Dave’s Whiteboard

My current project involves working with statutes and with case law. One of my project partners has built a learning assignment around a court case. Eric Turkewitz has the details (as do many others, including the Boston Globe), but this is the quick summary:

Dr. Robert Lindeman was defending against a malpractice suit in 2007. While Lindeman was on the stand, the plaintiff’s attorney asked if he had a medical blog. He said he did. She asked if he was Flea (posting on the now-vanished drfleablog). He said yes.

The case was settled the following day.

Flea, it turns out, had been blogging before the trial began. He discussed meeting with “an expert on juries” for advice on how to behave on the stand. He also blogged during the trial, commenting on the judge, the sleepy jurors and the appearance of the plaintiff’s attorney.

Ironically, in a PDF that claims to have been made of Flea’s site before it was taken down, Flea reports his lawyer suggesting that the opposing side “may pull articles from Flea’s ‘legitimate’ web site to use against him.”

This apparently did not cause Lindeman to tell his attorney, “You know, I have a blog, too.”

I don’t know anything about the merits of the court case. I do know that a client needs to help his attorney anticipate potential difficulties. And that blogging, while free, can have costs.

Stethoscope photo by happysnappr / Adrian Clark.
Megaphone photo by LarimdaME / Gene Han.

Series: The brain rules!

For this final post based on John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’m looking at Rule 12. That says, “We are powerful and natural explorers.” What Medina highlights is the way in which we learn about the world. From infancy, we’re busy figuring out what things are and how they related to each other.

When my oldest child was turning two, I came across a phrase I’ve always used in place of “the terrible twos” — “first adolescence.” The idea was that two-year-olds, like their teenage counterparts, have just acquired a clutch of physical and mental skills. They can walk, they can talk, they can form ideas and set out to put them to work. But they’re constantly running into limitations and setbacks.

Here’s how Medina sees the world to the two-year-old:

You push the boundaries of people’s preferences, then stand back and see how they react. Then you repeat the experiment, pushing them to their limits over and over again to see how stable findings are, as if he were playing peekaboo. Slowly you begin to perceive the length and height and breadth of people’s desires, and how they differ from yours. Then, just to be sure the boundaries are still in place, you occasionally do the whole experiment over again.

One tool for the miniature experimenter: the mirror neuron. This class of brain cells, discovered within the last 15 years, apparently helps us monitor activities around us and helps us plan our own activity.

It seems clear these mirror neurons played a major role in our evolution. When we came down from the trees, says Medina, we didn’t say, “Give me a book in a lecture and a board of directors so I can spend 10 years learning how to survive in this place.”

Turning to education, Medina argues for expanding the medical school model. Med school, he says, has three components: a teaching hospital, faculty who work as well as teach, and research labs. What does this mean for the student?

• Consistent exposure to the real world — med students constantly move through the teaching hospital, encountering real-life medical problems.
• Consistent exposure to people working in the real world — students learn from not only the medical faculty but also dozens if not hundreds of working professionals.
• Consistent exposure to practical research programs — students discover that the best research is an ongoing activity, that by nature it’s tentative, and that it connects to problems worth solving.

Consider the implications of this model both for how adults learn to teach and how children learn to learn better.

Years ago, I served as a Teacher Corps intern in a rural high school. Corena, he master teacher who led our intern team was also the office education instructor at the school. One of her most successful programs placed office ed students in jobs with businesses in the three small towns that comprised our school district.

So Cindy, Carolyn, and their classmates at 16 or 17 were already learning what really happens in a workplace. Some had more positive experiences than others; as their teacher, Corena would work at trying to improve the experience, or at trying to turn it into an occasion for learning.

That was a small program with the limited but very practical goal. How many other school experiences could profit from a combination of real-life experiences, guidance from trained adults, and exposure to continuing attempts to learn more?

Baby investigator photo by coreyt / Corey Thompson.

Series: The brain rules!

John Medina’s brain rule 11 says, “Mail and female brains are different.” He’s examining gender differences, which can be genetic, neuroanatomic, or behavioral.

Genetically, all men are momma’s boys. Women inherit two sets of X chromosomes (one from mom, one from dad), and apparently individual cells choose, randomly, which inheritance to activate. But men receive the X chromosome only from their mothers. And many genes on the X chromosome create proteins involved in the manufacturing of the brain.

So what are some of the neuroanatomical differences?

• Difference in the size and thickness of the cortex.
• Differences in the limbic system, which influences emotions.
• Differences in the amygdala, which controls and remembers emotions.
• Differences in regulating serotonin, which regulates emotion and mood. (Men synthesize serotonin 50% faster than women.)

Do these differences mean anything? Medina says we don’t know. But we’re trying to find out.

You have probably heard the term left brain vs. right brain. You may have heard that this underscores creative vs. analytical people. That’s a folk tale, the equivalent of saying the left side of a luxury liner is responsible for keeping the ship afloat, and the right side is responsible for making it over through the water.

Both sides are involved in both processes. That doesn’t mean the hemispheres are equal, however. The right side of the brain tends to remember the gist of an experience, and the left brain tends to remember the details.

Behavioral differences

Males suffer more from mental retardation, and the X chromosome is often involved. (Remember, women have a backup set of X chromosomes; men don’t.)

Men are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia; women, by depression.

Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male; most anorexics are female.

Medina discusses the work Deborah Tannen has done in studying verbal behavior. His summary: “Women are better at it.”

How much is genetic and how much is socially influenced may be impossible to tell — but the differences are clear early in life in such areas as building relationships and negotiating status. Those patterns are reinforced and greatly influence our interpersonal verbal behavior as adults.

Some final thoughts from Medina on using this data in the real world:

Get the facts straight on emotions.

Emotions matter because they make the brain pay attention. Men and women process certain emotions differently. That means they pat attention in different ways.

Medina recounts an experiment dealing with how men and women reaction to emotional stress. The tendency is for men to activate the right side of the brain (the gist), and for women to activate the left (details).

Question gender arrangements.

Are single-sex classrooms better? We haven’t experimented enough to know. They may depend on age, on subject, and certainly on the techniques for fostering learning.

Notice gender in the workplace.

Here’s Medina, recounting a presentation at the Boeing Leadership Center:

I said, “Sometimes women are accused of being more emotional than men, from the home to the workplace. I think that women might not be any more emotional than anyone else.”

I explained that because women perceive their emotional landscape with more data points (that’s the detail) and see it in greater resolution, women may simply have more information to which they are capable of reacting. If men perceived the same number of data points, they might have the same number of reaction.

Take management training, Medina says. Often it involves various complex simulations. Have unisex teams and mixed-gender teams. Then give one team of each type some training related to these real gender differences and their implications.

So you’ve got uni-untrained, mixed-untrained, uni-trained, mixed-trained. Real-world outcomes (and maybe a master’s thesis).

Which side of your brain is firing right now?

Photo of the General Post Office in Dublin by informatique / William Murphy.
Detail of the GPO’s name in Irish by jaqian.

Series: The brain rules!

Brain rule 8 from John Medina says, “Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.” What he means, unsurprisingly, is that excessive stress hinders our ability to learn and to respond. Medina describes such stress as having three key elements:

• A measurable physiological response to some stimulus.
• Perception of the stressor as aversive.
• A sense of being unable to control of the stressor.

Our stress responses depend in large part on two hormones: adrenaline and cortisol. To oversimplify, adrenaline trigger the release of energy; cortisol helps restore our normal state after stress. Both these hormones evolved when outside pressures demanded rapid but short-term response — like running into a hungry predator, or needing to run into prey.

Contemporary stress tends to last much longer, which means the hormones build up in our system with potentially dire consequences. Excessive adrenaline can damage the cardiovascular system, leading to heart disease or stroke. Excessive cortisol can affect the brain.

The hippocampus, that fortress of human memory, is studded with cortisol receptors like cloves in a ham. This makes it very responsive to stress signals. If the stress is not too severe, the brain performs better. Its owner can solve problems more effectively and is more likely to retain information…. Life-threatening events are some of the most important experiences we can remember. They happened with lightning speed in the savanna, and those who commit those experiences to memory the fastest (and recall them accurately with equal speed) were more apt to survive than those who couldn’t.

We know that learning can improve with a certain amount of stress. Chronic stress, however, can damage the hippocampus, disconnect neural networks, and even kill hippocampal cells. Yet another effect of prolonged stress is clinical depression. Not only can depression affect memory, reasoning, fluid intelligence, and other mental processes; it often leaves its victims convinced that there is no way out of their current state.

I’m speaking from experience when I say that few things can be as personally devastating as the distorted beliefs that form a significant part of depression. A “snap out of it” or “you shouldn’t feel that way” response from significant people in a person’s life tends to reinforce rather than dispel depression’s deleterious effects.

What’s the impact of stress on the workplace?

• Stress causes health problems. “… 77% [of workers] report being burned out; this translates into a lot of cortisol, a lot of missed meetings, and a lot of trips to the doctor.”
• Stress impedes fluid intelligence, problem solving ability, and memory formation.
• Overstressed people are often fired or leave their jobs for health reasons. Such turnover disrupts productivity, not to mention personal job satisfaction.

The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of two malignant facts: (a) a great deal is expected of you and (b) you have no control over whether you will perform well.

As I read this chapter, I thought about ways of managing stress in my own life. I often use a tool like the Beck depression inventory to gauge whether my perceptions are trending in an unfavorable way.

Thinking about work-life balance, I wonder whether occasions like performance reviews, especially in formal ones, might provide a chance to discuss the amount of control and the amount of predictability a person sees in his job. Unrelenting sameness or tedium provides its own form of stress. And a person who’s overstressed is, in a real sense, not in his right mind.

Stress photo montage by j.lee43 / jessica johnson.

Series: The brain rules!

Brain rule 7 from John Medina is “sleep well, think well.”

“Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast…

Will Shakespeare probably knew something about not getting enough sleep, and his language here is apt. Sleave is not a misspelling, but a synonym for skein. Macbeth imagines sleep as repairing the day’s mental tangles and twists.

A tale of two processes

Medina notes that the brain doesn’t rest in the way our muscles do. In fact, there’s a kind of ongoing struggle between two mental armies: one under the banner of the circadian arousal system (”process C”) and the other, the homeostatic sleep drive (”process S”).

Studies of people isolated from clocks and cues like sunlight confirm that humans tend to follow a roughly 24-hour pattern, with the process C (the wake state) lasting about twice as long as process S (sleeping). The amount of sleep an individual needs varies greatly from one person to the next — and with gender, and with age. So Medina suggests inverting the question and asking, “How much sleep don’t you need?”

Inadequate sleep can greatly decrease mental functioning. In one study, “when sleep was restricted to six hours or less per night for just five nights… cognitive performance matched that of a person suffering from 48 hours of continual sleep deprivation.”

Larks and owls

Many people have an optimal time of day, even with adequate sleep. 10% of the population consists of larks, or if you prefer, “early chronotypes.” They’re up before the alarm, often drink less coffee, and are ready for bed by about 9 p.m.

Late chronotypes (”owls”) make up about 20% of the population, which make explain why many of us are so puzzled by larks. Many owls say they’re most alert around 6 p.m., and if given the choice wouldn’t sleep till about 3 a.m.

There’s a side effect to the recurring combat between process C and process S. About midway through our day, no matter when we start it, both processes seem to run down — as if the two opposing armies are exhausted.

This midafternoon drag isn’t related to big lunches (though a high-carb lunch can make the sleepiness more intense). One thought is that a midday nap was an evolutionary adaptation — enabling our early ancestors to restore their alertness and abilities for the second half of the day.

What to do? Take a nap.

Medina cites a NASA study showing that a 26-minute nap improved a pilot’s perforamnce by 34%, and refers to other studies with similar effects. If you prefer anecdotes, many people known as indefatigable workers — Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill — regularly took naps. (Churchill is also patron saint of the owls.)

As with naps, so with nighttime sleep. Medina reports an intriguing experiment involving students and math problems. The students learned a method for solving the problems, but were not told about a shortcut that could solve them faster.

If twelve hours passed between the initial training and a second set of problems, about 20% of the group would have discovered the shortcut… but if that twelve hours included eight hours of sleep, the discovery rate rose to 60%. “No matter how many times the experiment is run, the sleep group consistently outperforms the non-sleep group about 3 to 1.”

Some ideas that Medina muses about (while admitting they need further research):

• Matching chronotypes among workers. In other words, don’t make an owl the partner of a lark.
• Promote naps. Those of us who don’t work in an office have a better opportunity to embrace this idea, but even in an organizational setting, you can mimimize the effect of the nap zone by avoiding meetings, presentations, or critical work during the lull. A NASA scientist asked, “What other management strategy will improve people’s performance 34% in just 26 minutes?”
• Sleep on it. Allow a night’s sleep between your initial encounter with the details of some problem and your attempt to resolve it.

Lark Motel photo by Thomas Hawk;
owl coffee photo by Neil101 / Neil Wilkinson.