Day: April 7, 2008

Emotional intelligence in training

Although I’m not a real big fan of some of the work on ’emotional intelligence,’ here’s an interesting short video of Daniel Goleman on Karma Tube (a positive, social change video site). As the page explains:

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Sharing the results of psychological experiments (and the story of the Santa Cruz Strangler), he explains how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it.

I’m really not sure what we gain by putting ’emotional’ with ‘intelligence’ except that it does seem to increase the importance of empathy and perceptivity for those who undersell these human capacities. That is, I think the furor of ‘EI’ is in part simply that people who normally don’t get just how crucial interpersonal savvy is suddenly notice it.

Nevertheless, Goleman is a good big picture thinker, and in this piece he points out the malleability of human empathy, a crucial consideration for neuroanthropologists. It’s important to point out training effects on these abilities so that we’re not too prone to considering them permanent ‘personality’ traits.

The Buzz about Epigenetics: Genes, Behaviour and the Environment

Our contemporaries in Behavioural genomics and Neurobiology are suggesting that epigenetics may be the key to understanding how the environment interacts with genes to produce obesity, longevity, sterility, mental illness, and maybe even cancer. But what is epigenetics? And, why is it important to Neuroanthropology?

Epigenetic processes provide a way for environmental factors to affect gene activity. These processes involve the chemical modification of the genome resulting in an alteration of gene expression. While the underlying DNA sequence remains unchanged, the activity of particular genes can be turned on or off. Nutrition, exposure to toxins and other exogenetic mechanisms can all be potentially involved in epigenetic activity. These environmental influences can act upon RNA transcripts, cellular structures, DNA methylation/chromatin remodeling, and even prions. For example, smoking can effect your epigenome which is believed to result in some forms of cancer.

Human research into epigenetics can be fraught with ethical dilemmas, and can take a number of generations before sufficient data is produced. But, this is where anthropologists come in. Behavioural and environmental data coupled with social statistics from communities across the world can provide scientists with useful data for analyzing long-term mental and physical health in relation to the environment and corresponding socio-cultural behaviours. Such data is particularly useful when collected from communities exposed to biological disasters or specific nutritional limitations.

To study epigenetics inside the very cells of our body, where most anthropologists are not able to venture, there is another option. Now, for the first time in an insect species, epigenetic modification has been identified and functionally implicated. The recent sequencing of the honey bee genome in 2006 has allowed scientists to discover genes that mediate epigenetic effects.

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A Crooked Science

Stanley Fish has an editorial today, Think Again-French Theory in America, which is a great reflection and historical contextualization of deconstructionism.  He builds much of the essay off the forthcoming book by Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.

 

The reason I like this piece by Fish is his ability to at one hand show the strengths and limits of a deconstructionist stance and on the other to show the polarization into the relativist versus absolutist “Culture Wars” in the US.

 

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Experiments and Effort

Gina Kolata describes an experiment by Ethan Sims in her book Rethinking Thin, where Sims put thin people on a forced-eating diet. Sims wanted to know whether people “would have a hard time gaining weight.” Kolata’s description of Sims’ and other similar experiments (such as putting people on starvation diets) plays a central role in establishing one of her main points—obesity is a biological problem.

In his first experiment with college students, Sims found that “these subjects found it all but impossible to gain much weight; no matter how much they tried to eat, they just could not become obese.” Sims reasoned that perhaps the students raised their activity levels and were burning off more calories. “He thought of the perfect subjects, people who really have no chance to cheat and burn off calories: prisoners.”

The study volunteers in prison did indeed gain weight. “But producing obesity turned out to be much harder than Sims had anticipated. The men increased their weight by 20 to 25 percent, but it took four to six months for them to do this, eating as much as they could every day. Some ended up eating 10,000 calorie a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that the researcher study had attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.”

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