Neuroscience 2009 Highlights New Research on Exercise, Music, and the Brain

CHICAGO — Research presented today at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health, provides a better understanding of the brain, nervous system, and related disorders.

Specific research released shows:

The benefits of exercise on both the brain and body, and, more specifically, underscores the positive influence of regular physical activity on Parkinson's disease, depression, premenstrual syndrome, and memory.
New tools are enabling researchers to identify neural similarities and differences between species. The findings may help to explain faculties, like language, and diseases, like Parkinson's, that are unique to humans.
New insights into male behavior support the idea that many gender differences lie in the brain and are influenced by both genes and environment.
Scientists are developing novel ways to bypass the blood-brain barrier, a network of blood vessels that prevents more than 95 percent of all chemicals from entering the brain from the bloodstream. Researchers describe new methods for transporting drugs across the BBB as well as ways to enhance the brain's own immune response, which is separated from the body's immune system by the BBB.

More information on the studies released today is available at www.sfn.org.

Neuroscience 2009 is a multifaceted exchange of important science research across biological, behavioral, psychological, and chemical disciplines. Hundreds of the world's foremost researchers, clinicians, and experts on all matters concerning the brain will present research findings and be available for interviews.

A Body Transformed Through Dance

Gregg Mozgala, a 31-year-old actor with cerebral palsy, had 12 years of physical therapy while he was growing up. But in the last eight months, a determined choreographer with an unconventional résumé has done what all those therapists could not: She has dramatically changed the way Mr. Mozgala walks.

In the process, she has changed his view of himself and of his possibilities.

Read the full NY Times story here. (Make sure to watch the video, too.)

Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious

This NY Times article was posted on Donna Luder's Somatic Mechanic blog recently.

Why Exercise Makes you Less Anxious:

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats. Scientists have known for some time that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells (neurons) but not how, precisely, these neurons might be functionally different from other brain cells.


In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood. But how exercise, a physiological activity, might directly affect mood and anxiety — psychological states — was unclear. Now, thanks in no small part to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress. In work undertaken at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for instance, scientists have examined the role of serotonin, a neurotransmitter often considered to be the “happy” brain chemical. That simplistic view of serotonin has been undermined by other researchers, and the University of Colorado work further dilutes the idea. In those experiments, rats taught to feel helpless and anxious, by being exposed to a laboratory stressor, showed increased serotonin activity in their brains. But rats that had run for several weeks before being stressed showed less serotonin activity and were less anxious and helpless despite the stress.

Other researchers have looked at how exercise alters the activity of dopamine, another neurotransmitter in the brain, while still others have concentrated on the antioxidant powers of moderate exercise. Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress. In an experiment led by researchers at the University of Houston and reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, rats whose oxidative-stress levels had been artificially increased with injections of certain chemicals were extremely anxious when faced with unfamiliar terrain during laboratory testing. But rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

The stress-reducing changes wrought by exercise on the brain don’t happen overnight, however, as virtually every researcher agrees. In the University of Colorado experiments, for instance, rats that ran for only three weeks did not show much reduction in stress-induced anxiety, but those that ran for at least six weeks did. “Something happened between three and six weeks,” says Benjamin Greenwood, a research associate in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado, who helped conduct the experiments. Dr. Greenwood added that it was “not clear how that translates” into an exercise prescription for humans. We may require more weeks of working out, or maybe less. And no one has yet studied how intense the exercise needs to be. But the lesson, Dr. Greenwood says, is “don’t quit.” Keep running or cycling or swimming. (Animal experiments have focused exclusively on aerobic, endurance-type activities.) You may not feel a magical reduction of stress after your first jog, if you haven’t been exercising. But the molecular biochemical changes will begin, Dr. Greenwood says. And eventually, he says, they become “profound.”

Interested in Becoming a Dance/Movement Therapist?

The Center for Movement Education and Research, CMER, is offering a Dance/Movement Therapy with the Elderly course in Southern California in January and February, 2010.

Please sign up! The course is in danger of being canceled due to low enrollment, and selfishly, I NEED THIS COURSE! :)Tell all your friends!

Info below:

January 9,10, 2010 – Scripps College -- Claremont CA
February 13,14, 2010 – Pomona College --Claremont CA
9:00am – 5:30pm


Course Title: Dance/Movement Therapy with Seniors —30 hrs
This dance/movement therapy theory, practice and application course will cover the specific developmental needs of seniors and the dance/movement therapy skills pertinent to working with this population age group. The course content will focus on physical, psychodynamic, psychopathological, and enculturating factors impinging on the later years of human development. Students will be exposed to various clinical concepts of dance/movement therapy viewed within a developmental framework that are pertinent to selected late adulthood populations, including clinical disorders of late adulthood and, the types of somatic transference/countertransference issues that might be encountered.

This course has been approved by the American Dance Therapy Association as meeting the Alternate Route Requirements for the R-DMT credential" and satisfies 30 hours of DMT Theory and Practice Training.


This course meets the qualifications for 30 hours of continuing education credit for MFTs and/or LCSWs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (Provider #3888). Students taking the class for continuing education are excused from the required assignments other than attendance and participation.

Course Objectives:
1) Students will develop an understanding of the developmental needs, tasks and challenges presented when working with various senior populations.
2) Students will develop a basic understanding of dance/movement therapy assessment and application of dance/movement therapy interventions as they apply to various senior populations.
3) Students will learn interventions through which to facilitate an individual or group dance/movement session for various senior populations.
4) Students will be able to design and facilitate a dance/movement therapy session for seniors that is developmentally sound and takes into account the unique developmental, physical, emotional, psychological and cognitive needs of seniors.
5) Students will conclude the class with a beginning level awareness of dance/movement therapy processes and techniques utilized in working with seniors.

Locations:
Scripps College
Richardson Dance Studio
1030 Columbia Ave
Claremont, CA 91711

Pomona College
Pendleton Dance Center, Studio 16
210 East 2nd Street
Claremont, CA 91711

Course Fee: $750.00

Course Instructor: Gabrielle Kaufman MA, BC-DMT, NCC
is a CMER faculty member, dance/movement therapist and counselor with close to twenty years experience in the helping profession. She has taught creative movement to preschoolers and elementary school students, has used DMT with the elderly, Holocaust survivors, adults with mental illness, individuals with eating disorders and body image issues, with teens at high risk and other individuals suffering from anxiety and depression.
Currently, she is the coordinator of the New Moms Connect Program of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. She has run several programs for high risk children and teens in both English and Spanish languages, taught classes to parents of newborns and toddlers, and runs support groups for single parents, women with eating disorders and women with perinatal mood disorders and with seniors. She is a coordinator with Postpartum Support International and has a private practice in Los Angeles.

For Information and Application Contact:
Judy Gantz-CMER Director
POB 2001
Sebastopol, CA 95473

(310) 477-9535

Arts in Healthcare

From Musings of a Dance/Movement Therapist blog:

Arts in Healthcare Seen Yielding Benefits
According to a new study by the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, Americans for the Arts, The Joint Commission and the University of Florida Center for the Arts in Healthcare documents that incorporating the arts into health-care settings has multiple benefits for patients and may reduce health-care expenses. Up to half of health-care institutions in the U.S. incorporate arts programming into their care. Benefits from arts programming include shorter hospital stays, less need for medication, and a boost for job satisfaction and employee retention. Philanthropy Journal, Oct 19, 2009

One of the Most Amazing Videos I've Seen All Year

I've been working with the elderly at a skilled living facility as part of my thesis research leading dance movement groups. After my group yesterday, the activities director showed me this video of a 92 year-old woman dancing with her 29 year-old great grandson. I had goosebumps the whole time. It's incredible.

SotoMotion Performance Lab in San Francisco

I am definitely going to try to get my booty to Performance Lab this fall. G Hoffman Soto, on faculty at the Tamalpa Institute, is pure genious. In his classes in the past, I have learned so much about myself, not only anatomically and physiologically, but at a deep and embodied level. I hear my heart beat, feel my blood like warm jelly spreading throughout my fingers and toes. I feel powerful, I feel strong. Alive. For anyone interested in expressive arts or creative arts therapies, Soto creates and fosters a safe environment to explore the self, your relationship with others, and the world, its a blending of dance class meets improvisation meets drama therapy. It is truly a mystifying and enlivening experience to attend Performance Lab. Hope to see you there!

IMPROVISATION AND THE PERFORMANCE LAB

Improvisation is a powerful metaphor for life. Studying improvisation provides a vehicle to understanding who we are in the present moment, and to develop ourselves through being awake and present in the moment. To improvise you have to be able to put aside your everyday mind and open up to a state of mind that exists in the now. You have to give over to the bodymind, the movement, and the present moment.

Movement, and a strong embodied physical presence, anchors and centers us in our bodies and in the present. The process is supported with awareness work to assist us in developing a strong kinesthetic base. From the embodied state we can begin to shape and change ourselves and our material both as artists and as human beings. Our personal history lives in the body and through the body we can access this energy and channel it into our creative life.
Improvisation comes very close to mirroring life. It is an art form that has the potential to be a direct reflection and practice of being. When improvising one has to be present and respond in a way that keeps this moment, and what is happening in the moment, alive.
The second part of the Performance Lab process is Movement Exploration. Movement Exploration is a development and refinement of the material that arises from the Improvisation process. M E allows us to recycle and rework our material, to shape and deepen it, and ourselves, in this model.

The Lab provides an environment for participants to develop skills for ones personal creative process through performance. The process moves through awareness, expanded artistic expression, and creativity for personal growth and embodiment that leads to transformation through the Movement Theater model.
The work unfolds in solo, duets, trios and ensemble configurations. The voice and spoken word layer and texture the work to give it a dynamic range of expression and creativity. The spoken word includes improvised text, as well as, developing our personal stories and myths.
The Performance Lab is for performers, actors, dancers, teachers, therapists, coaches, housewives and everybody and anybody who wants to develop themselves as artists, performers and human beings.

While talking about being one with the Tao, Lao Tsu said, “Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is.” If we add to that “yes, accept what is, and then work with it,” then we have an idea of what Improvisation can be.

The Performance Lab is movement theater model that creates a space to explore, improvise, express and create in movement, voice and spoken word. The class works through both improvisation and developing material. Participants will work in solo, duet, trio and ensemble configurations and is open to all levels of experience. The class has both advanced and more beginning students. Soto believes that we all learn from each other regardless of our experience.

G Hoffman Soto has been teaching, performing and studying movement since 1968. He has been developing this body of work for over 25 years. Soto has taught internationally since 1979 throughout Europe, Japan, Lebanon, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. He has been associated with Anna Halprin, the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop and Tamalpa Institute since 1973 and has a wide background in Post Modern Dance, various movement and awareness studies, Martial Arts and Body Work. Soto subscribes to the theory that creativity goes to the very core of what it means to be human. “When we are involved in the creative process we are anchoring ourselves in our humanness.”

When: Monday evenings 7pm to 9:30pm, beginning November 16 until December 14. The final class will be a student studio performance.

Where: Mary Sano Dance Studio at 245 5th Street #314, San Francisco between Howard and Folsom.

Costs: $125 with a $10 discount if paid in full by evening of the first class. For further information, questions and or to send deposits of $50 and reservations please contact:

GH Soto
Tel # 415 342 4899
e mail: sotomotion@me.com
Visit the web site at www.sotomotion.com

Feel Fine? Then Blog Already! And Buy this Book...

A friend of mine's girlfriend worked on this book, now available on Amazon. All I had to do were read the reviews (below) and I was sold. I can't wait for the book to arrive! Wonderfully displayed, a review of the book explains how the authors:

...use their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape. Armed with custom software that scours the English-speaking world's new Internet blog posts every minute, hunting down the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling," the authors have collected over 12 million feelings since 2005, amassing an ever-growing database of human emotion that adds more than 10,000 new feelings a day. Drawing from this massive real-world stockpile of found sentiment, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents the best of the best -- the euphoria, the despair, the passion, the dreams, and the desires that make us human.

It

...combines the words and pictures of total strangers to explore every corner of the human experience. Packed with personal photos, scientific observations, statistical infographics, and countless candid vignettes from ordinary people, We Feel Fine is a visual, fiercely intelligent, endlessly engrossing crash course in the secrets of human emotion.

We Feel Fine explores our emotions from every angle, providing insights into and examples of each. Equal parts pop culture and psychology, computer science and conceptual art, sociology and storytelling, We Feel Fine is no ordinary book -- with thousands of authors from all over the world sharing their uncensored emotions, it is a radical experiment in mass authorship, merging the online and offline worlds to create an indispensable handbook for anyone interested in what it's like to be human.

Furthermore, for blogging DMTs or DMT students, the content of the book, how people FEEL, is central to our work with therapy and expression.

It is beautifully done. Feel fine. Go ahead, check it out. And let me know what you feel (or think) about it.

Self Portraits and Healing

William Utermohlen’s self-portraits reveal his descent into dementia over the span of nearly four decades. The accompanying NY Times article can be read here.

In my expressive arts therapy (movement, drawing, writing) training with Anna and Daria Halprin at the Tamalpa Institute, self portraits are introduced as an integral part of the life/art process, at the beginning of the training and at the end.
How we paint or draw ourselves is a creative and symbolic process which can create a dialogue between our psyche and soul. "...the drawing...can contain and express our suffering in ways which help us be with it and move on, finding a healthy way to reintegrate, or live differently with, our wounding experiences" (Halprin, D, p. 179).

Utermohlen's self portraits from 1996-2000:

Dance Therapy for Postpartum Depression

I had the privilege of attending Gabrielle Kaufman, BC-DMT's workshop on postpartum depression and dance/movement therapy this October in Portland, and look forward to working with her in the future, since she teaches my next CMER course in DMT with the elderly in January, 2010.

The workshop on postpartum depression was fascinating. It is such an emotional and visceral topic for many women, I think we were all a blubbering mess sharing stories and connecting through movement.

Dance Therapy for Postpartum Depression by the Postpartum Progress: Together, Stronger blog:

One of the people I met at the PSI conference this summer was Gabrielle Kaufman, one of the PSI coordinators for Southern California. One of the things we discussed was dance therapy. I had never heard of dance therapy, and was intrigued to find out more about what it is and how it might be used to help women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. Gabrielle was kind enough to write the following article to enlighten us:

"When Rachel was deeply depressed after the birth of her baby girl, she didn't know what to do. In desperation and with her husband's encouragement, she reached out for help. Her OB/GYN referred her to a specialist in postpartum depression. When this specialist spoke to Rachel, she gave monosyllabic answers. Her baby sat alone in the baby carrier and Rachel stated, 'I don't want to be her mother.' When traditional talk therapy didn't seem enough to penetrate her sadness, her doctor thought to refer her to a dance/movement therapist.

Based on the understanding that the body and mind are interrelated, dance/movement therapy is defined as the psychotherapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical and social integration of an individual. The dance/movement therapist's goal was to help Rachel "move" toward health and connect with her baby girl Sophie.

So what did they do? A dance/movement therapist has training much like a traditional verbal therapist, but has additional tools in her belt. With an understanding of movement assessment, the dance/movement therapist can begin to help the client interpret her behaviors and initiate a shift. The process of bonding with a newborn is a very physical one. By simply encouraging the mother to hold her baby and rock with her, movement can begin a journey toward connection. The rocking rhythm is soothing to both the mother and the baby, and the closeness of touch can be healing for both as well.

The therapist may mirror the client in an effort to meet the mother in her depression, or she may be a model mother by encouraging her client to 'move' her depression. Sometimes the therapist might bring out scarves for her client to use. She might invite the client to 'hide' from her baby and return, 'peek-a-boo'. This process is one in which the mother can regain control and initiate her relationship with her baby. We know that the bond a mother forms with her baby early on makes a profound impact on the lifetime development of her child. As much of this attunement is non-verbal, dance/movement therapy can be an ideal intervention.

Read the rest of the article here.

Becoming an Embodied Therapist Workshop with Susan Kleinman

Becoming An Embodied Therapist workshop
Read the news straight from the Hope Blog here.

BECOMING AN EMBODIED THERAPIST:
ACCESSING THE LANGUAGE OF THE BODY IN EATING DISORDER TREATMENT
Wednesday December 9, 2009
9am - Noon
Hancock Center for Dance/Movement Therapy

Earn 3 CEU's
Workshop Cost: $60.00

This workshop offers the opportunity for mental health professionals to discover and trust their innate ability to "attend" empathically, respond authenticcally, and translate non-verbal experiences into cognitive insights. Experiential body/mind exercises based on dance/ movement therapy principles will be used along with didactic presentation, to integrate a more embodied approach into traditional psychotherapy theory and practice.
Participants will learn how these embodied methods can be used to treat individuals with eating disorders with a special focus on how to:

- Be more fully present and congruent.
- Facilitate a somatic state of readiness.
- Utilize treatment techniques based on mind/body congruity to deal with issues
underlying eating disorders.
- Track the process of therapy so as to not become lost in the experience of attending.
Workshop Presenter Susan Kleinman, MA, BC-DMT, NCC, is the dance/movement therapist for residential and outpatient services at The Renfrew Center of Florida. Ms. Kleinman is a trustee of the Marian Chace Foundation, past president of the American Dance Therapy Association, and a past Chair of The National Coalition for Creative Arts Therapies. She is co-editor of The Renfrew Center Foundation's Healing Through Relationship Series, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Creativity in Mental Health. She is the American Dance Therapy Association Recipient of the 2009 Outstanding Achievement Award.

Breath Made Visible, a film about Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin, post-modern dancer, pioneer, innovator, teacher, co-founder of the Tamalpa Institute (the school of which I just completed my MA coursework through!), shares her life and creative life/art process in this film by a French filmmaker and former student of Halprin's.


I highly recommend you check out the trailer for the film RIGHT NOW.