Brains On Purpose™

Upcoming conference has several workshops that will likely be of interest to mediators

Looks like an excellent conference next July in Vancouver. Some of the presentations being given at Brain Development & Learning: Making Sense of the Science:

• “The Human Mind and the Social World: Implicit Biases are Learned and can be Unlearned” - Mahzarin Banaji, PhD
• “Thinking Across Cultures: What’s Variable, What’s Universal, and Implications for a Culturally Diverse World” - Ara Norenzayan, PhD
• “Optimizing instruction: How we learn versus how we think we learn” - Robert Bjork, PhD
• “Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and Love: Implications for Mental Health and Mental Illness” - Sue Carter, PhD
• “Creativity and Flow: Making Life and Learning more Enjoyable” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD
• “The Challenges of Intergroup Interaction: Enhancing Trust for Better Intergroup Relations” - John (Jack) Dovidio, PhD
• “Mindfulness-based Stress and Pain Reduction (MBSR)” - Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD

The brain for non-scientists: A 75-minute lesson in 12 short segments

Want to learn about

• Plasticity
• Imaging/Development
• Vision
• Hearing
• Motor System
• Language
• Music
• And more?

Then take a look at Changing Brains, a Web site created by University of Oregon. Click on "Watch Online" to see the videos that will give you information about your brain. Click on "References" for a list of readings. Clicking on "Resources" will take you to a long list of links. Thanks, U of Oregon.

Read more about the videos in "All About the Brain, in Just 75 Minutes" (Newswise):

It is the consistency of room-temperature butter, fits easily into two outstretched hands and contains a galaxy's worth of neurons. It is the human brain and the focus of a DVD -- "Changing Brains: Effects of Experience on Human Development" -- produced at the University of Oregon.
Did you ever wonder how everything we know, feel, and think is wired in this delicate organ? Did you ever wonder how children’s experiences shape their brain? Answers to these questions and more can be found the 75-minute program created for parents, teachers, caregivers, policymakers and anyone else interested in the mysteries of the brain.

Students, faculty and staff in the UO's Brain Development Lab produced the content for DVD, which is geared for non-scientists. There are 12 segments, including nine specific topics, all presented in mostly everyday language. ...

"The central theme of our production is that virtually every aspect of the development of the human brain and the sensory, cognitive, social and emotional skills that it supports is dependent on and shaped by experience -- input from our environment," said Helen Neville, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and holder of the Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair at the UO. "Every statement that is made in this DVD is supported by evidence from scientific studies."

The program begins with an introduction that describes the human brain, the central role it plays in human functioning, its fragility and the methods used to study its structure and function. Also detailed are mechanisms that allow experience to shape the brain's development. Its architecture is likened to a house: structurally sound if built appropriately or weak and subject to collapse if not.

Using the arts in conflict resolution: Some more pieces of the puzzle?

As regular readers know, I explore the use in dispute resolution of playing and making music, drawing, and other activities that access parts of our brains and minds not typically reached through usual conversation and negotiation. Whether these neural regions facilitate resolution has been researched a little (see, for example, studies here) and supported often anecdotally.

A new book will likely provide some helpful information about the arts and the brain. I relish the thought of devouring such a book. The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts was reviewed in a press release from the News Center of University of Buffalo.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- In a groundbreaking new book, "The Neural Imagination" (2009, University of Texas Press), Irving Massey, PhD, explores the relevance of neuroscience to the study of the arts.

Subtitled "Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts," the book is concerned with the emergence and significance of neuroaesthetics, an alliance born of the recent and rapid convergence of art and technology.

"I undertook to write the book," the author says, "to allay fears in artists and audiences alike that brain science, in its ability to cite parts of the brain excited by dissonance, for instance, or to describe novelty in terms of neural trauma, may 'explain away' the arts."

Massey is professor emeritus of English and comparative literature and adjunct emeritus professor of French at the University at Buffalo, and the author of 10 noted books and scores of articles and reviews, in which he has often employed brain science to explore the work of specific artists.

"I am interested in how certain features of art are clarified by neuroscientific inquiry," he says, citing research that explores neural electrical activity that carries codes through which we experience our environment, and identifies the very neurons that respond to beauty as such.

This book's novel contribution to our understanding of esthetic experiences at the neurological level, however, lies in its combination of scientific and humanistic approaches and the author's full understanding of how each augments the other.

Massey explores the minds of such artists as Ravel, whose brain lesions helped to localize constituent elements of artistic production, and Stravinsky, whose use of dramatically unfamiliar asymmetries, polytonalities and primitive polyrhythms in "Rite of Spring" may have -- it has been speculated – over-stimulated listeners' neurons, provoking schizophrenic symptoms and the infamous riots that met its initial performance.

In these pages, too, appear Rousseau, Schubert (and his trout), England's greatest living travel writer (Paddy Fermor), Gerard Manley Hopkins' inscapes, Visconti and Fellini, Shakespeare, Proust and countless other visual, literary and musical artists whose work and/or neurological enhancements or detriments have contributed richly to our understanding of how neuroaesthetic processes operate.

But Massey is not interested only in the fascinating aspects of

Are you promoting yawning in your mediations? If not, you may want to rethink that

Yawning can affect the way we interact with each other. Read what neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg has to say about that mouth-opened-wide action. From "Yawn: It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain" (Penn Gazette):

Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy. One of those areas is the precuneus, a tiny structure hidden within the folds of the parietal lobe. According to researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London, the precuneus appears to play a central role in consciousness, self-reflection, and memory retrieval. The precuneus is also stimulated by yogic breathing, which helps explain why different forms of meditation contribute to an increased sense of self-awareness. It is also one of the areas hardest hit by age-related diseases and attention deficit problems, so it’s possible that deliberate yawning may actually strengthen this important part of the brain.

For these reasons I believe that yawning should be integrated into exercise and stress reduction programs, cognitive and memory enhancement training, psychotherapy, and contemplative spiritual practice. And, because the precuneus has recently been associated with the mirror-neuron system in the brain (which allows us to resonate to the feelings and behaviors of others), yawning may even help us to enhance social awareness, compassion, and effective communication with others.

Now are you going to invite yawns to your next conflict resolution event?

Want to know a brain? Don't take it out of context

Brains are changing all the time (when I think of neuroplasticity—brain changing—I sometimes imagine the brain as a verb instead of a noun), and that changing is not in isolation.  Brain changes are facilitated by social interactions such as a dispute, as well as by interactions with the non-people environment and the culture. To highlight the fact that the brain is not a lone ranger, I included "Ensemble" ("all the parts of a thing considered together") in my CARVE Disputes Model™. To think of the brain by itself can lead to some conclusions that are not useful.

If you are interested in how the brain dances with its surroundings, you might want to follow the field of cultural neuroscience. I have for you an article that gives an overview of that discipline. From "The cultural neuroscience of person perception" (Progress in Brain Research) [pdf]:

It seems unassailable at this point that the adult human brain is a place where plasticity is the norm, not the exception. This is a point that has startled some neuroscientists and psychologists, who have generally privileged anatomical and functional fixity. As one neuroscientist said, writing in Science: ‘‘If the neural systems used for a given task can change with 15 min of practice ... how can we any longer separate organic structures from their experience in the organism’s history?’’ The field of cultural neuroscience should answer with a resounding: we cannot! [footnotes removed]

The authors go on to mention the lone-ranger versus dancing-with-environment approach to the brain.

The epistemological stripping of the brain from its environment, social context, culture, and ecology — a notion that pervades the fields of psychology and neuroscience — has provided major challenges for the emergence of a research field dedicated to the study of the interactions between brain and culture, between the neural and the ecological. We hope that by studying how the brain and culture interact, the burgeoning field of cultural neuroscience can move beyond these dichotomies and provide novel insights into psychological processes. This is especially true for the cultural neuroscience of social perception, given the dynamic and interactive nature of perceiving and interacting with others.

Certainly cultural neuroscience will give us good information about minds and brains in conflict with other minds and brains. I will be watching.

Bonus: Here's research by the authors of the above article about what happens in our brains when we interact with someone from our outgroup versus our ingroup. This second article "The Neural Origins of Superficial and Individuated Judgments About Ingroup and Outgroup Members" (Human Brain Mapping) [pdf] cites and is consistent with Jason Mitchell's research I posted about in Brains of a feather: What brains do when thinking about someone in the ingroup versus someone in the outgroup.

Next week watch for posts from the NeuroLeadership Summit

I will be attending the NeuroLeadership Summit next week at UCLA. The list of scheduled speakers is excellent and includes Marco Iacoboni, Daniel Siegel, Matthew Lieberman, Jonah Lehrer, Yi-Yuan Tang, and Jeffrey Schwartz, all of whom I have blogged about at least once either here or at idealawg. Take a look at the program [pdf] and you will see why I am looking forward to hearing many of the speakers.

From the Summit, I will be blogging about the talks I attend and looking at the implications of each for conflict resolution.

And I will finally get to meet fellow ADR blogger Vickie Pynchon. She's not attending the Summit but we will be having dinner together. I am looking forward to both good conversation and fun! Scott Rogers is another person I will be meeting for the first time. He and I have spoken on the phone for many hours so I know that time with him will be thought-provoking and laugh-filled. Good things come in threes. I will be seeing Cinnie Noble again; I have had many good conversations with her, too. It will be nice to have both Scott and Cinnie at the Summit.

And, if course, it is always a remarkable event to see Jeff Schwartz. I have not seen him in a while so am looking forward to doing so.

Why it's brain-friendly to clarify ideas through images

I have before urged you to make images a part of the conflict resolution process. Here's a TED video on why images assist in good communication. From the Web page of this video of Tom Wujec:

Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?

The video is only 6 and 1/2 minutes long. And the presenter is a good speaker. Watching will be a good—and short—break for you.

On another note: Click to see the interview I posted today at idealawg of Sue Smalley, founder of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.

Want to communicate well in mediation? Here are a couple of tips for you

One of my favorite books about the brain and how we take in information is by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham. The book has a memorable title: Why Don't Students Like School?. (In April, I blogged about the book before reading it and linked to a review in the Wall Street Journal.)

What does learning, the focus of the book, have to do with conflict resolution? The two are inextricably bound together. As I said in a post about a year and one-half ago:

Resolving conflict typically requires our learning much, including the parties' positions, interests, and stories. Growing as a conflict professional requires that we be learning about ourselves, too, both in the room and away from sessions. We are not the only ones who need to be learning: When parties are able to move towards resolution, they too have learned. Learning causes changes of both brain and mind. ...

Today I saw an interview of Willingham about Why Don't Students Like School in USA Today. It holds a couple of tips that can be helpful to us here. First, for those still thinking we need to communicate, teach, and persuade by using the visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles:

Q: Ninety percent of people think they're either a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner. What does that mean? And why do you say that they are wrong?

A: The idea is that people have different ways of learning the same material, or learning styles. A visual learner understands and remembers better by seeing, an auditory learner by hearing, and a kinesthetic learner by touching and manipulating. This idea has been tested repeatedly in the last 50 years and it doesn't work. People differ in their abilities and in their interests, but there is no evidence for differences in learning styles.

Second, here's advice on one excellent way to get information understood: Use stories! We already knew that (some posts at idealawg) but here's a reaffirmation by Willingham:

Stories draw us in (and are easy to remember) because they constantly pose small, solvable mental problems that invite us to interpret the action and predict what will happen next: Why is Scarlett marrying Charles when she doesn't love him? How will E.T. get home?

A bonus of storytelling: Stories hook our curiosity and thus have the potential to calm us down. Click to read about the relationship between curiosity and anxiety. (That's one of the reasons I include curiosity as the "C" in my CARVE Disputes Model™.)

Have you told a story today?

Note: Interview about storytelling in the practice of law.

Your Brain at Work: Web site with lots of neuroscience resources and information

Click on over to http://yourbrainatwork.org/ to explore this resource-rich Web site brought to us by the Dana Foundation. Plan to spend a while; there's much to be found at the site.

Why use metaphors in conflicts? Because understanding is remembering in disguise

General Eisenhower to soldier: "Sarge, give me an assessment of the military situation."
Soldier: "Sir, picture a doughnut. We're the hole."
Quoted in Metaphorically Selling

The brain considers new information from the point of view of what it already knows and remembers, so the use of good metaphors is an effective way to communicate. Metaphors facilitate getting your message across in every area of your life, including dispute resolution. Those who have been reading my posts here for a while know that I have recommended metaphor use in the past; I am a metaphor advocate.

Here's what Anne Miller author of Metaphorically Selling has to say:

A metaphor is simply a way of communicating. It's a shortcut to instant understanding. Think of it as a mental equation in which something is compared to something else. Metaphors make complex and unfamiliar things or ideas simple and familiar to the listener, because they compare the unknown to what the listener already knows and accepts.

...

Information + Metaphor = "I see what you mean!"

Dr. Daniel Willingham puts it this way in Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. (The title of the section from which I have taken this excerpt is "Understanding Is Remembering in Disguise;" a great way to encapsulate the value of metaphor!)

[We] understand new ideas (things [we] don't know) by relating them to old ideas (things [we] do know). ...

...

The fact that we understand new ideas by relating them to things we already know helps us to understand some principles that are familiar to every teacher [and many skillful negotiators and mediators]. One principle is the usefulness of analogies.

Analogies and metaphors are cousins, both drawing similarities between two different things. Both can assist in understanding. Are you a user?

I know you use analogies everyday. Some examples from Metaphorically Selling:

• "Chew on an idea
• "Plow" through your work
• Return a "mountain" of phone messages
• Check your "inbox" emails
• "Surf" the web
• "Iron out the wrinkles in a speech
• "Mine" data

And are you using them in helping clients to resolve conflict? They're a good way to grease the mediation wheels. (Nah, I don't like that one either. Please suggest something better.)

Another BonP blog post on metaphors: Jell-O without whipped cream? Rhumba without rhythm? A joke without a punch line? Mediation without metaphor?.

Note (added November 11, 2009): Blog post from Mediation's Place: The Power of Metaphors.

Jell-O without whipped cream? Rhumba without rhythm? A joke without a punch line? Mediation without metaphor?

The brain seeks patterns, looking at new information to see how that information fits with what it already knows and has experienced. It can be pretty sloppy and lazy in its assessment, too. That is why it is very important when communicating, to connect with something already in the brain of the other person. If there is no connection, your message will likely be distorted or discarded.

A good way to connect with something already in the brain is the use of metaphors. I often recommend an excellent book for learning how to craft good metaphors (thus greatly increasing the chances of getting any type of message heard clearly): Metaphorically Selling. Skill at creating metaphors on the spot can be one of your best communication strategies in and outside of conflict situations.

I subscribe to the monthly e-newsletter published by the book's author Anne Miller. In the most recent edition, she, of course, wrote about about some metaphors.

Jerry Bader of MRPwebmedia wants to transform company websites so that their messages rise above the sea of boredom common to most of them. Does he attempt to persuade you by lecturing? No. Does he dump mind-numbing statistics on you to prove his points? No. Clever man, he engages with metaphors. Below is an excerpt from one of his articles.

I will include the whole Bader article below as it contains several examples of metaphors that work, don't you think? The article could use some copyediting but don't let that distract you.

"A Website Without Video Is Like… "

Do you like Jell-O? It's Okay I guess; I mean it's not a hot fudge sundae is it? But if you add a little whip cream, then my friend you've got something worth calling dessert. My question to you is, does your website have that something extra, that dollop of whip cream on top that says, "oh mama let me at it," or does it just lie there squirming in your dish with the sound of Peggy Lee's voice ringing in your ears, "is that all there is?"

Images can help you paint a bright resolution to conflict

Western societies have largely lost the ability to think in images rather than words.
-Ian Robertson

Each day, I am amazed at the brain power that is lost when we focus solely on words; I now am using hand-drawn images more and more for:

• problem-solving
• thought clarification
• communication
• memory enhancement.

For a couple of years, since reading neuroscientist Dr. Ian Robertson's Opening the Mind's Eye: How Images and Language Teach Us How To See, I have been increasingly convinced through many experiences that including both words and images enhances processes such as the four listed above.

Now it looks as if more and more people are coming to the same conclusion and practicing brain enhancement by image or drawing. Take a look at some of these links and excerpts below before discarding the idea of drawing pictures (and lots of them!) in your dispute resolution.

Over at idealawg, I posted about the new book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam. Roam's book about the value of using images in business has been in the top 200 at Amazon since it came out. Seems I am not the only one who found the book to be an excellent book, offering practical advice on using pictures—and explaining why you would want to incorporate images. A couple of articles about the book . . .

From "Doodling for Profit" (Business Week):

In a corporate landscape awash with slick computer presentations, charts, graphs, and logos, some managers still utilize an age-old tool for business problem solving: the hand-drawn doodle. Whether sketched on a legal pad or drawn on a whiteboard, a doodle has the power to humanize the abstract and simplify the complex. It's a way to add humor into a dry topic. And, when doodles are used in meetings with colleagues and clients, it's a way to pull people into the process of solving a problem.

The author of "Pictures aid communication, book argues" (Miami Herald) writes:

. . .I think the very act of trying to come up with the right images forces the presenter to break things down into the most important and meaningful components, which is a very good way to get a point across, irrespective of the chosen medium.  . . .[A]s a way to get attention and disrupt the status quo and penetrate defenses, simple imagery is deceptively potent and effective.

Here's the "lost chapter" of the book: "The 10-1/2 Commandments of Visual Thinking." (pdf)

Best-selling author Dan Pink's new book (book's Web site) uses lots of images: it's a comic book! (Or manga to be exact.) Howard Zinn's newest title is in comic format, too. The graphic novel genre is growing in popularity and acceptance.

Pictures are great teachers. I was happy to see that I am in good