Working in Movement

I won't be adding much, if any, content to this blog. You can find my further blogging adventures here.

I was just reading about some new research when the cat jumped onto my desk and distracted me. Then the phone rang, new email arrived, and I decided to update my RSS feed reader with the latest news. It was a while before I got back to the research.

Kind of ironic because the research deals with how aging effects how easily we get distracted. Why the Aging Mind is Driven to Distraction describes the study done at the University of Toronto and the Rotman Research Institute, and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The researchers put forth the idea that aging, starting at about 40, interrupts a balance between two brain regions dealing with attention span.

"It's known that older adults are more easily distracted. We think we've found a mechanism in the brain to explain this," (lead researcher Cheryl L.) Grady said. "The functional changes are detectable by middle age."

Maybe so. But what about the role of learning and environment in all this? Even Grady concedes that learning might have something to do with it.

Grady, however, suggested that people in their 20s today — their brains molded by instant messaging and all of the other high-technology of the short attention span — may be better able to manage unwarranted interruptions when they reach old age.

"If you are a 20-year-old today," Grady said, "you may find it easier to deal with distraction when you are 60 because you have had so much practice."

I noted a couple of things here. Since the study used brain imaging to discover what was going on, it might not be revealing the whole picture. See Searching for the Person in the Brain And the idea that culture is presenting many more things to keep track of in less time is nicely dealt with in the Steven Johnson book Everything Bad is Good for You.

Now where was I?

There's been a lot of glittery stuff about how brain imaging reveals where stuff happens in the human nervous system. Searching for the person in the brain makes the point that the brain has become a pop star of sorts with all this stuff about what's going on where in the brain. But if I understand what this author is getting at, sure, they'll locate the area of the brain where these activities show up during a brain scan, but that won't mean that imaging is a tool to understand people. That's because the images don't see the complete series of complex interactions in the brain associated with this activity. Maybe it will someday.

In the meantime, though, we can be misled by the images into thinking we're really on to something here. But even some in the neuroscience field are wise to the shortcomings.

"Any new method in neuroscience is powerful in terms of evolution of the field only insofar as it tells us that something we thought we knew is wrong," said Dr. J. Anthony Movshon, director of New York University's Center for Neural Science. So far, he said, brain imaging has not done that.

The technology, he said, though now central to brain science, "is in one sense disappointing, in that so far it has told us nothing more than what a neurologist of the 19th century could have told you about brain functions and where they're localized."

And others see risk in investing in the glitter over the substance.

"The risk is that seeing the neural activity allows people to take away or excuse responsibility for a behavior — to take away the individual person," said Dr. (Lucy)Brown of the Einstein School of Medicine in New York.

I agree that it can be entertaining to read about the studies and even to imagine that we know what's going on. But I like even more the idea that the striking distinctiveness of each individual goes beyond connections of neurons or whatever else.

I've been messing around with three very different programs recently, looking to possibly move my weblog from Radio Userland to something more "friendly." Not that Radio isn't powerful; it certainly is. But I'm getting tired of it and it seems so "geeky," so cumbersome to change things. Still, a lot of the complexity is hidden away yet accessible. I'm just tired of it.

So I've been playing around with iWeb, Sandvox and Tinderbox. Of the three, iWeb is the simplest, friendliest and perhaps the least powerful. Sandvox resembles iWeb, but packs more flexibility in the range of things it does for a web log. Still in beta and still pretty buggy, though. Tinderbox packs more power than I've seen in almost any program I've used in the past. But it's also a lot more complex, a somewhat cousin of the late Lotus Agenda. Minus the MS DOS prompt, of course.

I'm not sure what the outcome of these explorations will be. It's fun trying new stuff; really fun comparing programs that are so different in what they can do and how they do it. Perhaps I'll post this to all three and see how they look. (Make that four -- Working in Movement, this weblog, too.)

A recent study at UCLA looked into the difference in recognizing emotions in others between 10 high-functioning autistic kids and 10 non-autistic kids. The researchers imaged the kids' brains with MRI during the study. The brain images showed one big difference between the autistic kids and their peers: the autistic kids had much less activity in a brain region located near the temple, a region other studies have suggested helps humans understand other's intentions by observing their actions (or imitating their behavior). The study suggests a relationship between the reduced activity in this brain region (part of the mirror neuron system) and the trouble understanding emotional states.

Reading this got me to wondering about possible alternate pathways in the nervous system for things like social behavior. If one part of the nervous system is somehow impaired, can other well-functioned parts supply the functions normally associated with the impaired parts? In the Feldenkrais Method and other forms of somatic education, one belief is that we sometimes find what looks like an alternative pathway in the brain for some forms of motor behavior, at least those contained within the context of a lesson. (I don't know of any research that proves or disproves this belief.) But since motor activity (movement) is part of every human activity, is there some way to investigate whether there could be a link?

Maps help you get where you want to go. But an inaccurate map is even less useful than last week's newspaper, though you can still wrap fish with both of them, I suppose.

You wouldn't think your own body would rely on a map for its everyday goings on, but there's lots of research pointing to sensory and motor activity linked to their representations in the brain. That's kind of like a map. But there can be problems when those maps become inaccurate or otherwise faulty.

Most brain representations get information from specialized types of sensors or receptors in the muscles, skin and joints. There are sensors that feed direct experiences of touch, position in space, or pain. But, as reported on in Experiment Gives Illusion of That Shrinking Feeling there seem to be no such receptors dedicated to sensing the size of body parts. (Another report is in Feeling fat can be 'in the mind').

Like Alice in Wonderland, participants in a study at University College of London felt themselves shrinking. However, it was their waist size getting smaller, and not their entire bodies shrinking . But it wasn't due to the tea they had drunk. Their own brains were fooling them into experiencing a sensation that wasn't actually occurring.

Researchers produced this effect in most of the 17 participants by stimulating tendons in the wrists, while the hands were on the waist. The wrists moved from the stimulation, but the hands didn't. Most participants felt their waists shrinking, some by as much as 28%. An earlier study had participants feel their noses as the wrists were stimulated, producing a Pinoccio-like effect of their noses growing.

The sensation of growing noses and shrinking waists was due to a conflict between the senses;

"The illusion happens as a result of a conflict between senses," (lead researcher Dr. H. Henrik) Ehrsson said, explaining that the wrists feel as if they are moving, but the palms of the hands, resting against the waist, do not. "The brain has to interpret the conflicting sensory information. The brain hates ambiguity. It always tries to come up with an explanation."

Brain imaging done at the time indicated activity in an area of the brain concerned with processing sensory information, the parietal lobe. The more shrinkage felt, the higher the parietal activity.

Damage to this area can result in misleading maps. According to Dr. Ehrsson,

... other studies have shown that people with injuries in the parietal cortex area of the brain experience the feeling that the size and shape of their body parts have changed.

There is much more to be explored about this idea of faulty brain representations of sensory-motor and other types of activity. Just ask Alice.

The brain makes sense of things, including senses. That is, the brain does things with information from the senses that reach the brain. See dark clouds in the sky, and you brain arranges the visual information, combines it with things already stored there, and gives you the idea that taking your umbrella might not be a bad idea. The brain has made a prediction by combining what's coming from you eyes with some of the stuff that's already there. Our brains like to recognize familiar patterns and reliably predict what's going on now and in the foreseeable future.

But sometimes things get jumbled up. You might see or hear something unfamiliar that needs sorting out, brain-wise. Or maybe the brain itself gets a little confused, but it still faithfully tries to sort out what's happening and what will happen. Even if it doesn't make sense, the brain seems to try to make sense out of almost any situation. And it turns out it's not just the information coming into the brain that counts in the accuracy and usefulness of the sense begin made.

At least that's one of the ideas I got from reading about a recent bit of research at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. There researchers found that they could tell whether or not people would be successful at a simple guessing game, at least most of the time.

The game involved guessing which way some arrows would point on a video screen. Just prior to the arrows appearing, a hint would appear on the screen for a fifth of a second. Those who paid attention to the hint could easily guess which way the arrows would be pointing. Except that, like a rigged roulette wheel, the hints were accurate only 80% of the time, and that was determined by a computer-generated random number.

How did the researchers know the likelihood of success? The test was done in brain imaging device that showed a spike in activity in the area of the frontal brain lobes usually concerned with rewards, as well as other areas involved in prediction. The participants wanted their reward of guessing correctly, so their brains acted accordingly.

"The rewards system is involved in regulating behavior based on previous experiences of rewards and punishments," coauthor Giovanni d'Avossa, M.D., an instructor in neurology, says. "It also may help us build up predictions of what the world should be like and how certain events go together. When it works well, the world makes sense to you."

But the game was rigged, almost predictable but not absolutely reliably so. But the participants' brains still tried mightily to perform accurately, according to d'Avossa.

"But regardless of how hopeless it was to try to outguess the computer, some of our data suggest that the brain may still have been trying to do just that: to figure out a formula or a rule based upon which it could predict whether a hint was valid and should be trusted."

Most of us can sort out situations despite receiving questionable information from one of our senses. But one of the researchers theorizes that damage to the brain areas observed would be particularly troublesome, making the world an unpredictable and alien place to hang out. Nonsense coming in would not get sorted out, but still the brain would attempt some interpretation.

Trying to make sense of what's going on in the world isn't just a matter of the quality or reliability of sensory information reaching the brain. It has a lot to do with the information that's already there, and the integrity of the structures holding them.

"These activations may reflect the degree to which subjects variably directed attention on each trial to the location of the stimulus prior to its presentation," says Maurizio Corbetta, M.D., the Norman J. Stupp Professor of Neurology and senior author of the study. Regardless of how the results are interpreted, Corbetta notes, the study clearly showed that visual perception not only depends on the quality of sensory signals but also on the variability of internal signals.

In general, learning can slow down with age. Plasticity, the brain's ability to "rewire" itself, and learning seem to go hand in hand at any age. But with aging, though some portion (maybe a lot) of the plasticity remains, the time it takes to learn and remember things can slow way down. Some of the biggest, most visible impacts can show up with the cognitive skills, like reading or working puzzles. According to Exercising the Brain, there's some evidence that reading the newspaper or doing crossword puzzles can help here. But training sessions for older folks using a new computer program from Posit Science aims at restoring some of the plasticity in a way that could slow the decline by ten years or so.

The sessions use case narratives that are played slowly and then progressively faster. It offers a challenge by making the listening task hard, but not impossible. And it is this challenge that triggers the brain's plasticity.

Experts say this level of challenge is a crucial component for triggering the brain's plasticity, which underlies improvements in processing speed. "This is what good rehab therapists do, but most people don't have the money to do that," says Michael Kilgard, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas, who works with Posit. "We think it's possible to deliver this with a computer, rather than one-on-one."

Pretty neat, at least within the context of the training sessions, but no one knows how long the effects last. And it's not clear whether the gained skills can be transferred to life outside the training sessions:

The key question for Posit and other cognitive training programs is how well the specific training improves daily activities, such as shopping or driving. "The thing that eludes programs now is how do you train people in one area [such as working memory] and get improvement in another area [such as following conversations in a noisy room]," says Jeffrey Elias, a health science administrator at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, MD. Today, a typical training program focuses on memory tricks, such as mnemonics.

But even if the skills gained in the sessions last a while and can be applied to everyday activities outside the context of the training sessions, it's not likely to be a runaway best seller. There are some potential roadblocks to widespread adoption, namely that it seems to take a lot of time and effort to see a difference. This is not deterring Posit, which will soon offer an entire brain gym.

One of my thoughts as I read this article was that it would be really interesting to investigate across skill types to see if plasticity improvements generalize to other skill areas. For example, does an improvement in sensory-motor plasticity also imply an improvement in cognitive learning or improving cognitive tasks or vice versa? Moshe Feldenkrais held that it does, but no research that I'm aware of has even begun to investigate. But Posit may be might also begin investigating something along these lines:

In addition the auditory program, the company is building four other tools to train different cognitive systems: vision, executive control, balance and mobility, and sensory-guided motor control.

It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

Pay attention! We've heard it all our lives from family, teachers, bosses, and almost everyone else. And while there are any variety of good reasons for sharpening concentrative abilities, a new one has just shown up in some recently published research: it changes your brain. And this structural brain change just might delay some of the changes that come with the aging brain.

The research focused on people who mediate, and wasn't restricted to monks and the like that are usually examined in such research. Effects: When Mindful Awareness Goes to Your Head describes a small study at the Massachusetts General Hospital involving 20 people who regularly practice mindful awareness. It turns out that the meditators showed more gray matter in the frontal cortexes than those who don't mediate.

The difference was especially notable in older volunteers, suggesting that meditation may help reduce the cortical thinning that comes with age, the researchers said.

Is this "reduction of cortical thinning" a good thing? That doesn't seem so clear, but the interesting thing for me here is the idea that repeated concentration activity can contribute to reorganization in the nervous system - it changes the brain.

The study could not establish that the differences were attributable to meditation, but Dr. Lazar (the researcher) noted that other studies had found structural changes in jugglers' brain, presumably caused by the demands of their craft. She said the researchers believed other forms of meditation and even yoga might produce the same results.

I'd bet it's no so much the type of paying attention activity that matters. The act of engaging in some form of concentration on a regular basis is probably what matters.

Much of the Feldenkrais work that I do is based on the idea of using unique movement experiences to sharpen the body image stored in the brain. This can often change the sensory motor system's organization, or at least provide for a novel experience. Some practitioners point to this effect as an example of the brain's plasticity, the ability of the brain to "rewire" itself.

Another example of how experience can reorganize some functioning of the nervous system is in a recent study at Stanford reported in Playing music can be good for your brain / Stanford study finds it helps the understanding of language. The bit of research suggests that musical experience can improve how some aspects of how the nervous system processes spoken language. The researchers suggest musical training could help solve reading problems in children, notably dyslexia. This might be explored in future research.

The researchers divided their subjects into groups of musicians and non musicians before played tone sequences of different pitches slowly, then fast. The musicians were more able to distinguish the different pitches at faster speeds. FMRI differences also showed up in the musician group.

Here's where the reading connection comes in. The researchers then played similiar-sounding word syllables. Musicians made the distinctions more accurately and quickly than non muscians. This is a surprise when you think about it, because we all have experience with syllables.

"The musicians are better able to detect small differences than the non-musicians, which is surprising," said Nadine Gaab, a postdoctoral associate who moved from Stanford to MIT with (researcher John) Gabrieli. "Non-musicians have the same experience with syllables as musicians."

How does this apply to reading?

Many children who become poor readers have a trouble making rapid auditory distinctions, Gabrieli said. That becomes a reading problem, because when the teacher explains that this letter is a "p" and this one a "b," a student with poor processing ability might not hear the difference.

"Once they don't hear the difference, the thought is that they're going to have a hard time" understanding the difference when the letters are written on a page, Gabreli said.

This idea calls for further inquiry. According to Gabreli, this would involve kids identified with hearing difficulties who have a hard time reading. The idea would be to see if a bit of musical training has a significant impact on their language skills.

Interesting idea.