Author Topic: Does ELAN mean Early Left Anterior Negativity?  (Read 1782 times)

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Offline Awake

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Does ELAN mean Early Left Anterior Negativity?
« on: July 01, 2010, 09:25:06 PM »
Awhile ago this term, Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN), was given in connection with the meaning of the ‘ELAN’ program.  While the truth may never be known, I just find extremely coincidental, So I’m reposting it to see if it hits a note with those who were there (I wasn’t, but I get a familiar feeling).

So, before you read, I want to ask those from Elan, in your experience did the program seem to impose unexpected interruptions, perhaps setup routines only to  impede on it once it became an expectation, to keep preventing you from getting used to a pattern of activity, and maybe even teaching that the ideal paradigm is adopting a pattern of not being able to rely on regularity?   ….. Here’s the repost


Quote from: "Whooter"
Maybe this question?:
Quote from: "Eliscu2"


Do you think Elan is funny?

I don’t think Elan is funny but I do find it ironic that the school is named Elan.  My understanding of the word is quite different than others.  Elan is also a neurological event.  Consider this phrase for a moment:

I was rejected vs. I was “in” rejected.  By inserting the word “in” into the sentence it produces a stimuli "Early left anterior negativity"(ELAN) which stops the brain from understanding the sentence because it doesn’t make sense.  This abrupt stoppage of the brain is what causes the ELAN.  Eventually your brain will adapt.  But it will adapt to something different.

In understanding language the brain steps thru as follows:
1.   Group of individual words
2.   Word order
3.   Spoken words (orally or thru thought)
4.   Then understanding. (cognitive thought)


If you screw with the “word order” then the brain emits an ELAN (Neurological response) and the brain cannot move forward with its processing of the sentence and is subsequently derailed.  Word order is a prerequisite to understanding and relying on the rules.

Maybe this was the underlying premise of the school? To change the way you view the world thru constant manipulation of the rules until the broken rules feel normal.  Once the brain is in a state of ELAN there is a very short window of opportunity to alter its perception and to have it follow a new set of rules.  These rules may or may not be consistent with the rules society has defined as normal.

Something to think about.


...


I think there’s something to this Whooter. Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN) has it’s roots in Neurolinguistics and describes a disruption that occurs in the brain when expected rules are broken. Elan is also identified as a certain brainwave pattern that occurs in the anterior cingulate, which is an error detection wave.


The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is the frontal part of the cingulate cortex, that resembles a "collar" form around the corpus callosum, the fibrous bundle that relays neural signals between the right and left cerebral hemispheres of the brain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterior_cingulate_cortex

It makes sense that Early Left Anterior Negativity comes out of neurolinguistics because it shares the same characteristics as the “pattern interrupt technique” in Neuro-Linguistic Programming ( I posted this on NLP a little while ago    viewtopic.php?f=9&t=30591 ). And not at all unrelated to NLP is the area of hypnosis that makes use of brain lateralization as a core part of the process. The basic concept is to depotentiate the left brain, that is the cognitive ‘thinking’ side  associated with consciousness (with fixation, exhaustion and confusion), and stimulate the right brain, which is the creative, affective side. Hypnosis would also move from  anterior to posterior brain lateralization as the posterior part is associated with past events versus the anterior which is focused on the present. You are likely to find that the common model for hypnosis is FIXATE ATTENTION, BYPASS THE CONSIOUS MIND, STIMULATE THE UNCONSCIOUS.

It would not surprise me at all to find that the name ELAN was chosen to symbolize the depotentiating of ones critical faculty.  This is a very interesting connection and there’s ample evidence to think it might be the case because when you look into it you find,



“A Working Model of the Neurophysiology of Hypnotic Relaxation

ANTERIOR INHIBITORY PROCESSES


Fronto-Limbic Supervisory Attentional System.We went on to examine evidence of frontal inhibition in the context of a model of a supervisory attentional system which involves the frontal lobes and limbic system (Posner & Peterson, 1990; Shallice & Burgess, 1991). This system monitors ongoing activity and modulates behaviour in response to novelty, as in orienting, and when environmental stimuli convey conflicting information…..

The error detection wave has been localised to a midline anterior cingulate generator (Dehaene et al, 1994), a promising candidate for involvement in hypnosis. The anterior cingulate performs executive functions which have been subdivided into affective and cognitive components (Devinsky et al, 1995). The cognitive executive component is involved in response selection in advance of any movement and in cognitively demanding information processing such as Stroop interference, localised by blood flow imaging and lesion studies to the anterior cingulate. The affective executive functions are involved in regulation of autonomic and endocrine functions, assessment of motivational context and significance of sensory stimuli and emotional valence. These are mediated through extensive connections with the amygdala and periaqueductal grey and autonomic brainstem nuclei. Our results have indicated that the monitoring of motor performance carried out by the cognitive executive component remained intact, for the error detection wave and RTs were unchanged by hypnosis. Rather the affect system involving connections with the rostral limbic system including the amygdala would appear to be unresponsive with hypnosis, as shown by the absence of the error evaluation wave and apparently motivational influences on performance. This interpretation is also in keeping with the reduced electrodermal orienting activity reflecting a reduction in excitatory modulatory influences of the amygdala. Dissociation between cognitive and affective anterior cingulate executive systems would explain the increase in the Stroop interference effect with hypnosis.

Left Anterior Inhibition. There is evidence that anterior inhibition may be laterally asymmetrical and biased towards the left hemisphere in hypnosis. This was disclosed by measuring right and left hemisphere processing times with a haptic object sorting task in two studies (Gruzelier et al, 1984).

In summary there was further evidence of a selectivity of neurophysiological action of hypnosis shown through examination of anterior inhibitory influences:- 1) the dissociation between error detection and error evaluation waves; 2) the left lateralised influences on haptic processing and the improvement in right-sided processing that was specific to the active-alert induction; 3) the specificity within the left hemisphere for the effects on verbal fluency which were restricted to letter and not semantic designated categories; 4) the localisation of the changes in EEG coherence to within the left frontal lobe; 5) the restriction of the EEG coherence changes to the high alpha band.
http://www.mcmaster.ca/inabis98/woody/g ... 4/two.html

Cognitive Neuroscience Theory


Cognitive Neuroscience based theories of hypnosis explain hypnotic phenomenon patterns of brain activity. One researcher, John Gruzelier, used EEG data to show that hypnosis is characterized by a shift in brain activity from anterior (front) to posterior (back).  Other research shows increased activity on the right side of the brain, and decreased activity on the left, and more specifically changes in activity in certain areas of brain associated things like verbal skills.
http://hypnosisschool.org/hypnotic/hypnotism.php


In hypnosis
there is an inhibition of frontal functions, more so
on the left side than the right, and when the aim is
to induce relaxation with hypnosis, there is an
accentuation of posterior functions, greater in the
right hemisphere.
http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/rep ... /4/313.pdf

Neurolinguistics   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolinguistics


Violation-based


Many studies in neurolinguistics take advantage of anomalies or violations of syntactic or semantic rules in experimental stimuli, and analyzing the brain responses elicited when a subject encounters these violations. For example, sentences beginning with phrases such as *the garden was on the worked,[45] which violates an English phrase structure rule, often elicit a brain response called the early left anterior negativity (ELAN).[36] Violation techniques have been in use since at least 1980,[36] when Kutas and Hillyard first reported ERP evidence that semantic violations elicited an N400 effect.[46] Using similar methods, in 1992, Lee Osterhout first reported the P600 response to syntactic anomalies.[47] Violation designs have also been used for hemodynamic studies (fMRI and PET): Embick and colleagues, for example, used grammatical and spelling violations to investigate the location of syntactic processing in the brain using fMRI.[20] Another common use of violation designs is to combine two kinds of violations in the same sentence and thus make predictions about how different language processes interact with one another; this type of crossing-violation study has been used extensively to investigate how syntactic and semantic processes interact while people read or hear sentences


Early left anterior negativity  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_left ... negativity


The early left anterior negativity (commonly referred to as ELAN) is an event-related potential in electroencephalography (EEG), or component of brain activity that occurs in response to a certain kind of stimulus. It is characterized by a negative-going wave that peaks around 200 milliseconds or less after the onset of a stimulus,[1][2] and most often occurs in response to linguistic stimuli that violate word-category or phrase structure rules (as in *the in room instead of in the room).[3][4][5] As such, it is frequently a topic of study in neurolinguistics experiments, specifically in areas such as sentence processing. While it is frequently used in language research, there is no evidence yet that it is necessarily a language-specific phenomenon.
 

To summarize the three important ERP (event related potential)-components: First of all there occurs the ELAN at the left frontal lobe which shows a violation of syntactical rules. After it follows the N400 in central and paritial areas as a reaction to a semantical incorrectness and finally there occurs a P600 in the paritial area which probably means a reanalysis of the wrong sentence.  http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cognitive_ ... prehension ”.


…… So just wondering if any of you think it is plausible that the name ELAN refers to an experience of habitually breaking patterns?, in your experience.

.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline Awake

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Re: Does ELAN mean Early Left Anterior Negativity?
« Reply #1 on: July 01, 2010, 09:27:32 PM »
..... and Whooter, BTW, curious when you first heard of this?
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »