Day: February 3, 2008

Neuroscience On Out: The Forest and the Trees

Often on this blog we have argued about the relevance of neuroscience to our work as anthropologists.  Today, however, I want to turn the tables.  Neuroscience needs anthropology.  Given the emerging models of neural function, with their emphasis on embodied learning and active interaction with the environment, some of neuroscience’s best ideas can only be tested in the field. 

This thought came to me through my colleague Cameron Hay, an anthropologist at Miami University in Ohio.  I was reading over a near-complete draft of her paper on memory, anxiety and healing among the Sasak in Indonesia.  Cameron wrote: 

“Neuroscientists are well aware that the isolated models of mind and its cognitive processes that they tend to study are invalid and that the person’s social, cultural, and physical environment has ‘an active role in driving cognitive processes’ (Henningsen and Kirmayer 2000: 472-3). Neuroscientific methods do not allow for the kind of holistic exploration that anthropology encourages, therefore, the link between anxiety and memory retrieval is somewhat under explored; however, there are some tantalizing associations.”

 While laboratory research and even ecologically-valid experimentation certainly have a vital role in expanding our current understanding of our brains, the extension from brain research to the workings of the mind and behavior is not a simple step.  Extrapolation is, in effect, bad science, because it is not based on scholarly research. 
Continue reading “Neuroscience On Out: The Forest and the Trees”

Tools, mirrors and the expandable body

Michael Balter writes in Science NOW Daily News, Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind, about recent research led by Italian neuroscientist, Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma, head of the team responsible for discovering ‘mirror neurons’ (which I’ve been banging on about for a while, here and here). Rizzolatti’s team was looking at how primate brains managed to do the same tasks with hands and with tools. As Balter describes the research: ‘So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain’s trick is to treat tools as just another body part.’

Two monkeys were trained from six to eight months to grasp food with pliers. Then the team documented the activity of 113 neurons in areas F5 and F1, a region linked to manipulating objects. How did the monkeys’ motor areas act when using the tools?

The researchers first established the brain’s firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Balter summarize their conclusions: ‘Rizzolatti and his co-workers conclude that when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.”‘

Continue reading “Tools, mirrors and the expandable body”

Dopamine and Addiction – Part One

By Daniel Lende 

The Pathway 

In your brain you have a system that comes up from some of the oldest evolved parts of your brain to some of the most recently evolved parts.  Reptile parts to ape parts.  In brain research on addiction, it’s generally called the mesolimbic dopamine pathway or system.  All the main addictive drugs affect this system, making the mesolimbic pathway a core component in addictive behavior.  Addictive experiences—gambling, shopping, eating and sex—also impact the mesolimbic dopamine system. 

In both scientific research and the popular press, the dopamine system is often cast in the role of “bad boy,” a hard-wired brain circuit that has gotten out of control, self-indulging in an orgy of pleasure.  That neat story tells us a lot about how we cast our own morals onto the brain, selectively picking out research to provide a nice scientific sheen.  Hard-wired for hedonism, we have to work even harder at self-control.   

It strikes me as the same sort of story that addicts know how to spin so well.  So let’s be blunt.  Denial! 
Continue reading “Dopamine and Addiction – Part One”