Lives In Progress

In his article "Your Brain On Improv: Hacking Creativity" Dave Asprey of BulletProofExec.com writes about the remarkable research done by Dr. Charles Lamb (click here for his TED talk "Your Brain On Improv") into what happens in the brain when musicians improvise, and how that information transfers to other improvisation and creative activity. "During improvisation, the self-monitoring part of the brain (lateral prefrontal for you brain hardware hackers out there) is deactivated, while the self-expression part of the brain got activated (medial prefrontal). Literally, that means that to be creative you have to stop picking on yourself while boosting your self-expression abilities."
   When we are able to reduce activity in the self-monitoring part of the brain we are more free to experiment and take risks, to respond creatively to unpredictable and unknowable interactions with others. Improvisation warm-ups games and exercises are designed to reduce the s…

The 2015 Applied Improvisation Network Annual Conference 
started in the beautiful city of Montreal, then moved north to the mountains of Quebec. Here are some take-aways from this week of constant contact with creative people and Canadian culture:

1. In the mountans of Quebec, there is no wi-fi and very, very spotty cell service. Untethered to technology, one becomes aware of its power. A week without it felt similar to when I quit smoking, except technology connects me to a world beyond myself, and smoking connected me to a host of avoidable diseases. With neither wi-fi nor cell service, I was aware of a part of my brain that kept searching for them, until that craving was replaced by an indescribable openness to experience and a release from the need to know what would happen next.

2. When walking in Montreal with no agenda about what to do next and a determination to enjoy the present moment, sometimes you discover something special to think about (Rodin show at Montreal Museum of A…

Episode 2 of the (mostly) TRUE THINGS podcast featured an interview and story by the hilarious and always-interesting comic Stevie GB, who took this "3 studies" quiz about research into the role of laughter in learning very, very seriously. He analyzed each one in a very thoughtful, as well as entertaining, way. Maybe its just fun to listen to him talk and to his mental process. You can hear the podcast by clicking on the link above, and then check out this interesting research about the very serious way that humor boosts learning, reduces anxiety and stress in the classroom, and encourages students to take initiative in their education.

One study pointing to humor's benefits appeared in College Teaching (Vo. 54, No. 1, pages 177-180).  This research showed that students were more likely to remember information shared in a statistics lecture when it was laced with relevant comedy. ""Well-planned, appropriate, contextual humor can help students ingrain informatio…

Thanks for listening to (mostly) TRUE THINGS the podcast and for following your curiosity about the research studies we discussed in that interview with Dr. Debbie Zelizer to this blog. Here are links to the studies we discussed in the "3 studies" portion of the interview. Happy reading! And please check Episode 2 to find out if Dr. Zelizer changed anything in the telling of her moving story about her favorite patient on the Stonybrook University Hospital /AIDS Unit.

TELL ME A STORY-A CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION OF STORYTELLING IN HEALTH CARE EDUCATION  the Journal of Nurse Education

"The benefits of storytelling include;
 • development of the skills required to follow a narrative thread, tolerating ambiguity and surrendering to the story;
• the adoption of multiple and contradictory points of view;
• an ability to enter the storytellers' reality and to understand how the story teller makes sense of that reality;
• to gain insight into the use of image and metaphor;
• to acknow…

Today a group of people from all over the country and Canada met at the Marriott Hotel a few blocks from the World Trade Center for a conference about resiliency. Here to discuss what it takes to get through the kind of suffering brought about by terrorist acts like those on Sept 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, D.C and in the shadow of the memorial created in their wake, were clinical social workers, creative arts therapists, psychiatrists, lawyers and others involved in ongoing work with the families of people lost that day. But there were also clinicians and researchers who are involved with military families, the atrocity at Sandy Hook elementary school, the Boston Marathon bombing, a terrorist bombing that happened in 1985 off the coast of Ireland, among others. Because the people who do this work stick together, and support one another, and that turns out to be one of the key elements of the resiliency they cultivate in survivors.
    There is a Zulu saying "a person is …

Its 9 am. A group of staff therapists gather in the nicely-appointed conference room at the central office of this large not-for-profit organization for a special training session. The clinical director arranged this following a traumatic incident at one of the satellite locations, in which a new client was ambushed and assaulted as she walked through the dark parking lot to the office. The perpetrator disappeared into the woods alongside the largely-abandoned strip mall where the office was located and where staff had never felt safe in the first place. The young woman had broken away and screamed "call 911" as she ran through the door, triggering a legitimate panic in everybody there. Both therapists and clients working in quiet rooms were jolted into full-blown fight-or-flight mode. Reports of the incident had a ripple effect throughout the organization, since many of the satellite offices were in similar spaces where staff felt like sitting ducks having to stay open unti…