Brains On Purpose™

A way out of the prison of No Man's Land? Use the key of music

Musician David Amram tells a story in the beginning of his book Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat, and that story holds a big clue about why I want to include music in conflict resolution. I first heard a quick reference to his adventure several years ago, found the book to read more details, and since then have told Amram's story many times.

In the spring of 1978, he was stuck in the New Delhi Airport in India. He was supposed to be performing in Tehran, but instead was held up in this airport, in a room called No Man's Land,

the nickname given to the isolated room ... where travelers whose connecting flights were canceled or delayed for more than 24 hours were housed and not allowed to leave the airport since they had no visa for India ... .

In addition to delayed travelers, he was housed with "suspected drug dealers, ... and criminals arrested in the airport who were waiting to be extradited." The carpet upon which he sat was "ratty," and he was hungry and thirsty.

The situation gets even worse.

A young man in a navy blue uniform ... strode into the

Upcoming Symposium: “Forecasting the Future: Cutting Edge Issues in ADR”

"Forecasting the Future: Cutting Edge Issues in ADR" will be held January 28-29, 2011, and is being organized by University of La Verne College of Law in Ontario, CA. Click to read about the publication that will result from the event.

Note (added October 9, 2010): Click for more information about the event. Jeffrey Schwartz has been invited to speak.

Take and make notes, conflict professionals: Let's conduct mediation in the gymnasium for the mind

My desire to use music in conflict resolution is undaunted and, in fact, increases daily. (Scroll through these older posts for more about music and conflict.) My eyes and ears are always watching and listening for how music can affect disputes. Most recently I read the book The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It, and was once again inspired to find a way to include music in mediation.

Read this excerpt from the book and see if it does not resonate with your deepest affection for music.

Unlike language, say, music has no dedicated mental circuitry localised in one or a few particular areas: it is a “whole brain” phenomenon. On the one hand this makes it immensely challenging to understand what is going on. On the other hand, it shows why music is so fundamentally important: no other stimulus comparably engages all aspects of our mental apparatus, and compels them to speak with one another: left to right hemisphere, logic to emotion. ... It is quite simply a gymnasium for the mind.

I agree with the book's author Philip Ball that it may be no coincidence that words that describe how we get along with each other come from music: harmony and dissonance.

We are deeply musical beings. In some cultures, if you were to say you were not musical, it would be akin to saying you were not alive.

[M]usic is too deeply embedded in our cultures to be extracted. It is [also] too deeply embedded in our brains. ... Music is a part of what we are and how we perceive the world.

Why would we want to deny conflict resolution such an intrinsic key to our selves and our cultures? Is it because we are not yet quite sure how to use music in these situations? If so, I firmly believe we need to solve that puzzle, and soon. This is a new century and, as I have been saying (probably sounding like a broken record to many), we need to move beyond, and to leap out of, twentieth century mindsets and models and methods.

If we needed proof that music has a profound influence on our minds and brains, neuroscience is delivering the evidence. Let's find out how to most effectively use this tool with our clients. Who wants to join me?

Links to papers from the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

You will find dozens of papers here. Topics covered at the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society ranged from social cognition to decision making to language to education, and much more. Click to read those that you find of value.

Are experts often wrong? Sometimes? And, if wrong, why and how?

For a few weeks, I have been reading reviews of the book Wrong: Why experts* keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them *Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more by David Freedman. I chose not to purchase it, but ordered Wrong from the library; I am number nine on the holds list with the library only owning three copies, so I will not be reading the book soon.

Nevertheless, I thought some of you would want to know about Wrong. It does sound like a good read. Here's an excerpt from a review in The Globe and Mail:

When we hear that someone is an expert – or even, less grandiosely, a professor, scientist, economist, or forecaster – if they are talking about their domain of interest, we usually assume they are right. But science and business journalist David Freedman suggests we might be better off to assume they are wrong.

His latest book is titled Wrong. It’s an all-out assault on experts, and, perhaps more significantly, our mindsets, which give the experts more licence than they deserve.

Take medical journals, which normally have experts counter-checking the latest studies by other experts to make sure through peer review that the study is solid. But John Ioannidis, a doctor and researcher whose specialty is calculating the chances that a medical study’s results are false – an expert, in a sense, on the wrongness of other experts – has found that two out of three times the studies are wrong. And that is the score just with the most prestigious medical publications, which maybe shouldn’t surprise us because we are used to getting contradictory studies from them on things like wine or coffee’s health implications.

More generally, Mr. Freedman says, “expert wisdom usually turns out to be at best highly contested and ephemeral and at worst flat-out wrong.” In some ways, that’s not totally surprising. ...

"Gain and Loss in Optimistic Versus Pessimistic Brains"

News release (California Institute of Technology):

PASADENA, Calif.—Our belief as to whether we will likely succeed or fail at a given task—and the consequences of winning or losing—directly affects the levels of neural effort put forth in movement-planning circuits in the human cortex, according to a new brain-imaging study by neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

A paper about the research—led by Richard A. Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech—appears in the August issue of PLoS Biology.

Research in Andersen's laboratory includes work to understand the neural mechanisms of action planning and decision-making. The lab is working toward the development of implanted neural prosthetic devices that would serve as an interface between severely paralyzed individuals' brain signals and artificial limbs—allowing their planned actions to control the limbs' movements.

In particular, Andersen's group focuses on a high-level area of the brain called the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), where sensory stimuli are transformed into movement plans.

In the current study, Andersen and his colleagues used a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner to monitor activity in the PPC and other brain areas in subjects who were asked to perform a complex task. Using a trackball, they had to move a cursor to a number of memorized locations on a computer screen, in a predetermined order.

"The subjects were given 1 second to memorize the sequence, 15 seconds to plan their movements in advance, and then only 10 seconds to finish the task," says Igor Kagan, a senior research fellow in biology in the Andersen lab, and a coauthor of the PLoS Biology paper. "We intentionally made the task hard—I couldn't do it myself," he says.

The subjects received monetary compensation for participating in the experiment, with their earnings tied to their performance. The amount of money that would