Predatory attitudes make survivors

In war, anxiety can run as high as the Iraqi heat, and neuroscientists say that the most perceptive, observant brain on earth will not pick up subtle clues if it is overwhelmed by stress.

In the Army study of I.E.D. detection, researchers found that troops who were good at spotting bombs in simulations tended to think of themselves as predators, not prey. That frame of mind by itself may work to reduce anxiety, experts say.

From this article in the New York Times.

Our third child turns 3 next month; so much learned, so much more to know

Sadie, our third-child surprise, the one we almost named Merlot due to her likely inspiration, will turn three years old next month.

Her birthday is on Bastille Day. There's significance in that. I'm sure of it. I just haven't figured it out yet.

Sadie has two older sisters, ages 6 and 8, neither of which were nearly named after a red wine.

My wife and I learned gobs from our first two. Every developmental stage has its normal traits, like the tantrums of the "terrible twos" and potty training.

On the other hand, each child is different. We identified attention-deficit disorder in our oldest daughter when she was 6 years old. We suspected a degree of anxiety in our middle child when she was 4 years old.

In both cases, we sought professional help. We looked into conventional medical approaches to these problems as well as emerging remedies like neurofeedback, which has been the subject of mainstream medical research in Germany. My wife and I believe that our love for our children must be guided by critical minds that insist on multiple sources of information for anything we consider. While it is impossible to know everything, our approach removes some of the variables in decision-making -- and it has been fruitful. With our intentional involvement at home and the help of a licensed doctor, the oldest daughter can maintain focused attention for much longer, and the middle daughter is less anxious in her daily life.

But there remains the simple fact -- even as we begin our third run through the preschool years -- that we have so much to learn. Researchers say that the human brain develops dramatically during the first five years of life -- so much so, that my wife and I feel the burden of properly navigating Sadie's third and fourth years. How do you do it perfectly? When no one has ever done it perfectly?

Well, there is some good news for us.

Well, first, we've done made it through the preschool years twice already. And if you have done so, you ought to pat yourself on the back.

Second, we know where to look for good information. We have culled the good authors, books and Web sites from the mediocre and the bad.

Third, we know how to love Sadie. We make direct eye contact with her. We hug her and kiss her all the time (probably not difficult for most parents, yet extremely important at this stage of development). We spend time with her, even when it is difficult to peel ourselves away from our computers.

Sadie has been on her own learning curve. We don't let her do whatever she wants -- especially when what she wants to do involves wet toilet paper --never mind her persistence and fits. Surviving these episodes requires a level of patience and endurance that my wife and I do not possess naturally, and I'm sure many American parents feel the same way.

Yet in the end, all the little struggles are worth it. We see the outcomes of our preschool-year efforts in the 8-year-old and the 6-year-old.

I cannot wait for the next year with the little girl we almost named Merlot. I want to help that little brain develop to its full potential.

-Colin Foote Burch

NBA star, misdiagnosed with ADHD, uses neurofeedback to regain calm thoughts

Today's Los Angeles Times has an incredible article about L.A. Clippers center Chris Kaman and his discovery of neurofeedback.

Before he was 3 years old, Kaman was misdiagnosed as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. For years he took medicine that compounded his actual problem, which was an anxiety disorder, but now neurofeedback is helping him regain calm thoughts.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

After discovering the misdiagnosis, Kaman started working with [Dr. Tim Royer of Hope139] on a system called "neurofeedback," a method of reading brain wave activity to reinforce calm thoughts.

Kaman sits in front of a computer and if his brain waves are at a desired level, the screen will show it. If not, Kaman attempts to calm his thought process. During the off-season, he also worked with a wireless device that allowed him to measure his brain waves while on the court.

"It's a very fast-paced game, and for me to be able to slow it down in my head, it really has been a lot easier and a lot less stressful in the games," Kaman said.

Read the full article here.

Science, brain, mind & metaphysics

I'm reading a book that argues aggressively against the validity of the field of neurophilosophy. Excerpts from the introduction:

"The name 'neurophilosophy' itself, and the hyphenated expression 'mind/brain', are both part of the propaganda, intended to suggest the closest, intimate connection between neuroscience and philosophy....

"It is not physiology which drives this philosophical orthodoxy, but metaphysics, the idea that the findings of the sciences are now providing answers to the questions raised by metaphysics, providing a definitive statement as to what there really (ultimately) is....

"Opposition to the idea that science can be the fulfillment of metaphysics does not involve in any way opposition to science. If the objectives of metaphysics are spurious, then they cannot be fulfilled by science any more than they can be by metaphysics. The error which promotes the orthodoxy is, in an important respect, very simple and basic: it is to suppose that 'what anything is' is identical (in the very strongest sense) with 'what it is made of'."

- from Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) by Jeff Coulter of Boston University and Wes Sharrock of the University of Manchester

Books I'm reviewing for real publications

I'm reviewing The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to do Them), by NPR's Peter Sagal, for DoubleThink, the quarterly magazine published by America's Future Foundation in D.C. The review should appear in the Winter 2008 edition. You can visit the magazine's Web page at http://www.affdoublethink.com/. AFF also has an online-only publication called Brainwash, which you can find at http://www.affbrainwash.com/.

I'm also reviewing a slightly denser book: Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology, by Jeff Coulter and Wes Sharrock. This review will appear in the March 2008 edition of Appraisal: The Journal of the Society for Post-Critical and Personalist Studies. You can visit the SPCPS Web site at http://www.spcps.org.uk/.

Meanwhile, at LiturgicalCredo.com, I will soon post a book review of Praying with Beads: Daily Prayers for the Christian Year by Nan Lewis Doerr and Virginia Stem Owens.

'Mindfulness' training might help schoolchildren relax, pay attention

Patricia Leigh Brown's article in The New York Times Saturday explained a promising approach to quieting the minds of schoolchildren.

OAKLAND, Calif., June 12 — The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness.

With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground....

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept...

Brown wrote that some big research institutions are studying "mindfulness" and how it works.

“Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a [Stanford University] researcher. “But we never teach them how.”

That's not to say that "mindfulness" training is completely advocated by researchers.

Although some students take naturally to mindfulness, it is “not a magic bullet,” said Diana Winston, the director of mindfulness education at the U.C.L.A. center. She said the research thus far was “inconclusive” about how effective mindfulness was for children who suffered from trauma-related disorders, for example. It is “a slow process,” Ms. Winston added. “Just because kids sit and listen to the bell doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be more kind.”

A-ha! So moral, ethical and religious trainings are still necessary. As Winston suggests, there never really is a single silver bullet to human problems, is there? But this research indicates that "mindfulness" can be a tool.

Some teachers told Brown that the techniques have not worked for every student.

But [Yolanda Steel, a second-grade teacher at Piedmont,] noted that some students tapped pencils and drummed on desks instead of closing their eyes and listening to the bell. “The premise is nice,” Ms. Steel concluded. “But mindfulness can’t do it all.”

Words like "Tibetan" and "Buddhist" and "mindfulness" will alarm some parents, especially many more conservative religious folk, but I think they could suspend worry until they have considered two points.

First, focusing attention is not the same as "emptying" the mind, which produces a state that might make children more susceptible to manipulation -- or, as some religious folks will contend, dark spiritual influences. Focusing the imagination on something healthy and positive is not, at very least, the same as emptying the mind. I cannot remember who told me this, but somewhere along the way I heard someone define the Biblical word for meditation as "mulling over" or "chewing over" a certain idea. Could relaxing and repeating certain Biblical or liturgical phrases be detrimental? To me, this is not the same as repeating songs over and over in a revival service.

Second, some research suggests that focused meditation strengthens the brain. An article in the June edition of Men's Journal addressed meditation techniques in which a person will relax and focus on a repeated phrase. "When Harvard researcher Sara Lazar recently compared the brains of American meditators to a control group, she found that parts of the cortex responsible for attention were on average 5 percent thicker," the article said.

To me, techniques for focusing attention (as long as they do not involve "emptying" the mind) involve the same electrical patterns in the brain that are addressed in neurofeedback. Neurofeedback helps people redo the electrical patterns in their brains. Before neurofeedback can begin, the clinician must record the electrical patterns in the brain (an electroencephalograph). Clusters of electrical activity in certain parts of the brain can indicate attention-deficit disorder, depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, and other problems. After the diagnosis, to help remedy these problems, a clinician specializing in neurofeedback will program a computer system based on the diagnosis. When the time comes for the patient's office visit, the clinician will attach sensors to the head of the patient. The patient will sit in front of a screen that might have a video-game style race track or a movie. When the patient's relaxation and focus get into the right zone -- when the electrical patterns move away from those clusters and into other parts of the brain -- a car will move along the race track or the movie will fill the entire screen.

Exciting times for brain research.

Read Brown's article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/us/16mindful.html?ex=1182830400&en=981d7c4981c880cc&ei=5070

-Colin Burch

Meditating for a better brain

From the June edition of Men's Journal:

"In a University of Wisconsin study of Buddhist monks, researcher Richard Davidson used electroencephalograph readings to prove that monks can generate gamma waves, which are associated with attention and learning, for minutes at a time; mere mortals can sustain a few seconds of gamma activity at best. The same monks also showed an unusual amount of activity in the left side of their prefrontal cortices, which are associated with positive feelings. Sure enough, the monks were startlingly alert and happy....

"When Harvard researcher Sara Lazar recently compared the brains of American meditators to a control group, she found that parts of the cortex responsible for attention were on average 5 percent thicker...."

Neurofeedback gets into the toy market

Just as my family has become convinced of the value of neurofeedback, the science behind it is being used to create a new generation of toys -- perhaps the most "interactive" toys ever.

My wife, daughter, and I have have benefited from sessions with neurofeedback, a clinical process that trains the mind to rewire itself to overcome attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and a host of other struggles. When an individual has one of these problems, it is sometimes due to a clustering of the brain's electrical patterns in one area, rather than a more typical distribution. These electrical patterns are observable through electroencephalographic brain imaging.

I was skeptical when my wife and daughter began going to neurofeedback sessions, but then I observed their progress. I especially considered my daughter's progress, and figured a six-year-old couldn't be faking consistent improvements in emotional stability and comprehension of her school work.

My daughter sometimes watches movies during neurofeedback sessions. With gentle clips on her ears and a sensor on her head (attached with a conductive medical paste), she relaxes and focuses on the screen. When her attention laps or she tenses up, the movie frame might shrink, or the sound might stop. She learns how to focus and relax, reinforcing the accompanying electrical patterns in the brain, thus keeping the full movie experience. In my experience, I usually have a video-game style image of a race car on a track. The more focused and relaxed I am, the faster the car goes around the track.

Lately I've been seeing news articles about NeuroSky, a California company that is tapping the brain's electrical waves to control toys. This one is from News.com.au:

In California, a life-sized Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light sabre.

It isn't a man in a silly costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals. It then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the sabre which in turn lights up when the user is concentrating.

The player maintains focus by channelling thoughts on any fixed mental image or by thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky have big plans for brainwave-reading toys and video games.

(Read the full story at http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,23663,21711660-7486,00.html?from=public_rss .)

The psychologist we see for our sessions said many in the U.S. medical community remain skeptical of the clinical value of neurofeedback.

However, an article in the January 2007 edition of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry said that studies have shown that neurofeedback has produced "performance improvements in real-life conditions," as well as "improved cognitive and behavioral variables" in children with ADHD. The article was written by researchers at two Germany universities.

For my own testimony, I'll just say my organizational abilities are improving and my ability to focus on my studies (without my mind wandering) has improved.

-Colin Burch

Structure, creativity, and the brain

The human brain apparently integrates structure and creativity in much of what it does, the left hemisphere lending a hand to the work of the right hemisphere, and vice versa. In ancient Greek thought, apparently, the roles of structure and creativity were considered a bit more mutually exclusive. Let me introduce a quote with two brief, simplified definitions.

Lógos: For Greeks, encompassed reasoning and language

Mûthos: For Greeks, encompassed words, speech, stories, poems, fictions, and fables

"Recent neurological research indicates that, by and large, the hemispheres of the human brain have distinct functions [stay with me, it gets better]: in the left (for most people) is the proposenity for language, mathematics, and linear reasoning, in the right the propensity for visual, spatial, intuitive, and analogical skills, the hemispheres working together through their neural links. This discovery has prompted a re-examination of the roles and relationships of lógos and mûthos, suggesting that they may be partners rather than rivals. If this is so, creative thought may require both linear left and holistic right. In linguistic terms, logic is as likely in verse as in prose, and analogy and metaphor are as much the tools of philosophers and scientists as of bards and mystics." -The Oxford Companion to the English Language

For example, if I attempt to write a sonnet, the imposed structure forces me to be creative in solving the problems of tailoring topic and language. However, I think the point in the Oxford Companion might point to something more foundational, deeply rooted in the brain. In communicating a mystical fable, one must stick to grammatical norms, and the vision of the teller can inspire certain structural choices.

The knowing heart?

The other day I had a brief conversation with a doctor who specializes in neuro-feedback. He said Western folks live out their heads, while Eastern folks live out of their hearts. When we try too hard to do something, he said, we usually don’t do it so well. In a zen-like fashion, corresponding with neuro-feedback therapy (or at least theory), when we’re not straining to do something, we usually have more success doing it.

It occurred to me later that, even in the West, we have a thread of understanding that places the heart at the center of our essential nature. Historically, the West has not been completely wedded to the left hemisphere of the brain.

Several years ago, I found a passage from Thomas de Quincey that tried to describe the heart’s role. In The Poetry of Pope, de Quincey wrote, “The scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or co-operation with the mere discursive understanding; when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of ‘the understanding heart’ – making the heart, i.e., the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite.”

Can we know with our hearts? I’ve been trying to define “heart” in the sense that de Quincey uses it, and so far I haven’t been able to construct an adequate definition from my research of theological and philosophical ideas. In the meantime, it’s interesting to see how some thinkers didn’t believe the left-hemisphere empiricism could say everything important to being human.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher living in the 1600s, looked out into the darkness beyond the outposts of his rational faculties and said, “It is reason’s last step to realize that there are millions of things beyond reason.”

Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher, wrote in his book The Tacit Dimension, “We know more than we can tell and we can know nothing without relying upon those things which we may not be able to tell.”

Something is going on in us that is valuable yet not centered in the left hemisphere of our brains. This opens a whole can of worms regarding intuition, mind-brain issues, spirituality, and the nature of the “heart” as de Quincey uses it.

The Mind-Brain problem gets an EEG

Despite my old-school, Christian-Platonic presuppositions about the mind and soul, I'm realizing just how much we are predisposed (not predetermined) to certain traits due to the wiring in our brains.

And yet there is hope for some of the problems through neurofeedback.

My daughter, like both of her parents to some extent, has met the diagnostic criteria for having attention-deficit disorder (ADHD) and probably its incumbent dyslexia.

We gave neurofeedback a try. Our daughter improved dramatically in matters of mood as well as attention. My wife was also going to neurofeedback sessions, but her assessment, not to get myself in trouble, hasn't meant as much as my observations of my daughter. My daughter is 6, and six-year-olds don't have agendas and presuppositions in clinical settings. Adults will either be skeptical or wholesale believers or something in between, and their beliefs will impact their assessments of their clinical experiences. A child is less self-conscious of her behavior, and in my daughter's case, her moods and abilities to concentrate improved.

The idea behind neurofeedback is that people will self-correct the unproductive concentrations of electrical currents in the brain. My own recent, personal experience with neurofeedback went like this. I had a wire clipped to each ear lobe, and another wire stuck on my head. I looked at a TV screen that displayed a race car on a race track, like a video game. When my attention was relaxed and focused on the screen, the car began to move. The more focused, the faster the car moved around the track. When I was distracted, or became self-conscious, or my thoughts turned inward, the car stopped.

University researchers in Germany have recently added to the research that suggests neurofeedback is highly effective in addressing ADHD. This apparently was the first study of neurofeedback in which the researchers tracked progress with electroencephalographic brain imaging (EEG). Read about their findings here:
http://au.health.yahoo.com/061123/3/zj94.html

Perhaps neurofeedback will increasingly become the cure for the kid about whom it has been said: "He's got a good mind. Why doesn't he use it?" Maybe many kids just need a little help in moving more of their brains' electrical activity into their frontal lobes.