idealawg

The recounting of your life story is as much as process as a product: Why I won't use the fill-in-the-blank books

Each time I hear of someone giving his or her parent or grandparent one of those memory books titled something like My Father or My Grandmother, with blanks to fill in by writing responses to questions about the past, I cringe.

What a sad, simplistic way to remember a life. Telling one's story is best done in an interactive, flowing, improvisational process: Listening, asking, telling, silence. What a constricting, excluding notion of audience, too. The person doing the remembering is so much more than a parent or grandparent, and learning about his or her journey through life can benefit so many, both those alive and those yet to be born. What a strange notion about the result of remembering one's life. A filled-up, fill-in-the-blank book? The telling has so many more benefits than creating a tangible artifact.

The benefits of telling about one's life are as much for the teller as for any audience. Over the past few decades, I often have seen firsthand those benefits accruing to the storyteller.

Since 1996, I have been very lucky to teach courses in life story writing (which, of course, included the speaking and the telling of the stories, too). In working with people, I have seen over and over and over that the process of recalling life is rich and moving. Never did I teach a class in which there were not at least a few tears and many smiles.

Those grandparent-memory books remove the richness of the interaction and the depth of the slow telling and retelling. Filling in the blanks creates a static skeleton—at best—but life stories and memoirs are hearts, guts, breathing, soul, pauses, repeats, and telling a memory more than once, each time with a change.

What are the benefits of telling one's story? I count among my friends and colleagues several people who are professional life story teachers and storytellers, and I put that question to them this week. Below are their answers, mixed in with mine. I have only edited a bit for clarity and have used the masculine pronoun throughout. My friends explain in their own voices the benefits of a senior member of a family telling his story . . .

Podcast with author of RAINY BRAIN SUNNY BRAIN (one of my favorite books)

This short interview of Professor Elaine Fox is for all the people to whom I have recommended her book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: How to Retrain Your Brain to Overcome Pessimism and Achieve a More Positive Outlook. She gives a short overview of one of the best books I've read this year. For those to whom I have recommended the book, perhaps this will be the motivation to read the book—if you haven't already. Click to listen (Guardian).

Bonus: She mentions a study with law students.

What's your online life's role in your stress level? Dr. Whybrow answers

Happy to hear that Dr. Peter Whybrow has another book coming out. For a taste of what he'll cover, take a look at this interview from Pacific Standard. From "Manic Nation: Dr. Peter Whybrow Says We’re Addicted to Stress":

“The computer is electronic cocaine for many people,” says UCLA’s Peter Whybrow. “Our brains are wired for finding immediate reward.” Which is why we can’t stop.

...

“Many of the usual constraints that prevented people from doing things 24 hours a day—like distance and darkness—were falling away,” says Whybrow. Our fast new lives reminded him of the symptoms of clinical mania: excitement over acquiring new things, high productivity, fast speech—followed by sleep loss, irritability, and depression.

Whybrow believes the physiological consequences of this modern mania are dramatic, contributing to epidemic rates of obesity, anxiety, and depression. In his forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Intuitive Mind: Common Sense for the Common Good, Whybrow explores how to repair the damage. “Why is it that we’ve been railroaded down this path of continuous stimulation and can’t seem to control ourselves?” he wonders. “Why can’t we just stop?”

“The good news,” he goes on, “is that we are now beginning to understand it from the perspective of brain science.”

Click to read the rest.

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Does the billable hour play tricks with your mind?

We've looked before at how the billable hour can affect your brain, and how the effect can be akin to self-induced obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Click to read that post. But are there other ways the billable hour unconsciously affects you? Does it make time go slower or faster? Or sometimes the former, sometimes the latter? If the billable hour does play tricks with your sense of the passage of time, you may find some clues as to why in this article.

From "Every second counts" (The Independent):

Time is of the essence. Time heals all wounds. Time flies when you're having fun...

The platitudes exist because they represent broad, if scientifically unproven, notions that time is elastic. Time does seem to fly by when we're having fun. Likewise, it stretches out ad infinitum when we're willing it to zip past and deliver us with birthdays, Christmas Day or that longed-for holiday.

But how often do we examine the many nuances of our relationship with time? It is a construct, after all. ... Yet we rely on (and obsess about) timekeeping, time-saving and the rate at which we gobble it up.

There have been endless studies into time perception, whether or not time ticks away faster at altitude or whether there is any physical basis for the universal conclusion that time moves more slowly when we are children and speeds up as we grow older. Nobody knows the amount of time they will live in their lives and yet we claim time as our own, demand more, and feel cheated when we lose it.

Claudia Hammond ... has a better understanding than most of the ways that our perspectives on time can be morphed, manipulated and played with.

Click to read the rest.

Note: Related post: "How do you really know what time it is?" (io9). Excerpt:

What they've discovered is that your brain is one of the least accurate time measurement devices you'll ever use. And it's also the most powerful.

...

[C]locks may well be humankind's oldest brain-enhancing technology. They allow our brains to experience something we never could without machines: Objective time.

 

Effects of wealth on increase in educational achievement of kids must be indirect and accrue over time

Click to read a very interesting interview of cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham. From "Why Does Family Wealth Affect Learning?" (American Educator):

Question: Why do wealthy kids usually do better in school than poor kids?

Answer: Disadvantaged children face a host of challenges to academic success. These challenges fall into two broad categories. First, as one might expect, wealthier parents have the resources to provide more and better learning opportunities for their children. Second, children from poorer homes are subject to chronic stress, which research from the last 10 years has shown is more destructive to learning than was previously guessed. But research also shows it’s not all about money.

"Common knowledge" does not always turn out to be true, especially in matters relating to schooling. But when it comes to wealth and educational outcomes, common knowledge has it right: on average, kids from wealthy families do significantly better than kids from poor families. Household wealth is associated with IQ1 and school achievement, and that phenomenon is observed to varying degrees throughout the world. Household wealth is associated with the likelihood of a child graduating from high school and attending college. With a more fine-grained analysis, we see associations with wealth in more basic academic skills like reading achievement6 and math achievement. And the association with wealth is still observed if we examine even more basic cognitive processes such as phonological awareness, or the amount of information the child can keep in working memory (which is the mental “space” in which thinking occurs), or the extent to which the child can regulate his emotions and thought processes.

But these effects are not due to household income alone. In fact, it’s unlikely that they are directly due to income at all. Imagine showering cash on a low-income family; there will not be a sudden boost to the children’s cognition or academic achievement. The effects of wealth must be indirect and must accrue over time.

Indeed, researchers believe that a useful way to conceive of the impact of wealth is that it provides access to opportunities. Money is an obvious enabler of opportunities: cash buys books, and summer enrichment camps, and access to tutoring if it’s needed. But in addition to financial capital, two other types of capital afford opportunities for children: Human capital refers to the skills or knowledge of individuals, usually based on their education and experience. Parents who have a good deal of human capital in the form of education will, in subtle and overt ways, impart their knowledge to their children. Social capital refers to beneficial connections in social networks, such as ties to people with financial or human capital. Parents with a lot of social capital might have friends or relatives who can provide helpful summer internships for their child, or they might be more likely to have well-placed friends who can advocate for their child if he has a problem at school.

Naturally, we’d expect financial, human, and social capital to be related. ...

Click to read the rest.

How juries and other people decide: Law prof collaborates with interdisciplinary group

Click to read "Three-year decision-making collaboration results in 85 publications, and more" (ChronicleOnline):

By Susan Kelley
Three years ago, Valerie Hans, professor of law, applied to participate in a Cornell project that would bring together social scientists working on how people make decisions. Her goal was to better understand how juries make decisions about damage awards -- an area that lacked a theoretical framework. "But it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams," Hans said.

That's just one success story coming out Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences' 2009-12 theme project "Judgment, Decision Making and Social Behavior." A dozen professors spanning economics, psychology, government, law, policy analysis and management, human development, and business shared office space and met weekly to advance research on decision-making.

Hans and Valerie Reyna, professor of human development and of psychology, for example, applied Reyna's model of general decision-making to how juries decide to award damages. "I've presented it to legal audiences, and there's a lot of interest in it," Hans said. "To have a theoretical model that's enriched by the kinds of new knowledge about economics and psychology that we were able to learn from our colleagues in the group was really fantastic." The pair has also co-written a scholarly article and applied to Cornell for a small grant to test the model, she added.

...

Research by economists and psychologists on how people make decisions is an area that has exploded with scholarly work in recent years, but Cornell is one of the few universities where top-flight economists and psychologists are talking to each other about such research, ... .

Click to read the rest of the article.

You may attend my teleseminar next week if you acquire a guest PIN in advance

I am pleased to be giving a teleseminar for the membership of the Purposeful Planning Institute on May 1. The organization has been kind enough to let me invite you to attend. However, you must get a guest PIN in advance by e-mailing Julie Dorosz. There are still spaces available.

A description of the program:

Title: When Somebody Loves You, It's No Good Unless S/he Loves You ALL the Way

Date: Tuesday, May 1st

Time: Noon ET (90 Minutes)

Guest Speaker: Stephanie West Allen, JD

Description: Everything from a thought to a business to a conflict has an ALL: Ancestry, Life, Legacy. If we don't pay attention to ALL three chapters of time, we may make some misguided decisions. A chALLenge in telling the ALL stories is that they change with each retelling. So what's "true"? Perhaps the truth doesn't matter. How we relate to the stories as they are modified with time and remolded in our brains is the key.

Using conflict as an example, we will look at:

• How malleable our memories are
• How to apply CARVE to disputes (Curiosity, Attention, Reflection, Values, Emergence)
• How our relationship with our stories and thus our ability to resolve disputes can be improved by some basic knowledge of how the brain works and a higher level of self-awareness

Introduction to our Guest Speaker

Stephanie West Allen, JD, practiced law in California for several years, held offices in local bar associations, and wrote chapters for California Continuing Education of the Bar. While in CA, Stephanie completed a number of five-day mediation training programs, including several with the Center for Mediation in Law, and a two-year intensive with Center co-founder Gary Friedman. She has been a mediator for over two and one-half decades.

While in law school, she took many courses in Santa Clara University's School of Counseling Psychology.

Stephanie has consulted with lawyers and law firms for many years, and spent a number of years as lawyer training director at a large firm. ...

Click to read the rest of the description.

Accidental brain or brain on purpose? The choice is yours

The last sentence of this article describing a new research paper is a good definition of "brains on purpose," the name of my other blog. From "Changing brains for the better; article documents benefits of multiple practices" (University of Wisconsin news release):

"Rather than think of the brain as a static organ, or one that just degenerates with age, it's better understood as an organ that is constantly reshaping itself, is being continuously influenced, wittingly or not, by the forces around us," says Davidson, author of the new book "The Emotional Life of Your Brain." "We can take responsibility for our own brains. They are not pawns to external influences; we can be more pro-active in shaping the positive influences on the brain." [color added, of course]

Here's the abstract of "Social influences on neuroplasticity: stress and interventions to promote well-being" (Nature Neuroscience), the article described in the press release:

Experiential factors shape the neural circuits underlying social and emotional behavior from the prenatal period to the end of life. These factors include both incidental influences, such as early adversity, and intentional influences that can be produced in humans through specific interventions designed to promote prosocial behavior and well-being. Here we review important extant evidence in animal models and humans. Although the precise mechanisms of plasticity are still not fully understood, moderate to severe stress appears to increase the growth of several sectors of the amygdala, whereas the effects in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex tend to be opposite. Structural and functional changes in the brain have been observed with cognitive therapy and certain forms of meditation and lead to the suggestion that well-being and other prosocial characteristics might be enhanced through training.

A brain-friendly way to present information: Learning Bursts

If you're involved in training or teaching, you've probably already heard of Learning Bursts; the method has been the topic of lots of articles and blog posts. Bursts are brain-friendly learning for several reasons, two of which I will mention today.

First, learners are using the information in several ways so the chances of remembering the information is increased. Each method is what I call a Synapse Supporter* and the more of them you use, the more likely you are to create new and lasting neuronal pathways, new synapses. In other words, use of multiple methods of interacting with the information increases the changes of learning and remembering what has been learned. I call it the hybrid vigor of learning.

Second, Learning Bursts are consistent with the 10-Minute Rule. Brain scientist John Medina says about the Rule:

Before the first quarter-hour is over in a typical presentation, people usually have checked out. If keeping someone’s interest in a lecture were a business, it would have an 80 percent failure rate. What happens at the 10-minute mark to cause such trouble? Nobody knows. The brain seems to be making choices according to some stubborn timing pattern, undoubtedly influenced by both culture and gene.

Now on to the Learning Burst. What is it? Learners listen to an audio of about 10 minutes, then read just a few workbook pages, next write about how they'll apply the content they listened to and read, and finally use the material via a case study or simulation. Click to read more about the method (ASTD).

I think for variation that the last two steps following the taking in of the material through listening and reading can be any of several methods of interacting with the material. For some ideas, take a look at the list of Synapse Supporters below. Let me know what you create.

Do your clients worship you? Or perhaps you annoy them? Maybe this is happening

Professor Susan Daicoff posted on a listserv about legal education this link to a YouTube. The talk on the video is about transference and counter-transference. The speaker Dr. Ellie Izzo recently gave a similar presentation to law students at Arizona State University. Good information for lawyers and mediators, don't you think?

Note: Where did she get that jacket? I want one.