I love my Mac and even though this is a blog about work and the brain occasionally I add something about OS X.

OS X is pretty intelegant: simple, intelligent, elegant. I  just like my computer to do what I need to get done and Mac does that.

One of the few frustrations I have is how to, after minimizing a document or web page or application, restore that application to full-size.

I love that I can minimize applications and docs with an Cmd-M shortcut; but I got really frustrated that I can’t restore them with the opposite Shift-Cmd-M, which would be really logical and Mac like. Very unusual (and it bugs me) to find such a fundamental gap when just about everything else just works.

Sometimes Cmd-tab (Like ctrl-tab in Windows) and scrolling through the programs seems to work and sometimes it just doesn’t. And it is time consuming and destroys the thought flow to have to relocate the pad pointer and click… grrrrr….

So I use Spotlight.

Spotlight, for non-Mac users, is a super fast search engine for your HD built into Mac OS X. Just press Cmd-Spacebar and it’s there.

Firstly, it makes a superb program launcher: you simply type two or three letters of the name of the application, hit your arrow down button (And if Apps is your top list then you won’t even need to do this), press return and Boom! you’re away. Program launched. No clicking required.

It becomes very instinctive and fast, and just feels quicker. (And easier than, say, Quicksilver).

For restoring minimized apps & docs that you’ve put into the dock just use exactly the same method. Cmd-Spacebar to launch Spotlight, type the first couple of letters of the name of the Application you minimized, press return and you’re done. The app will restore. You can even hold down the shift button when hitting return if you want to see it done in the cool OS X Slow-Mo style….

Nice.

If anyone knows any other way of restoring minimized apps without clicks I’d love to hear about it - otherwise this is fast, easy, and becomes very Zen-like helping the cognitive flow of my work immensely.

Day Three: Humanistic Psychology

One of the more curious phenomenon of this decade has been the rise of Abraham Maslow. Maslow’s theory of self-actualization fits neatly into current ideas about coaching and self-development and seem instantly to have a flavor of being understandable, correct, and achievable.

There is a problem here. Firstly, people don’t read Maslow, they simply read summaries. Secondly, Maslow’s pyramid of needs wasn’t created in isolation and is based on the work and ideas of others, principally Otto Rank.

The First Committee Of The Vienna Psychoanalytical Society

[Source: Berlin, 1922 Becker Maas, Library of Congress (124),(LC-USZ62-119779)]

From Left to Right: Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Sàndor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, Hans Sachs

Otto Rank was a psychoanalyst and one of Sigmund Freud’s closest colleagues. The Committee, as they are generally referred to as a group, were a remarkable groundbreaking bunch.

Excluding Otto Rank and Freud, in the same order as the photo above:

Karl Abraham was co-author with Freud on his 1917 paper on depression “Mourning and Melancholia” and was personal therapist to many of the first generation of psychoanalysts including Helene Deutsch, who was the first person to concentrate on women in psychoanalysis.

Max Eitingon, who served as President of the International Psychoanalytical Society after Karl Abraham’s death in 1925, was probably Freud’s most staunch supporter. He had given up working as an MD when he met Freud in order to become a psychoanalyst, and was to make significant in roads into developing the profession of psychoanalysis by insisting that all psychoanalysts be trained in a standard triple combination of training analysis, clinical supervision, and seminars.

Sàndor Ferenczi, who would later come to find himself at loggerheads with Freud, made a significant collaboration with Otto Rank in developing the “Here-And-Now” approaches to therapy that were such an influence in America in the 1950s.

Ernest Jones was Fruend’s official biographer and the first native English-speaking psychoanalyst. He was very influential in Britain, and finally Hans Sachs, who was the first non-medical to join the group, and founder of Imago magazine.

Back to Otto Rank. Otto Rank deserves to be as much a household name as any scientist of the 20th century. He was hugely influential on both Rollo May and Carl Rogers, and more on this in a moment, Rank went from being Freud’s right-hand man to being vilified and rejected by Freud. He resigned all his posts within the Vienna group and left for France.

The fight was over the Oedipal Complex. Freud held that the sublimated sexual desires offspring have for their parents was the cause of all culture: art, society, everything. Rank contested this by stating that prior to this conscious awareness babies feel separation anxiety. Psychologists agree with Rank on this. As the idea of the Oedipal underpinned all of Freud’s writing to refute, attack, or re-evaluate it was more than Freud’s ego could take.

Rank’s principal concerned with Classical Freudian analysis was that it ignored transpersonal and interpersonal relationships - it looked only at the past, the childhood, and did not work with the whole person, or their needs and desires in the “Here-And-Now”. Otto Rank’s approach won out, and this leads on to Rolllo May and Carl Rogers.

Rollo May’s 5 stages of development are different. He freely admitted that while they are a developmental model they are not as strictly time bound as say a Piaget/Erikson model. May allows for human nature: sometimes we jump forward, sometimes jump back, sometimes get stuck, sometimes advance, and so on. It is truly “Here-And-Now” psychoanalysis.

The fives stages are:

1. Innocence – the pre-ego, pre-self-conscious stage: the infant. They do what they must do: e.g. crying is done instinctively, however, there is a degree of will in the sense of a drive to fulfill needs.
2. Rebellion – wants freedom, but lacks a full understanding of responsibility .
3. Decision- The need to break away from their parents and settle into the ordinary stage. Decide what path life will take, along with fulfilling rebellious needs.
4. Ordinary – the normal adult ego: responsibility is demanding, so conforms and adopts traditional values.
5. Creative – the authentic adult, the existential stage, beyond ego and self-actualizing. This is the person who, accepting destiny, faces anxiety with courage.

(These are interesting as analogies for leadership, and/or organizations too.)

May compliments Carl Rogers who was also interested in how development happens in individual growth. Rogers differed though as he was looking for universal clues for the concept of self.

What has all this to do with industrial/organizational psychology you may well ask? Maslow is one answer. Though Maslow’s ideas have been largely bastardized by many, and led to a general backlash from the psychology world, they contain the kernel of a very solid idea, which he got initally from his mentor Kurt Goldstein.

If man is a curious creature, and man certainly is curious and inquiring, then when needs are fulfilled, what will raise the stakes for him? Maslow quickly saw that once the physical needs are fufilled, then security becomes the issue, then love, then respect; but he posed a puzzle if all our needs our fulfilled what happens. He suggested in a bold move away from existentialism and nihilism that the human spirit would free itself and become, in his famous phrase, “self-actualized”.

There is a point to this.

And there is also a caveat.

Maslow never suggests that self-actualization will always happen.

And what looks lile self-actualization, the fulfillment of goals, can be deceptive.

Why?

Because how humans think and behave to get these goals also determines the result. Because ambition and effort of the individual are not universally positive. Because human sorrow, for disaster, bad luck, misfortune, for moral corruption, and most of all, the boredom or greed that comes from getting it all all stop us getting to the self-actualized state.

What it does suggest is that we have the desire to want to get better, which we hope is true, but in fact many of us simply seek the easiest path to reward, and find that the effort required in living is hard.

Importantly it give us a goal to aspire to, and a set of characteristics:

Creative, moral, socially adept, one with humanity, democratic, freshness of appreciation, clear perception of reality, acceptance of self and others. In Maslow’s own words:

“an episode or spurt in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly and intensely enjoyable way, and in which he is more integrated and less split, more open for experience, more idiosyncratic, more perfectly expressive or spontaneous, or fully functioning, more creative, more humorous more ego-transcending, more independent of his lower needs, etc. He becomes in these episodes more truly himself, more perfectly actualising his potentialities, closer to the core of his being, more fully human. Not only are these his happiest and most thrilling moments, but they are also moments of greatest maturity, individuation, fulfilment - in a word, his healthiest moments.”

Is it true that when we are happy, contented, fulfilled we will spend our time bettering the world? Mmmmmm……

Maslow argues that self-actualization comes when we are in a positive frame of mind - and this would seem right - the main attacks against Maslow are that there is little scientific evidence that supports self-actualization - but as a theory about human potential it’s very attractive and kind of cute.

I have said there is a kernel of a great idea here, and there is: psychologists can help healthy people to see ways to improve their lives. It was this idea that really gave force to the third wave, and one that we will look at in more detail on Day Four.

There is further one area where Maslow’s general theory does seem to work and that is in the artificial confines of work. As he and others, such as Hetzberger and McGregor point out: if everything is in place to make work a good experience the results are better.

Spelled out simply: good chair, good desk, good pay, good lighting, good strategies, and good implementation results in better results.

It seems obvious, but many in the 50s and 60s still refused to believe anything other than money motivated the individual. Of course, the Greeks had understood that glory, honor, respect from your peers and the ilk are really what we are looking for. Though the money really helps.

The usefulness of the Humanistic movement was that is emphasized the dignity and value of work, work being the human activity that we do more than any other, rather than simply production, and as we move into a world where work is becoming more and more invisible these ideas are going to matter more and more.

Puzzles remain: What is happiness and satisfaction at work? If you make me too happy do I stop working as hard? Why do we get stressed? How can burnout be universally prevented? etc;

Most of all the humanists tried to suggest that there is something better round the corner, and for anyone who has ever had a bad job and wouldn’t want their child to have such a job that’s not a bad thing.

Day Four: New Hope & New Science

Source: Flickr (CC License) Photographer: perfect_hexagon

This from Medical News Today:

What makes you suddenly dart into the bakery when you spy chocolate- frosted donuts in the window, though you certainly hadn’t planned on indulging? As you lick the frosting off your fingers, don’t blame a lack of self-control.

New research from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine reveals how hunger works in the brain and the way neurons pull your strings to lunge for the sweet fried dough.

Krispy Kremes, in perhaps their first starring role in neurological research, helped lead to the discovery.

In the study, subjects were tested twice — once after gorging on up to eight Krispy Kreme donuts until they couldn’t eat anymore, and on another day after fasting for eight hours.

In both sessions, people were shown pictures of donuts and screwdrivers, while researchers examined their brains in fMRI’s.

When the subjects saw pictures of donuts after the eating binge, their brains didn’t register much interest. But after the fast, two areas of the brain leaped into action upon seeing the donuts. First, the limbic brain — an ancestral part of the brain present in all animals from snakes to frogs to humans — lit up like fireworks.

“That part of the brain is able to detect what is motivationally significant. It says, not only am I hungry, but here is food,” said senior author Marsel Mesulam, M.D., the Ruth and Evelyn Dunbar Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School and a neurologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Next, the brain’s spatial attention network shifted the hungry subject’s focus toward the new object of desire — in this case the Krispy Kremes.

“If we didn’t have this part of the brain, every time you passed by a bakery you would have no control over your eating,” explained Mesulam, who also is director of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the Feinberg School. “If your nerve cells fired every time you smelled something edible, then you’d eat all the time, not just when you’re hungry.”

“There’s a very complex system in the brain that helps to direct our attention to items in our environment that are relevant to our needs, for example, food when we are hungry but not when we are full,” said Aprajita Mohanty, lead author of the paper and a post-doctoral fellow at the Feinberg School. The study was published on-line last week in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Mesulam noted the research demonstrates how our brain decides what to pay attention to in a world full of stimuli — not just sweets. “If you are in a forest and you hear rustling, the context urges you to pay full attention since this could be a sign of danger,” he said. “If you are in your office, the context makes the identical sound less relevant. A major job of the brain is to match response to context.”

The study helped Mesulam understand his own behavior. “Now I know why I can’t resist walking into the bakery some days when I smell fresh scones,” he said.

Bridge, Fog, And Tai Chi - Flickr (Creative Commons License)

Sedentary people who regularly complain of fatigue can increase their energy levels by 20 percent and decrease their fatigue by 65 percent by engaging in regular, low intensity exercise, according to a new University of Georgia study.

“Too often we believe that a quick workout will leave us worn out - especially when we are already feeling fatigued,” said researcher Tim Puetz, who recently completed his doctorate at UGA and is the lead author of the study. “However, we have shown that regular exercise can actually go a long way in increasing feelings of energy - particularly in sedentary individuals.”

Puetz co-authored the study with professor Patrick O’Connor, co-director of the UGA Exercise Psychology Laboratory, and former UGA student Sara Flowers. The team’s results appear in the February issue of the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

O’Connor said previous studies - including one that he and Puetz co-authored in 2006 - have shown that exercise can significantly improve energy levels and decrease fatigue. Those studies, however, primarily looked at patients with medical conditions such as cancer, heart disease and mental health problems. In this latest study, the researchers studied volunteers who had fatigue that was persistent yet didn’t meet the criteria for a medical condition such as chronic fatigue syndrome. O’Connor said about 25 percent of the general population experiences such fatigue.

“A lot of people are overworked and not sleeping enough,” O’Connor said. “Exercise is a way for people to feel more energetic. There’s a scientific basis for it, and there are advantages to it compared to things like caffeine and energy drinks.”

The researchers recruited 36 volunteers who did not exercise regularly and had reported persistent fatigue based on a commonly used health survey. The volunteers were divided into three groups: The first engaged in 20 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise three times a week for six weeks; the second engaged in low-intensity aerobic exercise for the same time period; the control group did not exercise.

The low- and moderate-intensity groups had a 20 percent increase in energy levels over the control group. Surprisingly, the low-intensity group had a greater reduction in fatigue levels than the moderate-intensity group, 65 percent compared to 49 percent, respectively.

“It could be that moderate-intensity exercise is too much for people who are already fatigued,” O’Connor said, “and that might contribute to them not getting as great an improvement as they would had they done the low-intensity exercise.”

He adds that energy and fatigue aren’t exactly opposites of each other. A student who stays up late to finish a term paper may feel fatigued, for example, but may also feel energized as she nears the end of the paper.

The volunteers in the study used exercise bikes that allowed the researchers to control their level of exertion so that low-intensity exercise was defined as 40 percent of their peak oxygen consumption and moderate-intensity exercise was defined as 75 percent of peak oxygen consumption. For comparison, O’Connor said a leisurely, easy walk is low-intensity exercise, while a fast-paced walk with hills is moderate-intensity exercise.

The team’s analysis also found that the improvements in energy and fatigue were not related to increases in aerobic fitness that the exercisers experienced. Puetz said the finding suggests that exercise acts directly on the central nervous system to increase energy and reduce fatigue.

“Exercise traditionally has been associated with physical health, but we are quickly learning that exercise has a more holistic effect on the human body and includes effects on psychological health,” Puetz said. “What this means is that in every workout a single step is not just a step closer to a healthier body, but also to a healthier mind.”

 Wynton Marsalis with the Lincoln Jazz Orchestra, De Bijloke, Ghent
Source:  Flickr (Creative Commons License)

A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.

This keyboard was specially designed for a study to assess brain activity in jazz musicians during improvisation. Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnets could attract.

The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

In a report published Feb. 27 in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, the scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their curiosity about the possible neurological underpinnings of the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation.

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a trained jazz saxophonist himself. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind,” he adds, “during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous.”

Though many recent studies have focused on understanding what parts of a person’s brain are active when listening to music, Limb says few have delved into brain activity while music is being spontaneously composed.

Curious about his own “brain on jazz,” he and a colleague, Allen R. Braun, M.D., of NIDCD, devised a plan to view in real time the brain functions of musicians improvising.

For the study, they recruited six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute, a music conservatory where Limb holds a joint faculty appointment. Other volunteers learned about the study by word of mouth through the local jazz community.

The researchers designed a special keyboard to allow the pianists to play inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a brain-scanner that illuminates areas of the brain responding to various stimuli, identifying which areas are active while a person is involved in some mental task, for example.

Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnet could attract. They also used fMRI-compatible headphones that would allow musicians to hear the music they generate while they’re playing it.

Each musician first took part in four different exercises designed to separate out the brain activity involved in playing simple memorized piano pieces and activity while improvising their music. While lying in the fMRI machine with the special keyboard propped on their laps, the pianists all began by playing the C-major scale, a well-memorized order of notes that every beginner learns. With the sound of a metronome playing over the headphones, the musicians were instructed to play the scale, making sure that each volunteer played the same notes with the same timing.

In the second exercise, the pianists were asked to improvise in time with the metronome. They were asked to use quarter notes on the C-major scale, but could play any of these notes that they wanted.

Next, the musicians were asked to play an original blues melody that they all memorized in advance, while a recorded jazz quartet that complemented the tune played in the background. In the last exercise, the musicians were told to improvise their own tunes with the same recorded jazz quartet.

Limb and Braun then analyzed the brain scans. Since the brain areas activated during memorized playing are parts that tend to be active during any kind of piano playing, the researchers subtracted those images from ones taken during improvisation. Left only with brain activity unique to improvisation, the scientists saw strikingly similar patterns, regardless of whether the musicians were doing simple improvisation on the C-major scale or playing more complex tunes with the jazz quartet.

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Limb notes that this type of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for artists and non-artists alike. For example, he notes, people are continually improvising words in conversations and improvising solutions to problems on the spot. “Without this type of creativity, humans wouldn’t have advanced as a species. It’s an integral part of who we are,” Limb says.

He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists, as well as non-artists asked to improvise.

This research was funded by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.

For additional information, go to:
http://hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/limb.html
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/
http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/
http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/jazz