotions.

The affect labeling data suggests that putting feelings into words is a form of emotion regulation. The problem with this account is that affect labeling does not feel like emotion regulation. When you try to suppress your emotions you know you are doing it – it is quite conscious. Although people sometimes put their feelings into words in order to generate new insights and improve their emotional well-being, we often put our feelings into words without any expectation that mere affect labeling will have an emotional benefit.

Can you improve your ability to put feelings into words in order to regulate them? Although more research is being done by Lieberman, results so far seem to indicate that practicing mindfulness meditation can make that ability sharper. Another good addition to the growing list of benefits of mindfulness

He concludes:

We have ... demonstrated evidence suggesting that putting feelings into words serves as an unexpected

Upcoming conference has several workshops that will likely be of interest to mediators

Looks like an excellent conference next July in Vancouver. Some of the presentations being given at Brain Development & Learning: Making Sense of the Science:

• “The Human Mind and the Social World: Implicit Biases are Learned and can be Unlearned” - Mahzarin Banaji, PhD
• “Thinking Across Cultures: What’s Variable, What’s Universal, and Implications for a Culturally Diverse World” - Ara Norenzayan, PhD
• “Optimizing instruction: How we learn versus how we think we learn” - Robert Bjork, PhD
• “Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and Love: Implications for Mental Health and Mental Illness” - Sue Carter, PhD
• “Creativity and Flow: Making Life and Learning more Enjoyable” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD
• “The Challenges of Intergroup Interaction: Enhancing Trust for Better Intergroup Relations” - John (Jack) Dovidio, PhD
• “Mindfulness-based Stress and Pain Reduction (MBSR)” - Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD

Watch the videos from the U of Chicago conference on how the social brain experiences empathy

The videos from the "How the social brain experiences empathy" conference are available online. Click to watch them. Talk titles and presenters:

• The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: Issues and Implications - Daniel Batson (University of Kansas)
• Oxytocin and the Neurobiology of Empathy - Sue Carter (University of Illinois at Chicago)
• The Benefits and the Costs of Empathy: the Price of Being Human - Jean Decety (University of Chicago)
• Relations of Children’s Empathy-related Responding to Their Regulation and Social Functioning - Nancy Eisenberg (Arizona State University)
• Challenges to Clinical Empathy - Jodi Halpern (University of California at Berkeley)
• The Strange (Recent) History of Empathic Cruelty - Allan Young (McGill University)

My computer is down for the count: Be back as soon as possible

A dark computer screen staring at you when it is supposed to be bright and functional is sad and distressing. My Mac gave up the techno-ghost yesterday mid-afternoon. I am disappointed because all my past Macs have been entirely reliable. Please wish me luck that I can somehow retrieve what I need from my dozing or departed laptop. I post this on a borrowed computer and will let you know when I once again have my own operative online access.

The brain for non-scientists: A 75-minute lesson in 12 short segments

Want to learn about

• Plasticity
• Imaging/Development
• Vision
• Hearing
• Motor System
• Language
• Music
• And more?

Then take a look at Changing Brains, a Web site created by University of Oregon. Click on "Watch Online" to see the videos that will give you information about your brain. Click on "References" for a list of readings. Clicking on "Resources" will take you to a long list of links. Thanks, U of Oregon.

Read more about the videos in "All About the Brain, in Just 75 Minutes" (Newswise):

It is the consistency of room-temperature butter, fits easily into two outstretched hands and contains a galaxy's worth of neurons. It is the human brain and the focus of a DVD -- "Changing Brains: Effects of Experience on Human Development" -- produced at the University of Oregon.
Did you ever wonder how everything we know, feel, and think is wired in this delicate organ? Did you ever wonder how children’s experiences shape their brain? Answers to these questions and more can be found the 75-minute program created for parents, teachers, caregivers, policymakers and anyone else interested in the mysteries of the brain.

Students, faculty and staff in the UO's Brain Development Lab produced the content for DVD, which is geared for non-scientists. There are 12 segments, including nine specific topics, all presented in mostly everyday language. ...

"The central theme of our production is that virtually every aspect of the development of the human brain and the sensory, cognitive, social and emotional skills that it supports is dependent on and shaped by experience -- input from our environment," said Helen Neville, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and holder of the Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair at the UO. "Every statement that is made in this DVD is supported by evidence from scientific studies."

The program begins with an introduction that describes the human brain, the central role it plays in human functioning, its fragility and the methods used to study its structure and function. Also detailed are mechanisms that allow experience to shape the brain's development. Its architecture is likened to a house: structurally sound if built appropriately or weak and subject to collapse if not.

Using the arts in conflict resolution: Some more pieces of the puzzle?

As regular readers know, I explore the use in dispute resolution of playing and making music, drawing, and other activities that access parts of our brains and minds not typically reached through usual conversation and negotiation. Whether these neural regions facilitate resolution has been researched a little (see, for example, studies here) and supported often anecdotally.

A new book will likely provide some helpful information about the arts and the brain. I relish the thought of devouring such a book. The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts was reviewed in a press release from the News Center of University of Buffalo.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- In a groundbreaking new book, "The Neural Imagination" (2009, University of Texas Press), Irving Massey, PhD, explores the relevance of neuroscience to the study of the arts.

Subtitled "Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts," the book is concerned with the emergence and significance of neuroaesthetics, an alliance born of the recent and rapid convergence of art and technology.

"I undertook to write the book," the author says, "to allay fears in artists and audiences alike that brain science, in its ability to cite parts of the brain excited by dissonance, for instance, or to describe novelty in terms of neural trauma, may 'explain away' the arts."

Massey is professor emeritus of English and comparative literature and adjunct emeritus professor of French at the University at Buffalo, and the author of 10 noted books and scores of articles and reviews, in which he has often employed brain science to explore the work of specific artists.

"I am interested in how certain features of art are clarified by neuroscientific inquiry," he says, citing research that explores neural electrical activity that carries codes through which we experience our environment, and identifies the very neurons that respond to beauty as such.

This book's novel contribution to our understanding of esthetic experiences at the neurological level, however, lies in its combination of scientific and humanistic approaches and the author's full understanding of how each augments the other.

Massey explores the minds of such artists as Ravel, whose brain lesions helped to localize constituent elements of artistic production, and Stravinsky, whose use of dramatically unfamiliar asymmetries, polytonalities and primitive polyrhythms in "Rite of Spring" may have -- it has been speculated – over-stimulated listeners' neurons, provoking schizophrenic symptoms and the infamous riots that met its initial performance.

In these pages, too, appear Rousseau, Schubert (and his trout), England's greatest living travel writer (Paddy Fermor), Gerard Manley Hopkins' inscapes, Visconti and Fellini, Shakespeare, Proust and countless other visual, literary and musical artists whose work and/or neurological enhancements or detriments have contributed richly to our understanding of how neuroaesthetic processes operate.

But Massey is not interested only in the fascinating aspects of