Archive for January, 2008
Posted by gregdowney on January 31, 2008
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s recent business report (January 2008) had an interesting research report on auditory neurons and the perception of complex sounds. (Science Daily has a short report on the longer piece available here). (The BBSRC is the UK’s principal funder of basic biological research.)
As the BBSRC piece discusses, sound perception is extremely difficult because similar objects often make quite different sounds, and the medium (typically air) through which we hear does not allow for the spatialization or easy decomposition that, say, light allows in vision. The Oxford-based research team is using neural imaging to try to figure out how the brain makes sense of sound, and one thing that they’re finding is that background noise appears to be extremely important to sound processing. The auditory cortex does not simply respond to isolated qualities of specific sounds but to variations in the statistical properties of the entire sound scape. As the article reports: ‘Cortical neurons appear to anticipate this particular level of statistical regularity, and respond best to sounds that vary in pitch and intensity according to this natural rate of ebb and flow, which is found in many natural scenes and most musical compositions.’
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Posted in Brain imaging, Brain Mechanisms, Human variation, Learning, Neural plasticity, Perception and the senses | Leave a Comment »
Posted by dlende on January 30, 2008
I was recently reading Kay Warren’s chapter, “Perils and Promises of Engaged Anthropology: Historical Transitions and Ethnographic Dilemmas,” where she discusses different strands of engaged cultural anthropology. Certain approaches—like critical takes on ladino/Maya relations and inequality in Guatemala—struck me as being at quite some remove from neuroanthropology. But one strand she describes did seem closer to me:
Another perspective is that we need to move beyond the antagonisms of the past to grapple with new issues: gang violence, alienation, and the mass marketing to the urban underclasses of commodities from foreign clothing styles to mood-altering drugs; the globalization of popular culture that undercuts local authority and parental status in the eyes of many youths and their parents; and consumer expectations and forms of employment that, as they respond to transnational media and forms of production, are independent of local space (Garcia Canclini 2000).
This chapter raised the question: What are the on-going theoretical and ethnographic discussions in cultural anthropology that are closest to the work we are doing on this blog?
Or, to take it further afield and include Todd and sociology, what strands of social science research offer the most immediacy to our work? Where are the fruitful collaborations and theoretical synergies likely to be found?
I present this as a question to people who read this blog. I would love to see plenty of comments, and look forward to a fun conversation.
Posted in Cultural theory, general | 2 Comments »
Posted by dlende on January 30, 2008
Todd, who commented on the Wending post, has an interesting discussion of “On Being A Public Intellectual” over at his blog Todd’s Hammer. He engages Russel Jacoby’s argument that public intellectuals have basically perished given the post-modern turn, the professionalization of the academy, and the rise of modern media.
I might counter that we have a new breed of public intellectual—people like Steven Pinker. The star professors who write popular books and who appear on television, and who command super-sized salaries from universities. They sell ideas and, in many cases, reassurances to the American public. To take a comment by Robert Steele, a top 50 reviewer on Amazon, about Joseph Nye’s book, Soft Power:
This book, perhaps deliberately so, but I suspect not, is out of touch with mainstream scholarship such as the last 50 books I have reviewed for Amazon. It is one massive “Op-Ed”, and its sources are virtually all “Op-Eds” (a number of them not written by the purported authors), with the result that this book gets an A for a good idea and a C-, at best, for scholarship. One simple example: the sum total of the author’s references on “virtual communities”, one of the most important ideas of this century, is one Op-Ed from the Baltimore Sun.
But in looking at the posts on this blog, the ones that have attracted the most attention are ones in the public domain—the critique of Steven Pinker or the Time Magazine article on love—as well as ones that address issues of everyday discussion—our mood affecting our health, IQ and race, our sense of balance.
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Posted in Education, general | 2 Comments »
Posted by dlende on January 27, 2008
Is neuroanthropology just “social theory with technical jargon,” giving us “street cred”? Are we doing anything “different from interpretive anthropology with its system of symbols”? Why invoke brain biology, we haven’t spent years studying the minutiae of brain circuitry and chemical interactions like real brain experts. Why even bother with the mention of neurotransmitters and such, which bastardizes the rich contribution that anthropology makes to understanding ourselves.
These are some of the comments I’ve seen about our site, some on the Internet, some in emails. In an initial answer to that, I pointed to Greg’s introduction, of listening to our informants and building explanations based on ethnography as well as to some of the limitations we bump up against in the dominant forms of social theory today.
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Posted in Cultural theory, general, Philosophy | 4 Comments »
Posted by dlende on January 27, 2008
Why will we study a favored painting again and again? Or gaze on our lover’s face with such pleasure, even after years and lines have mounted?
I came across an article, “Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain,” by Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel in American Scientist. They studied the distribution of mu-opioid receptors, associated with the modulation of pleasure and pain, in the visual cortex. Their basic result: “The receptors are sparsest in the early stages of this [central visual] pathway, the so-called V1 to V4 areas, where an image is processed as local bits of contour, color and texture. Intermediate stages of visual processing, such as the lateral occipital area and ventral occipito-temporal cortex, which integrate local information to detect surfaces, objects, faces and places, contain greater number of opioid receptors. The receptors are densest in the later stages of recognition, in the parahippocampal cortex and rhinal cortex, where visual information engages our memories.”
Thus, they argue, “a visual stimulus that elicits many episodic or semantic memories should be more pleasing (or more interesting) than a stimulus that brings forth fewer mental associations.”
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Posted in Brain imaging, Brain Mechanisms, Embodiment, Emotion, Perception and the senses | 2 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on January 26, 2008
There’s a fun piece in The New York Times on The Healing Power of Dogs that discusses a wide range of health effects linked to pet ownership. The article briefly discusses a range of research that has linked pet ownership to health benefits. For example:
One Japanese study found pet owners made 30 percent fewer visits to doctors. A Melbourne study of 6,000 people showed that owners of dogs and other pets had lower cholesterol, blood pressure and heart attack risk compared with people who didn’t have pets. Obviously, the better health of pet owners could be explained by a variety of factors, but many experts believe companion animals improve health at least in part by lowering stress.
This research is fascinating in its own right, especially for a person who’s only recently started to live around animals… a lot of animals (at last count, 8 horses, 1 horse expecting a foal, 2 cats, 2 dogs, innumerable wild birds, kangaroos and wallabies all wandering onto the property). I’ve noticed a huge difference in my health and mood since the change, but it’s hard to separate the effects of having Basil and Roxy (the dogs), Glitz and Glam (the cats), or the bigger monkeys around (the horses). But the research discussed also touches on two issues that I think are of particular importance to those of us interested in neuroanthropology and the biology-culture interface.
Edited version
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Posted in Animals, Evolution, Human variation, Medical anthropology, Perception and the senses, Stress | 2 Comments »
Posted by dlende on January 25, 2008
Edge asked prominent scholars a great question, What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Lera Boroditsky, in Cognitive Psychology at Stanford, called her post, “Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world?” (And just for the record, I got turned onto this great collection at Edge by kerim’s post, Rethinking Language and Culture, over at Savage Minds, so please check what kerim has to say!)
Here’s the opening Boroditsky provides us:
“I used to think that languages and cultures shape the ways we think. I suspected they shaped the ways we reason and interpret information. But I didn’t think languages could shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the way we actually see the world. That part of cognition seemed too low-level, too hard-wired, too constrained by the constants of physics and physiology to be affected by language.”
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Posted in Human variation, Language, Perception and the senses | 4 Comments »
Posted by dlende on January 24, 2008
I recently came across this post from Edge: The World Question Center, where Steven Quartz, a neuroscientist also interested in anthropology, answers the following question: “What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?”
He opens his letter to “the president” with the following summary: “Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and purpose. Yet, our modern way of life seems to provide fewer and fewer opportunities to engage in the group life that satisfies these human needs—indeed, many of its structures and institutions stunts these very needs.”
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Posted in general | 1 Comment »
Posted by dlende on January 24, 2008
There’s an interesting blog post here about “How to Boost Your Willpower,” which tells us that “researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.”
Well, how about a cultural muscle too? After all, we’re talking about a cultural trait too! In my research in Colombia, knowing how to manage limits and having reasons to say no help explain lower rates of illegal drug use there, despite plenty of risk factors and access to drugs.
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Posted in Education, Evolution, Learning, Skill acquisition | 1 Comment »
Posted by gregdowney on January 23, 2008
Alex Golub, one of the prime movers at Savage Minds, posted a link to an ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ bingo card that’s worth a chuckle.
Original post here.
I enjoyed the bingo card because it is such a great condensation of the usual hackneyed bits that crop up in conversations involving ‘evolution’ and ‘psychology,’ often with people who have serious interest in and understanding of neither evolutionary theory nor psychology. I’m not surprised that untrained individuals subscribe to evolutionary psychology (‘women like men who are tall because they could see prey farther off in the grasslands…’). After all, people close to me (who will remain unnamed) believe that one must inherit every trait or characteristic, however minor, from some relative, even if they are only related at a distance (‘you must get your love of traveling from your father’s brother…’) and into forms of ethnic personality theory (‘Italians are so expressive; Latins are so passionate…’).
The point of criticizing these trite versions of evolutionary psychology, for me, is not to throw out baby, bath water, and basin, but to really expose when pernicious sloppy thinking is masquerading as ‘science,’ especially under the guise of psychology and evolution. For whatever reason — probably because they have a sheen of ‘naturalness’ and being above criticism — these rubrics have become touchstones for some of the most retrograde thinking about sexuality, gender relations, ‘race,’ and other issues. The only way to truly engage them is to offer better accounts of both evolution and human psychology.
So in the meantime, I’m printing out my bingo card for the next salvo from the evolutionary psychologists.
Posted in Evolution, Fun and Humor, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
