Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee

Phantoms in the Brain was listed someplace as one of the books that must be read by any serious student of neurology. Having quite enjoyed watching Ramachandran give his TED Talk, of course I had to snap up the book!

If you are like me, and found this talk entertaining, lively and informative, then you will not be disappointed in reading Phantoms in the Brain.

Phantoms can be approached from any number of angles. Read it for the science, and you will come away with a deeper understanding of how parts of our brain function. Indeed, Ramachandran’s approach reminded me of an exercise we did with Robert Greenleaf this past August. Designed to teach the concept of verbs, the exercise had us rewriting a fairy tale but we had to leave out all verbs. One way to learn what a verb is, is to have to write without using any verbs. And one way to learn about our brains is to study the oddities of the brain.

Read it for the experiments and tinkering, and you will come away with an appreciation for how simple experiments can be used to find answers to complex questions. You are also sure to be impressed by the imaginative methods employed in devising these experiments.

Read it as a medical sleuth and join Sherlock Ramachandran as he attempts “to share the sense of mystery that lies at the heart of all scientific pursuits and is especially characteristic of the forays we make in trying to understand our own minds.”

Read it as a psychologist or philosopher to try and find neurological underpinnings for how we are who we are.

Read it as a novel filled with emotion, mystery, conflict, people’s lives, and pursuit of the unknown.

I appreciated it on all counts, and took note of his commentary on imagination, attention, left and right hemispheres, cognitive neuroscience, creativity, and the need for doing experiments, all of which will be covered in a future post!

By the way, no need to take just my word for it. On the amazon page for this book, there are 84 customer reviews; 67 folks give the book 5 stars, and the remaining 10 folks rate it 4 stars. The first three reviews (Matteson, Hills and Peterzell) provide an in-depth overview of the book’s content and style.

Brain Imaging from a New Perspective

In this almost four minute talk, Christopher deCharms provides a peek at the technology available to look inside your own brain and use what you see to make changes! His company, Omneuron, is looking at ways to use this technology to assist “patients, physicians, researchers, and subjects to visualize and control the functioning of the brain using non-invasive methods based on MRI, and is exploring applications of functional brain imaging.”

And how did I learn about Christopher deCharms? Why, from a TED talk!

Response Essay – most of the second part

National Educator Workshop – Response Essay
Summer Session 2002 / July 8-12

A conversation with Catherine (colleague from my school who also participated in this workshop) after the first music workshop yielded these observations:

• Everyone did something and was able to do something.
• There was no “wrong” or “right” approach or answer.
• Using our imagination it is possible to create something out of nothing, in this case just using our voices and bodies to make music.

Five days into the workshop I heard Tenesh (one of the group leaders) say that we are developing skills to focus, and that we try to go to the core of what the thing is all about. Being able to release our imaginations to focus in a multitude of ways and thereby get to the core of what we are learning…wow, very powerful ideas which this workshop modeled and helped me experience.

Eric Booth’s talk continued to model the ideas of the workshop and provided a more concrete framework for implementing those ideas. The brainstorming guide Entering the World of the Work of Art also provides a substantive model to use. And the two basic questions of the inquiry method: What’s going on? and Why do you say that? form the backbone of how to get started. Couple this with a work of art and you have a jumping off point. On the last day of the workshop I wrote the following notes in my journal. I don’t recall whose words they were but they sum up my feelings about this workshop experience, and the goal I have for my students (and myself):

There is excitement in experiencing something intrinsically. This experience makes you the expert; it empowers you and draws out your imagination. The result is self-confidence and a depth of knowledge.

It is more difficult to apply the concepts from this workshop to my work with faculty, not for lack of ideas or how to approach aesthetic education, but more because people tend to be protective of what they already do. Many faculty have invested time and energy in developing their curriculums, and those curriculums seem fine as they are. Tweaking those approaches ever so slightly to alter a lesson requires much conversation and modeling, and a willing audience/participant. But then again, that is the approach I have to take anyway when talking about technology!

Response Essay – first part

National Educator Workshop – Response Essay
Summer Session 2002 / July 8-12

An article in the October 3, 2001 Metro section of The New York TImes piqued my interest in Maxine Greene. I had never heard of her beforehand yet the ideas she espoused about education gave direction to the thoughts about which I had been ruminating. This prompted me to read her book Releasing the Imagination, which in turn led me to John Dewey’s Experience & Education. And all of that pointed me to the National Educator Workshop. My expectation for the workshop was to give my imagination some much needed prodding and help me look at what I do through a different perspective. With that in mind, the most significant ideas embraced during the workshop include:

• The aesthetic approach is one of self-discovery which can be guided through a series of carefully crafted questions and activities.
• This self-discovery is a process, and that process should tap into what people can do and help them expand their thought repertoire.
• Collaboration, questioning, and experiential learning (all part of the process) help to make learning intrinsic and give it meaning within the context of the student’s life.

To borrow from others (Maxine Greene and Apple Computer): With aesthetic education we are “releasing the imagination” and enhancing our perspective to “think different”. Imagination is an entry point into something that might otherwise by ordinary.

My perception of the works of art (each piece seen and heard twice) changed substantially over the course of the workshop. In both cases, viewing and listening to the art without any prior knowledge of the artist or piece was very satisfying. This let me form my own response to the art, modified a little by the comments of my workshop mates. In the case of Poulenc’s music, I listened “hard” the first time as I concentrated on what was being played; this was not listening for pleasure? The Chuck Close portrait interested me for its size and colors. The subject of the portrait intrigued me and I wanted to know more about him.

The early hands-on activities were enjoyable to do but I did not yet make connections between those activities and how I felt about the art of Poulenc and Close. The collaborative brainstorming (of questions we would like to ask about the artists/works of art) was highly satisfying. Indeed, it almost did not matter to me if the questions were ever answered. The very act of collaborative discussion and questioning was exhilarating, cementing ideas and possibilities for me to ponder. It was the satisfaction of thinking and the interaction with others concerned with the same topic.

Lincoln Center institute for the arts in education

In my post about Maxine Greene, I mentioned the Lincoln Center institute for the arts in education. During the summer of 2002 I participated in The National Educator Workshop: Introduction to Aesthetic Education. Everyday for the week of July 8 through 12, I trekked to New York City and spent my days at Lincoln Center. As a child growing up in the Long Island suburbs of the City, I had my fill of concerts, opera and ballet at Lincoln Center, but for that week in 2002 it was a treat to enter buildings that for years had seemed out of range to me as a theatre attendee. The location, and having access to these buildings that are home to artistic endeavors, made me feel artistically inclined; it was as though my surroundings could rub off on me and cause me to feel like an artist!

Wikipedia has some pictures of Lincoln Center’s buildings, and Carthalia contains a compilation of history about the buildings along with some postcard pictures of the complex. In fact, if you have an interest in old postcards or theatres and concert halls worldwide, you should check out Carthalia – Theatres on Postcards.

During the week long workshop I participated in activities designed to expose me to the sensations of aesthetic education. There were hands-on art workshops, hands-on music workshops, attendance at a concert, a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and attendance at a dance performance. There was also a lecture by Maxine Greene, which was one of the many highlights of the week. I was immersed in the arts, and loved every minute of the process!

Throughout the week each of us (there were about 40, if memory serves correct) were encouraged to keep a journal. After the workshop concluded, we were asked to submit a Response Essay about the week long experience. In addition to various handouts provided during the workshop, we were also given a booklet entitled Entering the World of the Work of Art – A Brainstorming Guide. The booklet’s purpose was to guide us in bringing art into the world of education, particularly as a way of expanding imagination. From the booklet:

“At Lincoln Center we believe that works of art provide an inexhaustible resource for exploration, reflection, and understanding. Children and adults have the capacity to respond to a work of art in ways that can stimulate fresh insights, encourage deeper understandings, and challenge preconceived notions. Without the limitations imposed by “right” or “wrong” answers, the process of responding to a work of art develops each student’s ability to think in fundamental and powerful ways.”

“As a result, unexpected connections are made, alternative points of view considered, complexities explored, and doors to new and imagined worlds opened.”

To read more about this experiential program, first visit the Lincoln Center page and then scroll down to the lower right corner, under Arts and Education, and click the link for Lincoln Center Institute.

Imagination & Experience: John Dewey

Experience and Education, written in 1938 by John Dewey, was read as a result of reading Maxine Greene. She referenced him often in her writings, including this sentiment:

Consciousness always has an imaginative phase, and imagination; more than any other capacity, breaks through the “inertia of habit” (1934, p. 272).

Dewey’s book is short and the commentary on the back cover calls it his most concise statement of his ideas. Well, it may be concise for Dewey but for me his writing was dense and his sentence structure was awkward. By the second to last chapter I was growing impatient with his prose and skipped that entire chapter. Nonetheless, I did benefit from the reading, and here are some of his ideas, mostly from the early chapters, which made an impression on me.

Educational reform based on opposition to what is current in education results in developing a potentially negative construct. Education has tended to be the handing down of information. Education based on experience will be perhaps more beneficial as it helps prepare students for what they will face. Therefore, it is necessary to have a philosophy of experience.

Of importance is the quality of the experience. Is it immediately agreeable or disagreeable, and how does it/will it influence future experiences? Dewey goes on to mention the experiential continuum.

And then there is the following quote, which resonated with me as a teacher and parent, and made me think of those teachers who practice their craft in one way only and do not take into consideration the differences or needs of those they teach.

The principle of interaction makes it clear that failure of adaptation of material to needs and capacities of individuals may cause an experience to be non-educative quite as much as failure of an individual to adapt himself to the material.

The Outdoor Education Research & Evaluation Center has extensive pages about Dewey, including a number of summaries of Experience and Education, a multitude of pages about Experiential Learning & Experiential Education, as well as pages about John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education.

While Dewey is perhaps more commonly linked these days with the idea of experiential education, he did a lot of writing about the arts. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an excellent article discussing Dewey’s Aesthetics, in which much is made of imagination. (I smiled to see that the author had similar feelings to mine regarding the accessibility of Dewey’s written words.) The discussion of imagination begins with part 2, Early Psychological Aesthetic Theory, and makes note of Dewey’s books, Art as Experience and Psychology, neither of which I have read.

According to this article, Dewey defines more than one stage of imagination, with creative imagination being the top level.

The highest form of imagination, creative imagination, allows us to penetrate into the hidden meaning of things through finding sensuous forms that are both highly revealing and pleasurable. The creative imagination makes its objects anew: it separates and combines, but not mechanically. It senses the relations of parts to the development of the whole and it raises details to the level of the universal. It develops the ideal aspect of things, freeing it from the contingent.

Imagination: Maxine Greene

In 2002 I read Releasing the Imagination – Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, by educational philosopher Maxine Greene. I stumbled upon Maxine Greene in an October 2001 New York Times article, One Philosopher’s Alchemy: Teaching as Romance. Alas, the online version does not include the photo of the then 83 year old Green, reddish hair, v-shaped face, glasses, broad-shouldered jacket, collared dark shirt and matching skirt, flowing scarf dotted with green and white, looking intent and much younger than her age. Luckily, you can both see what she looks like and hear her discuss snippets of philosophy at the maxine greene foundation for social imagination, the arts & education, which she founded in 2003.

Since 1976 Greene has been the Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. (To read about the Institute, click the “Lincoln Center Institute” link in the lower right of the Lincoln Center page, under Arts and Education.) I was so taken with Greene’s ideas that during the summer of 2002 I participated in the Lincoln Center Institute’s National Education Workshop: Introduction to Aesthetic Education. (More on that in a future post.)

Maxine Greene’s ideas, along with the Lincoln Center workshop, greatly informed my vision of professional development. Greene also introduced me to John Dewey, another educational philosopher. (Yes, more on him in a future post.)

From 1996 to 2005 I kept a journal of writings about books I read. Here is part of what I wrote about Greene’s Releasing the Imagination. In fact, these are quotes from her book that set the stage for my philosophy of professional development, and confirmed my ideas about education that were formed by my initial six years of teaching at St Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York.

…to provoke our students to break through the limits of the conventional and the taken for granted, we ourselves have to experience breaks with what has been established in our own lives; we have to keep arousing ourselves to begin again.

By “aesthetic education,” I mean the deliberate efforts to foster increasingly informed and involved encounters with art.

All depends upon a breaking free, a leap, and then a question. I would like to claim that this is how learning happens and the educative task is to create situations in which the young are moved to begin to ask, in all the tones of voice there are, “Why?”

Brain Imaging from the Inside–>Out

This morning I clicked on over to Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen blog, the way I do most mornings. His post, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s amazing TED presentation, describes Dr. Taylor as a brain scientist who will move you to tears. That was all it took – the combination of a brain scientist and something emotional – for me to sit glued to my computer screen at 6:32 this Saturday morning.

I’ve watched Jill’s talk and I was moved to tears. And now, before the sun has even tickled the horizon, the birds are chirping. This Wednesday past, true as clock work, the Osprey who summer on the creek behind our house returned to their perches. And I thought of my Dad at King Street Nursing Home…how his brain is humbled by Alzheimers but his heart still smiles with song. Unable to speak many words, he tells me he wants to go home, and he can still respond to family news with “That’s wonderful.” And Frank Sinatra or any of the Columbia University fight songs can still elicit from him a hum or a phrase of song and a twinkle of recognition.

Brain Imaging from the Outside–>In

My husband sent me a link for the Charlie Rose Science Series, sponsored by Pfizer. Charlie Rose is a public television talk show host, and this series consists of twelve conversations between Charlie and numerous scientists as they explore a range of topics, beginning and ending with the brain. I watched the first part, From Freud to the mysteries of the human brain and the last part, From Potential of the Mind to Diseases of the Brain. (While all the talks are nicely organized on the Pfizer site, they played more reliably from the Rose site.) We had a snow day on February 22 (meaning school was canceled), and these video conversations, complete with a cup or two of tea, made for a delightful afternoon’s journey.

The format of both talks was similar, with Eric Kandel helping to steer the round table conversations. Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 and is a Professor of Physiology & Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University. I was especially interested in the discussion about seeing the brain in action. Thanks to improved imaging techniques, we are able to view a brain in “real time”. MRI highlights the structure and details of the brain, while a PET scan or fMRI allows the mapping of brain function. Brain functions tend to be localized to regions or combinations of regions in the brain. What brain imaging does is measure the “change in blood flow to the active part of the brain”. (As noted by Nancy Kanwisher, MIT Professor.)

According to Steven Johnson, author of Mind Wide Open, “you have to have roughly 500,000 neurons active in an area for the scan to register them”. He writes about his own fMRI in chapter six, which is what gave me the urge to want to see my own brain in action. You can see a really quick movie of a portion of a brain scan here.

Eric Kandel, whose interest is learning and memory, believes that psychotherapy is a learning experience. Therefore, he would like to see the mapping of a brain prior, during and after psychotherapy, with the goal being to see what anatomical changes may be occurring as the brain goes through the process.

For more on these imaging techniques see:
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)
PET (positron emission tomography)

and this wonderfully informative and well-designed site fMRI 4 Newbies – A Crash Course in Brain Imaging by Jody Culham, Robarts Centre for Functional & Metabolic Mapping in London, Ontario

Image and movie: Charlie Rose site

Mel meet Ken, Ken meet Mel

Just imagine a conversation between Dr Mel Levine and Sir Ken Robinson. They’d both be telling stories about individuals, education, and the process of learning. They really should meet each other, if they haven’t already, as they both advocate for finding your passion and pursuing it, and they both would like to see education change to better serve all students.

Mel Levine aims to help demystify kids and young adults to themselves, so they better understand how they learn by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. A person’s strengths can serve as the foundation around which their learning and maturing take place. Sometimes it is difficult to assess one’s own strengths, though, particularly when one’s weaknesses can seem insurmountable or simply overshadowing. The goal of Mel’s program is to assist individuals in overcoming or circumventing their weaknesses, while highlighting, enjoying and celebrating their strengths.

Ken Robinson believes that individuals should pursue their passions, and that many times in education the educators school individuals out of their passions. Schools should retune themselves to place equal emphasis on the nontraditional areas, such as the arts, thus permitting students who enjoy or excel in these areas ample opportunity to pursue their studies while being lauded for those skills, regardless of their aptitude in more traditional areas.

Both Mel and Ken feel that having a passion and being able to pursue it are highly motivating and important aspects of education, and are often downplayed (when not in typical academic areas) in favor of more traditional areas. I think they would have a fine time chatting with one another!

Don’t take my word for it! Here they are, in their own words (except for Garr’s blog entry.)

On his Presentation Zen blog Garr Reynold’s has an excellent summary of Sir Ken Robinson on the art of public speaking.

Interviews with Ken Robinson

• IMNO – International Mentoring Network Organization: World Renowned Expert on Innovation and Creativity
• Phorecast Podcast No 01 – Sir Ken Robinson (12/10/07)
• DishyMix Episode 6 – Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity and Innovation Expert
• Mediasnackers Podcast #88 (6/24/07)

Interviews with Mel Levine

• Educational Leadership – Celebrate Strengths, Nurture Affinities: A Conversation with Mel Levine (9/06)
• NPR – Mel Levine: Teaching All Kinds of Minds (1/24/05)
• A Series of audio and video interviews with Mel Levine on the All Kinds of Minds web site
  Family Talk – Part 1
  Family Talk – Part 2
  How To Nurture Success In All Children
  Students As Innocent Victims Of Their Own Wiring
  How To Understand Difficulties That Are Not Well Understood