Brains On Purpose™

Neuro-nitwittery and brain aberrations: Why are people brain-crazed?

Why has putative neuroscience flooded the culture? And why don't some people recognize how much brain science is over-hyped? What is that people are really seeking when they buy the pop-science books or attend the neuro-this and neuro-that presentations? What do readers of these books (and articles) and attendees of these events think neuroscience can provide? Chances are high that whatever is being sought will not be delivered by brain science.

Everyday this neuro thing becomes more widespread; the number of pilgrims to Mount Brain grows; the promises of what the brain can tell us increase in outlandishness. Fortunately, articles and blog posts are being written to warn us about the growing brain silliness. Today I call your attention to two.

From "Your brain on pseudoscience" (NewStatesman):

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

...

Distortion of what and how much we know is bound to occur, Paul Fletcher points out, if the literature is cherry-picked.

“Having outlined your theory,” he says, “you can then cite a finding from a neuroimaging study identifying, for example, activity in a brain region such as the insula . . . You then select from among the many theories of insula function, choosing the one that best fits with your overall hypothesis, but neglecting to mention that nobody really knows what the insula does or that there are many ideas about its possible function.”

But the great movie-monster of nearly all the pop brain literature is another region: the amygdala. It is

Rituals: Attention reruns and behavior echoes change our brains

What are your rituals? Those activities that are repeated in your life regularly? Going to the gym, ruminating on how others have wronged you in the past, eating snacks, walking your dog, writing in your journal about what you appreciate (or detest), praying to a Higher Power or earthly idol, meditating on a mantra, focusing on the present moment?

What do you think or do faithfully, religiously, routinely?

What are your conflict rituals? Is the way you handle conflict in a rut, or in renewal as time passes? How often do you stop to attend to conflict with respect, honoring the root of the word re-spect that reminds us to re-look, look again?

When you are involved in conflict, what do you meditate on? Pray to? Focus on?

The rituals you have incorporated into your life change your brain. Many times at my blogs (here and Idealawg) we have looked at the brain's plasticity; the fact that rituals change your brain is no surprise. We also know that the older the ritual, the more it has changed our brain, and the more our brain will ask us to stick with the ritual. Since old rituals are sticky, are yours the ones you have chosen? The ones you want to keep? If not, you can change them, as sticky as they are; plasticity maintains old rituals but also helps us to change them and to create new ones.

Listening at On Being to approximately 2 minutes of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks precipitated the above thoughts. (Even if you are an atheist, you may appreciate a listen.) He talks about the plasticity of the brain, seems in awe of it, and thinks the spirituality of plasticity is "beyond belief." Rabbi Sacks says that plasticity leads us to a whole new study of the role of ritual, because we now know that deep practice reconfigures the brain. For example, he says that if you pray everyday, eventually you will develop attributes such as gratitude.

Rabbi Sacks thinks that ritual is a way of changing us using plasticity, a way that God "wrote into the script."

After listening to the audio of Sacks a couple of times, I began to mentally tally and then write down my rituals. They are more numerous than I would have guessed before I began my inventory! In doing this writing, I realized that I want to keep some of my regular reruns; others need a new script.

Seven keys to change are also seven elements of conflict resolution—And seven ingredients in brain changing

Are there essential precursors to change? Professor Fred Hanna believes so. His book Therapy With Difficult Clients: Using the Precursors Model to Awaken Change lays out seven precursors, and gives suggestions on how to enhance them. As you can tell from the book title, Dr. Hanna's audience is therapists. Although mediation is not therapy, knowledge of these seven can help conflict professionals to assess missing ingredients when movement towards resolution seems jammed, dammed, or barred.

Here are the seven:

1. A sense of necessity for change
2. A willingness or readiness to experience anxiety or difficulty
3. Awareness of the problem
4. Confronting the problem (...culmination of awareness but is not the same)
5. Effort or will toward change
6. Hope for change
7. Social support for change

Click to read "Overcoming Resistance in Difficult Clients: Techniques and Precursors of Change" for definitions of each of the seven. As you will see, each of them is a precursor to self-directed neuroplasticity: changing the pathways in your brain to make changes in your relationship, your behavior, your perspective, your conflict.

As I read and reread the list, and pondered each item, I liked the list more and more. Partly because it is a good inventory for the parties to conflict, but more because these are essential for mediators, too. Do you agree that mediators need to base their process, regardless of the model they use, on these states and traits in themselves?

What would you add to the list? Would you eliminate any of the elements?

Reminder: This is not the only place I blog about mediation

Posts here at BonP are typically related to both conflict resolution AND the mind and the brain. I also sometimes blog more generally about mediation at idealawg. Click to read posts at idealawg about mediation and conflict resolution.

Memory is a creative activity, like poets and painters in your brain

Memory is not like a video camera; it's malleable, shifting and changing with time, place, and mood. That's why, in mediation, the story of a conflict is not as important as the role and place of the current versions of the story in the path towards resolution.

When reading Beauty and the Soul, I came upon a fanciful and charming paragraph that helps to illustrate memory's shiftiness.

What happens to our memory as time moves on? We think of it as an archive, and for this reason we call the recording of computer data "memory." I am afraid it is a misleading metaphor. Imagine that the data stored in your computer have their own life. A spell changes the numbers. The texts you have written mix with each other, conjure up stories, or turn into songs. The photos become animated, then a film, the characters take trips all over the computer, start writing e-mails themselves, and the people in your address book suddenly have a will of their own and decide to play videogames. That is how a computer would work if it had human memory. That is how our unconscious works. Any experience we record does not stay the same, but interacts with other experiences, creates in us certain moods, evokes reminiscenses, rouses fantasies, makes up stories. Memory is neither neutral nor mechanical, and hardly accurate—it is not like a filing cabinet of archives. Memory is a creative activity.

Videos from Society for Neuroscience on neuroscience careers and teaching

Click to watch a number of videos from SfN. From the Web site:

Neuroscience Departments and Programs 2012 Annual Spring Conference: "Sustaining Training Program Vitality During Challenging Times"

March 30, 2012 in Washington, DC

The Annual Spring Conference of Neuroscience Departments and Programs brought together 70 neuroscience program directors and faculty representing 58 programs from the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean to discuss models and innovative approaches for preparing undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral trainees for careers both within and outside academia. The one-day conference covered current trends and issues in neuroscience training, including ways to enrich students' research experiences, providing professional skills training to better prepare students for nontraditional career paths, and approaches to using students as teachers to give them experience that will help them succeed in academia.