Thriving too

Social Brain Lab: Introduction to Social Cognition

Last week I introduced the Social Brain Lab, and our intention to work with others to create some helpful tools based on selective, condensed knowledge about how people function.

The key points from the learning models I described from my research is that firstly, when knowledge is applied well it can make our interpretations of situations more accurate and interpersonal exchanges more positive … and secondly, that the knowledge itself can trigger an ongoing learning process of self-observation and self-direction.

In a series of posts I wanted to focus on some aspects of social brain research, which might help a person working in a community achieve more positive results. 

What is social cognition?

Today I am going to introduce social cognition, a term used in a few different ways.  The social cognition I am referring to here is the ability to understand another person’s mental states and thought processes.  From the age of 5 children start to understand that other people may think differently from them… this natural phenomena is labelled Theory of Mind.  This whole area of study has become very intricate and over recent years a number of extremely detailed and interconnected disciplines have emerged, many resulting from the application of new research from neuroscience. An example of this is 'social neuroscience' which is a relatively new field first developed by John Cacioppo at Chicago University.

Although I am personally fascinated with the academic research, what I am most interested in is the key pieces of knowledge that a regular person might find helpful in managing themselves and navigating interpersonal relationships. In the Social Brain Lab we are intent on focusing on how key pieces of knowledge might be helpful in community/social settings.

The community scenario

The scenario you could imagine is that you are regular person who is interested in making your community a nicer place to live.  You know that this will require a great deal of collaboration and co-operation, with groups of people working together to make positive things happen.  Your motivation for getting involved in such community building activity is that you would like to see divisions between age or culture bridged… and believe that a genuine opportunity now exists among residents to make and shape their social and physical environment of the neighbourhood.  You are realistic however, and understand that this can be difficult. New community activity often challenges existing social and professional structures and hierarchies and even the most positive activities can create controversy – in turn possibly leading to difficult conversations.  

In these complex situations you want to be able to communicate well.  You want people to understand what you are saying in substance, but also clearly understand your intentions and motivations.  You also want to be able to understand other people well, not misinterpreting what people say, or making negative assumptions about their intentions. As well as the diplomattic communication burdens you recognise that communicating ideas, stimulating ideas in other people and helping groups work together productively is very important in achieving your aims. 

In his important the new book Together, sociolist Richard Sennett is very persuasive in his argument that co-operation requires skill as well as goodwill - particularly when trying to work with people who aren't of the same mindset or background as ourselves - the type of co-operation that puts a much higher burdern on social cognition. You can listen to his recent RSA talk here.

Understanding what is going on in your own head is difficult.  Monitoring a conversation in a live situation to ensure that what you say is an accurate reflection of what you mean, is even more difficult.  Then when you add ‘social cognition’  - trying to understanding what is happening in the other person’s head as they process what you are saying… is very challenging indeed … but not impossible.

Communicating well in every single situation we find ourselves in is too much to ask of any undividual in my opinion, there are simply too many stresses in daily life to demand that degree of concentration of ourselves.  But we can learn to communicate well regularly with some practice, improving our social cognition abilities over time, but not without understanding how our minds work - particularly many minds together.

Applying social cognition to workshop activities

We use this understanding of social cognition thinking and Theory of Mind in some of the activities we have designed for workshops already.  We call them ‘talking tools’, but basically they are activities to help a group of individuals surface and share their mindsets.  We used these activities in public workshops with Reading Council, and are about to test a similar new health related activity later this month.  Our experience is that these tools perform an interesting function – people are genuinely surprised to discover that people think differently from them, that they have differing attitudes to the role of the council vs the potential role of local residents., and the way the conversation is structured through the activity leads people to be intrigued to find these differences.

What to learn more?

There are two ways you can explore social cognition in more detail if this topic interests you.

Firstly, you can start to delve into the academic research.  A good place to start would be to listen to some of the free lectures from Berkeley that you can get from iTunes U – I would recommend as a good starting point lectures 19, 20 and 21 from this series of lectures by John Kihlstrom. 

Secondly, you can look at the more practical literature on communication. The two best books I have read on communication are Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations. 

In summary

High level communications are incredibly valuable. They can be learned, with knowledge and practice, but the type of good communication that I am promoting here is not the same as masterful manipulation - smooth talking attempts are often designed to get people to do what others want them to do - and thankfully they regularly and predictably get exposed for what they are. 

In my experience, important collaborative relationships, creating genuine mutual understanding and dialogue, can only be developed with completely ruthless self-honestly. We need to challenge ourselves constantly to avoid getting stuck in our own group mindsets, defensive, inaccurate or unhelpful narratives. Genuine dialogue also requires generosity of thought - ingredients for understanding the frames and perspectives of other people.

Which leads me neatly onto the next post on the Social Brain Lab .... where I will talk about trust building. 

The Penguin and The Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self Interest

I am enjoying hearing about this new book Yochai Benkler from Harvard University, also author of the Wealth of Networks.

The argument he makes is that humans are not purely self-interested creatures. In this interview the question is asked "How did we even get ourselves into a position where we have to make that argument?"

Benkler replies

"If we look at the 40 year trajectory you might think of as scientific selfishness.  From about the late 50s until early 90s we see a progression across many disciplines, economic obviously taking the lead, but also science, evolutionary biology, some aspects of psychology, continuously basically saying 'look we all talk about morality and fairness but that's not serious - serious people look at mathematical models, and they tell us that at the end of the day, if you want to get things done you have got to get the incentives right.  Incentives mean material incentives and if you want people acting you need to monitor them, reward them if they do good things, you need to punish them if they do bad things.

All these other things that the mushy people talk about are peripheral in terms of getting things right in terms of incentives.

Developing in various academic disciplines, but we also saw it developing in companies and company policies with the rise of scientific management.  We are at the point now where we can step back and say that what is not serious is that we are not being well represented by a self-interested model - we are much more complex than that.  We need to build systems for this new complex view of ourselves as, to some extend self-interested for sure, but also concerned with empathy and solidarity, concerned with what we think is right, what we think is fair.  Capable of being trusting and being trustworthy ... and that's what we need to understand now."

"I think the reason why the self-interest model was so powerful combines several factors. The first one is that we have to admit that it is at least partly true... It is not completely false ... but it isn't the whole story.  It is also partly that we love clear, simple explanations, sometimes called by psychologists 'cognitive fluency', something that's easy for us to digest. It turns out when you look as people we are very complicated.  It is a lot simpler to say that we can collapse it all into a simple, mathematically describable model that says 'if I add more money I get the behaviour I want - if I punish I won't'. So it's simple and easy to absorb."

Benkler goes on to describe how the rise of this thinking coincides with the period of the cold war and that these clash of ideologies - principally collectivism and capitalism, made it easy to adopt the model because we had a 'then and us' situation.

The case that Benkler makes is not entirely new - but I like the way that he describes his thinking and I do think that this book makes a hugely valuable contribution to trying to shift the mindset away from designing policy and systems which call on the more negative human qualities.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has also contributed to this thinking.  First published in 1976 The Selfish Gene suggested that although as human's we often behaved in socially supportive ways - this was always a conscious battle against our innate instincts.  Dawkins received criticism when he ended The Selfish Gene with the following words:

"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators.  We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. (Dawkins, 1976, p215)

In the 30th Anniversary copy of Selfish Gene, Dawkins defends his original statement by explaining:

…it is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences. (Dawkins, 2006Ed, p331-332)

Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes (Dawkins, 2006Ed, pxiv)

Frans de Waal, one of my favourite researchers has fought Dawkins for many years.  Having studied primates for most of his life he strongly disagrees.  In Primates and Philosophers he argues against 'Veneer Theory':

"Since Darwin saw morality as an evoluntionary product, he envisioned an eminently more livable world than one proposed by Huxley and his followers, who believed in a culturally imposed, artificial morality that receives no helping hand from human Nature.  Huxley's world is by far the colder, more terrifying place."

Daniel Pink in Drive also gave us lots of research examples where the self-interest model had failed - from blood drives to toxic waste - introducing self-interest and incentives can suppress cooperation.

It is important stuff - more important than we probably imagined. These self-interested models have driven huge pay increases at the top - sometimes even leading to unethical behaviours - and I believe it can also lead to 'consumer activism'  rather than co-production and creative problem solving at local level.

If we said that we are capable of both fair and unfair behaviours - we have ample evidence that the way we design our systems promotes the behaviour of one or the other.

Thanks to David Archer for pointing me to the interview! 

 

Big Society: Admiration, idea spreading and gentrification

(Pic FARM:shop)

I don't know if this is more or less than the average person but immersed as I am in people's socially driven creative projects I am probably more exposed to experiencing admiration than average. This blog, Hand Made and the Travelling Pantry project have all been deliberate efforts to uncover and share new and interesting projects by people from around the world (via positive deviance approach), but these stories and ideas have had profound effect on my own work, most of which have been around spreading ideas and observing the effects of this.

In Travelling Pantry workshops I describe this as almost being ‘infected’ by ideas. And if violence can be spread like a virus (see disease specialist Gary Slutkin's Pop!Tech video for his work in reducing violence in Chicago), can positive action work the same way?

I have been thinking quite a lot about this recently in the context of my work around cognition and emotion and I was prompted to write this by the Mindapples training session Andy Gibson and I ran last week in Cardiff.

There has been a lot of research published over the last few years about socially related behaviours in networks on health and wellbeing. Levels of happiness have been shown to effect not only our friends but our friends friends.  On an even more subtle level we effect people physiologically by simply being in their company.  Research has shown that our blood pressure and heart rate synch with people when we are in the same space – and even when asleep patients have been seen to benefit physically from the presence of another person in the room.  There is lots of evidence that emotional contagion impacts us physically on an unconscious level and some of this understanding of cognition and emotion is embedded in ‘nudge’ strategies.  [If you want to delve into your unconscious and discover if you have some hidden biases, even to yourself, try the Implicit Association Test.]

What about more important deliberate and conscious human mechanisms – ones which drive you do big things, not simply choose salad or tick the right box on life insurance – how exactly does that work?  Andy wrote recently about the misalignment between unconsciously ‘nudging’ and the sort of motivations and drives that Big Society will require to be successful.

Last time I looked you couldn’t be ‘nudged’ to commit to large projects, even in the most exciting circumstances many involve long and frequently excruciatingly boring meetings.  You have to have a really good idea why you want to be doing these things – a vision in your own mind about how your efforts might transform, not just push paper around or talk about how to make others transform.

Which leads me to introduce one of my favourite neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Mary Helen works as assistant Professor, unusually across two departments,  Education and Psychology, Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.  She is pretty awesome I can tell you.  When I attended the Mind, Brain and Education conference in  a couple of years ago, Prof Jennifer McCrickerd from Drake Uni and myself spent the whole two days following Mary Helen's talks, stopping *just* shy of asking her for an autograph (yes, nothing sadder than neuro-groupies). Not only is Mary Helen a particularly engaging speaker she has an incredible combination of knowledge, having first worked as a high school teacher, then receiving her doctorate from Harvard University Graduate School of Education before moving to USC to work with Antonio Damasio, who is the formost researcher on emotion and the brain.  She also does a lot of research on topics that really interest me.

Two studies that she has worked on examine the effects of the complex emotions associated with ‘admiration’. Evidence has shown that having admiration for another person’s good work can act as personal motivator to behave in a similar fashion.

“Social emotions like admiration for another person’s virtue play a critical role in interpersonal relationships and moral behavior, and often lead to a sense of heightened self-awareness that is profoundly motivating (i.e. the desire to be virtuous and to accomplish meaningful actions despite difficult obstacles; Haidt & Seder, 2007). Our recent study of the brain and psychophysiological correlates of experiencing admiration revealed that the feeling of this complex, culturally constructed, motivating emotion involves not only high-level ‘‘cognitive” systems, but also the neural systems for the feeling of one’s own body, especially the gut and viscera (Immordino-Yang et al., 2009)."

You can read the two published studies here and here. 

I found the experience of going into communities and groups around the UK, hearing people’s ideas and feeling the energy incredibly inspiring, so much so that I was relieved to take a break around Christmas.  It was almost overwhelming. I was reminded of exactly this powerful feeling last week in Rotterdam at an event where several people described their social projects in detail.  Nick Booth and I had been invited to the Netherlands for 3 days of presentations and workshops on the Bottom Up aspects of Big Society by marvellous Maurice Specht - pic below from our breakfast presentation. We were fortunate to visit a couple of totally amazing projects which I will blog about in detail very soon. 

The point I wanted to make here is that admiration is really motivating. So why do I find nearly all concepts of ‘motivational speakers’ so unappealing?  It is not that I don’t admire people sailing around the world or walking to the north pole.  They are often expressions of fortitude and inner human strength and this is admirable in itself.  But if these efforts aren’t directed towards the good of other people I find them a bit pointless to be honest.  The studies around ‘admiration’ also firmly point to a very biological human response to ‘meaningful’ and ‘virtuous’ actions.

Yvonne Roberts wrote very memorably in 2008 “Diffusion is the valley of death for social innovation.” This is very true in many ways and is the core of our current frustrations with ‘scaling up’ - both for social enterprise projects and community-led activities. “Can it be replicated?’ is the first question asked of any idea… as if a social project’s only hope of impact is to model itself on Starbucks growth principles.  I have spent some considerable time (and many emails) considering ideas around ‘social franchising’ myself.  How do we maximize the genius effects of ideas that connect communities so creatively such as Pie Lab or Trade School?  How do they protect their ethical and creative integrity?  How do they use replication as a model for sustaining their projects without commercialising them a way that negatively effects the core of what they are doing?

But there are also some very interesting things going on in some communities.  David Gauntlett (Co-founder of Social Spaces - please see his fantastic new book Making is Connecting) and I had the great pleasure of meeting Rob Hopkins of Transition before Christmas.  Among many interesting things he said was the point that the house prices have gone up in Totnes, Devon, home of Rob and Transition, and that this has been attributed at least in part to the high density of community activity. 

And there are other places which show similar signs of activity inspiring further activity. Places such as Brixton, Brighton, Brooklyn, Bristol, Sheffield … where creative citizen-led activity is spreading.  Are we encouraged by the social artistry of others? And are we slowing beginning to really recognize this?  I was so delighted to hear that Dan Thompson of Artists and Makers has won the award of ‘Unsung Coastal Hero’ in the Coast Awards 2011 and that Melanie Bryan from Why Not Change recently won a Big Society Award.  What I like about Melanie and Dan is that they are doing the *work* on the ground, not just talking about it.  They are of course brilliant people, but they also focus on doing really meaningful but simple projects, which anyone with the motivation could do themselves. They aren't trying to be heros, or build 'tribes', or any of that nonsense... they are doing their *thing*... which happens to have rather wonderful effects.

There are signs that certainly some people want to live in vibrant communities where they can have some role in making and shaping those places - rather than in more 'serviced' communities? If the house prices are going up in these areas because people obviously enjoy the fresh opportunities to contribute created by these simple but imaginative projects, isn’t that ‘gentrification’?  The effects are pretty similar, and likely over time the negative effects of regeneration might be similar i.e. prices become prohibitive to local people.  Time will tell. What is different though is that these communities are beginning to look and feel homegrown and handmade - very different to ones that have been regenerated by developers. There is a whole new aesthetic developing around these communities too – which is quite far away from the ‘hippy’ look and feel we are used to associating with community and environmental projects (except in Totnes perhaps where there seem to quite a lot of *lovely* hippies).  I don’t think it is ‘open source’ place-making which David Barrie describes so well in this fantastic article either?

So what is it – how do we label it, dissect it and describe it? 

If installing solar panels is contagious, can even our smallest positive actions have motivating effects for others? Are we actually inspiring ourselves and each other by what we are *doing*?

I was reminded again of the description from InCUBATE in Chicago (currently spreading Sunday Soups for community micro-granting), that they are interested in 'experimental practices that assume responsibility in making the world around us instead of critiquing it from afar.'

[Poster below from Anthony Burrill]

Open publication - Free publishing - More big society

[wow!]

 

Friday evening just gone I was sitting in Goodenough College listening to a variety of speakers share their vision of 'In 10 years" at a TEDx conference with some colleagues and friends from my previous job with the RSA.

We heard Christian Busch of Sandbox talk about socially aware business models, Jan-Emmanuel de Neve shared his work on the genetics of happiness, and Bia Carnieiro on the ways that sport can develop young people from her work in Brazil.

I went out feeling full of ideas, and carrying a goodie bag with Penguin books and some tea bags, both of which I have tucked in to this weekend. (I've not read Alain de Botton before, but 2 pages in and it seems interestingly wide ranging and poetically detailed...goes quite well with a strawberry tea.)

So this evening, while I'm sat re-hemming a dress from the thrift shop that needed a few inches less frump before being wearable, I tuned into again, and the film above reminded my why I love it so much and how amazing we really are.

Social Brain: The Benefits of Interacting With Real People

  

I have been reading a lot via the Mind Brain and Education on the how neuroscience findings apply to educational settings, but I was really struck by some of the research highlighted by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London) in an article The Developing Social Brain: Implications for Education published last month in Neuron.  

In the article Blakemore describes research conducted by Kuhl et al in 2003.

"A key question is whether sounds that have been lost can be relearned.  A study confirmed that infants older than nine months can learn to discriminate speech sounds to which they have not previously been exposed.  Kuhl and colleagues studied American babies who had grown up hearing only English and had thus lost the ability to distinguish between certain Chinese Mandarin sounds.  The authors trained three groups of nine-month-old American babies: one group interacted with a real native Chinese speaker, who played with and read to them; a second group saw movies of the same Chinese speaker; the third group heard the same Chinese speaker through headphones.  The content and the time of the exposure were identical in all three groups.

The group that had been exposed to a real live Chinese person significantly improved their ability to distinguish between the two sounds, performing at around the same level as native Chinese babies. In striking contrast, babies who had been exposed to the same amount of Chinese but in the form of video or sound recordings showed no learning, and their posttraining performance was the same as American babies who had received no exposure."

This related strongly to a really interesting conversation I had with a teacher recently.  She was a teacher of 20 years experience and she was describing how she worked with the 4-5 year olds in her class. This teacher was working at a highly intuitive level, recognising interest in a child, guiding and developing that interest.  She was also very attentive to the children's physiology, sensing when they needed to move about, go outside to play, have a change of pace.  This is teaching at it's most exciting, fulfilling and best, but she was very careful to point out that she had a lot of support from her Headteacher to work in this flexible way.

In an era of evangelical support of technology based educational investment we need to extend the research which looks at the value of real teaching.  Students think that contact time with their teachers is important - it seems we are now in an era where we need to re-prove that value.  I heard that a London university recently told their students that despite dropping 20% of their staff due to 30% reduction in finding that 'students could expect the same quality of teaching due the large investment made in technology'.

In Blakemore's article she also compares adolescence with early years in terms of brain development 'If early childhood is seen as a major opportunity - or a 'sensitive period' - for teaching, so too should the teenage years'.  She suggests that there are a number of questions which are ripe for research, which focus on the differences in the brain between face-to-face interactions over DVD watching, video conferencing etc.  

[Pic above is Michael Owen's miss in 2003 - The photograph by Phil Noble was named FA Premier League photograph of the decade. Blakemore used to photo to illustrate two aspects of the social brain. 'Firstly, it shows how rapid and instinctive social responses are.  Within a split second of Michael Owen missing the goal, nearly everyone is making identical arm gestures and has the same expression on their face. The other aspect of the social brain this photograph illustrates is our ability to read other people's gestures and faces in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states'.]

Is this Phineas Gage?

 Phineas Gage is one of neuroscience's most well known cases - a railroad worker who had an accident with an iron rod which penetrated his skull.  Until 12 months ago we have had to rely on illustrations of Phineas, but in December 2008 Jack and Beverly Wilgus had a response to a picture they posted on Flickr under the title 'One Eyed Man with Harpoon' and after much investigation it has been discovered to be a picture of Phineas Gage!

Phineas's mental faculties seemed relatively unharmed after the accident, which led to conclusion that frontal lobe was redundant and a period of brain surgeries on psychotic patients - the frontal lobotomy. It wasn't until they started to notice that patients could no longer plan for the future that the surgery was stopped. 

Daniel Gilbert writes in Stumbling on Happiness:

"The fact that damage to the frontal lobe impairs planning and anxiety so uniquely and precisely suggests that the frontal lobe is the critical piece of cerebral machinery that allows normal, modern human adults to projects themselves into the future.  Without it we are trapped in the moment, unable to imagine tomorrow and hence unworried about what it might bring."

The Smithsonian writes:

"Gage’s initial survival would have ensured him a measure of celebrity, but his name was etched into history by observations made by John Martyn Harlow, the doctor who treated him for a few months afterward. Gage’s friends found him “no longer Gage,” Harlow wrote. The balance between his “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” seemed gone. He could not stick to plans, uttered “the grossest profanity” and showed “little deference for his fellows.” The railroad-construction company that employed him, which had thought him a model foreman, refused to take him back. So Gage went to work at a stable in New Hampshire, drove coaches in Chile and eventually joined relatives in San Francisco, where he died in May 1860, at age 36, after a series of seizures."

The neurons that shaped civilization

I am a big fan of VS Ramachandran's fascinating work, especially around Theory of Mind, understanding each other and empathy - here is his recently released TED talk on mirror neurons, which increasingly point to (!) neural pathways for social connection and learning. 

 

Collaborative Knowledge Building

 

This just launched project already looks fascinating!

"The Cognitive Atlas is a collaborative knowledge building project that aims to develop a knowledge base (or ontology) that characterizes the state of current thought in cognitive science. The project is led by Russell Poldrack, Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin."

Getting my head around a transdisciplinary approach to educational neuroscience

When I went to the Mind, Brain and Education conference in May I came away with a handful of important new ideas to think about, but I haven't really blogged about them. 

At the conference I met Bruno della Chiesa, who has been working on a huge project for the OECD, investigating how neuroscience research can inform education policy and practice. He writes:

"In a given system (or within a given discipline), new knowledge is generated by combining internal knowledge (specific to this discipline) with external knowledge (coming from other fields) and making tactic knowledge explicit (Al-Laham).

...Transdisciplinarity is a dynamic concept whereby various disciplines are connected and ascent to a new discipline, giving rise to a three-dimensional shape. As Koizumi eloquently expresses, "[t]rans-disciplinarity emerges through a fusion and bridging of disciplines, not merely through the bundling of multiple disciplines".

...However, academics tend to focus only on knowledge that is immediately relevant to their research (Heinze, 2003), which makes spontaneous combination of knowledge across fields rare"

In the last few months I have noticed a real need for this type of thinking almost everywhere, and this seems to need a huge and fundamental shift.  It is not just about climbing out of a knowledge silo for the occasional meeting, but a whole new approach - not only how academics and researchers work but how policy makers need to tackle old problems which are increasingly stiffening to traditional top-down  linear intervention-style methodologies. 

It doesn't surprise me that transdisciplinary approaches should be raised so coherently by Bruno della Chiesa in the area of neuroscience.  The type of new knowledge Bruno describes, with the depth of insight and understanding he has been looking for, is best developed in a single brain.  Like Darwin's brain for example, a massive cognitive processor making links between vast amounts of data, analysing within one brain, what transdisciplinary research aims to do with many.

Here are some of the transfer barriers that d. Chiesa raises:

Individual

Emotional-motivational activation

Individuality and attachement to the past

Capacities of perception, processing and learning

Wrong knowledge

Intrapsychic conflicts

Collective

Defensive routines

Conflicts of cooperation

Specialisation

Quite complex stuff in fact.  We have an understanding of this already though.  I don't know a single person who doesn't appreciate the importance of collaboration to bring about new ideas and thinking. My friend Roland Harwood works for NESTA on their Connections programme, and when I imagine him at his desk these are exactly the sort of things I believe him to be grappling with (see his latest post on Trusted Agents and you will see what I mean). 

We talk about collaboration so much, that somehow I get a sense that it is thought to be something 'you decide to do', rather than what it really is .... 'embarking on a journey involving dangerous activities where some people could die'.  Ok, I dramatise a little, but not much. Certainly disciplines potentially could (or should?) die as they join with others to become new ones. Without this type of intelligent (and deliberate) rationalisation how are we going manage the explosion in knowledge... but of course more importantly, create the new insights we need.

The point that excites me in my everyday work, is tactic knowledge.  In particular, how new scientific knowledge can be given practical meaning by blending it with (rather than bolting it onto) the tactic knowledge of practitioners. When I am lecturing teachers on metacognition, or talking to teenagers about cognition/emotion/behaviour, the thing I am most interested in is: what experiences/knowledge are they are connecting the information to ... what new knowledge are they *constructing* in their heads... how are they learning .....and how can I understand, visualise and document their new, unique, but largely invisible knowledge?

I would have loved to attend the discussion at the RSA last night on the Cambridge Primary Review.

The Review is a superb and important piece of research:

"The report calls for the responsibilities of the DCSF, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), local authorities and schools to be re-balanced; and for top-down control and edict to be replaced by professional empowerment, mutual accountability and proper respect for research and experience."

Respecting and understanding knowledge and experience, and imagining the great potential of real transdisciplinary work seems to me to be vital work.

Bruno della Chiesa ends his article:

"Despite the political, cultural, historical and ethical challenges we faced, it is no longer acceptable to ignore neuroscience research in reflections on education nor to ignore the need to create transdisciplinary sciences more broadly, and we should continue to develop innovative solutions for tackling emerging challenges. The responsibility is huge.  As the former CERI Governing Board Chair Sylvia Schmelkes del Valle so wisely expressed, "we are not working for governments, we are working for our children and grandchildren".'

If you are interested in how neuroscience will effect politics and policy, you will likely enjoy Matthew Taylor's lecture, entitled "Left Brain, Right Brain: Human nature and political values' on 29th October.

Jonah Lehrer on 'How We Decide'

If you are interested in cognition and emotion it is very hard not to like the work of  Johah Lehrer because he is a very engaging writer on the subject.  His latest book How We Decide was the subject of a talk at the RSA last week.  If you have 40 mins and are interested in this subject it is worth watching the talk below.

A quote I enjoyed from his blog:

"The point is that, while all of Freud's theories might sound convincing, only a few of them are actually correct. In this sense, neuroscience is what helps us separate the beautiful theory from the definite truth."

Cognitive Disenhancement

New drugs may help to enhance people's mental powers (article here). But a study carried out by Pamela Smith, of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and her colleagues suggests a less pharmacological approach can be taken, too. Their work, just published in Psychological Science, argues that simply putting someone into a weak social position impairs his cognitive function. Conversely, “empowering” him, in the dread jargon of sociology, sharpens up his mind.

Dr Smith focused on those cognitive processes that help people maintain and pursue their goals in difficult and distracting situations. She suspected that a lack of social power may reduce someone's ability to keep track of information and make plans to achieve his goals.

Via Applied Imagination

Blogging good, penalty shoot outs bad

An article in Scientific American looks at recent research into examining the benefits of expressive writing:

"Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not."

While this week it was also reported that football from a spectator's perspective can be a real health hazard. The article quoted a number of reports showing the effects of stresses in the passionate supporter.

"Researchers at the University of Birmingham, in central England, suggested in all seriousness that penalty shootouts be scrapped "on public health grounds" after discovering that the number of heart attacks in Britain rose by 25 percent on the day England lost to Argentina on kicks in the 1998 World Cup.

"We advise our patients not to watch important matches after a heart attack or if they are considered to be a high cardiac risk," said Herve Douard, a cardiologist at the University Hospital Clinic in Bordeaux.

Counter-intuitively, football-related violence seems to rise when a team wins, rather than when it loses, says Vas Sivarajasingam of Cardiff University Wales, who looked at the city's emergency room admissions when the national side played."

Evolve through play.

I didn't understand this until I checked here.  Now I do and I like it a lot.  Homo Ludens succeeds through play.

Hat tip Jon Bounds. Original source Emergent Game.

Whole thinking

Your brain on Violent Media

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active.
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