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Brain & Mind Roundup 3

June 30, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Here are some recent stories about what goes on in the brain when we’re writing, making music, and appreciating art.

Click on the titles to read the complete articles.

Our Brains Are Made for Enjoying Art

Ann Lukits (The Wall Street Journal)

Analysis suggests art appreciation is a natural biological process.

“Viewing paintings engages a number of different regions of the brain, suggesting art appreciation is a natural biological process, according to the report in the June issue of the journal Brain and Cognition. The study found that paintings activated areas of the brain involved in vision, pleasure, memory, recognition and emotions, in addition to systems that underlie the conscious processing of new information to give it meaning.”

This is Your Brain on Writing

Carl Zimmer (The New York Times)

Becoming skilled at writing may activate the same areas of the brain that are activated in people who are skilled at other things, such as sports or music. This study showed that the areas of the brain activated in novice writers were not the same as those activated in the skilled, “professionally trained,” writers.

“During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech.”

It would appear that training is training is training—no matter what the training is for.

Musical Training Increases Executive Brain Function in Adults and Children

Jeremy Dean (PsyBlog)

“Both the brains and behaviour of adult and child musicians were compared with non-musicians in the study by researchers at the Boston Children’s Hospital. They found that adult musicians compared to non-musicians showed enhanced performance on measures of cognitive flexibility, working memory, and verbal fluency. And musically trained children showed enhanced performance on measures of verbal fluency and processing speed.”

Music Changes the Way You Think

Daniel A. Yudkin and Yaacov Trope (Scientific American)

Different music encourages different frames of mind.

“Tiny, almost immeasurable features in a piece of music have the power to elicit deeply personal and specific patterns of thought and emotion in human listeners….Ponderous, resonant, unfamiliar tonalities—the proverbial “auditory forest”—cause people to construe things abstractly. By contrast, the rapid, consonant, familiar chords of the perfect fifth—the “auditory trees”—bring out the concrete mindset….That music can move us is no surprise; it’s the point of the art form, after all. What’s new here is the manner in which the researchers have quantified in fine-grained detail the cognitive ramifications of unpacked melodic compounds.”

Filed Under: Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Creating, Learning, Living, Writing Tagged With: Art Appreciation, Brain, Cognition, Mind, Music, Writing

Brain & Mind Roundup 2

June 16, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

This time, Brain & Mind Roundup focuses on articles about writing and the brain, specifically how taking notes by hand (instead of by computer) actually facilitates learning and how learning cursive stimulates the brain.

The pen compels lucidity. –Robert Stone, novelist

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop

Cindi May (Scientific American)

Because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor.

 But new research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning.  Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture.  Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information.  Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention.  By contrast, when typing, students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain

William R. Klemm (Psychology Today)

Scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn “functional specialization,” that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.

The benefits to brain development are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper.

Brain Research and Cursive Writing

Dr. David Sortino*

Rand Nelson of Peterson Directed Handwriting, believes that when children are exposed to cursive handwriting, changes occur in their brains that allow a child to overcome motor challenges. He says, the act of physically gripping a pen or pencil and practicing the swirls, curls and connections of cursive handwriting activates parts of the brain that lead to increased language fluency. That is, cursive writing ability affords us the opportunity to naturally train these fine motor skills by taking advantage of a child’s inability to fully control his fingers. This means cursive writing acts as a building block rather than as a stressor, providing a less strenuous learning experience.

Moreover, cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing, typing or keyboarding.

*Dr. David Sortino holds a Master’s degree in Human Development from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Clinical/Developmental Psychology from Saybrook University.

Filed Under: Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Learning, Living, Writing Tagged With: Brain, Cursive, Learning, Mind, Writing

Brain & Mind Roundup

May 17, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

 

Here are some  links to a few of the really great articles and blog posts I come across in the course of keeping up to date on the best way to use the brain & mind. Click on the titles below to go to the original posts. Please check these sites out. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Psychological Benefits of Writing

Gregory Ciotti (Sparring Mind)

Writing isn’t just for writers.

Have you ever had too many Internet tabs open at once? It is a madhouse of distraction. Sometimes I feel like my brain has too many tabs open at once. This is often the result of trying to mentally juggle too many thoughts at the same time. Writing allows abstract information to cross over into the tangible world. It frees up mental bandwidth, and will stop your  brain from crashing due to tab overload.

You Don’t Know What You’re Saying

Scientific American (reprinted from Nature)

Our awareness of our own speech often comes after the words have left our mouth, not before. The dominant model of how speech works is that it is planned in advance — speakers begin with a conscious idea of exactly what they are going to say. But some researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that people know what they are saying in part through hearing themselves speak.

Things You Cannot Unsee

The Atlantic

What you know influences what you see. Once you see something in a different way, you can’t unsee it. “[P]erception is not the result of simply processing stimulus cues.  It also importantly involves fitting prior knowledge to the current situation to create a meaningful interpretation.” — Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino

How Attention Works: The Brain’s Anti-Distraction System Discovered

Jeremy Dean (PsyBlog)

Attention is only partly about what we focus on; it’s also about what we manage to ignore. “Most contemporary ideas of attention highlight brain processes that are involved in picking out relevant objects from the visual field. Our results show clearly that this is only one part of the equation and that active suppression of the irrelevant objects is another important part.” –John M. Gaspar, Simon Fraser University

Super-Focus: 10 Natural Steps to Nurture Your Attention

Jeremy Dean (PsyBlog)

How to deal with interruptions, structure your environment, enter a flow state and much more.

The Backfire Effect: The Psychology of Why We Have a Hard Time Changing Our Minds

Maria Popova (brainpickings)

The disconnect between information and insight explains our dangerous self-righteousness. “Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you.” –David McRaney, author of You Are Not So Smart and You Are Now Less DumbEnhanced by Zemanta

Filed Under: Attention, Brain, Brain & Mind Roundup, Mind Tagged With: Attention, Brain, Mind, Perception, PsyBlog, Psychology, Scientific American, Speech, the Atlantic, Writing

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