Brains On Purpose™

Videos from APS: Memory formation, brain diversity, and our brains as conductor-less orchestras

Last time I went to the annual conference of Association for Psychological Science, I was grateful for all that I learned. I attended again this year and the experience was no less valuable. Even if you did not attend, several of the talks are available online for you to view. Below I will link to some of them.

Michael Gazzaniga gave a keynote address titled "Unity in a Modular World." From the writeup:

In his keynote address, Michael S. Gazzaniga suggests the brain may work through local gossip rather than central planning.

A composer standing with hands at his side while the orchestra plays a perfect symphony — that’s how the brain works.

At least that was the metaphor offered by Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, during the keynote address of the 25th APS Annual Convention. ...

Click to read the rest and watch the video of his talk.

The Presidential Symposium this year focused on memory formation. The speakers were Joseph Steinmetz, Ted Abel, Elizabeth Loftus (photo above), Michael Fanselow, and Elizabeth Phelps. From the writeup:

This year’s speakers...took the audience on a tour of memory formation that began with cells encoding the memories, continued through various brain regions retrieving them, and concluded with the social experiences that sparked them in the first place.

Click to read more and watch the video.

Another keynote was titled "Diverse Brains."

[L]anguage-processing researcher Morton Ann Gernsbacher explained why it makes more sense to accept disabilities like autism as examples of brain diversity rather than viewing them as defects.

Click to read more and watch her talk.

To read and watch still more from the conference, click here and here. Very soon, I will write a couple of posts about other presentations I attended. Watch for them here at BonP and at idealawg. I only returned a couple of days ago so am a bit behind on my blogging.

Image credit: Association for Psychological Science.

Experts in Emotion: Listen to Kevin Ochsner talking about emotion regulation

Click to listen to Columbia University's neuroscientist Dr. Kevin Ochsner talking about emotion regulation. (The interview is a part of a Yale interview series.) Among other topics, he talks about reappraisal and reframing, generating emotions, and using cognitive control. One of the processes he studies is using high-level thoughts to adjust the amygdala response; he explains in this interview.

I am glad to hear that he recommends emabracing the complexity because nothing about the brain can be reduced to sound bites!

While you are at the link, listen to many other interviews in the series Experts in Emotion, including James Gross, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Roy Baumeister.

Filters and frames: Mediation is all about the viewfinder

Our brains are vigilant, hyperaware of any sensed change to see if it represents danger. Partly because they use a lot of our energy, our brains seek to deal with new information quickly and easily. So, rather like a photographer, the brain applies filters and frames. The filters shift, accentuate, and diminish what is seen. And the frames limit what is viewed to certain boundaries.

Changing the filters and the frames can make the shot new, fresh, and different. Perhaps the picture is improved—more clear, with a clarity that brings high resolution.

In a conflict, each party has a viewfinder; typically the views found are diverse, disparate, and sometimes painfully discordant. The less attention paid to those viewfinders, the more remote effective and satisfactory resolution becomes. In contrast, attention can bring a solution into focus.

By applying apps, filters, and frames below, I can display several versions of the same scene. (Please click on the pictures to see them full-sized; the quality is reduced by importing them into Typepad.) Do the different shots remind you of any dispute you have mediated? Any conflict in which you and another person have disagreed?

Conflict resolution can be as simple as becoming aware that our viewfinders are individual and often contrasting. Once in a while, coming to a resolution can even be a snap if we pay full attention to the fact that our views may be as different as a photo is from its negative.

When in conflict, it can help to snap to attention!

Conflict concert? Dispute ditty? Mediation minuet? Can the speech of angels lead to agreement?

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite. --Thomas Carlyle

It's been a while since I last blogged about the role of music in conflict resolution. But I was reminded of its potential by a recent piece of research done by Daniel Levitin. Dr. Levitin and his colleague Mona Lisa Chanda analyzed many scientific papers and derived some conclusions about the benefits of music. The abstract of "The neurochemistry of music" (Cell):

Music is used to regulate mood and arousal in everyday life and to promote physical and psychological health and well-being in clinical settings. However, scientific inquiry into the neurochemical effects of music is still in its infancy. In this review, we evaluate the evidence that music improves health and well-being through the engagement of neurochemical systems for (i) reward, motivation, and pleasure; (ii) stress and arousal; (iii) immunity; and (iv) social affiliation. We discuss the limitations of these studies and outline novel approaches for integration of conceptual and technological advances from the fields of music cognition and social neuroscience into studies of the neurochemistry of music.

Obviously reward, motivation, pleasure, stress, arousal, and social affiliation are basic ingredients in dispute resolution. This is why many of us believe in the strong potential of music in the management or resolution of conflicts.

For more about the research, read "Can Music Be More Effective Than Drugs?" (io9). Excerpt:

According to a new analysis of 400 published scientific papers, the old adage that “music is medicine” may literally be true. Canadian psychologists from McGill University have shown that the neurochemical benefits of music can boost the body’s immune system, reduce anxiety, and help regulate mood. The time has come, say the researchers, for doctors and therapists to start taking music much more seriously.

Mediators, too?

Another clue that brain locationism is likely wrong or misleading: Why is the location concept sticky as glue?

Locationism is when people talk about the brain as if its activities or functions happen or are governed in just one location. For example, someone may say, "Here is the place in the brain for talking and the location for balking and the place for walking." I have blogged about this misperception before, e.g, here, here, and here. For some reason, I guess because it makes explanations easier and the brain simpler, the notion hangs on and on and on.

Related to a different, alternative theory—that a brain function results from the brain working as a team and not at a single location—is this new research. From "‘Brain waves’ challenge area-specific view of brain activity" (KU LEUVEN):

Our understanding of brain activity has traditionally been linked to brain areas – when we speak, the speech area of the brain is active. New research by an international team of psychologists led by David Alexander and Cees van Leeuwen (Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics) shows that this view may be overly rigid. The entire cortex, not just the area responsible for a certain function, is activated when a given task is initiated. Furthermore, activity occurs in a pattern: waves of activity roll from one side of the brain to the other.

The brain can be studied on various scales, researcher David Alexander explains: "You have the neurons, the circuits between the neurons, the Brodmann areas – brain areas that correspond to a certain function – and the entire cortex. Traditionally, scientists looked at local activity when studying brain activity, for example, activity in the Brodmann areas. To do this, you take EEG's (electroencephalograms) to measure the brain’s electrical activity while a subject performs a task and then you try to trace that activity back to one or more brain areas."

Click to read the rest.

Lessons from Poe: Detecting the Inner Mediator—Join us this May in Baltimore

I will be presenting three programs in Baltimore on May 2 and 3. They are being offered by the ADR Section of the Maryland Bar Association at Westminster Hall, site of the Edgar Allan Poe crypt. Below is the description of the day-long program being held on May 2. I will also give a keynote that evening.

And, if 20 people register by April 1, we will have a practicum on May 3 based on the day-long program from the day before. More information and registration for May 2 here. If you are interested in the practicum, please email David Simison. [Note added April 3: We are no longer taking sign-ups for the practicum.]

I hope to see many of you there!

Lessons from Poe: Detecting the Inner Mediator

Poe is acknowledged by many as the genius who invented the detective story and inspired the genre of science fiction. Over 150 years after his death, we can still learn much from the imagination of this author and poet.

A skilled mediator is a supreme detective. The foremost, primary, and threshold mystery to solve: What method of mediation is best suited to the individual conflict professional, the parties, and the conflict. We will use an assessment approach to facilitate that first solution.

The clues a mediator must be able to read with precision involve self-awareness and self-knowledge, discovery of purpose, theory of mind (or discovering what's in the minds of other people), and razor focus on solutions, not problems. We will take our magnifying glasses to those topics and sharpen those skills.

What's science fiction have to do with mediation? Currently conflict resolution training is full of neuroscience that is fiction. We will separate the facts from the fiction and hype. We'll look at

Learn about your brain from a comic book? Yep, this one's from an artist/neuroscientist team

Soon you will be able to read a neurocomic, a book created by a comic artist and a scientist who studies the brain. Click to learn more and watch a short video (The Verge) about the forthcoming graphic novel.

More about the book in this video from The Guardian.

Mindfulness: Some benefits and brain science from Jeffrey Schwartz

A movie on mindfulness is coming out in the summer of 2013. Click to learn more about The Mindfulness Movie. Click to read the list of experts involved. One of the experts is Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz; you may watch a short interview of him here. Four other interviews on mindfulness are available here and here.

36 cites in the new edition of MINDFULNESS RESEARCH MONTHLY

From the February, 2013, edition of the monthly newsletter: 

• 17 Interventions
• 6 Associations
• 2 Methods
• 7 Reviews
• 4 Trials

47 new cites in the current edition of MINDFULNESS RESEARCH MONTHLY

From the January, 2013, edition of the monthly newsletter: 

• 17 Interventions
• 18 Associations
• 2 Methods
• 8 Reviews
• 2 Trials

5 unsolved brain mysteries: Despite many clues in neuroscience, we still don't know much about whodunnit, howdunnit, or whatdunnit

In even just a few years, we will look back at our assertions about the brain and be amused at our degree of certitude. There are many reasons people forget that we are still in neuroscience infancy: need for closure about how the world works, desire to make people behave as we want, impulse to make our client's problems easier to solve and conflicts quicker to resolve, plus many other motives. Unfortunately, we still don't know enough to accomplish more than minimally, if at all, any of those goals by using brain science.

Every so often, it is helpful to pull back on the reins of the racing, sometimes runaway, neuroscience horse. One effective rein-pulling technique is to remind ourselves of what we don't know. This morning, to remind myself of vital information we are missing, I read "Top 5 Unsolved Brain Mysteries" at howstuffworks. Excerpt:

When you compare the brain's detectives, neuroscientists, to other detectives, the neuroscientists seem to fall short in solving mysteries. After all, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple needed only about 250 pages each to get to the bottom of their cases. Ditto for Nancy Drew. ...

...

T­he workings of the brain, however, determine such fundamental questions about personhood that we may never know everything about what's going on. That doesn't mean we can't speculate, though. While we may not be able to solve these capers with clues that point to Colonel Mustard in the library with a revolver, we can dive into the current thinking on some of the brain's famous unsolved mysteries. ...

Click on over to the site to read about five mysteries: Nature versus nurture, why the brain stops functioning, sleep and dreams, memory, and consciousness.

For people who insist that we do know a lot about the brain that can be used in conflict resolution, I recommend reading Psychology's Ghosts. Don't have time to read the whole book? Then just read the chapter titled "Missing Contexts" to understand why much that is learned in the laboratory is not necessarily applicable in, or even relevant to, our world beyond the research lab.

45 cites in the new edition of MINDFULNESS RESEARCH MONTHLY

From the current edition of the monthly newsletter:

Contents

45 New Cites

15 Interventions

14 Associations

6 Methods

9 Reviews

1 Trial

Highlights

Announcements

Note: Once again, Typepad is being glitchy so I cannot indent the contents. Sorry. This periodic peskiness is getting tiring.