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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ Category

The biology of music?

Posted in from the reading room, music, neuroscience on March 1, 2011| 1 Comment »

Our willingness to listen to music is a biological trait and related to the neurobiological pathways affecting social affiliation and communication, suggests a recent Finnish study.

The understanding of the “biology” and even evolutionary position of music in human life is something I hadn’t really thought about until I read Ian McGilchrist’s excellent, “The Master and His Emissary“. In that work he describes the theory that music was the precursor to language and that one of its unique functions was to develop and strengthen bonds between people in a group, and to communicate at a “feeling” level, rather than at a more cognitive one.

The particular issue of the relationship between music and bonding is explored in the way the right hemisphere functions, and how it has a major role in the appreciation of music, and in the forming of social bonds. This Finnish study refers to some very similar ideas.

Similarities between human and animal song have been detected: both contain a message, an intention that reflects innate emotional state that is interpreted correctly even among different species. In fact, several behavioral features in listening to music are closely related to attachment: lullabies are sung to infants to increase their attachment to a parent, and singing or playing music together is based on teamwork and may add group cohesion.

Rather less interesting (in my opinion) is their exploration of the genetic “associations” (although I was pleased to see this word “associations” rather than “determinants”) related to the appreciation of music.

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How do we make decisions?

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, from the viewing room, life, neuroscience, perception, psychology on February 27, 2011| 1 Comment »

Once you learn that most of the activity of the brain goes on without either conscious awareness, or with conscious awareness only kicking after the initial response, you begin to doubt that all our choices are conscious ones…..or rational ones. In fact, the brain stem and the limbic system are the key centres for our survival responses, our drives, our avoidances, and our emotional processing. How often do we behave in ways which really can’t be understood from the premise of consciously choosing once presented with the facts? Is that how human beings function? Would that even be the best way for human beings to function? (consciously and rationally, whilst discarding other ways of perceiving, processing our experience and responding). What do you think once you learn that there is an enormous neural network around the hollow organs of the body, the heart, and the gut especially, which we might well use to figure things out….where we might process and produce what we call “gut reactions”, or “heart felt” beliefs?

I’ve stumbled on two very different texts in this area in the last couple of days. Isn’t that weird, actually? It’s that old “coincidence” thing again…..never quite got to a point of really figuring out how those “coincidences” come about, or what they mean.

A few days ago, I read about a report for the WWF called “common cause“. The report, written by Tom Crompton. Essentially it argues that if we look at the research evidence, it would seem that human beings don’t make decisions using rational thought very much. Here’s a paragraph from the Summary –

There is mounting evidence from a range of studies in cognitive science that the dominant ‘Enlightenment model’ of human decision-making is extremely incomplete. According to this model we imagine ourselves, when faced with a decision, to be capable of dispassionately assessing the facts, foreseeing probable outcomes of different responses, and then selecting and pursuing an optimal course of action. As a result, many approaches to campaigning on bigger-than-self problems still adhere to the conviction that ‘if only people really knew’ the true nature or full scale of the problems which we confront, then they would be galvanised into demanding more proportionate action in response. But this understanding of how people reach decisions is very incomplete. There is mounting evidence that facts play only a partial role in shaping people’s judgment. Emotion is often far more important [see Section 1.3]. It is increasingly apparent that our collective decisions are based importantly upon a set of factors that often lie beyond conscious awareness, and which are informed in important part by emotion – in particular, dominant cultural values, which are tied to emotion. It seems that individuals are often predisposed to reject information when accepting it would challenge their identity and values.

That’s got me thinking about the importance of understanding our values (and/or our “virtues”) again.

Then, this morning, I read a post about some interesting TED videos, and the first one was this, by Dan Airley. He makes the case that we suffer from “cognitive illusions” just as much, if not more than, we suffer from “optical illusions”. (It’s about how we make decisions. It’s VERY entertaining, and thought provoking, and it’s just 17 minutes long. Take the time to watch it)

 

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Irreducible

Posted in from the living room, life, neuroscience on February 6, 2011| 2 Comments »

Are you well? How’s your energy? If I were to ask you to rate both your well-being and your energy on a ten point scale where 0 is the worst level you could imagine and 10 is the best, what numbers would you give me right now? You’re able to do that. Instantly. But how do you do it? You don’t check your blood pressure, your pulse, your blood sugar etc etc. You assess it holistically. It’s not actually possible to reduce your well-being or your energy to any single element. Yes, of course, individual elements play a part. They are factors, and influences. But your well-being cannot be reduced to component parts. The moment we reduce a human being to a part of a human being we don’t know that human being any more. Maybe we can know how much haemoglobin they have in their red blood cells, but we don’t know them.
There’s a similar thing happens when people say to me when someone gets better, what is it that got them better? Patients regularly say after an admission to our hospital that it was “the whole package”, or “the way everything fitted together”, or they’ll say it was the rest, and the physio and the way they were listened to, and…and….and. It’s not reducible.
What’s our obsession with breaking things down into pieces? According to Ian McGilchrist it’s because our left hemisphere works that way. It abstracts, selects, and then re-presents information to us. Our right hemisphere however processes the world more holistically. Its main focus is the world as it is, without filtering, selecting and re-presenting.
The moment we select only a part of something, we see only what we’ve selected. Some people seem to think if you examine a part of the whole you’ll get closer to the truth. Actually, you get further away.
Maybe it’s time we engaged our right hemispheres more, and quieted down that noisy, rather arrogant left hemisphere.
Health is not reducible to component parts.
Human beings are not reducible to component parts, not even genes.
We should stop treating patients as if they are only the containers of parts, and deluding ourselves into believing we know exactly what produces healing and wellbeing. We don’t.

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Are all forms of meditation the same?

Posted in from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, tagged on December 1, 2010| 8 Comments »

My answer to this question would be you’d only think all forms of meditation were the same if you think differences are irrelevant. My entire working life is based on understanding difference. I think it’s true of all holistic and integrative practices that understanding the uniqueness of a personal story, told by an individual within their distinct context, is the core focus. But I’ve wondered, just what is different between TM and Mindfulness practice? They seem very different to me. They involve different methods. So it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out they had different effects on the brain, and hence on the body too. Well, here’s some fascinating research which is beginning to clarify just what the differences are. It starts with a description of three “types” of meditation practice – Controlled focus; Open monitoring; Automatic self-transcending, then goes on to explore different brain wave patterns associated with each, different mind-body changes and the published research on the effects of different practices. The summary is as follows –

  • Controlled focus: Classic examples of concentration or controlled focus are found in the revered traditions of Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Qiqong, Yoga and Vedanta, though many methods involve attempts to control or direct the mind. Attention is focused on an object of meditation–such as one’s breath, an idea or image, or an emotion. Brain waves recorded during these practices are typically in the gamma frequency (20-50 Hz), seen whenever you concentrate or during “active” cognitive processing.2
  • Open monitoring: These mindfulness type practices, common in Vipassana and Zazen, involve watching or actively paying attention to experiences–without judging, reacting or holding on. Open monitoring gives rise to frontal theta (4-8 Hz), an EEG pattern commonly seen during memory tasks or reflection on mental concepts.3
  • Automatic self-transcending: This category describes practices designed to go beyond their own mental activity–enabling the mind to spontaneously transcend the process of meditation itself. Whereas concentration and open monitoring require degrees of effort or directed focus to sustain the activity of meditation, this approach is effortless because there is no attempt to direct attention–no controlled cognitive processing. An example is the Transcendental Meditation technique. The EEG pattern of this category is frontal alpha coherence, associated with a distinct state of relaxed inner wakefulness.4

 

My personal experience is greatest with the third category. I practice TM for 20 minutes twice every day. I’ve explored some Mindfulness meditation with colleagues at work over recent months (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is one of the services we offer at the Centre for Integrative Care in Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital) But I’ve no experience of the first type – controlled focus. My first take on this research is that I’m encouraged to know that it’s good to engage in more than one kind of meditation practice. If loving kindness and compassion meditation increases the amount of love, kindness and compassion in the world I’m all for it. If Mindfulness also reduces negative rumination as it suggests in this research, then that strikes me as also a very good thing. And if TM can lower blood pressure, reduce chronic anxiety and lower stress hormones like cortisol, then that’s good too.

I do enjoy a scientific exploration of how something might work, but I also think that we are all different and it’s likely that we will all experience different meditation practices differently. It is a subjective human experience as well after all! I know Dan Siegel, of Interpersonal Neurobiology fame, claims that there is plenty of evidence to show that Mindfulness meditation increases the size and function of the integrative fibres of the mid prefrontal cortex. He also says that just 10 minutes a day of breath awareness will produce measurable change in integrative neurons.

Are you convinced yet? If you haven’t done it yet, maybe a month from now as you think ahead to 2011, making meditation part of your daily life should be part of the changes you might want to make. (you know what I’m talking about – resolutions!)

 

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I urge you…watch this

Posted in from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, neuroscience, video on September 21, 2010| 1 Comment »

There are some fabulous TED talks but this one from Jill Bolte Taylor describing her experience of having a stroke in the left side of her brain is not only incredibly moving but might change the way you’ll think about your brain, your mind and even the nature of reality.
It is a great confirmation of Ian McGilchrist‘s work on how the left and right side of the brain can be shown to have unique and very different ways of approaching and engaging with the world. She also uses language entirely consistent with the work of Dan Seigel’s Interpersonal Neurobiology approach.

I urge you. Take a few minutes and watch this video. It’s an amazing story.

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Clocks and clouds

Posted in books, from the reading room, neuroscience, science on July 18, 2010| 4 Comments »

I recently read a great piece by Jonah Lehrer where he ponders about the way we pursue science. It’s worth reading the whole article, but here’s the paragraph which really grabbed my attention –

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

rain clouds

UFO clouds

sun through clouds

sun setting below clouds

I think clouds are beautiful, don’t you? Their variety, their constantly changing shape and colour and size…..their unpredictability. Astonishing. So, yes, I agree with Jonah, (and with Karl Popper), the mechanistic view of the universe has brought certain understandings and certain powers, but the networked, complex view of the universe will bring us a new understanding of reality, with quite a different concept of power. Jonah sums it up this way –

So how do we see the clouds? I think the answer returns us to the vintage approach of the Victorians. Right now, the life sciences follow a very deductive model, in which researchers begin with a testable hypothesis, and then find precisely the right set of tools to test their conjecture. Needless to say, this has been a fantastically successful approach. But I wonder if our most difficult questions will require a more inductive method, in which we first observe and stare and ponder, and only then theorize.

I think it’s about learning to use the whole brain again. Read Ian McGilchrist’s “The Master and his Emissary”. He explains more clearly than anyone else just what these two ways of seeing the world are about and how we might recapture our ability to use both halves of our brain!

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Mindsight – it’s changing my life

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, neuroscience, personal growth, psychology, tagged , on June 1, 2010| 8 Comments »

I like to read books which change my life. Lots of books do that for me. In fact, the books I enjoy most are those which do just that, the ones which open up new ways of thinking to me, new ways of seeing, expand my understanding, stimulate my creativity, books which, once I’ve read them, my world is not the same.
I’ve read a lot of books like that, and if you browse this blog reading the posts in the category “from the reading room” you’ll find reviews of several of them.
I’ve just read another. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I felt this excited reading a particular book. It’s Dan Siegel’s “The Mindful Therapist” [ISBN 978-0393706451]
Now, I haven’t come to this book cold. I’ve read, first of all, his “Mindsight” [ISBN 978-1851687619] (and if you’re inspired to explore this body of work I recommend you start with that), his “The Mindful Brain” [ISBN 978-0393704709], and “The Developing Mind” [ISBN 978-1572307407], before I got hold of this, his latest book, “The Mindful Therapist”.

I’m also well into his online course which I’m thoroughly enjoying.

So, a lot of the concepts in this “Mindful Therapist” were already familiar to me before I opened it up – the idea of the mind as “an embodied, relational process of regulation of energy and information flow”,  the idea of the triangle of wellness – mind, brain and relationships, the understandings from neuroscience of integrated function of differentiated parts, of the key roles of the midfrontal cortex, and of neuroplasticity,  and the practices of the wheel of awareness and other meditations
Despite my familiarity with all of that, and more, this particular book has blown me away. I’ve already begun to introduce patients to the idea of health as a flowing, adaptive, coherent, energised, stable river, with the opposite banks of chaos and rigidity which we end up on when we become unwell.

I’ve begun to share with some patients the deceptively simple wheel of awareness meditation. But now, I’ve got a whole new level of insight.
Into this familiar mix, which Dan expands and reinforces throughout “The Mindful Therapist”, he gives exercises in self-discovery, and models of personality and behaviour which I’ve never seen described elsewhere. I’ve said before I’ve got a synthetic brain – always making links, seeing patterns, associations, expanding through increasing connections – well, I’m pretty sure that’s how Dan’s brain works too. He draws on insights from a multiplicity of disciplines and together, (in a “consilient” way), they create a whole which is way greater than its parts.
If you’re a health professional of any kind, I urge you to read this book. You practice, your life, won’t be the same again. You’ll find new depths as well as new horizons.

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Empathic civilisation

Posted in from the viewing room, life, neuroscience, video on May 14, 2010| 2 Comments »

This is superb – a short talk by Jeremy Rifkin illustrated fabulously by the RSA – please, take a few minutes and watch it. I think you’ll be inspired

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Imagination – making connections

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, neuroscience, photography on May 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

feather plant

I’ve been thinking about imagination.
I’m updating my knowledge of neuroscience at the moment and learning a lot about brain function and the mental processes from the perspective that a definition of mind would be “an embodied, inter-relational process of regulation of energy and information flow”. That’s a wonderfully dynamic and holistic model of the mind. The brain in this model is the organ which produces the mind, and on which the mind acts, and we can see how energy and information flows around the brain, between the brain and the rest of the body, and between brains.

Given that the brain has 100 billion neurons and that each neuron has up to 10,000 connections, the number of distinct brain states (where each neuron is either “on” or “off”) is as great as the number of known stars in the universe!

Each brain state represents an act of remembering, perceiving and imagining – all at once!

So, what’s this imagining process? I’ve been wondering if it’s the process of making connections – of putting elements together to make a pattern. Those patterns might represent what we’ve already experienced, what we are currently experiencing, or, perhaps even more astonishingly, ones which nobody has ever experienced…..not even ourselves!

Remembering is a creative act. Perceiving is a creative act. Both involve focusing the imagination. In the former, we focus it on the past, and in the latter, we focus it on the present. But when we focus imagination on either the future, or use it to play with the patterns inside our own minds, then we make new connections – like seeing these feathers on this plant and imagining a feather-plant……ah that’s where feathers come from! That must be why we find birds in trees and bushes so often….they’re collecting feathers to cover their bodies and make their wings so they can fly!

See how easy it is to get your imagination flowing when you make connections?

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Believing your own eyes and the importance of sharing

Posted in from the reading room, life, neuroscience, perception on April 14, 2010| 5 Comments »

I read this fascinating fact in Scientific American recently –

Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, the equivalent of 10 billion bits per second arrives on the retina at the back of the eye. Because the optic nerve attached to the retina has only a million output connections, just six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only 10,000 bits per second make it to the visual cortex. After processing, visual information feeds into the brain regions responsible for forming our conscious perception. Surprisingly, the amount of information constituting that conscious perception is less than 100 bits per second.

Wow! The first part of that whole story is startling enough, and one we don’t routinely consider. There is a vast amount of information surrounding us, but we can only pick up the limited amounts which our sensory organs are capable of handling. For example, we don’t see the same spectrum of colours as other creatures – a flower won’t appear to a bee, the way it does to a human! But, then when you consider the rest of this story, look at just how much “data loss” occurs between what the sensory organ can detect and what we can consciously appreciate!

Funnily enough, I’d just recently read the following in “The Renewal of Generosity” by Arthur Frank (ISBN 978-0226260174) –

Dialogue suggests that the world is co-experienced by two of more people. Each one’s perspective is necessarily partial, and each needs to gain a more adequate sense of the world by sharing perspectives.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to respect each others’ perspectives and enter into dialogue, than to assume that our personal (limited) view is THE right one? (I’m just thinking of the way the politicians are acting in this current election month in the UK)

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