This is your lawyer brain on blogs

In their post "Brain of the Blogger" at Eide Neurolearning Blog Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide contemplate the effects blogging may have on our brains.

Why ask this question? The primary reason can be found in one of the central tenets of modern neuroscience: "The neurons that fire together, wire together." What this basically means is that our mental activities actually cause changes in the structures of our brains--not only what we think, but how we think as well.

(In an earlier post I discussed this brain changing.)

Given such activity-directed change, it always makes sense to ask whenever large numbers of people start using their brains in new and different ways, what effects these new activities are likely to have on brain structure and function. Blogging, which only seems to be accelerating in popularity, is a prime candidate for such investigation.

The Eides exercised my brain with the following conclusions. Be sure to click over to "Brain of the Blogger" to read much more about each of these five points. What they have written is well worth the click.

1. Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.

2. Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.

3. Blogs promote analogical thinking.

4. Blogging is a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information.

5. Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.

In conclusion, it looks as if blogging will be very good for our brains.

I found the Eides by following a link at neo-neocon. The blogger guesses that bloggers are high in ideaphoria, the rate at which ideas flow into a person's mind. Since lawyers often score high in ideaphoria (or idea productivity as it is called by Highlands), blogging may be a particularly good match for our profession.

[T]he sheer volume of output necessary with blogging, the need to post very frequently, does mean that we must write--if not thoughtlessly--then quickly and unhesitatingly. In fact, I think the hallmark of bloggers is the ability to come up with a wide variety of ideas per hour (iph).

I had to smile when I read what neo-neocon wrote about her collection of paper scraps.

My home, my car, my purse, my countertops, my drawers--all are littered with little scraps of paper on which are written sentence fragments, notes for posts I haven't written yet. My guess is that that is true of most bloggers.

Do other bloggers have this collection? I do. Not only do I accumulate the scraps but I e-mail myself with ideas. I also have a number of partially written posts containing idea skeletons just waiting for their flesh. My ideaphoria/idea productivity score: the 90th percentile.

neo-neocon continues writing about bloggers with high ideaphoria.

The generation of ideas is probably relatively easy for them.

But after the idea production comes much more.

It's finding the good ones, and fleshing them out with thoughts and well-reasoned argument, as well as doing the research that backs it all up, that's the hard part.

And that process requires skills and abilities in addition to high ideaphoria.

Looks like the complete evolution of a blog post is good for your brain. Why don't you jump on your mental treadmill right now and blog? Blogging effectively prevents neuro-flab.

Note (added 11:11 AM Mountain): Take a look at how various occupations score on ideaphoria.

Comments

[Sharon Lippincott]

Stephanie -- Thanks for the great post. Nice to know that my blogging is keeping my brain young, right along with all those crossword puzzles.

This post and the item it links to spur me to postulate that the self-analysis done during writing life stories and memoirs also rearranges neural connections. Research has already demonstrated that the act of remembering an event restructures the memory of the event by incorporating traces of the occasion upon which it was remembered. Following this line of thinking we could actually redesign our pasts by remembering them in structured ways. Is this scary or exciting? Take your pick!

[ellenweber]

What hopeful news -- no wonder some of us like blogging so well. Thanks for your thoughtful ideas here, Stephanie!

Brain Based Business

[Eileen van Ravenswaay]

I just started blogging, and after I sent an email to my friend Sharon about how wonderfully absorbing it is, she sent me the link to your blog.

Ideaphoria is a new term for me. It's nice to have a better word for my favorite state of mind. Heretofore, I thought of this mind state as instrinsic motivation to learn. But ideaphoria gives a much better sense of the feeling that produces instrinsic motivation.

I bet most bloggers are high on ideaphoria. And I bet that blogging promotes a state of ideaphoria.

So I wonder if blogging would help students experience ideaphoria, which in turn, would promote their intrinsic motivation to learn.

In addition to the Eid's blog, do you know about any other research on technologies or environments that encourage the development of ideaphoria? Is it simply innate or learned?

Thanks for your very stimulating blog. I will recommend it to all my ideaphoria friends.

[StephanieWestAllen]

Hello, Eileen, and thanks so much for posting. You may enjoy taking a look at http://www.trackknacks.com as you will find there more nformation about ideaphoria. I will be adding in the future, too.

Ideaphoria is the number of, or speed at which, new ideas come to a person. It does not have anything to do with the quality of the ideas. The hunger to learn may come from other factors such as values or being high subjective/specialist (see TrackKnacks for more about that).

(A thought: you might enjoy the chapter on giftedness in the Eids' new book The Mislabeled Child .)

Not sure if ideaphoria is innate or learned but we can say that a person's ideaphoria score is hard-wired at about the age of 15 and does not change much after that. I suspect given what we know about neuroplasticity that you can promote ideaphoria in a child.

Ideaphoria in high levels is both a gift and a burden. I am in the process of writing a book and much of it will address the challenge of high ideaphoria and how to harness it.

Please do send your High I friends! I would love to "meet" them. Again, thanks.

[Kevin McGrew]

Ideaphoria, as you folks are calling it, refers to a collection of narrow cognitive abilities under the broad CHC (Cattell-Horn-Carroll Theory of Cognitive Abilities) domain of Gr (idea production) or Glr (long-term storage and retrieval). More information can be found at http://www.iapsych.com/chcdef.htm. Look under the domain of Glr for the various "fluency" cognitive abilities, esp. idea production (FI).

[StephanieWestAllen]

Thanks for the comment, Kevin. That link did not work for me. The test for ideaphoria comes from the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation. They have several labs around the US and have been testing since the early 1900s. The same assessment for ideaphoria is used by AIMS and Highlands Ability Battery. You would need to check with the researchers to see if what you are talking about is the same as what we measure. I hesitate to draw any conclusions as people often will try to draw parallels without having extensive knowledge of the two tests they are comparing; I don't want to do that. Again, thanks.