Brains On Purpose™

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN now available for pre-order at Amazon

UCLA psychiatrists Rebecca Gladding and Jeffrey Schwartz have written You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life. Description of the book from Gladding's Web site:

I am excited to announce that my new book, co-written with Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, author of Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain, will be released by Avery/Penguin in June 2011.  It is called You Are Not Your Brain and focuses on helping people use our Four Step method to deal with anxiety, depression, overeating, overthinking/overanalyzing, as well as find new, lasting ways to change habits that are unhelpful to them, such as using alcohol, substances or unhealthy behaviors to alleviate stress or deal with unsettling feelings and experiences.

Here's how the book is described:  In You Are Not Your Brain, two leading UCLA psychiatrists discuss cutting-edge research that explains why your brain deceives you and how you can make your brain work for, rather than against, you.  Using their clinically proven Four Step method that increases awareness of deceptive brain messages, you will learn how to access and bolster - most often without medications - the loving, smart inner guide within you to prevent your deceiving brain from taking control of your life.

Jeff will be talking about how his four steps apply to conflict resolution at this event.

 

Two resources for you: One on attention and the other on cultural neuroscience

I have blogged several times about attention and culture here at BonP because I think understanding both is important for conflict professionals. Here are two additional sources of information.

First, click to listen to neuroscientist Amishi Jha give a very short talk at Pop!Tech on how to improve attention. From YouTube:

Amishi Jha is a brain scientist who is working on ways to train brains to pay better attention. How can mindfulness training help people in high-stress situations -- from medical staff to soldiers -- better navigate their challenging environments?

Second, click to read a blog post by neuroanthropologist Daniel Lende (Neuroanthropology at PLoS Blogs Network) about your brain and culture. From that post:

Your Brain on Culture is a November article in the Monitor on Psychology. Written by Beth Azar, this piece provides good coverage of the boom in cultural neuroscience, covering current research and prominent researchers.

Cultural neuroscience looks at how culture can shape cognition, how brains work in different settings, and the culture-dependent connections between cognition and brain function. Cultural neuroscience has emerged at the intersection of the incredible rise of neuroimaging research and decades of work in cultural psychology.

I will provide an overview of the article below, complete with reactions to its main sections. At the end, I will also provide links to the main researchers and article abstracts covered by Beth Azar.

On this day after Thanksgiving in the US, I continue to be grateful for all that the Internet provides, such as the ability to watch and read the above.

Image credit: Neuroanthropology.

Another upcoming Learning & the Brain conference: Excellent speakers in Chicago this May

Learning & the Brain offers several events each year. (In August, I attended one of their Summer Institutes.) Their conference coming up in May on "The Science of Success" looks especially worthwhile. Speakers include Sian Beilock ( CHOKE: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To) , Daniel Coyle (The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life), and Mark J. Fenske (The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success).

From the Web site:

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

• Impact of fear, stereotype threat and mindsets on success
• Why smart students do poorly on tests and performance
• How training, motivation and coaching can unlock talents/skills
• Strategies to create more failure-resistant, better focused brains
• Using flow and mental states to engage goal-related, meaningful action
• Ways to cultivate the drive to win and succeed in school, sports and life
• Methods to help students overcome learning, reading and math anxiety
• Creating extraordinary performance through brain, music and fitness training

Note: Past posts on why understanding learning is valuable for conflict professionals. The L & B upcoming conference in February.

"Building Trust: Neuroeconomist Wants to Know How It’s Done"

Excerpt:

For Mason neuroeconomist Kevin McCabe, economics is a matter of trust. Trust, or what he sometimes calls the trust paradigm, has been at the root of his economic experiments for the last decade.

Director of the Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics, McCabe came to Mason in 2001 from the University of Arizona as part of Nobel laureate Vernon Smith’s research group.

It was at Arizona that the first trust experiments and the idea of neuroeconomics began.

“We were looking at individual behavior and realized there wasn’t a really good [scientific] model for it,” he says. Research led McCabe and his colleagues to the fields of evolutionary and cognitive psychology, then, finally, to cognitive and social neuroscience.

“In exploring, we realized that there was this whole new field that was just starting to get at the biological foundations of human cognition,” says McCabe, who holds a joint appointment with the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and the School of Law.

“It became obvious that, if we were going to build a scientific model of the economic behavior of individuals, it would need to be based on the same biological model that neuroscientists were exploring.”

And the field of neuroeconomics was born.

Click to read the rest of "Building Trust: Neuroeconomist Wants to Know How It’s Done" (University News George Mason University).

Another clue about what can trigger in-group/out-group bias: Accents?

Do we have a bias against people who do not speak as we do? Some research reported at this year's meeting of the Society for Neuroscience suggests that we may. From "Unfamiliar Accents Turn Off Humans And Songbirds" (NPR):

New research suggests that our brains have a built-in bias against people whose accents don't sound like our own.

That's the conclusion of Scottish researchers who presented their work [great overview of the research at this link] at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.

The team ... used a functional MRI scanner to study the brains of 20 native Scots as they listened to native English speakers with Scottish, American and southern English accents. They focused on the brain's temporal voice area, which seems to specialize in processing characteristics of particular voices.

What is one hypothesis drawn by the researchers as a result of their observations? From "Listeners' Brains Respond More to Native Accent Speakers; Imaging Study Suggests Accents Are Subtle 'Insider' or 'Outsider' Signal to the Brain" (Science Daily):

"The pattern of neural activity differed strikingly in response to their own specific accent compared with other English accents," [Patricia] Bestelmeyer said. "The initial results suggest that such vocal samples somehow reflect group membership or social identity, so that 'in-group' voices are processed differently from the 'out-group.'"

This research has gotten a fair amount of attention in the media and blogosphere, including from The Dana Foundation blog. From We prefer people who sound like us:

... Dr. Bestelmeyer noted that people attribute more positive traits to their native accent, indicating that we are more likely to hire someone or buy from someone who sounds like us.

Anyone with the goal of persuading others may want to to follow this line of research as it unfolds. If you are interested in that and other voice research, you may want to check in periodically at University of Glasgow's Voice Neurorecognition Lab.

Exhibit on the brain opens tomorrow at American Museum of Natural History

If anyone is visiting Brain: The Inside Story, could you pick me up a Brain Freeze, please? From what I have watched and read, this appears to be an excellent exhibit. Watch videos here. Read about the exhibit in an article from nj.com "Exhibit inspires awe about the workings of the brain" (including what a Brain Freeze is).

Image credit: nj.com.

More about the upcoming "Forecasting the Future: Cutting Edge Issues in ADR"

The news release:

ONTARIO, Calif. - (Business Wire) A growing number of legal disputes never make it into the courtroom. Instead, they are being resolved through Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR): arbitration, mediation, negotiation and other methods of coming to terms with a conflict without mounting up the costs associated with litigation.

The University of La Verne College of Law will bring together some of the nation's top minds in this evolving practice in a two-day symposium, Forecasting the Future: Cutting Edge Issues in ADR. Leading experts will present insights into the latest trends in technology and techniques, discuss proven strategies, and examine how an understanding of neuroscience can help in reaching resolution.

What: Forecasting the Future: Cutting Edge Issues in ADR

When: 6-9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 28 (dinner and speaker);
8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 29 (program)

Why: Dramatic developments in ADR will be the topic of the two-day event.

(Up to 7 MCLE credits available for attending the event.)

Where: Sara and Michael Abraham Campus Center, University of La Verne, 200 C. Street, La Verne.

Cost: $90 for both days general admission, $50 for one day, with discounts available to La Verne Law alumni as well as academic, government and nonprofit representatives. La Verne Law students and faculty are free.

“With the cost of litigation mounting and demands on courtroom scheduling at an all-time high, many view ADR as an effective and cost-efficient solution to a variety of legal conflicts,” said La Verne Law Professor, Tiffany Graham. “Even more interesting are the ways in which our

Excerpt from ARE WE BORN RACIST? leaves out one key to lessening in-group/out-group response

It is not news that our reactive brains respond in predictable ways to those we see as different from us. Those ways are not the same as how we respond to members of our in-groups. You can read about some of that research in this excerpt (AlterNet) from Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology.

Unfortunately the role that self-awareness, attention, mindfulness, can play in facilitating a person's being more reflective, less reactive, when interacting with those different from him or her is not mentioned. With training in self-awareness, attention, mindfulness, we do not need to be slaves to our brains.

As we have often pointed out here, there are those in the science community who do think we are clueless, helpless, hapless slaves. From "Missing Persons" (The Catholic Thing):

Many scientists have for some time denied the old view of what really distinguishes human beings: that we have the ability to know the truth and the freedom to choose right and wrong. It’s odd that modern science – which has given us so much knowledge about the world and useful technologies in medicine and other fields – should deny our ability to know and will. But no small segment of modern scientists regard the human capacity for knowing not, as in the past, as a kind of miracle, something of a different order than everything else we observe in the universe. For them, human knowledge is merely a kind of higher evolutionary reaction to stimuli. Indeed, if you look at the statements of some neuroscientists, they have started to call it a “folk view” that we know things and can act freely. For them, it’s determinism all the way down. We dummies – the non-neuroscientists – just don’t know it yet.

What we each think about determinism and reductionism, whether or not we think we can override our brain to be in alignment with our values, is important. It affects how we see the rights and responsibilties of our clients, and more important, what, in our own behavior, we believe we can and cannot change. Even if we are born racist, I believe we have the power to overcome reactive responses. Do you?

Sure, our brains may react and act up in ways that our reflective mind may find upsetting, even horrifying. Through self-awarensss and attention training, by increasing mindfulness skills, our reflective minds can steer. Remember: "The brain puts out the call, the mind decides whether to listen."

White paper: "Neuroscience of Learning"

I have often posted about the intimate relationship between learning and conflict resolution (for example, see this post). Because of the value to conflict professionals of understanding how learning best takes place, I wanted to point out to you a very good resource: A white paper on the neuroscience of learning. It was written by talented colleague Ronni Hendel-Giller, vice president at The Martiz Institute.

From the paper's abstract:

We are beginning to understand how the brain is involved in everything we do, including learning, engagement, motivation and social interaction. Neuroscience research has produced more knowledge about the brain in the last decade than in all history prior. Maritz has always been at the forefront in the effort to understand, enable and motivate the people who touch an organization. Today, we are tapping into the almost daily breakthroughs in neuroscience research to help organizations more effectively lead and influence mindful change in their employees, customers and channel partners. One of the key areas where that knowledge can be applied is learning.

Click to read the paper.

Note: If you are in the Los Angeles area, you can sit down and talk about the neuroscience of learning with Ronni on December 14. Click for the details [pdf].

Want to follow some of the activities at Neuroscience 2010? Read these Neurobloggers

I hear that the number of presentations and activities at the annual Society of Neuroscience conference can be overwhelming. For those of you who want to take a few peeks at the goings-on this year, here are the links to the official Neurobloggers, with many Twitter handles, too.

A magical treat for those of you in NY interested in neuroscience

I am reading Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. The book is one of the most fascinating I have read this quarter about how our brains work; I highly recommend it. (Click for a couple of reviews of the book.)

The authors and a magician will be speaking at New York Academy of Sciences on November 18, at a public event. From the Web page:

Two Neuroscientists and a Magician Show How Tricks Hack Our Brains
Science & the City and Scientific American will host "Mind over Magic" this week.

Magic tricks work because humans have a hardwired process of attention and awareness that is hackable. At a November 18 public event at the New York Academy of Sciences, vision scientists Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, authors of Scientific American MIND's November/December cover story and of the new book, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, will explain just how magicians distract and fool an audience by surreptitiously manipulating people’s attention, tricking

Applications for Neuroscience Boot Camp at Penn due February 1, 2011

What is 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.

Penn’s Neuroscience Boot Camp has been endorsed by the Neuroethics Society as a way for non-neuroscientists to gain a better understanding of the science behind the proliferation of new “neurofields” including neuroethics.

Next year's is being held from July 31 through August 10. More here.