I'd like to see this on the main page.
Anyhow, since you brought up the sensory homunculus, titillating homunculus quote:
Komisaruk also checked what happened when women's nipples were stimulated, and was surprised to find that in addition to the chest area of the cortex lighting up, the genital area was also activated. "When I tell my male neuroscientist colleagues about this, they say: 'Wow, that's an exception to the classical homunculus,'" he says. "But when I tell the women they say: 'Well, yeah?'". (ref)
A possible caveat:
The main premise of the article is that directing one's attention to a sensory input can make one better at processing this input (where "better" may mean "higher resolution and/or sensitivity") by "growing" the associated area of the cortex.
However, the article does not give a clear reason for the assumption that the same principle should apply to higher-level mental behaviors not directly related to sensory inputs -- e.g. playing chess.
(I'm not familiar with the relevant science, so I'm just voicing my doubt.)
An excellent question.
I would say that the effect is most likely very relevant for higher-level skills, for the following reasons:
The effect has been shown for motor planning, for estimation of timing, and for several other plastic features. Thus, it isn't limited to sensory processing alone.
If we assume a "worst case scenario" in which the higher-level networks are themselves exempt from this effect, we still have to expect an indirect improvement. The reason for this is relatively simple: higher-level mental behaviors are based on metanetworks that interconnect subnetworks which certainly are subject to attentional modulation.
I would say that transferability of the effect would depend on how transferable the trained skill is itself. If you train yourself to be really good at the go/no-go task where a red dot appears on the screen, you'll get good at it, and it won't make a difference anywhere else in your life - no matter how much attention you paid while training. If you train yourself to enunciate words better (which is predominantly motor training, and the attention effect has been shown to make a huge difference), this could transfer into many other higher...
I think this comment deserves to be included into the article, with minimal edits, somewhere between the end of the section I and the beginning of the section II.
The concept being described in the article sounds very similar to deliberate practice, which I think might be described as keeping what you are trying to practice at conscious level instead of going on autopilot.
Many of those studies are actually based on chess, so if this describes how deliberate practice changes the brain, it should also map to higher level activities.
Of course, I'm not terribly familiar with all of the relevant science either.
A great example of practical advice backed by deep theories, and something that I can apply immediately to my daily life. Great job!
I agree with Manfred, this should be on the main page.
Consider the last paragraph of the text again, then meditate on what mindfulness meditation does along these lines. :)
I’m guessing these are very familiar to most readers here, but let’s cover them briefly just in case.
I, for one, was not familiar with the terms, so I appreciated the explanation.
We don’t become better at things we do – we become better at things we pay attention to while we’re doing them.
I'd like to thank you for articulating something that now seems obvious to me, but was in fact at variance with both my beliefs and what I believed I believed.
It also describes failures I've had to improve my own skillsets accurately. As an example, I had tried to learn guitar for some time.
While doing so, my internal mental dialogue while learning was 'I just need to get through this fifteen minutes of practice', as opposed to 'Ah, so that's how I play a G chord.'. I abandoned the attempt as I learned very slowly, and decided I simply had no natural talent for the area, as my learning speed was significantly slower there compared to friends of mine who were spending comparable amounts of time for vastly superior results.
That's called learning how to meditate. And yes, it works wonders with cognitive ability and control of cognitive ability. The standard efficient process of learning how to meditate is:
If you do this up to step 7, you will exponentially improve your ability to do everything and learn everything. If you choose to go on through step 8, you wi...
This is a well supported article with real life applications. Even better it shines a spotlight on holes in my thinking. I appreciate it when I read something that makes me want to slap my forehead and yell, "well, of COURSE!"
Thank you for your time putting this together.
Interesting. I wonder if this explains the reason why I'm usually happier when I don't focus/constantly ask myself if I'm happy. The theory would explain it like so: I ask myself if I'm happy, and I notice all the things that are preventing me from being optimally happy. As I keep asking myself, I become better at noticing those things, thus becoming less happy.
At the moment, the balance of evidence supports CBT as the most effective therapeutic approach for depression. And CBT is in large part based on training yourself to pay attention to positive thoughts while ignoring depressive ones.
So, it would appear that you wonder along the right lines here. :)
Is there any evidence for this effect in brain regions related to empathy? (mirror neurons?)
Does focusing one's attention on emotional states of others (and, more importantly, one's own feelings experienced while watching others) increase one's "empathic sensitivity"? Or when parents focus child's attention on emotions of others during upbringing, does that make the child more sensitive to others?
To me, it signals "If you are likely too impatient to read through the entirety of a science-heavy article, here is a rough summary. However, be warned that this is a compromise and doesn't capture the whole essence of the article." Whereas summary means "Here is everything you need to know, in short."
As an impatient reader I wouldn't have even noticed "summary for impatient readers" if not for this comment. It's a couple of paragraphs in and disguised as sentence text.
A nice big bold Summary heading works wonders!
Hmm, I didn't realize that consciously paying attention to the activity you want to excel at, as opposed to simple mechanical training, makes such a difference. Thank you! Now, if you'll excuse me, I will go rethink my ping-pong practice structure.
I would argue based on my own experience, that it is very difficult to maintain this type of attention when practicing any type of complex skill. I think the typical pattern of rapid learning at the beginner stage and then stopping improving completely is the result of mind resisting continuous, persistent attention. The beginner's state of mind is not a pleasant one to be in and we want to start feeling comfortable quickly. Easiest way to do this is to stop paying so close attention. I don't think this is an explicit decision. It's just our tendency to no...
Huh, I hadn't heard of CBT until 2007, but your nail biting example is exactly the procedure I made for myself to stop biting my nails in 2003, described in almost the exact words :) Actually, at the very end, my mind would notice the nail-biting reflex before my hand even began to move towards my mouth. It felt awesome, and worked.
...Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a highly successful approach for breaking habits, which requires only a very subtle alteration to this process. You notice that you are biting your nails. You immediately focus your attention
Mr. / Ms. kalla724,
A couple years ago I remember having a discussion with my neuroscience professor about whether or not long-term potentiation could occur from visualization, and if it does occur the strength of such synaptic development in relation to deliberate practice.
I was wondering what your opinions were on the matter, and if you could suggest any reading?
This NY Times article says that mindful people may be worse at "implicit learning" (e.g. learning to ride a bike). Based on this post of yours, I would have guessed that mindfulness would be useful for this kind of learning. Is this a contradiction in the research or do I need to upgrade my ontology?
Could drugs like adderall or ritalin could be useful in this regard? Do the same changes occur even when the focus is a result of a stimulant? If it takes sustained attention on a task for the brain to change the structure of your brain, these drugs seem like a convenient shortcut to 'rewiring' certain areas of your brain.
This seems to be a direct reply to the common thought/command/belief "Just stop" As in "why don't you just stop biting your fingernails/smoking/overeating/procrastinating?" or "Why can't I just stop (hated activity here)?" I don't know if this is a common experience, but everyone I have met and discussed the issue with personally (a very small minority) believes that humans have the ability to stop an action by "deciding to stop". Then, when that fails anger and self-loathing is immediate result. I understand that th...
How does the research determine if the subjects, particularly the animals, are focusing on a task rather than doing it autonomously? In the monkey example it seems like it is based off of the complexity of the task, but if that is the case it seems like the effects could be from complex tasks(which may be done autonomously) rather than focus.
Reading this improved my self control over night, strong upvote.
I've been mainly using it for improving posture and eating healthier.
Focusing your attention on stopping does wonders for breaking bad habits,
I can tell stopping gets easier after just one or two iterations.
I'm interested in the opposite of mindfullness - absent mindedness - why it exists and how mutable it is. I have, it must be said, a particularly diffuse personality - I forget things, a lot, put things down and forget where they are, fail to plan things. Introspection identifies this as a mixture of acrasia and propensity to boredom - I find it very difficult to concentrate on mundane things instead of thinking about neural networks or politics.
I've unfortunately chosen a line of work (molecular biology) that punishes absent mindedness ruthlessly. After ...
Thank you for posting this! It's cleared up some behavior of mine, and will definitely be a useful tool that I can put into practice.
Comparing pain to chess and music was intriguing. Intuitively, it seems that attention to pain is qualitatively different. Pain impinges on our attentions, while the other two activities are objects of attention. On the other hand, it is certainly possible to focus on pain or distracting one self from pain. The thesis of the article suggests that by directing attention towards pain, it gets worse, while directing attention away from pain can reduce it. This seems to be a testable hypothesis. Is there any study about this?
Yes, a lot of work has been done, and it is a hugely controversial area.
From my reading, the balance of evidence suggests that people can indeed exacerbate their pain by focusing on it, which is why I included the example in the article.
Whether training to ignore the pain makes it go away is harder to say. Some studies suggest that it does, some that it has no effect. Metastudies generally show no statistically significant effects - but I think people here already know to be wary of statistical significance as an end-all. One certain thing is that pain has its own rules, and utilizes several pathways that are not skill-like at all, which makes training it away somewhat iffy.
My colleagues who work on neuroscience of pain tend to be skeptical. Pain specialists I've spoken to tend to really like the approach; from what I hear, it has an unpredictable efficacy level (which could indicate that the effect is in large part placebo-based), but it often works extremely well.
A popular review that extolls the method is Morley et al. in Pain (80) 1999. Several self-help books on the subject are often recommended to patients by pain specialists; John Otis's "Managing Chronic Pain" is very popular.
As for the somewhat-opposing view, check out this Cochrane review (Cochrane is generally a highly reliable source) which shows much smaller effect size (although there still is a positive effect): Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2009 Apr 15;(2):CD007407.
You claim that posting attention to some kind of pain might make you feel that pain stronger in the future. However Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction supposedly makes you feel better despite chronic pains. It inckudes mindful meditation, which has you pay attention to how your body feels. This seems to be a contradiction with what you claim, because of you pay attention to it, it will become worse, as you say.
If you want to make this post even better (since apparently it's attracting massive viewage from the web-at-large!), here is some feedback:
I didn't find your description of the owl monkey experiment very compelling,
If a monkey was trained to keep a hand on the wheel that moved just the same, but he did not have to pay attention to it… the cortical map remained the same size.
because it wasn't clear that attention was causing the plasticity; the temporal association of subtle discriminations with rewards could plausibly cause plasticity directly, wit...
Awesome! This is very useful. I now have a perfect way to describe why Taoist meditation is among the most useful things someone in this community can learn to do. And I have tons of experience to back it up.
Mindfulness meditation is the prerequisite for Taoist meditation. And Wikipedia doesn't explain how to practice Mindfulness meditation.
Nice post with much interesting material.
I wonder when I read the following:
"Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a highly successful approach for breaking habits, which requires only a very subtle alteration to this process. You notice that you are biting your nails...."
Do you know of any studies on this, or could you link me to some other source of further reading? (eg on the specifics of the method, on the evidence for them, whether there are any high-quality meta-reviews, etc)
this was really well written i thought - nothing new as such but really well explained for those it would be new to.
couple of points:
I'll just insert that in my personal experience 7 is very true.
That doesn't mean much but it means at least a little.
With the question of neural real-estate in mind, what areas of the brain would most be benefited by outsourcing? If you could do the processing for a large-scale brain region externally, is it possible that would make those zones more likely to give their functionality to the surrounding regions? This would increase overall efficiency, especially by giving more resources to what would have been historically more limited areas. I am curious what areas would best be candidates for future BCI applications.
The SSC area expanded only when the monkey had to pay attention to the sensation of touch in order to receive the reward. If a monkey was trained to keep a hand on the wheel that moved just the same, but he did not have to pay attention to it… the cortical map remained the same size.
Is that a bad thing? Useful evidence would be a functional difference, achieving a lower performance level. As presented, this could just mean that training in that mode doesn't have an easily visible expression as a localized change in brain structure.
The rest of the post m...
Pretty interesting idea.
SSC area expanded only when the monkey had to pay attention to the sensation of touch in order to receive the reward.
This seems like strong evidence that something correlated with attention is necessary for the SSC to expand. Has work been done to figure to rule out things besides what we think of when we think of "attention"?
After reading this post I came across this Bruce Lee quote which seemed in synch with the idea:
“I’ve always been buffeted by circumstances because I thought of myself as a human being affected by my outside conditioning. Now I realize that I am the power that commands the feeling of my mind and from which circumstances grow.”
I wonder if empirically and instinctively, Bruce had arrived at the same concept as this post explores.
I’ve just been reading Luke’s “Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation.” It is a useful text, although there are a few technical errors and a few bits of outdated information (see [1], updated information about one particular quibble in [2] and [3]).
There is one significant missing piece, however, which is of critical importance for our subject matter here on LW: the effect of attention on plasticity, including the plasticity of motivation. Since I don’t see any other texts addressing it directly (certainly not from a neuroscientific perspective), let’s cover the main idea here.
Summary for impatient readers: focus of attention physically determines which synapses in your brain get stronger, and which areas of your cortex physically grow in size. The implications of this provide direct guidance for alteration of behaviors and motivational patterns. This is used for this purpose extensively: for instance, many benefits of the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy approach rely on this mechanism.
I – Attention and plasticity
To illustrate this properly, we need to define two terms. I’m guessing these are very familiar to most readers here, but let’s cover them briefly just in case.
First thing to keep in mind is the plasticity of cortical maps. In essence, particular functional areas of our brain can expand or shrink based on how often (and how intensely) they are used. A small amount of this growth is physical, as new axons grow, expanding the white matter; most of it happens by repurposing any less-used circuitry in the vicinity of the active area. For example, our sense of sight is processed by our visual cortex, which turns signals from our eyes into lines, shapes, colors and movement. In blind people, however, this part of the brain becomes invaded by other senses, and begins to process sensations like touch and hearing, such that they become significantly more sensitive than in sighted people. Similarly, in deaf people, auditory cortex (part of the brain that processes sounds) becomes adapted to process visual information and gather language clues by sight.
Second concept we’ll need is somatosensory cortex (SSC for short). This is an area of the (vertebrate) brain where most of the incoming touch and positional (proprioceptive) sensations from the body converge. There is a map-like quality to this part of our brain, as every body part links to a particular bit of the SSC surface (which can be illustrated with silly-looking things, such as the sensory homunculus). More touch-sensitive areas of the body have larger corresponding areas within the SSC.
With these two in mind, let’s consider one actual experiment [4]. Scientists measured and mapped the area of an owl monkey’s SSC which became activated when one of his fingertips was touched. The monkey was then trained to hold that finger on a tactile stimulator – a moving wheel that stimulates touch receptors. The monkey had to pay attention to the stimulus, and was rewarded for letting go upon detecting certain changes in spinning frequency. After a few weeks of training, the area was measured again.
As you probably expected, the area had grown larger. The touch-processing neurons grew out, co-opting surrounding circuitry in order to achieve better and faster processing of the stimulus that produced the reward. Which is, so far, just another way of showing plasticity of cortical maps.
But then, there is something else. The SSC area expanded only when the monkey had to pay attention to the sensation of touch in order to receive the reward. If a monkey was trained to keep a hand on the wheel that moved just the same, but he did not have to pay attention to it… the cortical map remained the same size. This finding has since been replicated in humans, many times (for instance [5, 6]).
Take a moment to consider what this means.
A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the next move, about his chess strategy, and about the future possibilities of the game. His neural networks are optimizing, making him a better chess player.
A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the music he hears, listening to the chords and anticipating the sounds still to come. His neural networks are optimizing, making him better at understanding music and hearing subtleties within a melody.
A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, gritting his teeth as another flash of pain comes from his bad back. His neural networks are optimizing, making the pain more intense, easier to feel, harder to ignore.
II – Practical implications: making and breaking habits, efficacy of CBT
Habitual learned behaviors are often illustrated with the example of driving. When we are learning to drive, we have to pay attention to everything: when to push the pedals, when to signal, where to hold our hands… A few years later, these behaviors become so automatic, we hardly pay attention at all. Indeed, most of us can drive for hours while carrying on conversations or listening to audiobooks. We are completely unaware, as our own body keeps pushing pedals, signaling turns, and changing gears.
We can therefore say that driving behaviors, through practice and attention, eventually become automatic – which is, most of the time, a good thing. But so do many other things, including some destructive ones we might want to get rid of. Let’s take a simple one: nail biting. You are reading, or watching a movie, or thinking, or driving… when you suddenly notice some minor pain, and realize that you have chewed your nail into a ragged stump. Ouch!
You catch yourself biting, you stop. Five minutes later, you catch yourself biting again. You stop again. Repeat ad infinitum, or ad nauseam, whichever comes first.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a highly successful approach for breaking habits, which requires only a very subtle alteration to this process. You notice that you are biting your nails. You immediately focus your attention on what you are doing, and you stop doing it. No rage, no blaming yourself, no negative emotions. You just stop, and you focus all the attention you can on the act of stopping. You move your arm down, focusing your attention on the act of movement, on the feeling of your arm going down, away from your mouth. That’s it. You can go back to whatever you were doing.
Five minutes later, you notice yourself biting your nails again. You calmly repeat the procedure again.
By doing this, you are training yourself to perform a new behavior – the “stop and put the hand down” behavior – which is itself triggered by the nail-biting behavior. As you go along, you will get better and better at noticing that you have started to bite your nails. You will also get better and better at stopping and putting your hand down. After a while, this will become semi-automatic; you’ll notice that your hand went to your mouth, a nail touched your tooth, and the hand went back down before you could do anything. Don’t stop training: focus your attention on the “stop and drop” part of the action.
After a while, the nail-biting simply goes away. Of course, the more complex and more ingrained a habit is, the more effort and time will be needed to break it. But for most people, even strong habits can be relatively quickly weakened, or redirected into less destructive behaviors.
It’s probably obvious that habits can be created in this way as well. We don’t become better at things we do – we become better at things we pay attention to while we’re doing them. If you want to make exercise a habit, your efforts will be much more effective if you focus your attention on your exercise technique, rather than repeatedly thinking how painful and tiring the whole process is.
There is also a direct implication for training in any complex skill. Start with the well-known learning curve effect: we gain a lot of skill relatively quickly, and then improvements slow down incrementally as we approach our maximum potential skill level. It is relatively easy to go from a poor to a mediocre tennis player; it is much, much harder to go from mediocre to good, and even harder to go from good to excellent.
Complex skills have many different aspects, which we usually attempt to train simultaneously. We can become very good at some, while staying poor at others. The optimal approach would be to focus most of our attention on those aspects where our abilities are weakest, since smaller investments of time and effort will lead to larger improvements in skill.
To keep with the tennis metaphor, one could become very good at controlling the ball direction and spin, while still having a poor awareness of the opponent’s position. Simply playing more will improve both aspects further, but our hypothetical player should optimally try to focus her attention on opponent awareness [7].
Finally, there is another implication which I’ll leave as an exercise for the readers. Mindfulness meditation, which essentially boils down to training control of attention, has been shown to exert a positive effect on many, many different things (lowering depression, anxiety and stress, as well as improving productivity [8, 9, 10]). In the light of the previous text, one obvious reason why better control over attention can produce all these beneficial effects should immediately come to mind.
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References
[1] I have several quibbles, but let’s stick to one (to prevent this note from becoming longer than the above text). Luke presents a view of dopamine reward system which is stuck in the early 2000’s – ages ago by the pace of neuroscientific research. Dopamine actually has a very, very complex effect on motivation, and is able to strengthen or weaken single synaptic connections based on timing of the signal relative to the signals from the sensory systems. Endocannabinoid neurotransmission (i.e. signaling through chemicals that stimulate the same receptors that are affected by active ingredients in marijuana) is being shown as more and more important in this system as well, and the relative timing of the two signals appears critical.
The complexity of the effects increases by several orders of magnitude when networks are concerned. Consider this: a planning-related network in the prefrontal cortex can influence the motivation-generating networks in the striatum. A stimulus from the outside is perceived by the sensory networks and transmitted to the dopamine system, to the prefrontal cortex, and to the striatum. The same dopamine signal can, depending on exact timing of action potential bursts, strengthen synapses in the striatum, while weakening synapses in the prefrontal cortex. The result? The link between the stimulus and the actual motivation can increase or decrease, depending on exact connectivity between networks, on the relative sensitivity and on the exact topology of the meta-network in question.
See the following two references for a broad overview of the subject area.
[2] Calabresi P, Picconi B, Tozzi A, Di Filippo M. "Dopamine-mediated regulation of corticostriatal synaptic plasticity" Trends Neurosci. 2007 30(5):211-9.
[3] Wickens JR. "Synaptic plasticity in the basal ganglia" Behav Brain Res. 2009 199(1):119-28.
[4] Recanzone GH, Merzenich MM, Jenkins WM, Grajski KA, Dinse HR. "Topographic reorganization of the hand representation in cortical area 3b of owl monkeys trained in a frequency-discrimination task" J Neurophysiol. 1992 67(5), 1031-56.
[5] Heron J, Roach NW, Whitaker D, Hanson JV. "Attention regulates the plasticity of multisensory timing" Eur J Neurosci. 2010 31(10), 1755-62.
[6] Stefan K, Wycislo M, Classen J. “Modulation of associative human motor cortical plasticity by attention” J Neurophysiol. 2004 92(1), 66-72.
[7] I’m not finding good papers directed exactly on this point, so I’ll just throw this out as a personal opinion (although I’ll say it appears well supported by indirect research). We all like to appear competent and skillful, especially in those areas where we have invested a lot of time and effort. This can lead to a bias where we focus on using those aspects of complex skills we are best at, and training those aspects most intensely. In other words, a tendency appears to exist to do exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. (If anyone has encountered a name for this bias, or has references to suggest, I would be very grateful to hear from you.)
[8] Brown KW, Ryan RM. "The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being" J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003 84(4):822-48.
[9] Davidson RJ, Kabat-Zinn J, Schumacher J, Rosenkranz M, Muller D, Santorelli SF, Urbanowski F, Harrington A, Bonus K, Sheridan JF. "Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation" Psychosom Med. 2003 65(4):564-70.
[10] Shao RP, Skarlicki DP. "The role of mindfulness in predicting individual performance" Canadian J of Behavioral Sci 2009 41(4): 195–201.