A series of articles today in the New York Times nicely captures several of the themes of Neuroanthropology—(1) the importance of evolution, with an emphasis on comparative work, variation, and mechanism in addition to adaptive function; (2) examining the interaction between the environment and behavioral biology, where the environment can significantly shape and even alter basic behavioral biology; (3) that brains are there not just to process information or create accurate representations, but are designed for doing things; and (4) social context matters, shaping what people do and what they experience (again, brain-environment interaction), so a focus on the brain alone will not explain significant social patterns or problems.

Evolution and social context are both necessary to successful neuronanthropology, which in turn focuses on what people do and feel through the lens of person-environment interaction. Our approach avoids placing analysis into any one academic category (saying something is an anthropological or a neurological problem alone) and eschews the essentialism that most academic fields incorporate into their causal explanations (culture or biology or psychology made them do it). So here are the articles.

–//–

Nicholas Wade reports on new research that shows that the evolution of brain complexity is related to synaptic structure, and not just to the number of neurons (the older “bigger brain” theory). The following graphic shows the sequence well.

Synapses had been viewed as a standard feature across animal brains. “In fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition, Dr. Grant said… ‘From the evolutionary perspective, the big brains of vertebrates not only have more synapses and neurons, but each of these synapses is more powerful — vertebrates have big Internets with big computers and invertebrates have small Internets with small computers’.”

Continue reading “The New York Neuroanthropology Times Today”