Serge Lang, a math professor at Yale, used to give his Calculus students a fairly simple algebra problem on the first day of classes, one which almost everyone could solve, but some of them solved it as quickly as they could write while others took a while, and Professor Lang claimed that all of the students who solved the problem as quickly as they could write would get an A in the Calculus course, and all the others wouldn’t. The speed with which they solved a simple algebra problem was as good a predictor of the final grade in Calculus as a whole semester of homework, tests, midterms, and a final.
I did not take a math class my senior year in high school. Then in 4 years for my undergraduate I only took one semester of college algebra. When I shift to computer science and take a Calculus course last semester, I have to solve solve two problems for every regular problem. First, the algebra behind the problem, and then the actual calculus problem. If the algebra was second nature, then I could focus my brain on the Calculus. But with rusty algebra skills, Calculus is just that much harder.
Don’t listen to Copland very often. In fact his music can be a little, shall we say, hokey, even at the best of times. But this one is a fun little one for this afternoon.
He would study the way thoughts change the brain by using TMS to observe changes in the finger maps of people learning to play the piano. One of Pascual-Leone’s heroes, the great Spanish neuroanatamist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who spent his later life looking in vain for brain plasticity, proposed in 1894 that the “organ of thought is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectible by well-directed mental exercise.” In 1904 he argued that thoughts, repeated in “mental practice”, must strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones. He also had the intuition that this process would be particularly pronounced in neurons that control the fingers in pianists, who do so much mental practice.
Ramon y Cajal, using his imagination, had painted a picture of a plastic brain but lacked the tools to prove it. Pascual-Leone now thought he had a tool in TMS to test whether mental practice and imagination in fact lead to physical changes.
The details of the imagining experiment were simple and picked up Cajal’s idea to use the piano. Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played. Then members of one group, the “mental practice” group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence and hearing it played. A second “physical practice” group actually played the music two hours a day for five days. Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward. Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.
Pascual-Leone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes. Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece. By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual players were on the third day.
The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however substantial, was not as great as in those who did physical practice. But when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group’s performance at five days. Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.
As I said, a really fascinating book and worth checking out.
I work in the main library as a computer consultant Saturday mornings at 8am. This part of the library is open 24 hours/day (and is 95% a huge computer lab), which is great for the few souls who want to study at such odd times. Mostly it’s empty though, which I like because that means I get more done on the computer (read: computer science assignments) than I would working a normal shift where I get question after question.
This morning is a dead as always. I am counting about 4 people I can see (there are hundreds in here on a busy evening) and it’s wonderfully quiet. But 1 of those four people came up to my co worker not to ask a computer or even general library question. He came to complain that there were people sleeping in the lobby of the library. And he was completely serious too! I cannot fathom why anyone, and I mean anyone, could possibly be offended by a few exchausted students catching a few zzzs after pulling an all nighter. In the lobby. 200 feet away outside the door in a place you cannot see them. It’s jerks like this guy that make places come up with absurd policies which, if they can even be enforced at all, are almost embarassing to enforce from the workers point of view. We actually have a no sleeping policy on the floor where I am working. If I see somebody asleep I am supposed to go wake them up and tell them to do their sleeping elsewhere. O.K, so if it’s peak time and somebody is taking up a table, snoring loudly while a group is waiting to do academic work, then of course I will wake them up and tell them to leave. But on a dead quiet Saturday morning? I said there were 4 people I could see. Actually, there are 6 people, 2 of which are sleeping peacefully on couches. I have no intention of waking them up. I don’t know why they don’t go home to sleep, but if they want to crash here I don’t care because they aren’t bothering anybody. In fact I like them much more than Mr. Complainy Pants over here because they are keeping the peace, while uptight assface disturbs the peace by loudly complaining about the quiet sleepers.
Some people need to chill out. Take a deep breath and realize that the world is filled with things and people they may not like. Just because someone behaves differently or chooses different lifestyles doesn’t mean the sky is falling.
You can’t help but wonder sometimes, do my dreams mean something? Some dreams have apparent meaning in relation to something in your life yet others seem to come straight from bizzaro land. But do those bizzaro land dreams have some sort of hidden meaning? Is your brain trying to process some subconscious memory? I wish I had an answer. Because this dream is total bizzaro land at surface level but I can’t help but wonder if there is any meaning at all to it. I don’t remember many details. Only the basic story line which goes something like this:
I am with my parents in some dark building (the whole dream has a slight shadow over it, in every room I can see things clearly yet it feels as though the light is from out of sight lighting and it is in a windowless room in a basement). They pull me aside and tell me they have something very important to share with me. It is my mother who speaks. She tells me that the day I was born I had some sort of congenital heart defect. Then she tells me that she is not actually my mother. Heidi Klum is my mother. This of course is impossible on so many levels, mainly that if she were my mother she would have been 9 when she had me. But she goes on. She says that when she gave birth to me, Heidi was dating Patrick Stewart, but that on the night I was born (also strange because I was born at 5am) he violently killed himself. She didn’t say how he killed himself but I had the distinct feeling that however he had done it, it was a terrible way to be killed. Heidi was so upset at this loss that she gave me up to my biological father (my current dad) and that my mom and dad had simply taken me in and decided it was best not to tell me the truth until I was older.
The next part is fuzzy. All I remember is that I am walking around inside flashbacks of Heidi Klum. In each one she is working for some fashion magazine and people are taking pictures of her. She is very shy at first about being a model, but through the flashbacks she gains confidence.
The last part is shorter because it was interrupted by my alarm. Apparently Heidi had also had another child, a daughter, who also did not know that Heidi was her mother and that she was my sister. Somehow I have found her and the woman who raised her as her mother. The three of us are sitting at a table in a restaurant and I am trying to find a way to tell her that she is really my sister and that the woman who raised her is not her mother. Her ‘mother’ knows I am going to break the news and waits patiently for me to say something about it. I delay. I am nervous but excited to know that I have a sister. Then the alarm goes off. I am still in a half dream state and am pissed off that the alarm is going off now. I’m just getting to the good part! Since my alarm is my cell phone I wait for it to stop wailing. I know it will go off in an other 5 minutes. I sit up in bed, groggy, wondering how on earth my brain comes up with this stuff. Is there meaning to it? I suppose there could be. But if it is, it is so random and esoteric that my conscience brain has no chance at deciphering it. Some dreams are best left alone.