Re-telling a story is thought to produce a progressive refinement in the mental representation of the discourse. A neuroanatomical substrate for this compression effect, however, has yet to be identified. We used a discourse re-listening task and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions responsive to repeated discourse in twenty healthy volunteers. We found a striking difference in the pattern of activation associated with the first and subsequent presentations of the same story relative to rest. The first presentation was associated with a highly significant increase in blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in a bilateral perisylvian distribution, including auditory cortex. Listening to the same story on subsequent occasions revealed a wider network with activation extending into frontal, parietal, and subcortical structures. When the first and final presentations of the same story were directly compared, significant increments in activation were found in the middle frontal gyrus bilaterally, and the right inferior parietal lobule, suggesting that the spread of activation with re-listening reflected an active neural process over and above that required for comprehension of the text. Within the right inferior parietal region the change in BOLD signal was highly correlated with a behavioural index of discourse compression based in re-telling, providing converging evidence for the role of the right inferior parietal region in the representation of discourse. Our findings demonstrate, for the first time, the existence of a neural network underlying discourse compression, showing that parts of this network are common to re-telling and re-listening effects.

from Neuropsychologia

“Left-brain-style thinking used to be the driver and right-brain-style thinking the passenger. Now [right brain] thinking is suddenly grabbing the wheel…stepping on the gas.”

– Daniel H. Pink, “A Whole New Mind”

Until we reach our mid-forties, we are following the advice and guidance of our brain’s left hemisphere. And while no one (excepting those with autism) really thinks with just one hemisphere, one side nevertheless dominates. Since most of our marketing models were designed by, and intended for, a youthful market, the system has been extremely effective for half a century. Left brains talking to left brains. Young people in advertising talking to young people on the streets.

Sometime in our forties, our maturing brains are slowly pulled to the right. Suddenly, but not overnight, we are no longer receptive to messages and ideas that are no longer compatible with our new way of thinking. And while they don’t bother us, they certainly don’t seem very relevant either.

Since 1989, when older Americans first started to outnumber younger Americans, this problem has only gotten bigger. And, not surprisingly, we can trace the decline of advertising effectiveness to around that date.

We could list the differences between the two hemispheres for several pages, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll focus on just five.

Youthful, left-brain thinking is:

Logical
Reason-based
Objective
Verbal
Time-sensitive

Older, right-brain thinking is:
Intuitive
Emotional
Subjective
Visual
Time-insensitive

To say the least, these are two very different ways of looking at life, not to mention marketing. They represent different attitudes, different values, different ways of speaking and different ways of listening. It all comes down to how we process the information of life, not what the information is. Which is one of the reasons why so much marketing seems so irrelevant to older consumers: If you don’t understand their needs, there’s no reason for them to try and understand your product.

Mike Baumayr, Chapter Two Communications

Mature marketing expertise from one of America’s “oldest” authorities on boomers, retirement, aging, longevity, and inter-generational marketing.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist went through a massive stoke during which she was able to clearly differentiate between the left and right hemispheres of her brain. Her insight into the oceanic expansiveness of the right hemispheres changed her entire perceptive of life.

Watch her talk at TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor shares the fascinating, terrifying and downright uplifting story of her stroke experience. The aneurysm was located in the left hemisphere of her brain, with the consequence that as the stroke progress Taylor was able to experience right-hemisphere consciousness largely undiluted by the influence of the left.

The whole video truly is worth watching, but of particular interest: Around 3:50, Taylor describes the function of the right hemisphere. Assembling “a collage of the present moment,” thinking in pictures, learning kinesthetically – to generalize, the ‘experience’ component of consciousness. By contrast, the left hemisphere deals with higher-order thought, memory, planning – the ‘agency’ component of consciousness. This, to me, seems to provide evidence for the neuroanatomical underpinnings of what Ned Block conceptualized as phenomenal consciousness (i.e. right hemisphere, experience) and access consciousness (i.e. left hemisphere, behavior control). And this is not just any evidence, but first-person evidence – the holy grail of the study of consciousness! This doesn’t, of course, license the tempting generalization that p-consciousness and a-consciousness are the manifestations of activity in their respective hemispheres – but there is a definite correlation. I want to know more about this circuit processor/parallel processor business. That seems to be the major functional difference between the hemispheres. My understanding is that the structural differences are nil.

Another interesting question this raises: what if the aneurysm had been in the other hemisphere? (Would Taylor have started to function something like a human zombie? And, if so, would she have been more successful at getting help more quickly?)

An international research team has used lotto to show that the condition ’spatial neglect’, which affects how we see the world, isn’t connected to how is it is imagined.

The findings to be published in the journal Cortex, suggest that the way we represent the world in our heads can operate independently of how it is actually perceived.

By Annabel McGilvray (ABC Science)

Read More Here

By Rosanne Bane

Writers have to read. Most of what we know as writers, we learned through absorption, by immersing ourselves in good fiction. Unfortunately, learning to read and write has seriously impaired your creativity. I’m not kidding about this. We’d all be more imaginative, creative writers if we’d never learned to read and write.

Have I got your attention yet? Good. Here’s how it breaks down.

Grade School: Where You First Learned to Not See

The first time I read Betty Edwards’s Drawing on the Artist Within, I had a distinctly uncomfortable ‘A-ha’ moment recognizing that being ‘smart’ in school wasn’t my smartest move. Edwards claims that because our current educational system teaches us to recognize and focus on abstract verbal concepts, it teaches us to not see.

The principles of arithmetic apply regardless of how the numbers look: 2 + 2 = 4 is the same as ii + ii = iv. We are taught to recognize the letter ‘R’ as a representation of a particular sound regardless of differences in the font, size or color of the letter. This adds another layer of meaning to Gertrude Stein’s observation that a

a ROSE

is a Rose

is a rose.

We learn to overlook the differences so that we can focus on the verbal abstraction.

Edwards suggests that seeing is intimately connected to creativity and wondered what effect learning to not see had on our creativity. But she was just speculating and I assured myself that I’m plenty creative even though I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag.

The Origins of the Alphabet: When Humanity Learned Not to See

But any reassuring doubts I had about reading and writing having a downside and literacy casting a powerful shadow were blown away when I read Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. 

Shlain claims (and I believe convincingly demonstrates) that literacy elevates the brain’s left hemisphere abilities of abstraction, analysis and linear processing to the detriment of the right hemisphere’s abilities of seeing the whole, synthesis and spontaneity.

I tried to minimize the significance of Shlain’s claims when I first read them. I told myself that the conclusions most people drew from the left-brain, right-brain dichotomy were flawed. (After all, the theory is based on research with people who had their corpus callosum surgically cut, permanently separating the left and right hemispheres, which creates legitimate questions about how applicable the research is to people who have intact brains.)

But I was intrigued by Shlain’s claim that literary is the cause of both men’s subjugation of women and the historical shift from recognizing both the feminine and masculine aspects of the Divine to focusing exclusively on a masculine God.

Quieting the Left Hemisphere: An Opportunity to See Differently

Reading My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor’s personal account of losing her entire left hemisphere in a massive stroke and her amazing recovery, finally convinced me that there are significant differences between the brain’s hemispheres. For example, the left and right hemisphere process light and sound differently: the left hemisphere perceives shorter wavelengths of light, which increases the ability to see sharp edges and distinguish boundaries between things, while the right hemisphere perceives longer wavelengths of light, which softens visual perception and is more inclined to see the whole picture and how things relate to each other.

Of course, those of us who haven’t had a stroke or other brain injury have an integrated brain where the left and right hemispheres cooperate magnificently to, as Taylor writes “generate a single seamless perception of the world.” And creativity requires skills and contributions from both hemispheres.  

Still, the left hemisphere is a bit of a bully, insisting that real thinking is logical, linear and language-based and that the fuzzy stuff the right hemisphere does isn’t really thinking at all. The left hemisphere, which excels in academic settings and looks for abstract concepts and generalizations, actively interferes with the observations the right hemisphere has to offer.

How does the left hemisphere inhibit our creativity? Here’s a simple example. The left hemisphere perceives a door in motion and thinks “the door is closing.” The left hemisphere “knows” that doors are rectangular, so it muffles and discounts the right hemisphere’s observations that the door’s shape is constantly changing as it moves. Is it any wonder then that if we try to draw a door, the drawing will lack perspective? We can tell our drawing is off, but we can’t tell why unless we learn to attend to the right hemisphere’s observations and mode of thinking.

Is not easy to set aside the left hemisphere’s dominance, but if we can do that, we can learn to see again. We’ll see what’s really there. And not just doors or other physical objects; we’ll learn to see the softer perception of the whole picture and how we and everyone and everything around us connect and relate. We’ll learn to stop averting our eyes.

I’m condensing this post from a few emails I’ve sent round, so this will be a chronological record of how the information has come to me and such.

Wednesday, April 22nd, Mom went in for a scheduled round of surgery.

There was a laundry list of stuff to do:

repair or replace both the mitral and tricuspid valve
replace the aortic valve (same as me)
Maze Procedure/Ablation to try to kick her out of the 4 years running atrial fibrillation she’s been in
replace the “jumper cables” on her pacemaker (iPod)
a bypass (dunno where sorry) as it was occluded 80%

The surgery ran maybe an hour longer than the projected 6 – 7 hours due to the amount of scar tissue encountered (from previous surgeries), they didn’t do anything to the mitral valve as it was only leaking 1 on a scale of 1 – 4, but otherwise it went well, the surgeons were pleased.

That’s the good news.

However, she won’t wake up. The CAT scan and EEG’s don’t show a stroke. They’ll repeat the same tests tomorrow (Fri 4/24) which will show if there was one today (Thurs 4/23). As I’ve been running a low grade temp this week I can’t go down there even. Marissa is there of course, staying downtown, losing her damn mind. As much difficulty has I have w/my mom I sure don’t want this.

I know that if she’s at all conscious of this, which I don’t think she is, as there are hardly any arousal signs on the EEG according to Gregg, but if she is, she’s fighting like hell. Stubborn and not giving up on life would be two core descriptors of my mom. Still this is awful.

I don’t know much more because when I talk to Marissa, she’s wound so much tighter than usual, I’m afraid to ask her anything and stress her more. It’s just not worth the added stress for her. I know she’s bird dogging the Drs.

So, I”m a lil stressed, frustrated and anxious, waiting for a few calls a day from Marissa or Gregg w/status updates.

I’ll let you guys know more when I know more.

***************************

Just got off the phone w/Marissa (mid-morning Friday 4/24).

She’s waiting for the full team of Drs to make their rounds, they’ve not yet done the CAT scan today yet either, so we don’t know a lot more.

Her sodium is high, they’re working to bring that down, and for some reason her right leg was spasming all night long on and off, got kinda beat up flopping off the bed when Marissa or the nurse couldn’t catch it.

Marissa finally took a Xanax and got about 3 hours sleep. She’s not yet been to the hotel room, she canceled it. I think after the Neurologist comes by she may run home for a shower and change of clothes.

So far today my temp has held steady at normal so if I can hang in there for 24 hrs. I’ll be headed downtown too.

Feel free to call or text my cell at any point.
I’m keeping Skype up so they can reach me there too or call out clearly.
(If you don’t have those contact numbers, email me or comment below and I’ll send it to you “on the side”.)

I’ll send more info when I know more, thanks.

************************

Here’s the latest (a/o about noon Friday 4/24):

Her EEG shows signs of seizure-like activity in the right hemisphere, consistent with a stroke.

Her vitals are still solid.

No idea at this time the extent of damage or the duration of the seizures.

She’s on anti-seizure meds.

The EEG was discontinued at noon instead of 3 pm as they’d already gotten the information noted above that they needed. Some time after noon they’ll perform another CAT scan.

Marissa is on her way home for a shower and clean up and change of clothes, will turn around and head back afterward.

A stroke is one thing Mom was particularly scared of having happen, this will piss her off to no end, which I hope will work in her favor in recovery.

That’s all I know right now. Thanks guys.

Okay, I’m back.  So, I took a little break from my blog – it turns out when you add more stuff to an already bustling schedule there is less time to do other stuff . . .like my blog.  But I learned something extremely valuable about myself while I was busily engaged in whatever it was I was busily engaged in (currently I have been on a coaching tear and I’m loving every minute of it!): I learned that I totally worship “busy.”  Specifically, I’m an achievement addict (yes, that compulsive part of me is an insidious and persistent little bugger).  I discovered that when I’m not in the process of achieving something, I’m looking to be in the process of achieving something.  The key concept here is in the process.  Once I achieve something, I get bored and want to move on to achieving something else.  I rarely – if ever- bask in my achievements and if one of my coaching clients skipped this part, I would ask “why aren’t you basking?” Here’s just one example (and this need to achieve thing is not limited to my physical accomplishments; it creeps into my parenting, career and friendship arenas as well – it’s quite versatile!): between gaining my pole fitness level back to a place where I could perform advanced pole tricks again (after I took the entire winter off) and contemplating how often and for how long I would need to train to be an elite aerial artist (and I’m only half  kidding here, people!), I decided to ask myself “why can’t I just bask in the glow of my re-achieved Death Lay?” The answer to that question was “I must constantly be achieving to be happy” and underneath that little stressful thought was the even more stressful “my achievements protect me from criticism when I choose to be myself”. This is basically comes down to me thinking I am fundamentally lacking as an individual and that my accomplishments make up for that lack. Yuck.  I just had to take that one to Inquiry and here’s the result:

(Some extremely technical notes you may feel free to skip: when I refer to my social self I am referring to the left hemisphere of my brain – which houses the primitive amygdala – this is where fear lives.  When I refer to my essential self I am referring to the right hemisphere of my brain – which involves the neocortex, but I had difficulty locating documentation, so here’s a video of a neuroscientist explaining brain topography in lay terms as she also explains her life-altering stroke which caused her to experience Pure Consciousness, it is FABULOUS – this part of my brain is where I am made aware of my spirit/divine nature/Being/soul and how I know I am whole and perfect underneath my physical existence and circumstances.)

My achievements protect me from criticism when I choose to be myself.

Is this true? Yes      Can I absolutely know this to be true?  No

When I think this thought, I am: wired, anxious, caught up in doing, my chest feels tight, I’m focused on other people (not my business).  I treat myself as if my needs/wants are second to how people may perceive me.

Without this thought, I am: freer, lighter, open, unfettered. If I lived my life not thinking this thought, “my people” would find me and recognize me – I would do exactly what I want without the added wastage of time and energy from worrying about stuff I can’t control.  I would take better care of myself and I would do more stuff I truly enjoy.

My thoughts protect my achievements from criticism when I choose to be myself. (This turnaround felt more true than my original stressful thought.)

-       my thoughts tell me I must achieve in order to be happy – I don’t have to do anything to be myself

-       I can choose to be myself independent of fear of criticism, yet my mind tells me my achievement is necessary to live critcism-free (such bullshit!)

-       I can’t know when I’m being criticized or praised anyway b/c those judgments live in the minds of others (and is totally none of my business)

-       If I followed my essential self and just went off and did what I genuinely felt like, my social self would tell me I needed to achieve in order to be allowed to do it (the price I must pay for “freedom”)

-       It’s not Me that needs to be defended, my essential self doesn’t care about that, but my social self (ego) is super concerned with appearances and images and feels compe
lled to add more (achievement) in order to feel worthy.

-       Ultimately, I get to decide whether I choose to believe the critical opinion of others, and my achievements, or lack of, has little to do with that (my thinking tells me b/c I achieve, I’m allowed some credit to do as I please, until the next time I need to rack up more achievement “credit” for the next time I choose to be in alignment with my essential self.).

Does this mean I stop achieving? Hell no!  It just means that I can now achieve whatever I truly, authentically want free from the shackles of thinking that it has to do with anything other than serving the best in me, so I can, in turn, be of genuine service to others.  I’m still working on it, but I now feel I am in a better place to relax into savoring and honoring my achievements for the gems that they are rather than using them as defense shields against unfounded and irrelevant social fears.  That feels mighty liberating.

Persons with aphasia vary greatly with regard to clinical profile; yet, they all share one common feature – anomia – an impairment in naming common objects. Previous research has demonstrated that particular naming errors are associated with specific left hemisphere lesions. However, we know very little about the cortical activity in the preserved brain areas that is associated with aphasic speech errors. Utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show for the first time that specific speech errors are associated with common cortical activity in different types and severities of aphasia. Specifically, productions of phonemic errors recruited the left posterior perilesional occipital and temporal lobe areas. A similar pattern of activity was associated with semantic errors, albeit in the right hemisphere. This study does not discount variability in cortical activity following left hemisphere stroke; rather, it highlights commonalities in brain modulation in a population of patients with a common diagnosis but vastly different clinical profiles. Hum Brain Mapp 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

from Human Brain Mapping

Link:

• The Brain: ZenUniverse 4.o
• The Brain: ZenUniverse 3.o
• The Brain: ZenUniverse 2.0
• The Brain: ZenUniverse 1.0

Today, Nvidia announced the launch of its GPU Ventures Program aiming to identify, support and invest in early stage companies leveraging its graphics processors, in areas like video and image enhancement, scientific discovery, financial analysis and 3D interfaces.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker expects to invest between $500,000 to $5 million in about five startups this year and provide additional support to market, develop and even sell their products.

Prior to the GPU Ventures Program, Nvidia invested in several startups including Acceleware, Keyhole (acquired by Google for Google Earth), Mental Images (later acquired by Nvidia), MotionDSP and Right Hemisphere but didn’t have a formal structure to find, manage and nurture its investment effort.

Nvidia plans to host its second annual Emerging Companies Summit in the Fall of 2009, showcasing startups leveraging the chipmaker’s graphics and visual technologies.

“Tao can Tao not Tao”

Lao Tzu

Since reading the work of Clare W. Graves of Spiral Dynamics fame, reflecting on the work of all the people mentioned in my Blogroll as well as my recent foray into Zen I attempted to review and revise my work on the assortment of frameworks I had come up with. As I was making revisions it dawned on me that nature had done all the work already.

“Outside this office, Business as Usual;

Inside this office, Thunder and Lightning.”

Colonel John Boyd

I decided to take another angle of attack.  I realized I was dealing with entities, hierarchies, attributes and relationships and one thing Boyd overlooked, results, in two dimensions not one.  You may remember this graphic:

I realized I would have to take the Boyd Pyramid a bit more seriously.  And I have.  I compared Boyd’s work to Einstein’s, saw the correlations and what I think is a flaw.

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”

Albert Einstein

ZenEntity

The first thing I want to address is a misconception regarding solids.  It was one Plato made as well as R. Buckminster Fuller.  There are not five stable solids.  There are six.

The mistake Plato and R. Buckminster Fuller made was to demonstrate the stability of a triangle composed of three rods to their students while saying that the simplest solid in three dimensional space is the tetrahedron.  He didn’t realize the triangle in his hand was the simplest solid.  The triangle is a two sided three vertex solid that is the simplest enclosure of space.  Our eyes use two of them to locate an object and calculate distance.

Considering the above solid and the Platonic Solids we have six three dimensional closed network structures as illustrated below:

Take note of the stability of each of the solids.  What this means is that the triangulated solids are able to support themselves structurally, while the non-triangulated solids collapse.

What I realized regarding the work of Einstein and other physicists is they did not regard the various phases of matter as important.  However the states of matter are important.  Each state from the triangle up to the icosahedron as illustrated above are higher states of order.  Yet, each state of order is fundamental to the universe in which we live.  And all are simply phases of what I call the “ZenEntity”.

ZenAssociations

I decided after looking at what I had found regarding the solids to reject contemporary empirical conventions and simply address one thing.  We have six fundamental ordered states.  After several billion years of evolution would not all organisms have what they require to function in response to all of the six states in their niche?

My next question was, “How do I represent the phenomena I had encountered as a network?”

In my profession there are data architects, database designers, data modelers, database administrators, data entrists, data analysts, database developers, database programmers database analysts, data warehouse architects, data warehouse analysts, data warehouse developers, Extract-Transform-Load architects, ETL analysts, ETL designers, ETL developers, ETL programmers, Business Intelligence architects, BI analysts, BI designers, BI developers and so on.  However, I was never satisfied with any of these position titles.  So, I coined one myself: data designer.  I was of the opinion no matter how much data was out there, it was finite.  Zero and Infinity were very useful, but they violated the laws of thermodynamics.  I saw seven distinct phases of order in the universe and only saw transitions from one state to another.  I could design according to those states.

This led me to explore how I could represent the six states.  I studied and applied a variety of project lifecycles such as System Development Lifecycle, Extreme Programming and Rapid Application Development, joint application development.  I had learned various enterprise frameworks such as Zachman and TOGAF, modeling techniques like UML, the various generations of programming languages, data structures, network topologies, organizational concepts, rule based systems, event based systems, data based systems, user centered design, goal directed design, location based services, pattern languages, service oriented architecture, hardware architectures and many more.  I studied English, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German and French to see how I could develop a consistent taxonomy as well.

Ultimately I concluded that a majority of the people out there working on these problems had abandoned the basics for pet concepts.  They had no idea how many entities there were.  They had no idea how those entities should be related.  So I took it upon myself to identify all the relations that were applicable and came up with the following:

The associations are as follows:

1. Pattribute: a triangle entity
2. Battribute: a one to many relationship describing the association between a triangle and an tetrahedron
3. Attribute: a one to one relationship describing the association between a triangle and a hexahedron
4. Nattribute: a many to one relationship describing the association between a triangle and a octahedron
5. Lattribute: a recursive many to one relationship describing the association between two icosahedrons and one icosahedron
6. Mattribute: a recursive one to one relationship describing the association between two dodecahedrons

As you can see, the network is asymmetrical and allows for Node, Lattice, Tabular, Lattice, Linear; Lattice arrangements.  Note that since all of the entities are simply states of a single “ZenEntity” none of the states are independent from each other in the network.

ZenPhases

Now, that we have established the solids and how they are interconnected we can look at what the actual phases of the ZenEntity are.  Each of these phases are recognized in physics, however I have not come across any discussion of the possibility that they are together a set of fundamental phases.

Usually, we see Space, Time, Energy and Mass described in Einsteinian classical physics.  We also have discussions of Ions, Gases, Liquids and Solids as states of matter.  But we don’t see them together.

1. Energy: a three dimensional coordinate system
2. Time: a connection between one three dimensional coordinate system and two four dimensional coordinate systems
3. Ion: a connection between one three dimensional coordinate system and one six dimensional coordinate system
4. Gas: a connection between two three dimensional coordinate systems and one eight dimensional coordinate system
5. Liquid: a connection between two twelve dimensional coordinate system and one twelve dimensional coordinate system
6. Solid: a connection between two twenty dimensional coordinate systems

Next, we will see how these states are all very important to our sensory systems.

ZenStates

As well as the phases there is another way to look at the six solids.  This is in the Latinate language of the six states.  The states differ from  the phases in that they deal with the essence or source of each of the states.

The essence of each of the states is as follows:

1. Pattern: Father
2. Battern:  Hold
3. Attern: Give
4. Nattern: Birth
5. Lattern: Milk
6. Mattern: Mother

ZenSensors

Now, I am going to introduce you to some friends of mine.  I call them “Zen Sensors”

As you can see each ZenEntity State has a coresponding human sensory organ:

1. Eye: detect events
2. Ear: detect pressures
3. Nose: detect plasmas
4. Throat: detect molecules
5. Jaw: detect organics
6. Body: detect inorganics

ZenInterrogatives

Next, we have for your viewing pleasure the standard interrogatives and how they correlate:

I found this interesting, because I spent a great deal of time resisting the order of these interrogatives.  Finally, I just went along and found ultimately the order does make perfect sense.  It is an acquired taste.

1. Eye: Who: Identification
2. Ear: What: Objectification
3. Nose: Where: Location
4. Throat: When: Chronation
5. Jaw: Why: Rationation
6. Body: How: Function

If you read enough Anglo-Saxon it makes sense.

ZenHemisphere

Having considered the Entities, Associations, States and Sensory Organs, let us now look at how this relates to a hemisphere of the brain:

The above illustration shows the left hemisphere of the brain and the major regions.  They are color coded to correspond to the fundamental states I have described.  You can also see the corresponding sensory organ as well as the corresponding network structure in the region:

1. GREEN: EYE: OCCIPITAL LOBE: visual center of the brain
2. YELLOW: EAR: TEMPORAL LOBE: sensory center of hearing in the brain.
3. SKY: NOSE: BRAINSTEM: control of reflexes and such essential internal mechanisms as respiration and heartbeat.
4. BLUE: TONGUE: PARIETAL LOBE: Complex sensory information from the body is processed in the parietal lobe, which also controls the ability to understand language.
5. RED:  JAW: FRONTAL LOBE: control of skilled motor activity, including speech, mood and the ability to think.
6. ORANGE: BODY:  CEREBELLUM: regulation and coordination of complex voluntary muscular movement as well as the maintenance of posture and balance.

ZenBrain

Everything is great so far, but there is the fact that there are two hemispheres to the brain and they interact through the Corpus Callosum which I claim is where the self resides.  One of the interesting things about my study of Latin is that I discovered most questions actually required a two part answer.  This answer would be composed of an Archetype and a Type.  After reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight and listening to her account of her perceptions while the left hemisphere of her brain was being shut down by an exploded blood vessel, it became apparent to me that the left hemisphere of the brain contained the Types the Latin language required and the right hemisphere of the brain contained the Archetypes.  It was necessary to create a two axis model to accomodate a brain with two hemispheres:

Each of the light colored cells in this table represent a connection between one coordinate system association (row) and another coordinate system association (column).  This accounts for the broad variety of properties we encounter making the states we experience.

There are actually not one or two, but four directions you can take on the above table.    Top to Bottom is right hemisphere deduction.  Bottom to Top is right hemisphere induction. Left to Right is left hemisphere deduction.  Right to Left is left hemisphere induction.

This is a physiological model of human perception that I have arrived at.  Our current definitions of dimensionality are incorrect.  Each state has its own dimensionality, its own associations, its own sense organs, its own region of the brain and the brain two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum.  If the work of Dr. David Bryson on Physical, Decisional and Perceptual Learning is right, then deduction happens during waking and induction happens during sleeping.

This is not a complete model by any means as it does not deal with scale-free networks.  Or does it?

But to this point, that is the Zen Universe.

Link:

• The Brain: ZenUniverse 4.o
• The Brain: ZenUniverse 3.0
• The Brain: ZenUniverse 2.0

Learning the name of a color changes the part of the brain that handles color perception.

Infants perceive color in the right hemisphere of the brain, researchers report, while adults do the job in the brain’s left hemisphere.

Discovery Channel

Read More Here

Although previous studies have attempted to identify distinct patterns of dysphagia following unilateral hemispheric stroke, the relationships between lesion sites and swallowing dysfunction remain unclear. In particular, swallowing deficits resulting from right hemisphere stroke remain poorly understood. The present study employed a case report design to examine the oral and pharyngeal phase deficits in swallowing following right hemisphere stroke. Lateral-view videofl uoroscopic images were obtained from six subjects following right hemisphere stroke as they performed swallowing trials with various bolus consistencies (i.e., thin liquid, thick liquid, and paste). Each swallow was evaluated on 17 oral phase, and 17 pharyngeal phase physiologic swallowing parameters. Results indicated that, whereas all patients exhibited both oral and pharyngeal phase swallowing defi cits, the majority of patients showed relatively greater oral phase than pharyngeal phase impairment. In addition, patterns of swallowing defi cits were highly variable across individuals, particularly for the pharyngeal phase. These fi ndings suggest that oral phase swallowing impairment can be a prominent feature of right hemisphere stroke. Thus, swallowing assessment in patients with right hemisphere stroke should emphasize both oral and pharyngeal phases. Instrumental techniques can provide valuable insights into swallow pathophysiology in this population.

from the Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology
]]> http://thebookwright.com/2008/11/02/unleash-your-book-with-imindmap/ Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:40:26 +0000 thebookwright http://thebookwright.com/2008/11/02/unleash-your-book-with-imindmap/ http://thebookwright.com/2008/08/05/unleash-the-book-inside-correspondence-course/ Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:27:23 +0000 thebookwright http://thebookwright.com/2008/08/05/unleash-the-book-inside-correspondence-course/ http://castorel.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/my-stroke-of-insight-must-see/ Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:53:54 +0000 CAsToReL http://castorel.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/my-stroke-of-insight-must-see/

Fantastically interesting article from the NY Times about how the brain processes sarcasm and why, for various reasons, some folks just don’t pick up on it.

Click here for the article.

When neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke back in 1996, one might have called it an oxymoron. For her though, it was an incredible opportunity as a brain scientist to witness first-hand how it feels when the left hemisphere of the brain is inhibited by a haemorrhage. In remaining conscious throughout the stroke, Dr. Taylor, then 37 years-old, was able to act as an external witness to herself, and in addition to that, to the workings of the right hemisphere of her brain as they remained unaffected. This gave her a fascinating Stroke of Insight, which is also the name of her book (My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey).

Though I am as far away from understanding the brain as I am from Japan, it can be enlightening to know how each hemisphere of the brain operates. In the simplest of terms, the left hemisphere is responsible for communication, the control of the speaking apparatus, language, and most pertinent to me, the voice in the head, which is the ego. The left hemisphere states the “I am” of our identity. It is concerned with the finer details, and making connections between letters, words, phrases, thoughts, and circumstances. It is the storyteller that can retell stories from the past, and even tell us stories about the future. As Dr. Taylor says, the left-brain associates current information with everything we have learned in the past, and projects future possibilities. The right brain is responsible for giving us context and understanding, and provides analysis for what we are absorbing from the external world. It is “right here, right now” – all about the present moment. Together the two hemispheres balance to give us both thought and comprehension, as well as the translation of those elements into language and forms of communication.

The right hemisphere is also where our sense of peace resides, as Dr. Taylor can attest when she was no longer influenced by the left and was able to experience a silent mind. Unable to speak or understand language, comprehend and execute simple tasks, or recognize aspects of her former life, this Harvard-trained brain scientist was reduced to an “infant in a woman’s body,” to put it into her own terms. Feeling sorry for herself was a mechanism she could not even muster up if she tried, nor could she feel embarrassed, because these reactions resided in her now dormant left hemisphere. In the midst of all this, she says she found Nirvana, which led her to believe that all people could go to a place of peace if they could only stop listening to the constant chattering and voices of the left hemisphere of the brain.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was first inspired to study the brain when her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was inspired to recover from the stroke, which took about eight years, because she realized that her insights could better humanity, and raise awareness for people who are seen as ‘disabled.’ While she was recovering, though her thoughts could in no way be translated to those around her, Dr. Taylor’s experience with the people treating and caring for her offered her perspective on how ‘disabled’ people are treated. “I’m still in here,” she says on behalf of the people who cannot communicate this for themselves. Inside a body which might not function like the rest of us lies a mind and a person that see us and observe us more clearly than we think.

Interestingly, Dr. Taylor points out that our current formal educational system is geared to develop primarily the left hemisphere, and reward it when it performs correctly. We are focussed on the facts, grammar, multiple choice questions, numbers, and terminology, which are all important things to learn, however when the ‘big picture’ is left out, we are lacking in true context and understanding. We know how, but we don’t know why, or for what purpose. We get lost in the facts, in crunching out the numbers, and in showing up to countless meetings (details, details, details!) that it becomes nearly impossible to know when our brain is chattering nonsense, and when information is absolutely pertinent. We are ruled by our schedules, and drive our children from ballet to soccer and then to an hour of math tutoring, all the while telling our own story through their lives and the expectations we place on them. Even our moments of relative external quiet are bombarded by that voice in our head coaxing us into unrest: “Shouldn’t you be doing something right now?,” “When was the last time you called your mother?” We relive conversations from the day, or from last week, and resurrect the emotions that came with our original experiences.

Our right hemispheres are left for a nice long nap until we realize that simply pursuing the workings of the left hemisphere does not satisfy. Why?

It comes down to Dr. Taylor’s insight as a brain scientist that we can actually give our brain’s something to think about. We can choose when to listen to that collection of cells in the left hemisphere of the brain that she says is about the size of a peanut. How often do you let that peanut rule your life?

When your brain is giving you something to think about that you don’t want to think about, you can simply choose to think about something else. Many of us would deny this because we think we are the sum of our thoughts, and therefore to stop listening to our thoughts is impossible because they are who we are. But, Dr. Taylor says that we can use our own anatomy to our advantage. That peanut is a tool that you can use – it can communicate beautifully and can help you converse with the world around you – but the price we pay for that peanut is the ego, or that relentless voice in our head that keeps us from enjoying the present moment.

Good teachers will find creative ways of incorporating these things into their lessons. But based on my understanding of the curriculum dictated by school boards, there simply isn’t time for it even if the desire is there. In that way, I think that the duty is left to the guardians, parents and mentors of our young. I am thankful for my parents who introduced me to the nurturing of the right hemisphere from a young age. They are deeply spiritual people, and instilled that sense of ‘context’ for my life and the bigger picture. That picture looks quite different now. God, for example, is no longer an old man with a long white beard sitting in a cloud, but a label-free Entity. However, the notion of having a ‘background’ to my life as I know it was taught from a very young age. Furthermore, and probably unbeknownst to them, they supported me as I pursued passions that would cultivate the sense of creativity I have about interpreting the world around me (mainly through writing, theatre studies, adventure, and travelling).

When I have the opportunity to be a mother, one of my goals will be to introduce my children to the appreciation of the right brain – that part of you that isn’t concerned with the fine details, that doesn’t speak to you erroneously, and where that sense of peace and rest resides. Inevitably, that peace will flow out into the lives of those around us. Imagine our children free from the unnecessary expectations to perform the tasks dictated by that peanut! Imagine your pain-body freed when you realize that you can begin that now, even if you were not raised to understand that you could! As Dr. Taylor says, “imagine losing 37 years of emotional baggage.”

All it takes is a step to the right of your left hemisphere.

To learn more about Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, please go to:

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s official website

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor on TED (Technology, Entertainment Design): Ideas Worth Spreading

Oprah’s Soul Series – (you’ll have to become a member of Oprah.com).

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor on NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness

© Meghan J. Ward, 2008

from European Psychiatry

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) applied over brain regions responsible for language processing is used to curtail potentially auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia patients and to investigate the functional organisation of language-related areas. Variability of effects is, however, marked across studies and between subjects. Furthermore, the mechanisms of action of rTMS are poorly understood. Here, we reviewed different factors related to the structural and functional organisation of the brain that might influence rTMS-induced effects. Then, by analogy with aphasia studies, and the plastic-adaptive changes in both the left and right hemispheres following aphasia recovery, a hypothesis is proposed about rTMS mechanisms over language-related areas (e.g. Wernicke, Broca). We proposed that the local interference induced by rTMS in language-related areas might be analogous to aphasic stroke and might lead to a functional reorganisation in areas connected to the virtual lesion for language recovery.

a cool article from Physorg.com

“Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.”

more after the jump

http://www.physorg.com/news142185056.html