Aspen Brainlab

I was fortunate enough to score a comp ticket to the first annual Aspen Brainlab. It was a one day marathon of 20 minute speeches on - you guessed it- the Brain with an impressive line up of Speakers.

I decided to try a new technique of note taking inspired by Sheryl Connelly (Futurist for Ford) and her
"Art of Listening"

pdf of Sheryl's notes

I went to Paepcke Auditorium

 armed with a mini ipad and the Adobe Ideas app.

I'd already been informed by the Aspen Audio Visual crew that there would be 12 Powerpoint presentations. Since I firmly believe that Edward Tufte is absolutely correct and that Powerpoint is Evil I was pretty sure that listening and working on the ipad wouldn't degrade the experience. If you haven't seen the Powerpoint Gettysburg address it's a must...

I also completely agree with Peter Doolittle that we are "We built for images. We need to take advantage of that."

Here's one of 7 "layers" created during Brainlab:

The top is Chris Nowinski - Harvard Grad and professional wrestler (full disclosure: yes I've worked for WCW- and there were a lot of times that the wrestlers got "a bump on the head") who talked about the devastating effect of concussions in sports- especially for kids.  He told numerous stories of athletes who committed suicide after multiple concussions. He also emphasized how doctors ask "how many concussions have you had?" instead of  "have you ever been knocked out? seen stars? had the world turn orange?" He also showed some rather dramatic MRI images which illustrated a "brown out" after concussions which mimics Alzheimers. 

I was reminded of Jane McGonigal's struggle with concussion. Jane is a top notch Game Designer (World of Warcraft) and her TED talk on the evolutionary potential of problem solving in the gaming world is a must see talk.  Her brilliant process of recovery was to create the game "Concussion Slayer"

The second half of the page is Barclay Morrison's (Phd) talk on how to prevent the effects of a concussion in the first place. His technique uses the principles of thermodynamics to equalize the positive and negative charges in our neurons. An overabundance of negatively charged neurons means the brain will compensate by increasing the amount of fluid which increases swelling and reduces oxygen. This is the main cause of brain damage after a concussion. He stops this by reactivating genes with specific (positively charged) cells.  Other than that the only solution (literally and figuratively)  for reducing brain swelling is salt (yep, table salt) or sugar (nope, not one lump or two sugar). 

No, swallowing a handful of rocksalt (which was the cure all for altitude sickness and dehydration according to NOLS in the 70's) will not cure your "bump on the head" after falling off your mountain bike.

I wonder if our "reptile" brain is located at the base close to the spinal chord because chances of injury are less there? Which brings me back to Heather Berlin's (Phd) presentation on improvisation.

Her talk was the most interesting one of the lot for me since it dealt with the concept of "flow". Jazz keyboard Artists were asked to perform both memorized and improvised tasks while in an MRI. The freestyle (improvised) MRI showed the DCPL (dorsolateral prefontal cortex) deactivated and the  OFC (orbital frontal cortex) increased in activity (boy I hope I got that the right way round). Basically your attention decreases but within a context and the the subcortical (reptile brain) decides what to do before you are aware of your decision process (which is how subliminal advertising works). This loss of self awareness was generally experienced as something positive *as long as you could escape* back to a self aware state.

... and now I'm back to my little note taking exercise... because what I was feeling while listening and drawing was "flow". The images and associations came without thinking or filtering. It's not quite as much fun as skiing fresh powder with some rockin' tunes on the iPod or riding a dory down the Grand Canyon... but it's close.