Day: March 7, 2008

Headline: Maternal Instinct Is Wired Into The Brain

Sometimes it’s great to see other people make all those arguments that come to mind when brain imaging research gets turned into instincts and hard wiring.  Tara Parker-Pope runs a blog On Health through The New York Times, and while I have liked some of her previous posts (that’s where I found the autism YouTube video), today she really misses the mark.  And the people commenting really let her know it!

 So here’s the quick summary.  TPP reports on imaging research with 13 mothers and their 16-month-old infants (well, toddlers, wouldn’t they be by then?).  They were then shown videos of their own babies and other babies while images were taken of their brains.  “When a woman saw images of her own child smiling or upset, her brain patterns were markedly different than when she watched the other children. There was a particularly pronounced change in brain activity when a mother was shown images of her child in distress.”

TPP then provides a winner quote from the editor of Biological Psychiatry, which published the piece last month: “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior”

First comment, from PlainJane: “This does seem to be proving the bleeding obvious… [But] what happens then to mothers who are shown NOT to have these “natural” responses in their brains to their infants? Will they be locked up as freaks or have their kids taken from them? I can just imagine.  Or will neglectful mothers be able to say “oh its biological, I can’t help not bonding with my child”?  I applaud further research into all aspects of the human brain but you and other non-scientist commentators are vital in directing HOW this is viewed. It would be nice for your blog to put it in some more context.’

Katie: “By 16 months mothers and children must be bonded, and of course the mothers would react to seeing their child in distress – for more than a year they have been reacting to their child to meet its needs… And what about moms who adopt? or use surragates?”

Mark: “I would never have suspected that mothers have a special attachment to their own children. What will they find out next?”

Marcus: “The phrasing is misleading and suggests a common but fundamental misrepresentation of what this type of fMRI research shows — or maybe a misunderstanding that confuses a general audience. “Wired,” “hard-wired,” and “instinct” suggests genetically programmed in, like a reflex. A brain pattern that shows up on fMRI studies, however, can reflect brain “programming” that has been acquired through experience, to use the computer metaphor.”

LJB: “I can’t help but feel like this research is going to be used as the crux of some defense lawyer’s argument as to why his client abandoned her child. While I’m sympathetic to post-partum issues (it took me longer than expected to bond with my son after birth) I was still fiercely protective of him and responded to him, although I was terrified of not doing it right when I went to him. I think the mother-infant bond is more complex and this is just one of the many layers of the proverbial onion.”

JiminBoulder: “Will you please stop turning us into machines?”

Jeanne, mother of five: “The absolute hilarity of the line “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior,” made my day!”

Time Globalized

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchStefan Klein has an editorial, Time Out of Mind, in today’s New York Times, where he writes “the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions.”

 He elaborates on this argument as follows:

Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time… To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. Neuroscientists have observed this phenomenon using computer-assisted functional magnetic resonance imaging tomography. When subjects are asked to indicate the time it takes to view a series of pictures, heightened activity is measured in the centers that control muscular movement, primarily the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and the supplementary motor area. That explains why inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any Tai Chi master knows.Time seems to expand when our senses are aroused. Peter Tse, a neuropsychologist at Dartmouth, demonstrated this in an experiment in which subjects were shown a sequence of flashing dots on a computer screen. The dots were timed to occur once a second, with five black dots in a row followed by one moving, colored one. Because the colored dot appeared so infrequently, it grabbed subjects’ attention and they perceived it as lasting twice as long as the others did. 

Klein then links this argument to stress: “Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash… Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.”

 His conclusion? “The remedy is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. Time is not money but ‘the element in which we exist,’ as Joyce Carol Oates put it more than two decades ago (in a relatively leisurely era). ‘We are either borne along by it or drowned in it’.”

 By coincidence, Kevin Birth, professor of anthropology at Queens College-CUNY, wrote us about our blog recently, highlighting his own work on time, anthropology and biology.  Birth has a recent article, “Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization (full pdf).”  Given that we live on a “rotating globe where each locale has its own cycles of day and night,” our present globalized economic system produces some severe contradictions that people struggle with in everyday life: “temporal conflicts between locations on the globe, desynchronization of biological cycles, and lack of correspondence between those cycles and social life.”

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‘Innate’ fear of snakes?

Live Science has a recent piece, Why We Fear Snakes, written by Clara Moskowitz. I have to admit that, well, I hate this sort of thing for so many reasons that I hesitate to write. My problem with these accounts is with ‘innate’; I think the term is, generally, poorly defined, unprovable and unproven, sloppy, theoretically suspect, and freighted with so many dangerous implications that it gives me, for want of a better word, the heebie-jeebies.

Before I get too critical, however, it’s necessary to acknowledge that some of the assumptions I’ll critique may have, likely have, arisen in the translation of a complex research project into a few hundred words for a popular press account. God knows my own work has suffered when it’s been translated into popular formats (don’t even get started about a CNN special on race that I was interviewed for…). We’re encouraged to do outreach to the community, to put our specialties up on ‘expert’ databases and basically pimp ourselves for any positive reference, so we wind up bending over backwards to make our ideas accessible. This can lead us to stumble, especially in the view of a discipline that doesn’t share our concerns. For example, if I were to try to give an accessible account of my work, a neuroscientists would likely gag on some of the explanatory shortcuts. So some of the criticisms that I will level might be better applied to the science writer rather than the researchers; we’ll know when the research findings are eventually published. Caveats in place, on with it…

Apparently, the Psychology Department at the University of Virginia has a couple of scholars studying the ‘universal’ fear of snakes. The piece says what one might expect: ‘The researchers were inspired to investigate the fear of snakes when they thought about how universally people dislike the slithering legless lizards. “This feeling is really common,” [Vanessa] LoBue told LiveScience. “We don’t see snakes all the time. There’s really no reason for this overwhelming disgust or hatred of snakes.”‘ The researchers demonstrated this universal fear by showing that both adults and children ‘could detect images of snakes among a variety of non-threatening objects more quickly than they could pinpoint frogs, flowers or caterpillars.’ And the explanation is that an innate fear of snakes would have made humans more likely to survive in the wild.

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(insert clever French grammar title here)

Every once in a while, I drop some comment about language being ‘un-language-like’ when I’m talking about culture. It’s a tick, aggravated by my envy of linguistic anthropology, my wish that bodily practice was studied in anthropology as much (or had produced as much cool theory), and by my secret insecurity that I never took a course from Michael Silverstein when I was at the University of Chicago (what can I say? I was busy…). Most readers probably overlook my comments about language, chalking them up to PGSSD (post grad-school stress disorder) or some moral failing that they don’t want to know any more about. But I feel compelled to explain, especially since I found this great article on French speakers disagreeing on the gender of nouns (thanks to Dr. X’s Free Associations and grant-writing avoidance behaviour on my part).

Too often I think anthropologists use language ‘to think with’ when they are talking about ‘culture.’ Language is a kind of subliminal or suppressed metaphor guiding how they talk about this thing, culture. It leads to various problems, such as ‘code’ metaphors, reification of ‘the language/culture’ in things like meme theory, and the like. That is, people say some pretty daft things about ‘culture’ guided by the analogy with language.

The problem is, they’re not just committing sloppy thinking about human variation, they also don’t generally have a very grounded, empirically based view of language. That is, they assume things about language that linguistic anthropologists would dispute, especially those coming from a pragmatic approach (like Silverstein, from whom i took no courses and thus feel inadequate to be writing this).

Well, every once in a while, web surfing drops the perfect example right in your lap.

Continue reading “(insert clever French grammar title here)”