Brains On Purpose™

Wishing some of your clients were a bit more hypo-egoic? Two practices that might help

What if your mediation clients had an accurate assessment of their abilities, were able to acknowledge their mistakes, had a lower self-focus (with focus on self often taking a backseat), did not have over-active self-talk, kept their place in the world in perspective, and appreciated others? The items I just listed are some indicators of hypo-egoic states. A mediation between people in hypo-egoic states might be fairly easy to facilitate, don't you think?

"Hypo-Egoic States: Personal and Interpersonal Consequences of Attentuated Self-Attention, Image Concerns, and Ego-Involvement" was the title of one of the symposia I attended at this year's Association for Psychological Science annual conference. This one was presented by Drs. Mark Leary, June Price Tangney, Jennifer Crocker, and Kirk Warren Brown.

The four presentations in the symposium were on humility, self-esteem, mindfulness, and a model of hypo-egoic processes. The theory and research behind each topic were intellectually intriguing, and the possible practical applications

Use fMRI to measure the usefulness of conflict resolution programs? Me, I don't think so!

This guest blog post at Scientific American hovers nicely along the continuum between breezy and meaty. Its author Kristina Bjoran is a student in MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing; she has written  a brief overview of some of the disagreements in the world of neuroscience. It is a good read for anyone interested in the brain and conflict resolution.

Excerpt:

If [Emile Bruneau] succeeds in quantifying empathy, then perhaps, he says, there will finally be a way to measure whether or not conflict resolution programs are working. If a participant in such a program has "greater" empathic activity in his brain after a program, then, obviously, it’s working. If not, adjustments to the program would have to be made.

I don't think a brain scan will ever be able to gauge the efficacy if a conflict resolution program or technique, at least not in the foreseeable future. But not everyone agrees on the potential of brain scans.

Ten years ago, cognitive neuroscience was skeptical about trying to localize any kind of social process in the brain. The endeavor has been likened, by the harshest of critics, to a new wave of phrenology, the pseudoscientific idea that bumps on a skull indicate some kind of "brain map." The skeptics argue that such behaviors and processes, like empathy, can’t be pinpointed to one specific place—the processes

Interview of Dr. Dan Siegel about THE MINDFUL THERAPIST

Click to read the interview. Excerpt:

Ruth [Buczynski]: Let’s jump right in and talk about why mindfulness can make health and mental healthcare practitioners more effective. There’s more and more science coming out about that all the time. Can you just give us some of the highlights?

Dan: Well, there are a number of reasons why learning to be mindfully aware helps a practitioner of anykind of clinical intervention be more effective.

On the basic level, the studies have now shown that if a primary care physician learns to develop mindful awareness (which we’ll define in a moment), that individual will be less likely to burn out.

They’ll be more likely to maintain a state of empathy, which nowstudies are showing as one of the key ingredients for any kind of clinical encounter for a patient or a client to heal and to respond positively to therapeutic intervention.

So, you keep a clinician feeling well themselves; you keep a clinician passionate about their work and you allow them to actually have the very ingredient of interpersonal compassion (empathy) that is needed for effective therapy in any kind of medical or psychotherapeutic encounter.

In all these ways science has now shown that teaching mindfulness to clinicians would be a very important basic step in helping everyone involved in the clinical experience.

 

Conference: Mind & Its Potential

From the event Web site:

Change your mind: change your brain
How do we learn? How should we teach? How do we overcome adversity and disability? How should we live our lives? Join world leaders in science, education, psychology and the arts in exploring these profound questions at Mind & Its Potential 2011.

Be motivated and inspired by an amazing gathering of 40+ speakers! Keynotes include leading authority on creative thinking, Dr Edward de Bono, world renowned neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, Mind Mapping guru Tony Buzan, acclaimed neuroplasticity researcher Dr Jeffrey M Schwartz and learning and the brain expert Dr Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

The conference, to be held in November in Sydney, will include these programs:

• You are not your brain - Dr Jeffrey Schwartz
• The view from within the mind studied from without - Dr Baljinder Sahdra
• Outside the box: the neuroscience of creativity - Baroness Susan Greenfield
• Use your head – innovative learning and thinking techniques to fulfill your potential - Tony Buzan 
• The rewards of mental effort - exercising your imagination and creativity - Professor Erica McWilliam
• How to have a beautiful mind - Dr Edward de Bono

Click for more details about the conference.

Notes for 19th Northwest Dispute Resolution Conference

Here is the information related to my program on May 5. Thank you for visiting. Above and here you can see the graphic recording of the seminar. I will be adding to this list until May 11, 2012. I hope what I have posted will be helpful to you.

As I said at the program, unless you review the material presented, you will very likely forget. If you want to recall what we discussed, I hope you have gone over your notes since May 5. Click for some information about the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting which I described to you. Times for reviewing vary slightly according to what books and articles you read; to counteract forgetting, I recommend interacting with the material during the program, after 1 day, after 2 days, after 1 week, and after 1 month. A related article: "Four Principles of Memory Improvement: A Guide to Improving Learning Efficiency" (International Journal of Creativity & Problem Solving).

A primary key to learning and to resolving conflict is attention. Click to read about the role of learning in conflict resolution. What you pay attention to will change your brain, so one of the primary tasks of a person wishing to help others resolve conflict is to pay attention to what the parties are paying attention to. A teacher, a trainer, a mediator, a conflict professional is an attention conductor, an attention choreographer.

Because the brain uses approximately 20% of our energy, it tries to conserve energy which presents a challenge for trying to get its attention. The brain can be very lazy.

Methods we discussed for getting INSIDE the brain, qualities that will attract the brain's attention:

• I-nteractive
• N-ovel
• S-cary
• I-ntense
• D-iverting (or D-eviant)
• E-motional

The more ways you work with the material presented, the more ways you pay attention to the material, the stronger will be your learning.

Remember: Learning = More neuron connections/more synapses

Seven methods for interacting with content . . .

7 Synapse Supporters

• Listen
• Write parrot notes
• Write notes, thoughts & reflections
• Discuss
• Use
• Teach
• Draw*

*Click for information about using images to enrich your thinking, remembering, and learning. The best book on the topic is Opening the Mind's Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How To See.

More about the elements of the CARVE Disputes Model™:

The amygdala is the fear center? Come on, mediators, let's wise up (and be as wise as our grandmothers)

A lot of what is being said about the neuroscience of conflict resolution is cringe-worthy. Not only is research often done on college students, in the artificial setting of a lab, being presented as if it applies to real-life conflicts, but also as if we know for sure how people act outside the lab.

One of many criticisms I have about these this-is-your-brain-on-conflict assertions is that many are too reductionist. Dr. Will Meecham expresses my frustration with reductionism much better than I can. From "Computers of Flesh?" (PsychCentral):

It frustrates me that ... it has become difficult to say anything about human behavior without invoking the findings of neuroscience. Although meditation clearly helps people cope, and has done so for millennia, its benefits now need the imprimatur of functional MR scanning in order to be accepted. Although building positive activities into one’s lifestyle can assist with battling addiction, we apparently need to hear this common sense advice framed as neuroscience before we’ll take it seriously.

If it were just a question of objective science validating ancient wisdom, I’d have no complaint. But because of the neuroscience perspective, human behavior is now viewed as a product of computations carried out in brain tissue. Different aspects of our experience get ascribed to named nuclei in the brain. Thus, the amygdala is our ‘fear center,’ the hippocampus is a ‘memory module,’ and so on.

These descriptions are not only highly reductionist, and therefore a bit suspect, they are also gross

"The Mind in the World: Culture and the Brain"

Excerpt:

One of the most fundamental ways in which cultural beliefs, practices, and ideologies influence psychological processes is in the cognitive schema or self-construal style that people use to think about themselves and their relation to others. In particular, previous cultural psychology research has identified two main styles of self-construal: independent (or individualistic) and interdependent (or collectivistic). Individuals from independent cultures, such as the United States, tend to value their autonomy, uniqueness, freedom, and right to self-expression; whereas individuals from interdependent cultures, such as Japan, tend to prize social harmony, conformity, and adherence to group norms. In a 2007 study Zhu and his colleagues asked native Chinese and Western participants to decide whether a given trait adjective described themselves (self condition), their mother (mother condition), or an unrelated other (other condition), or if the adjective was pleasant or unpleasant (semantic condition). In Western participants, the medial prefrontal cortex, or the MPFC, a part of the brain implicated in processing self-referential information, was activated only in the self condition. In the Chinese participants, however, there was no difference in activity within the MPFC during processing of self and processing of the mother, indicating that Chinese participants who are more interdependent use the MPFC to represent both themselves and a close other. Because the self is core to our social and interpersonal interactions, this finding that culture can affect these representations at the neural level is striking and has important implications regarding how we represent ourselves and others across cultures.

Culture affects both what and how we see. ...

Click to read the rest of "The Mind in the World: Culture and the Brain" (Observer of the Association for Psychological Science).

This blog on list of top 25 conflict resolution blogs

BlogRank included Brains on Purpose as one of top 25 blogs on the topic of conflict resolution. The first 10 on their list are:

1st    Settle It Now Negotiation Blog   
2nd   ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)
3rd    Pace and Kyeli
4th    Notes from the World of Anger Management
5th    Brains On Purpose
6th    Conflict Zen
7th    Reporting on Conflict | Peacemakers Trust Media Watch Blog
8th    Colin Rules blog 
9th    Random Nuclear Strikes
10th    Brillianter

Click to see the rest of the list. It includes some very novel blogs.

Short description of self-directed neuroplasticity

As you will recall, when you have a brain on purpose, or change your brain with your mind, you are engaging in self-directed neuroplasticity (SDN). A quick overview of seminal work in SDN is given in a new article "The Neurobiology of We" (Parabola):

The breakthrough in imaging techniques led Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, now a research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of The Mind & The Brain, to wonder two decades ago, “What kind of internal experience is generated by the neuronal activity captured on a brain scan? Even more important, how can we use scientific discoveries linking inner experience with brain function to effect constructive changes in everyday life?”1 A student of Buddhist meditation, he developed a form of therapy to change the faulty chemistry of a well-identified brain circuit: that of the patient with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (OCD is

May issue of Mindfulness Research Monthly now available

From the current edition of the monthly newsletter:

In this issue

36 new studies including:

12 Intervention & Application studies

10 Etiology & Association studies

7 Review & Meta-analysis studies

3 Method & Measures studies

Also...

3 New NIH Research Trials