Lift Up Your Hearts!

One of the reasons I like Mallard Fillmore is that he can always be counted on to remember:

This Memorial Day I also want to honor a living veteran, who served as a WAVE in World War II, and who is

90 years old today!

(Not that she's likely to see this...but I honor her anyway.)

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michale Pollan (Penguin, New York, 2009)

Food Rules is a condensation of what journalist Pollan has learned from his investigation of what's wrong with the American diet and how it can be improved.  If this is the only Pollan food book you will read, or if you want to introduce his ideas to a skeptical friend with a short attention span, it rates five stars.  Half of the 140 pages are merely pictures, and the other half are short and very easy to read.

I enjoyed reading through it, but am glad I borrowed it instead of buying it, as for my purposes The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food are better.  (On the other hand, at $6.60 from Amazon, the book costs no more than one of those fast food meals Pollan wants us to avoid.)

From #1 Eat food (as opposed to edible food-like substances) to #63 Break the rules once in a while, following these succinct suggestions would go a long way towards improving most people's diets.  Best of all I like Pollan's relaxed attitude that reminds us that eating well isn't rocket science, nor is it onerous.  It's a basic birthright that we have lost and must reclaim for ourselves and our children.

Today I almost gave up before I started.  First, there was a blog post that I felt needed a comment, and I was guiltily trying to get it written without using up the entire hour, when I learned that there was yet another wrinkle in my ongoing struggles with the insurance company over a medical procedure from last year.  (It isn't even an acrimonious battle; everyone agrees that the company should have paid.  But one small error in a procedure code has taken months to rectify.)  I thought we had finally gotten it straightened out, but this morning another charge popped up that the insurance company says it has paid but the provider says it hasn't received.  I managed to take myself out of the middle and now have them talking directly to each other on this one—but by the time I was done my computer time was well over an hour, and the day barely started.

Still, I plowed on, deciding merely to log the time while trying to keep it down.  That worked somewhat (though I did keep coming back to the machine more than I had hoped), until mid-afternoon, when I realized that the timer had been running throughout a long conversation with Porter and now read nearly four hours.  Probably three of that was legit, but not really knowing the truth I again gave up the fight.  At least I lasted longer than I did yesterday.

Ganbarimasu!

Last night I finished a project that had kept me welded to the computer for the better part of several days, and I awoke wondering if it would be possible to go through a day limiting my computer use to one hour.  The experiment started out well enough, though I had accomplished but the minimum of my normal morning computer routine when I realized I'd already used up a quarter of the time.  It was not too hard, however, to set the routine aside and turn to (mostly) non-computer-related projects.  I felt empowered, and looked forward to a day of accomplishment.  Occasionally I needed the computer briefly for something I was doing, but managed to do the job and get off, resisting the temptation to check blogs, news, or e-mail.

That lasted till maybe 9 a.m.

I had successfullly prepared, assembled, and packaged two boxes for mailing, but printing the postage for one turned out to be a bit of a problem and involved an online chat with USPS customer service.  Another half hour of computer time gone, just like that.  Then there was a problem with a recent Amazon order that could not be put off, and included another customer service exchange.  After that, the allotted hour was completely gone.

For some of the day I continued to try to minimize computer use, but then we worked on researching and purchasing a new camera (shhh—it's an early birthday present for me!) and that ate up hours of computer time—so I just plain gave up.  Which is why I'm able to write this post.  One thing I know for sure is that I can't limit myself to an hour of computer use a day and do any significant writing, let alone make any progress on many important projects.  But even an hour a day is so much time!  How different might I be if I spent that hour reading, or praying, or learning to play the piano!

One thing I know:  the important work I do, in this stage of my life, requires time on the computer.  A lot of time on the computer.  That's simply the nature of the work.  Some things are plain impossible without it; others possible, but much less efficient or effective.  I am in no danger of giving in to Luddite tendencies.

But the taste of freedom this morning was so sweet I'm continuing the experiment tomorrow.

Super Size Me (Sony, 2004, PG-13)

When Morgan Spurlock was growing up, his mother made the family's meals at home; they ate at restaurants only on very rare, special occasions.  Once a common scenario, it is no longer true for Fast Food America.

Spurlock, young, healthy, and in fine physical condition, turned himself into a human guinea pig to investigate the health effects of fast food:  For 30 days, he ate at McDonalds, and only McDonalds, three meals a day, every day.  His progress (regress) was evaluated and monitored by three doctors, who expected to see no more problems from his change of diet than a moderate rise in his triglyceride levels.  Instead, nearly every aspect of his physical and mental health disintegrated rapidly; it took him more than a year to recover from his month-long binge.

Super Size Me is a dramatic condemnation of the fast food industry, and even more so of modern America's eating habits.  However, it would have been more effective, if less dramatic, had Spurlock have eaten reasonably instead of deliberately (and sickeningly) gorging himself at every meal.  He conflates problems of food quality and food quantity, muddying the results.

The movie is somewhat interesting, but I'd rate it worse than PG-13 for sexual content and language.  Unlike some reviewers, I don't find the graphic bariatric surgery to be a problem, but I wouldn't watch it while eating.

Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids blog is one of my favorite antidotes to the frustrations of modern life, and the outrageous stories she finds make great pass-along blog fodder, though they probably don't do my blood pressure any favors.

In an attempt to resurrect the once-normal sight of kids playing outdoors with their friends till the sun goes down—now unthinkable to many parents despite a crime rate lower than when they themselves played outside unsupervised—she declared tomorrow, May 22, to be Take Our Children to the Park...and Leave Them There Day.  I don't think she was expecting quite the firestorm she created when she suggested that pre-teens could survive for half an hour without their parents hovering nearby.  You can read all about it, positive and negative, on her blog.

None of our grandchildren is as yet old enough to participate in tomorrow's event, but I think it's quite exciting enough that the six-year-old is bicycling (in tandem with his father) to the park—some 75 miles away!

In honor of the day I reproduce one of my favorite Baby Blues comics, sent to me many years ago by a friend.

The Dark Ages  (The History Channel, 2007, not rated)

Having worked for a number of months in New York City, Porter had the opportunity both to explore the History Channel on television and to observe throughout the city the advertising placards proclaiming, "The History Channel:  Where History Is Made Every Day."  If he were a vandalizing sort of person, New Yorkers would have soon seen a slight alteration in the slogan:

With my expectations sufficiently lowered, I found The Dark Ages not to be too bad.  (Thanks, Netflix.)  It's not my favorite approach to a historical documentary—Ken Burns set a standard that is hard to beat.  The tone is unpleasantly sensationalistic, and the re-enactments almost painfully unprofessional.  But the facts are consistent with what little I know of the time period (as consistent as historians get, anyway), and without doubt the show packs an amazing amount of history into 94 minutes.

I believe history needs to be taught using many sources, and many approaches.  Not only does this help balance out the inevitable bias each historian brings to his work, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who needs to hear a fact at least three times before it sticks with me.  The Dark Ages is not a great show, but it works well in this context.

The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge (Penguin, New York, 2007)

Neuroplasticity.

The idea that our brains are fixed, hard-wired machines was (and in many cases still is) so deeply entrenched in the scientific establishment that evidence to the contrary was not only suppressed, but often not even seen because the minds of even respectable scientists could not absorb what they were certain was impossible.  Having been familiar since the 1960s with the work of Glenn Doman and the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the idea that the human brain is continually changing itself and can recover from injury in astonishing ways did not surprise me. In fact, the only shock was that in a 400 page book on neuroplasticity and the persecution of its early pioneers I found not one mention of Doman's name. But the stories are none the less astonishing for that.

In Chapter 1 we meet woman whose vestibular system was destroyed by antibiotic side-effects.  She is freed by a sensor held on her tongue and a computerized helmet from the severely disabling feeling that she is falling all the time, even when lying flat.  That's the stuff of science fiction, but what's most astounding is that the effect lingers for a few minutes after she removes the apparatus the first time, and after several sessions she no longer needs the device.

Chapter 3, "Redesigning the Brain," on the work of Michael Merzenich, including the ground-breaking Fast ForWord learning program, is worth the cost of the book all by itself.

Sensitive readers may want to steer clear of Chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves," or risk being left with unwanted, disturbing mental images.  But it is a must read for anyone who wants to believe that pornography is harmless, or that our personal, private mental fantasies do not adversely affect the very structure of our brains.

The book is less impressive when it gets away from hard science and into psychotherapy, as the ideas become more speculative, but the stories are still impressive.

Phantom pain, learning disabilities, autism, stroke recovery, obsessions and compulsions, age-related mental decline, and much more:  the discovery of neuroplasticity shatters misconceptions and offers hope.  The Brain that Changes Itself is an appetizer plate; bring on the main course!

For those who want a sampling of the appetizer itself, I'm including an extensive quotation section.  Even so, it doesn't come close to doing justice to the depth and especially the breadth of the book.  I've pulled quotes from all over, so understand that they are out of context, and don't expect them to move smoothly from one section to another.

Neuro is for "neuron," the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for "changeable, malleable, modifiable." At first many of the scientists didn't dare use the word "neuroplasticity" in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notions. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many "circuits" and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior—surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must re-think our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing. ... The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.

In Chapter 2, Building Herself a Better Brain, a woman with such a severe imbalance of brain function that she was labelled mentally retarded put her own experiences together with the work of other researchers to design brain exercises that fixed the weaknesses in her own brain ... and went on to develop similar diagnostic procedures and exercises for others.

The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and "not relevant."   But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation—the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex.

Here are several (but not enough!) from my favorite chapter, "Redesigning the Brain."

[As] they trained an animal at a skill, not only did its neurons fire faster, but because they were faster their signals were clearer.  Faster neurons were more likely to fire in sync with each other—becoming better team players—wiring together more and forming groups of neurons that gave off clearer and more powerful signals.  This is a crucial point, because a powerful signal has greater impact on the brain.  When we want to remember something we have heard we must hear it clearly, because a memory can be only as clear as its original signal.

Paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. ...  When the animals performed tasks automatically, without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last.  We often praise "the ability to multitask."  While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain maps.

Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of preschool children have a language disability that makes it difficult for them to read, write, or even follow instructions. ... [C]hildren with language disabilities have auditory processing problems with common consonant-vowel combinations that are spoken quickly and are called "the fast parts of speech."  The children have trouble hearing them accurately and, as a result, reproducing them accurately.  Merzenich believed that these children's auditory cortex neurons were firing too slowly, so they couldn't distinguish between two very similar sounds or be certain, if two sounds occurred close together, which was first and which was second.  Often they didn't hear the beginnings of syllables or the sound changes within syllables.  Normally neurons, after they have processed a sound, are ready to fire again after about a 30-millisecond rest.  Eighty percent of language-impaired children took at least three times that long, so that they lost large amounts of language information.  When their neuron-firing patterns were examined, the signals weren't clear. ... Improper hearing lead to weaknesses in all the language tasks, so they were weak in vocabulary, comprehension, speech, reading, and writing.  Because they spent so much energy decoding words, they tended to use shorter sentences and failed to exercise their memory for longer sentences.

[Five hundred children at 35 sites] were given standardized language tests before and after Fast ForWord training. The study showed that most children's ability to understand language normalized after Fast ForWord.  In many cases, their comprehension rose above normal.  The average child who took the program moved ahead 1.8 years of language development in six weeks. ... A Stanford group did brain scans of twenty dyslexic children, before and after Fast ForWord.  The opening scans showed that the children used different parts of their brains for reading than normal children do.  After Fast ForWord new scans showed that their brains had begun to normalize.

Merzenich's team started hearing that Fast ForWord was having a number of spillover effects.  Children's handwriting improved.  Parents reported that many of the students were starting to show sustained attention and focus.  Merzenich thought these surprising benefits were occurring because Fast ForWord led to some general improvements in mental processing.

"You know," [Merzenich] says, "IQ goes up.  We used the matrix test, which is a visual-based measurement of IQ—and IQ goes up."

The fact that a visual component of the IQ went up meant that the IQ improvements were not caused simply because Fast ForWord improved the children's ability to read verbal test questions.  Their mental processing was being improved in a general way.

This is just a sample of the benefits that made me want to rush right out and buy Fast ForWord, even if it were to cost as much as the insanely-expensive Rosetta Stone German software I'm also tempted to buy.  From the description, it sounds like something everyone could benefit from for mental tune-ups.  Unfortunately, the makers of Fast ForWord are even worse than the Rosetta Stone folks about keeping tight control over their product:  as far as I've been able to determine, you can only use it under the direction of a therapist (making it too expensive for ordinary use), and even then you don't own the software but are only licensed to use it for a short period of time.  :(  It works, though.  We know someone for whom it made all the difference in the world, even late in her school career.

Merzenich began wondering about the role of a new environmental risk factor that might affect everyone but have a more damaging effect on genetically predisposed children:  the continuous background noise from machines, sometimes called white noise.  White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex.

"Infants are reared in continuously more noisy environments.  There is always a din," he says.  White noise is everywhere now, coming from fans in our electronics, air conditioners, heaters, and car engines.

To test this hypothesis, his group exposed rat pups to pulses of white noise throughout their critical period and found that the pups' cortices were devastated.

Psychologically, middle age is often an appealing time because, all else being equal, it can be a relatively placid period compared with what has come before. ... We still regard ourselves as active, but we have a tendency to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are learning as we were before.  We rarely engage in tasks in which we must focus our attention as closely as we did when we were younger.  Such activities as reading the newspaper, practicing a profession of many years, and speaking our own language are mostly the replay of mastered skills, not learning.  By the time we hit our seventies, we may not have systematically engaged the systems in the brain that regulate plasticity for fifty years.

That's why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving and maintaining the memory generally.  Because it requires intense focus, studying a new language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds.  No doubt Fast ForWord is responsible for so many general improvements in thinking, in part because it stimulates the control system for plasticity to keep up its production of acetylcholine and dopamine.  Anything that requires highly focused attention will help that system—learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and material.  Merzenich himself is an advocate of learning a new language in old age.  "You will gradually sharpen everything up again and that will be very highly beneficial to you."

The same applies to mobility.  Just doing the dances you learned years ago won't help your brain's motor cortex stay in shape.  To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus.  That is what will allow you to both lay down new memories and have a system that can easily access and preserve the older ones.

This work opens up the possibility of high-speed learning later in life.  The nucleus basalis [always on for young children, but in adulthood only with sustained, close attention] could be turned on by an electrode, by microinjections of certain chemicals, or by drugs.  It is hard to imagine that people will not ... be drawn to a technology that would make it relatively effortless to master the facts of science, history, or a profession, merely by being exposed to them briefly. ... Such techniques would no doubt be used by high school and university students in their studies and in competitive entrance exams.  (Already many students who do not have attention deficit disorder use stimulants to study.)  Of course, such aggressive interventions might have unanticipated, adverse effects on the brain—not to mention our ability to discipline ourselves—but they would likely be pioneered in cases of dire medical need, where people are willing to take the risk.  Turning on the nucleus basalis might help brain-injured patients, so many of whom cannot relearn the lost functions of reading, writing, speaking, or walking because they can't pay close enough attention.

[Gross motor control is] a function that declines as we age, leading to loss of balance, the tendency to fall, and difficulties with mobility.  Aside from the failure of vestibular processing, this decline is caused by the decrease in sensory feedback from our feet.  According to Merzenich, shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brain.  If we went barefoot, our brains would receive many different kinds of input as we went over uneven surfaces.  Shoes are a relatively flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are increasingly artificial and perfectly flat.   This leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control.  Then we may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady ourselves.  By resorting to these compensations instead of exercising our failing brain systems, we hasten their decline.

As we age, we want to look down at our feet while walking down stairs or on slightly challenging terrain, because we're not getting much information from our feet.  As Merzenich escorted his mother-in-law down the stairs of the villa, he urged her to stop looking down and start feeling her way, so that she would maintain, and develop, the sensory map for her foot, rather than letting it waste away.

Brain plasticity and psychological disorders:

Each time [people with obsessive-compulsive disorder] try to shift gears, they begin ... growing new circuits and altering the caudate.  By refocusing the patient is learning not to get sucked in by the content of an obsession but to work around it.  I suggest to my patients that they think of the use-it-or-lose-it principle.  Each moment they spend thinking of the symptom ... they deepen the obsessive circuit.  By bypassing it, they are on the road to losing it.  With obsessions and compulsions, the more you do it, the more you want to do it; the less you do it, the less you want to do it ... [I]t is not what you feel while applying the technique that counts, it is what you do.  "The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling"—by acting out a compulsion, or thinking about the obsession.  This technique won't give immediate relief because lasting neuroplastic change takes time, but it does lay the groundwork for change by exercising the brain in a new way. ... The goal is to "change the channel" to some new activity for fifteen to thirty minutes when one has an OCD symptom.  (If one can't resist that long, any time spent resisting is beneficial, even if it is only for a minute.  That resistance, that effort, is what appears to lay down new circuits.)

Mental practice with physical results:

Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played.  Then members of one group, the "mental practice" group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence and hearing it played.  A second "physical practice" group actually played the music two hours a day for five days.  Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward.  Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.

Pascual-Leoone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes.  Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece.  By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual players were on their third day.

The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however substantial, was not as great as in those who did physical practice.  But when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group's performance at five days.  Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.

In an experiment that is as hard to believe as it is simple, Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole showed that imagining one is using one's muscles actually strengthens them.  The study looked at two groups, one that did physical exercise and one that imagined doing exercise. ... At the end of the study the subjects who had done physical exercise increased their muscular strength by 30 percent, as one might expect.  Those who only imagined doing the exercise, for the same period, increased their muscle strength by 22 percent.  The explanation lies in the motor neurons of the brain that "program" movements.  During these imaginary contractions, the neurons responsible for stringing together sequences of instructions for movements are activated and strengthened, resulting in increased strength when the muscles are contracted.

Talk about unbelievable.

The Sea Gypsies are nomadic people who live in a cluster of tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand.  A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea. ... Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food ... and have done so for centuries.  By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers.  They do this without any diving equipment.

But what distinguishes these children, for our purposes, is that they can see clearly at these great depths, without goggles.  Most human beings cannot see clearly under water because as sunlight passes through water, it is bent ... so that light doesn't land where it should on the retina.

Anna Gislén, a Swedish researcher, studied the Sea Gypsies' ability to read placards under water and found that they were more than twice as skillful as European children.  The Gypsies learned to control the shape of their lenses and, more significantly, to control the size of their pupils, constricting them 22 percent.  This is a remarkable finding, because human pupils reflexively get larger under water, and pupil adjustment has been thought to be a fixed, innate reflex, controlled by the brain and nervous system.

This ability of the Sea Gypsies to see under water isn't the product of a unique genetic endowment.  Gislén has since taught Swedish children to constrict their pupils to see under water.

The fact that cultures differ in perception is not proof that one perceptual act is a good as the next, or that "everything is relative" when it comes to perception.  Clearly some contexts call for a more narrow angle of view, and some for more wide-angle, holistic perception.  The Sea Gypsies have survived using a combination of their experience of the sea and holistic perception.  So attuned are they to the moods of the sea that when the tsunami of December 26, 2004, hit the Indian Ocean, killing hundreds of thousands, they all survived.  They saw that the sea had begun to recede in a strange way, and this drawing back was followed by an unusually small wave; they saw dolphins begin to swim for deeper water, while the elephants started stampeding to higher ground, and they heard the cicadas fall silent. ... Long before modern science put this all together, they had either fled the sea to the shore, seeking the highest ground, or gone into very deep waters, where they also survived.

Music makes extraordinary demands on the brain.  A pianist performing the eleventh variation of the Sixth Paganini etude by Franz Liszt must play a staggering eighteen hundred notes per minute.  Studies by Taub and others of musicians who play stringed instruments have shown that the more these musicians practice, the larger the brain maps for their active left hands become, and the neurons and maps that respond to string timbres increase; in trumpeters the neurons and maps that respond to "brassy" sounds enlarge.  Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains—the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others—that differ from those of nonmusicians.  Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres.

It is not just "highly cultured" activities that rewire the brain.  Brain scans of London taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets, the larger the volume of his hippocampus, that part of the brain that stores spatial representations.  Even leisure activities change our brain; meditators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention.

Here's something completely different, and frightening.

[T]otalitarian regimes seem to have an intuitive awareness that it becomes hard for people to change after a certain age, which is  why so much effort is made to indoctrinate the young from an early age.  For instance, North Korea, the most thoroughgoing totalitarian regime in existence, places children in school from ages two and a half to four years; they spend almost every waking hour being immersed in a cult of adoration for dictator Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung.  They can see their parents only on weekends.  Practically every story read to them is about the leader.  Forty percent of the primary school textbooks are devoted wholly to describing the two Kims.  This continues all the way through school.  Hatred of the enemy is drilled in with massed practice as well, so that a brain circuit forms linking the perception of "the enemy" with negative emotions automatically.  A typical math quiz asks, "Three soldiers from the Korean People's Army killed thirty American soldiers.  How many American soldiers were killed by each of them, if they all killed an equal number of enemy soldiers?"  Such perceptual emotional networks, once established in an indoctrinated people, do not lead only to mere "differences of opinion" between them and their adversaries, but to plasticity-based anatomical differences, which are much harder to bridge or overcome than ordinary persuasion.

Think the North Koreans are the only ones whose brains are being re-programed?

"The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of 'practice' events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to.  Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure—but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary 'tools,' etc." — Michael Merzenich, 2005

Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message.  They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them.  As Just put it, "The brain constructs the message ... differently for reading and listening. ... Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does.  A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper."  This finding refutes the conventional theory of comprehension, which argues that a single center in the brain understands words, and it doesn't really matter how ... information enters the brain.

Television, music videos, and video games, all of which use television techniques, unfold at a much faster pace than real life, and they are getting faster, which causes people to develop an increased appetite for high-speed transitions in those media.  It is the form of the television medium—cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises—that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the "orienting response," which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement.  We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings. ... Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can't keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend.  Because typical music videos, action sequences, and commercials trigger orientating responses at a rate of one per second, watching them puts us into continuous orienting response with no recovery.  No wonder people report feeling drained from watching TV.  Yet we acquire a taste for it and find slower changes boring.  The cost is that such activities as reading, complex conversation, and listening to lectures become more difficult.

All electronic devices rewire the brain.  People who write on a computer are often at a loss when they have to write by hand or dictate, because their brains are not wired to translate thoughts into cursive writing or speech at high speed.  When computers crash and people have mini-nervous breakdowns, there is more than a little truth in their cry, "I feel like I've lost my mind!"  As we use an electronic medium, our nervous system extends outward, and the medium extends inward.

Ouch!

"Use it or lose it" is a common refrain in The Brain that Changes Itself, whether talking about specific knowledge and abilities, or the capacity for learning and the very plasticity of the brain itself.  (There is some hope given, however, that knowledge apparently lost is recoverable, even if its brain "map" has subsequently been taken over for another use.)  Do you worry, as I did, that these new discoveries mean that it really is possible to learn too much, that we need to save our brains for that which is most important?  That learning German will drive away what little I know of French?  Relax; that doesn't need to happen, although I must be sure to keep the French fresh in my mind or it will get shelved.

As the scientist Gerald Edelman has pointed out, the human cortex alone has 30 billion neurons and is capable of making 1 million billion synaptic connections.  Edelman writes, "If we considered the number of possible neural circuits, we would be dealing with hyper-astronomical numbers:  10 followed by at least a million zeros.  (There are 10 followed by 79 zeros, give or take a few, of particles in the known universe.)"  These staggering numbers explain why the human brain can be described as the most complex known object in the universe, and why it is capable of ongoing, massive microstructural change, and capable of performing so many different mental functions and behaviors.

I'm tired of typing.  Get the book.

We recently returned from a lovely two weeks in Switzerland (with brief side trips to France, Germany, and Italy).  I hope eventually to post more pictures and stories, but here's a start.

Just over a week before our scheduled departure from the U.S., the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, threw a spanner into the works for European flights.  Porter wrestled for a while with changing our itinerary to go through airports less risky than Amsterdam's Schiphol, but with the ash cloud as unpredictable as it was, decided the best course was to hand on to what we had.  We did what we always do when there's nothing else we can do (and even when there is):  we prayed a lot.  Unlike that of our friend who needed to get to her brother's funeral (she made it), this was not a critical flight, but the primary purpose of the trip was to attend Janet's end-of-school recital, and we would have been very sad to miss it, having not yet heard any of her grad school performances.

The airports gradually opened, and we had no problems on the flight over.  (Side note:  Schiphol is a lovely airport, and very friendly to English-speakers.  I believe there is more English in Amsterdam's airport than in Miami's, and the announcements are much clearer and more easily understandable than in several American airports of my experience.)

The flight home two weeks later was another story.  Getting from Basel to Amsterdam was uneventful, and all appeared normal as we boarded the flight to Philadelphia.  We were upgraded to better seats, and soon learned why:  Porter's Preferred status with Star Alliance, plus the fact that we were on a different plane from that which had been scheduled.

That was the hint that not all was well.

We were using a different plane because Eyjafjallajokull's ash cloud was forcing the planes to take less direct routes, and unlike the 757 originally assigned to our flight, the 767 could make the journey without a refueling stop.  The difference in planes turned out to have even more significance later on.

We had a new plane, but we were still waiting.  And waiting.  The 767 has a different set of kitchen equipment, and the caterer had to take back the old and bring in the new.  From somewhere off-site.  And got snarled in a long security line for getting back onto airport grounds.  Finally, we were stocked and ready to go.

Except that while we were waiting, the entire North Atlantic airspace had been closed, and all flight plans cancelled.  Ours was to take us north of the ash cloud, and thus was still a good plan—except that everything had to be re-filed and re-evaluated, I'm guessing because the controllers had to give priority to dealing with planes that were already in the air when the airspace was closed.

However, our alert and savvy pilot re-filed his plan immediately, and thus we were the first transatlantic flight given permission to leave Schiphol when the time came.  The three hours on the tarmac in Amsterdam, plus the longer flight time and further delay because we missed our connection in Philadelphia, were more than compensated for by the view afforded by our new flight path, which took us spang over the middle of Iceland.  There are much better photos of the volcano available, but nothing beats the personal experience.  The picture came out better than I thought it would, but you'll need to click on it and look at the bigger picture to discern much of anything.

Here's a video Porter took that shows things a bit better.

I was, by the way, more than impressed with USAirways.  The entire crew was cheerful, helpful, patient, and gracious through the delay and uncertainty, and the pilot particularly savvy and helpful.  He was definitely on the ball when it came to getting us off the ground; he made a point of helping us find the ash cloud; and before we even left Amsterdam had the reservations desk working on rescheduling connecting flights, so that our new boarding passes were waiting for us, along with meal vouchers as we deplaned in Philadelphia.  For those who were unable to get flights that day, USAirways not only provided hotel vouchers, but made all the hotel arrangements.  True, for no discernable reason and without warning they downgraded our seats on the Philadelphia-Orlando flight as we were boarding, so that we were many rows apart, and also mangled one of our suitcases (note to self:  fly with full suitcases and don't try packing one inside another).  But overall, I think they did a commendable and above-and-beyond job in difficult circumstances.

The Inn of the Sixth Happiness  (20^th Century Fox, 1958, not rated)

A sympathetic and positive portrayal of a segment of the life of Gladys Aylward, the British Christian servant girl with a powerful love of both God and China.  This small woman (incongrously but convincingly played by Ingrid Bergman) had great impact in northern China during the tumultous 1930's and 40's.  Single-handedly leading nearly 100 children over the mountains to safety during the Japanese invasion, and persuading the remote villages to comply with the new law against the footbinding of women, were but a small part of her successes.

As movies go, this one is reasonably true to the story.  I realize that's damning with faint praise, but I've learned to lower my expectations for truth from movies, which must alter events to make a convincing story fit in under three hours, and must include non-existent romantic scenes to please the audience.  Perhaps its worst crime is in making Aylward's extremely arduous life look easy.  In addition to the "normal" hardships of malnutrition and hard labor, she was beaten, tortured, shot, and severely injured in a bomb blast, but Bergman's hair is never mussed more than can be fixed with a quick flick of her fingers, and the journey across the mountains seems almost as easy as the end of The Sound of Music.

It's a fun and inspiring movie, worth watching if you also make a point of learning "the rest of the story."  As much as can be learned, anyway:  Aylward was old, with broken health and failing memory, when her story was finally written down, so much remains unknown.

Monk, the television show about obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk, ran from 2002 - 2009.  We encountered it in 2007, thanks to Netflix and the suggestion of a friend, and completed the eighth and last season this month.  Part mystery, part comedy, and part fantasy, Monk ranks as the only television show for which we have seen every episode.

The Pros

I love recognizing our own quirks and foibles in the character of Monk.

Mystery has always been one of my favorite genres, and I'm not too fussy about realism and consistency, especially when the intent is also comic.

Although Monk is about crime, loss, and disability, it is not dark, but hopeful.

The characters are likeable.  In most movies and TV shows the characters are unlike anyone I know, and unlike anyone I would like to know.  I'd be happy to have the Monk characters in our neighborhood—except for the disturbing tendency of those around them to murder or be murdered.

The writing is of variable quality, but we found only a handful of episodes unsatisfactory.  Overall it's fair, imaginative, and well done.

Monk knew when to quit.  As they say, it's better to leave while people are still sad to see you go than after they've tired of you.  Unlike many shows—I remember specifically The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek (the original series) from my youth—Monk managed to draw the curtain before it became obvious that the writers had run out of ideas and the actors were sick of each other.

The series ended well, unlike the final episode of M.A.S.H., which still haunts me.

With respect to sex/violence/language issues, the show was purposely kept "at a 1970's level."  I find understatement and implication to be far more powerful than explicitness, and in any case there's far too much of the latter in real life.  If I wanted to hear the kind of talk prevalent on most current shows, I'd go back to volunteering in our local high school.

The Cons

The 1970's is not far enough back for sex/violence/language levels, as far as I'm concerned.  Sometimes it seems amazing to think that my own family lived and grew and managed to be quite articulate without ever using profanity in any form.  In most cases, I found the occasional, mild expostulations in Monk appropriate in context—the genre itself not being something the grandkids would watch, anyway—but I do find offensive the repeated use of "oh my god," with no more meaning than "like" or "um."

The show is formulaic; I'll admit it.  But I like the formula—and it's hard to avoid in the mystery genre if you're going to write more than one or two books, so it doesn't bother me. 

Is Monk important to watch?  No.  But for what it is, it is good.  And, come to think of it, if it's not important to watch shows like Monk, it's at least important to support them.  Dark, depressing, explicit, and frightening movies and television shows are forming the imaginative structure of the minds of a large number of people; a contemporary vision of hope and humor through difficulty may, indeed, be important for them to experience.

Today's Mallard Fillmore comic inspired this post, which Li'l Writer Guy had actually been working on in the background ever since a conversation we had about the subject last night.

Mind you, I don't know any of the details of how it will work, and am only commenting on the theory that children should be covered on their parents' health insurance until they are 26 years old.

It shows the hazards of exposure to pop culture that I was tempted to respond to this idea with "WTF?"  Language I would never speak begins to look harmless as an acronym, and one commonly in print at that.  But I digress.

There are at least two issues here.  One is the need to address the health care gap many young people experience when they begin their adult lives.  An affordable source of insurance for those who are, as the Japanese so elegantly put it, "not in education or employment," opens up intriguing possibilities for self-directed learning, volunteer work, internships, and other ways of independent exploration that could better prepare a person for college, grad school, or a good career fit.  Too many people move mindlessly from high school to college to the workplace without gaining the life skills necessary to get the most out of them.

On the other hand, this is yet another instance of the bizarre phenomenon of extended adolescence.  Parents are not only paying for a college education for their children, but many are covering their graduate school expenses.  Worse, the schools expect this, and require information on parental income for scholarship applications.  (I think universities have some nerve mocking "helicopter parents" while freely expecting their money.)  Now the parents' insurance is expected to cover their children long after those children should be on their own.  We have come a long way, and not all for the better, from the days when teenagers—some of them quite young—routinely married, held responsible jobs, raised children, and supported families.  You can say all you want that it takes more education to acccomplish that in today's society, and I'll mostly agree, though I'll add that the amount of time given to acquiring that education is shockingly and unnecessarily high.  But in any case it cannot be good that we've removed a decade of strong, healthy, exuberant and enthusiastic youth from the years of independence and productivity.

I am not going to join the recent chorus of voices crying that multitasking is a bad thing.  It can relieve tedium (listening to lectures while ironing), increase efficiency (knitting while keeping an eye on swimming children), and add to enjoyment (conversing while eating).  What's more, if mothers couldn't multi-task, the whole world might crash to a halt.

Nonetheless, there is increasing evidence—in scientific studies and in my own life—that multitasking can also lead to poor performance on all tasks.  Conducting a business deal via cell phone while driving may increase your productivity, but not if it distracts you from brake lights suddenly appearing on the car ahead.  Fixing dinner while talking to a friend on the telephone may cause you to miss a critical change in her tone of voice—or to burn the meal.

I was inspired a month ago to make Pay Attention this month's resolution.  If there was a specific reason I no longer remember it, but the decision was confirmed when I read The Brain that Changes Itself, a book that showed up in my mailbox after I unexpectedly won it in a contest.  Here are some of my thoughts as I evaluate multitasking, and areas in my life where I need to be more attentive.

I've been a mental multitasker for as long as I can remember—before the word was invented, actually (1966, according to Webster).  My mind is always active in its own world, no matter what else is going on.  Li'l Writer Guy is a significant, but not exclusive, contributor.  The Good:  I do a lot of thinking, and am almost never bored.  The Bad:  I am rarely paying complete attention to what is going on around me.  It requires an almost physical effort, for example. to pay attention to the music in a concert, rather than to let the sound serve as an enjoyable accompaniment for whatever direction my thoughts take me.  My hope for this resolution is not to squelch my active mind, but to discipline it.  I need to be able to distinguish between activities that work well in the periphery of my attention, and those which deserve to be in clear focus.

Anything I want to be able to learn, and remember, is in the latter category.  The Brain that Changes Itself is about the plasticity of the brain, and the ability of even adult brains to change and grow and re-wire themselves.  For a long time we believed that there is a critical period in which the brain is plastic and learns easily, and that after adolescence we are pretty much stuck with the brains we have at that point.  Some skills, such as learning a foreign language with complete fluency, were considered nearly impossible for adults.  Recent studies (and much older studies that had been ignored) have shown, however, that the adult brain is also plastic and can change far more than we thought.  Yes, young children do have a great advantage, in that their brains are always "turned on" for effortless learning in a way that ceases by adolescence.  Adults retain the ability to rewire their brains, but a crucial component of the process for them is paying attention.

Paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change.  In numerous experiments [Michael Merzenich] found that lasting changes occurred only when his monkeys paid close attention.  When the animals performed tasks automatically, without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last.  We often praise "the ability to multitask."  While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain maps.

This explains many things, including the fact that I am totally hopeless in remembering a route taken, even many times, in a strange city, if I am merely following a leader rather than making the navigational decisions myself.

So how about some concrete examples?  What situations are amenable to multitasking, and what not?

• I loved nursing my babies, but I must admit that part of the pleasure was that those moments were just about the only time I had to read books, one of the great delights of my life.  I later found out that other mothers spent nursing time gazing into their babies' eyes, fondling their little hands, and otherwise bonding.  I think my babies and I bonded quite well, but I do sometimes wonder what I missed.
• I've already mentioned concerts, and I was quite successful at not letting my mind wander during a recent series of lovely medieval music recitals.  It helped a lot that the works were short.  Maintaining concentration throughout an entire symphony is still beyond my grasp.
• Listening to audiobooks or reading during long car rides is a mixed blessing.  It can make the time pass much more pleasantly, especially on an Interstate in the Midwest, but it can also be a loss.  I was a teenager when my family took an amazing cross-country automobile journey—and the scenery I saw the most was inside the large collection of science fiction books my uncle had given me at the start of the trip.
• One area in which I want to harness, rather than suppress, multitasking is in my projects.  I am quite capable—perhaps too much so—of sustained, concentrated focus and effort when my work is going well.  When I hit a snag, however, I tend to veer off into something else.  For the most part, this is a good thing, and having a full to-do list makes it possible for me to still be productive.  Very often I find that my brain will continue working in the background on the difficulty, and I can return to the first project with the problem solved and something else accomplished as well.  It's much better than spinning my mental wheels.  However ... I know there are times when I should push through the difficulty rather than fleeing from it, and I also know that I sometimes flee to less than useful work, such as checking my e-mail for the fourth time in the past hour.
• I need to pay more attention to people.  Scanning photographs while IM-ing with a friend is a good use of multitasking, because scanning is otherwise tedious and does not distract from the conversation.  Reading blogs while IM-ing, however, is a poor combination, even though there is time between exchanges to do so, because it leads to me not paying sufficient attention to either.
• Some areas I think I will not bother to work on:  Movies tend to drive me crazy if I don't have something else to do at the same time.  (I need to learn to knit.)  I suppose I could be a better player if I concentrated 100% on a game, but I rarely find games interesting enough to do so.  (This is why I prefer fast games, and ones in which my lack of attention doesn't hurt a partner.)

This is going to be a difficult resolution.  During our recent trip to Switzerland, I tried forcing myself to pay attention as we travelled from place to place, but found it extremely hard.  Oh well—I learned from The Brain that Changes Itself that another secret to real, lasting change is small, incremental improvements over time.  Each moment spent paying full attention is a victory that enables further progress.

Progress report:

#1  Read More Books  Not so good in April—only three books completed—but that was not unexpected.  I've been working on two more difficult books (The History of the Ancient World and The Chronological Guide to the Bible), and this month also included some travel that left little room for reading outside of the airplane ride—which, I admit, I spent mostly doing puzzles when I was not sleeping. Still, my monthly average is six books, so I'm happy with this one.

#2  Rediscover Feasting  This month focussed more on feasting itself, rather than on the contrast with fasting and ordinary time.  Helped by something I learned from In Tune with the World (to be a link when I review the book), I was able to feast extravagantly during our recent trip to Switzerland, reining in any concerns about either calories or cost.

#3  Learn to Relax  I was much less stressed during our recent travel than I usually am, though I suspect it had more to do with increased travel experience than with anything I've done.  Oh, and the biggest factor—Stephan and Janet did nearly all the work of planning and guiding.  Having watched in jaw-dropping amazement Janet's Alexander Technique class, I think I may have discovered something to help with this resolution—although I haven't found a practitioner closer than an hour and a half away.

#4  Like More Things  No discernable progress here.  I need to find some small steps to take.  Stephan did try to introduce me to a new cheese, but it was not love at first bite and I ran out of time to learn to like it.

Our six year old grandson is brilliant, of course:  great in reading, great in math, and, as those of you who know our family will agree, also great in spelling.  (Photo credit the Daleys.)