In the post Trader Peak Per­for­mance and biofeed­back pro­grams we showed the Heart Rate Vari­abil­ity pat­terns cor­re­lated with lev­els of a) anx­i­ety or b) Peak Per­for­mance, “The Zone”. Biofeed­back sup­ports our emo­tional self-regulation: we can visu­ally track what is going on inside us and train our­selves to man­age our emo­tional state. On the left you have an exam­ple of my own per­for­mance dur­ing a 5-minute exper­i­ment 4 months ago. At the top, you see my name; at the bot­tom, the dura­tion of the ses­sion. Right axis, for top half, is Heart Rate. (This is only the half left of the screen in the program-the right half would give you more infor­ma­tion.) I have high­lighted sev­eral phases:

A: you can see long waves fol­low­ing a smooth rhythm-that is the phys­i­o­log­i­cal “The Zone”, where I can per­form at max­i­mum level. I was using breath­ing and visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques that are some­times called “The Men­tal Game” in ath­let­ics and sports.

B: I stressed myself. How? well, maybe think­ing of a pre­vi­ous boss, or some bad moment in my life. You see that the “waves” dis­ap­pear, and nar­row erratic pat­terns appear instead.

C: I quickly go back into “The Zone”, Read the rest of this entry »

Big party today. Car­ni­vals everywhere. 

Car­o­line and I admit we are quite biased. We see the world through our own lenses. Which, these days, means a lot of pas­sion for the science-based Brain Fit­ness Rev­o­lu­tion. We have been try­ing hard to com­bine fun brain teasers with seri­ous posts on how brain research is start­ing to influ­ence Edu­ca­tion, Health and Train­ing, and are thank­ful that these efforts are start­ing to pay off-Mission Accomplishing!

The week­end started very well. Kevin from IQ Cor­ner and Tick­Tock­BrainTalk had brought great early aus­pices by intro­duc­ing a Sharp­Brains feed box into his blog. A num­ber of trad­ing blogs, includ­ing Brett Steenbarger’s and Trader Mike’s, enjoyed our posts on trader per­for­mance and biofeedback.

Today has been the full Car­ni­val day. Read the rest of this entry »

What an event yes­ter­day night. My wife and I were for­tu­nate to visit the Google Cam­pus and attend the Sixth Annual North Amer­i­can Fel­low­ship Induc­tion Pro­gram of Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic, a social ven­ture fund where we have been involved for a num­ber of years, and thanks to which (thanks Michele!) my wife and I met in the first place.

18 new Ashoka Fellows/ social entre­pre­neurs were elected, and after a fun cock­tail recep­tion the cer­e­mony began. Sergei Brin (Google Co-founder), Sheryl Sand­berg (who helped launch Google Foun­da­tion and google.org), Salar Kaman­gar (the mind behind AdWords) gave intro­duc­tory remarks. Salar explained how he first heard of Ashoka (through the book How to Change the World, by David Born­stein) and how he saw tremen­dous sim­i­lar­i­ties between Ashoka and Google: both Read the rest of this entry »

Tech­nol­ogy & Learn­ing mag­a­zine, widely read among school admin­is­tra­tors, has just pub­lished a good arti­cle Take a Deep Breath: Biofeed­back soft­ware is help­ing stu­dents calm down for bet­ter test per­for­mance.

Some quotes

- (School prin­ci­pal says) “It just goes to show that the emo­tional state can really affect a child’s per­for­mance on the test,” says Lagozzino, who prac­tices the same exer­cises him­self after an ini­tial bout of skep­ti­cism. “If they have tools to calm them­selves so they can focus on the task at hand, then it’s some­thing we should do for all students.”

- The train­ing exer­cise usu­ally lasts five to seven min­utes, and stu­dents can use it at a PC in the back of a class­room or in a lab. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (yes, that is me!), man­ag­ing direc­tor of Sharp­Brains, a San Francisco-based reseller of the pro­gram, known as Freeze­Framer, which has been sold to 80 schools nation­wide, says the $300 price tag for a sen­sor (Note: and the soft­ware that comes with it) breaks new ground. Read the rest of this entry »

Some days ago we men­tioned atten­tion deficits and exec­u­tive func­tions, as part of a review of Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science and Edu­ca­tion. Let me explore that in more depth now, hav­ing just met a num­ber of very inter­est­ing researchers, doc­tors and experts at CHADD con­fer­ence, and wit­nessed the first baby steps of a com­ing rev­o­lu­tion.

First, 3 clar­i­fi­ca­tions are in order: Read the rest of this entry »

Last day of CHADD. Yes­ter­day, we had 2 great pre­sen­ta­tions by Dr. Torkel Kling­berg on Cogmed work­ing mem­ory train­ing pro­gram, RoboMemo, very well received by a large audi­ence.
Read the rest of this entry »

Great day at CHADD today. Very good con­ver­sa­tions on Brain Fit­ness with Dr. Torkel Kling­berg and the Cogmed team, pedi­a­tri­cians such as Dr. Arthur Lavin, who was the first clin­i­cal provider of Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing in the US, and neu­rop­shy­chol­o­gist Dr. Sam Goldstein-this con­ver­sa­tion around how biofeed­back devices can help golfers bet­ter man­age their stress lev­els and improve their game.

Mark Katz won a well-deserved award and talked about his inter­est in resilience and emo­tional endurance, and Richard Barkley, in his keynote, showed pre­lim­i­nary find­ings from his research on adults with ADD/ ADHD and con­cluded that most rel­e­vant symp­toms to diag­nose an adult with ADD/ ADHD involve exec­u­tive func­tion­ing and frontal lobe prob­lems. We have talked about this ear­lier, but in short: exec­u­tive func­tions reside in our brain’s frontal lobes (behind our fore­head), and deal with abil­i­ties such as inhi­bi­tion, work­ing mem­ory, orga­ni­za­tion to time and future events, emo­tional man­age­ment, self-motivation, and planning.

Will add some rel­e­vant links over the week­end, when I have some time.

Alvaro

Great day at CHADD today. Very good con­ver­sa­tions on Brain Fit­ness with Dr. Torkel Kling­berg and the Cogmed team, pedi­a­tri­cians such as Dr. Arthur Lavin, who was the first clin­i­cal provider of Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing in the US, and neu­rop­shy­chol­o­gist Dr. Sam Goldstein-this con­ver­sa­tion around how biofeed­back devices can help golfers bet­ter man­age their stress lev­els and improve their game. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been rec­om­mend­ing, in this blog and in “real” life, the won­der­ful book Magic Trees of the Mind: How to Nur­ture Your Child’s Intel­li­gence, Cre­ativ­ity, and Healthy Emo­tions from Birth Through Ado­les­cence, by Berkeley’s Mar­ian Dia­mond and Janet L. Hop­son.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Cre­ativ­ity is not just about the cre­ation of an art object, or a piece of music, or a film, or the cre­ation of a sci­en­tific project, but also about the cre­ation of social rela­tions and of cul­tural insti­tu­tions,” says Anto­nio Dama­sio. “Peo­ple rarely asso­ciate these lat­ter areas with cre­ativ­ity, but any­time we pro­duce some­thing new, be it an archi­tec­tural draw­ing, class­room cur­ricu­lum, or a new approach to a busi­ness prob­lem, the cre­ative process is at work.”

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, cre­ativ­ity “is a men­tal process involv­ing the gen­er­a­tion of new ideas or con­cepts, or new asso­ci­a­tions between exist­ing ideas or con­cepts.” In her book, The Cre­ative Habit, the chore­o­g­ra­pher Twyla Tharp writes an excel­lent guide to fos­ter­ing the habits that pre­pare you to be cre­ative. As with all forms of brain exer­cises, it takes con­sis­tent effort, orga­ni­za­tion, and com­mit­ment. Green­man Review sum­ma­rizes:

Tharp’s basic premise as this: you can’t be cre­ative if you work with­out struc­ture. This struc­ture can take many forms. One is the struc­ture of daily rou­tines or rit­u­als. Tharp starts her day, every day, at 5:30 a.m. with a cab ride to the gym where she works out for two hours. Some­times struc­ture involves par­ing away unnec­es­sary dis­trac­tions. Tharp talks about Henry David Thoreau going to live alone at Walden Pond as a way of allow­ing his inner voice to be heard more clearly, and men­tions that she often avoids watch­ing films while she is in the mid­dle of a project. Often struc­ture takes the form of a record of the steps you took to get from the begin­ning to the end of a project. Tharp uses heavy card­board file boxes to hold var­i­ous arti­facts that relate to each of her cre­ative projects. She labels them and stores them on indus­trial shelv­ing in her work area. Other peo­ple might use file fold­ers or note­books or elec­tronic files to store these records.

Nancy Andreasen is a psy­chi­a­trist and neu­ro­sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­sity of Iowa. Based on her research using positron-emission tomog­ra­phy (PET) scans of people’s brains dur­ing cre­ative tasks, she sug­gests that cre­ativ­ity arises largely from the “asso­ci­a­tion cor­tex”—parts of the frontal, pari­etal and tem­po­ral lobes that inte­grate sen­sory and other infor­ma­tion. In her book, The Cre­at­ing Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Genius, she lists cul­tural fac­tors that have spurred cre­ative thought in the past: intel­lec­tual free­dom, open com­pe­ti­tion, a crit­i­cal mass of cre­ative peo­ple, the pres­ence of men­tors and patrons, and some degree of eco­nomic pros­per­ity. She also sug­gests that to boost cre­ativ­ity, adults prac­tice mak­ing close obser­va­tions of a cho­sen item or imag­in­ing one­self to be some­place or some­one else. Her rec­om­men­da­tions for chil­dren include: less tele­vi­sion, more music, and more out­door activity.

Alice Fla­herty from Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal and Har­vard Med­ical School presents a three-factor model of idea gen­er­a­tion and cre­ative drive, focus­ing on inter­ac­tions between the tem­po­ral lobes, frontal lobes, and lim­bic sys­tem. Tem­po­ral lobe changes, as in hyper­graphia, often increase the quan­tity of idea gen­er­a­tion, some­times at the expense of qual­ity. On the other hand, frontal lobe deficits may decrease idea gen­er­a­tion, in part because of rigid judg­ments about an idea’s worth. The bal­ance between frontal qual­ity and tem­po­ral quan­tity is medi­ated by inter­con­nec­tiv­ity within each cor­ti­cal area that mutu­ally inhibits the other area. Dopamine in the mesolim­bic path­way influ­ences nov­elty seek­ing behav­ior, cre­ative drive, and goal-directed behav­ior. Although cre­ative drive and actual skill are nei­ther the same thing nor use the same brain anatomy, cre­ative drive does cor­re­late bet­ter with suc­cess­ful cre­ative out­put than actual skill does. Tra­di­tional neu­ro­sci­en­tific mod­els of cre­ativ­ity, such as the left brain — right brain hemi­spheric model, empha­size skills pri­mar­ily, and stress art and musi­cal skill at the expense of lan­guage and math­e­mat­ics. This three-factor model pro­posed by Fla­herty opens up to research find­ings in a broad range of nor­mal and patho­log­i­cal states.

Fur­ther Links
Mind/Body, Emo­tions, and Decision-Making
Social Intel­li­gence and Mir­ror Neu­rons
Social Intel­li­gence and the Frontal Lobes
An Ape Can Do This. Can We Not?
“Use It or Lose It” : What is “It”?
The Exec­u­tive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civ­i­lized Mind by Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg
Brain Exer­cise at the Osher Life­long Learn­ing Institute