Brains On Purpose™

Do you have a conflict habit? A reminder of the role of values in effective conflict resolution

When a person affirms his or her deepest values, the process of conflict resolution can be easier, and often quicker. In fact, most other activities can be facilitated by affirming your values (what is called self-affirmation), whether it be running, or recharging, or writing.

However, for many of us, our habits can get in the way. We all have seen clients, friends, colleagues, and, yes, ourselves repeatedly or automatically default to a conflict mode. And, at the extreme, are behaviors such as addiction to indignation, a state that makes the resolution of a dispute very difficult. As we have discussed here before and as I talk about in my programs, those habitual behaviors, even the most extreme, can be changed and self-affirmation plays an essential role in that change.

Here's an overview of a recent talk by neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz in which he talks about habit and self-affirmation. I highly recommend reading it as a good review. Click to read "The neuroscience of habit with Dr Jeffrey Schwartz" now. He talks about the helpful role of mindfulness, too:

Jeffrey says that when you practice mindfulness, you become aware of all the nonsense going on in your mind. You can then use this observation to make judgments about what you will allow to play out in your life.

“The brain is passive, the mind is active. The mind is the choices and decisions you make. You have to use the brain and the mind as a team. The brain puts out the call, the mind decides whether to listen.”

Good to hear: Two interviews with me have made top-10 or most-listened-to lists

I am pleased to say that the interview by Zena Zumeta of me for the Texas Conflict Coach Radio Blog Show was one of The Best of 2013. The description:

Brains on Purpose: Traits and States to Shape Your Conflict Fate

Our brains are changing all the time. We can be in control of those changes or we can have accidental brains, ruled by habit. Stephanie will show you how you can break bad habits, set and reach goals, and maximize your ability to handle conflict through the process of self-directed neuroplasticity. By using some basic techniques, you can take charge of how your brain changes. You can rewire your brain on purpose.

Click to listen (the link is towards the bottom of the page).

And my interview by Dave Hilton was among the top 10 episodes of the Conflict Specialists Show. The description:

Conflict Resolution, Neuroscience & Zombies with Stephanie West Allen (Idealawg)

In this 31st episode of the Conflict Specialists Show, Dave Hilton interviews Stephanie West Allen (Idealawg & Brains on Purpose) about her work with Conflict Resolution, Neuroscience, Mediation, Monsters and…wait for it…ZOMBIES!

Some of the topics in today’s episode:

• Writing Multiple Blogs
• BOOK – Triversity Fantasy: Seven Keys To Unlock Prejudice
• Neuroscience and Conflict
• Edgar Allan Poe, Monsters and Zombies
• and more

Click to listen.

5 minutes worth watching: A dose of skepticism about benefits of meditation and value of fMRIs

Because scientists don't have a sophisticated knowledge of meditation, they have defaulted to measuring meditation expertise by the number of hours a person has practiced, says Dr. Willoughby Britton. This way of defining expert meditators is both misleading and skews research results. She then quotes the old adage: Practice does not make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect. One of problems she cites that results from this lack of understanding is the benefits of meditation are being "way over-hyped."

In this entertaining video clip, she also talks about the Blobology Effect: If we see something explained or proven by a colorful blob on a fMRI scan, we tend to think it is true, even if preposterous. The fMRI becomes a marketing opportunity, and the Blobology Effect underscores how impoverished our self-knowledge is if we need to look to technology to read how we are feeling in our minds and bodies.

The short video of caution is worth watching. Click now to view The Blobology Effect.

Note: Click to watch another recommended video of Dr. Britton, this one on happiness, habit, neuroplasticity, self-criticism, judgment of others, and attention. From the site:

In this TEDxTalk, Professor Willoughby Britton tells us that happiness is not about getting what you want. She discusses our mental qualities as habits we practice and she sheds light on an important link between neuroscience and contemplative studies.

Being mindful to changing your brain: Short videos of neuroscientist Jeff Schwartz

To view short videos of Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz talking about topics ranging from mindfulness to leadership to changing your brain (self-directed neuroplasticity), click here.

Free ebook by neuroscientist on science and compassion

From the Web site featuring the ebook:

What is the difference between empathy and compassion? Is it possible to train compassion? Can it be measured? How useful is compassion training in schools, clinical settings, and end-of-life care? Can the brain be transformed through mental training?

The free eBook: Compassion. Bridging Practice and Science by Tania Singer and Matthias Bolz describes existing secular compassion training programs and empirical research as well as the experiences of practitioners. The state-of-the-art layout of the eBook includes video clips and a selection of original sound collages by Nathalie Singer, and artistic images by Olafur Eliasson

Click to read more about the book (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences) and the story behind it (Science).

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

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?

Intense prep for law school admission test alters brain structure: So does mediating, meditating and reading this blog

This message is not new here: Our brains are changing all the time. We can be in charge of those changes, i.e., change our brains on purpose, or let life change our brains willy nilly. Who wants a willy nilly, haphazard, accidental brain?

This news release from UC Berkeley about brain changes resulting from LSAT prep reminded me of an article I had written with Jeff Schwartz about changing our brains with deliberation. We begin:

Warning: reading this article will change your brain. But so will your next phone call, your next drive home, your next worry or wish.

Not so long ago, scientists believed that by the time people were young adults, their brains were fixed, static, hard-wired. Now we know that quite the opposite is true. Every experience shifts, shapes and sculpts the brain. The synapses (connections) between the neurons (brain cells) realign as we go about our daily life.

If we decide to take control of our thinking, we have choices about that realignment. If we are passive or indifferent to our thoughts, life steps into the void and molds our brain outside our awareness.

Taking control is similar to riding a horse. ...

Click to read the rest. And click to read a post on the same topic from a while back at my other blog: Managing the blessings and burdens of thinking like a lawyer: A couple of tips.

More about our ability to change our brains for the better from the news release:

John D. E. Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research, noted that researchers in the past have shown anatomical changes in the brain from simpler tasks, such as juggling or playing a musical instrument, but not for tasks as complex and abstract as thinking or reasoning, which involve many areas of the brain.

“I think this is an exciting discovery,” he said. “It shows, with rigorous analysis, that brain pathways important for thinking and reasoning remain plastic in adulthood, and that intensive, real-life educational experience that trains reasoning also alters the brain pathways that support reasoning ability.”

Make you want to pay attention to how you're using your brain? And help your clients to pay the same attention? That's all it takes to be an attention choreographer, one of the best roles you can play in conflict resolution.

At least, that's what I think. And I think about it everyday. Because of that frequency, my brain often reinforces the value and skill of attention choreography. Want to learn more? Come to one of my attention choreography seminars. Or read past posts (e.g., these) in this blog. Or, best of all, do both!

Note: Click to read the study: "Experience-dependent plasticity in white matter microstructure: reasoning training alters structural connectivity" (Frontiers in Neuroanatomy).

Are you sure you know what you're communicating? With which beak do you speak and which ear do you hear?

According to the four-ears model of communication, when we talk we transmit four messages and, when we listen, we can hear with four different ears (thus, of course, why the model is called four-ears). I believe the number of ears and messages are more than four, but this model nevertheless can be very helpful in improving understanding.

(Click the image above to enlarge the four-ears diagram.)

The model was developed by Friedemann Schulz von Thun, who was influenced by the work of Paul Watzlawick in its creation. Schulz von Thun believed that the four messages of any communication are:

• Content (What are the facts and data I'm stating)
• Self-disclosure (What i'm revealing about myself)
• Appeal (What I'm seeking from the other person)
• Relationship (How I relate to, think about, and regard the other person)

Because there are four kinds of ears with which we can listen, and four beaks (that's what Schulz von Thun called the output part of the communication) with which we can transmit, the potential for miscommunication can be very high. In fact, if you were only to consider the single channels, any communication has 16 different combinations! My statement of a fact can be heard by any of your four ears, as can my communication of self-disclosure, appeal, and relationship.

Here's an example from Wikipedia which I have edited a bit for clarity:

The classic example of Schulz von Thun is the front-seat passenger who tells the driver: "You, the traffic lights are green". The driver will understand something different according to the ear with which he hears. With the content ear, he will understand the "fact" that the traffic lights are green. He could also understand it as "Come on, drive!" command, the appeal ear. Or in the relationship ear he could hear a helping message like "I want to help you." Or the listener may hear "I am in a hurry" [which] reveals something about the speaker--self-disclosure ear. The communication on the four layers can be meant differently and also be understood differently. So [for example,] the sender can stress the appeal of the statement and the receiver can mainly receive the relationship part of the message.

There are many communication models of which this is only one. I like using models such as this for a

How important is mindset to conflict resolution? Or to anything you do? Aging? Creating? Mediating?

What's your mindset about conflict? Those conflicts that you may be a party to and those that you work with as a conflict professional? What's your mindset about the role of a mediator? Before you answer those questions, read this good overview article about mindsets and their strong influence.

From "Intelligence and Other Stereotypes: The Power of Mindset":

Our brains never stop learning, never stop changing, never stop growing new connections and pruning unused ones. And they never stop growing stronger in those areas where we reinforce them, like a muscle that keeps strengthening with use (but atrophies with disuse), that can be trained to perform feats of strength we’d never before thought possible—indeed, that we’d never even thought to imagine.

...

Not only is intelligence not fixed, but neither are any number of abilities that we may think we either have or don’t have, be they as straightforward-seeming as math skills or as complex as musicality. Walter Mischel and Carol Dweck may have been labeled when young, but at the end, it was their attitude towards those labels and not the labels themselves that ended up determining the course of their lives.

It is a remarkable thing, the human brain.

Amen to that! Click to read the rest.

Read all about it in the New York Times: Brains on purpose = self-directed neuroplasticity

The phrase "brains on purpose" was included in a blog post this weekend published in the New York Times:

One can decide to be a more attentive and compassionate partner, mindful of the other’s motives, hurts and longings. Breaking old habits isn’t easy, since habits are deeply ingrained neural shortcuts, a way of slurring over details without having to dwell on them. Couples often choose to rewire their brains on purpose [emphasis added], sometimes with a therapist’s help, to ease conflicts and strengthen their at-one-ness.

Yes, we all can choose to rewire our brains on purpose. We've been saying that around here at this blog for a few years now. It was great fun to see the phrase in a national newspaper.

The New York Times post is a very short overview of some aspects of interpersonal neurobiology and neuroplasticity. Click here to read "The Brain on Love."

Note: (added March 27, 2012): Another article which picks up the phrase "brains on purpose": "How love goes to one’s head" (Mercator.net).

Note (added April 6, 2012): Although I don't often refer to a New Age guru, Deepak Chopra makes some good points in responding to the New York Times article and criticizing the materialist point of view: "Can Your Brain Fall in Love?" (San Francisco Chronicle). Excerpt:

Yet the basic premise of the article is problematic. She doesn't crudely claim that your brain is in love and therefore you are, too. (We suppose that's why the article is titled "The Brain on Love' rather than "The Brain in Love"). But at bottom it's still the standard materialist argument, bolstered by tons of data from neuroimaging, which fails to separate brain from mind. When a person experiences love, the brain registers and expresses that experience through electrical and chemical reactions, the way a radio playing music registers and plays every note that Mozart wrote. But the brain isn't in love any more than the radio is enjoying music.