Neuroanthropology

For a greater understanding of the encultured brain and body…

Archive for May 20th, 2009

Wednesday Round Up #64

Posted by dlende on May 20, 2009

So a few favs, then some more complicated decision making, followed by anthro and the brain, and finished off with some very good stuff on our new lives online.

Top of the List

The Economist, Expats at Work
“Living abroad gives you a creative edge” – so anthropologists rule! See Jonah Lehrer’s nice riff on creativity and being abroad, as well as Greg Laden’s complement piece, Knowing More Languages = Good
Darwinius masillae
Tim Arango, The Missing Link, and a Mass Audience
Does that picture look like a missing link to you? Hyping science even as it’s in process. For a more detailed write-up on this basal primate fossil, see the new Wikipedia entry. PZ Myers also covers the basics while ranting about the “missing link” nonsense. Update: Greg Laden also summarizes and critiques in a very effective post on this new fossil nicknamed Ida.

Malcolm Gladwell, How David Beats Goliath
“When underdogs break the rules” – the Davids in the world win on a fairly consistent basis. So how?

Scott Horton, A Convenient Death
Death in a Libyan prison and a key person gone from the center of the torture debate

Decision Making

Psique, What Is Rewarding Brain Stimulation?
This YouTube clip on the development of research on electrical stimulation of the reward systems in the brain

Rachel Rettner, Monkeys Ponder What Could Have Been
Using imagined information to guide behavior, not simply direct experience of reward. Here’s the abstract for the actual Science article, Fictive reward signals in the anterior cingulated cortex

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Wednesday Round Up | Leave a Comment »

Talent: A difference that makes a difference

Posted by gregdowney on May 20, 2009

A young Andre Agassi

A young Andre Agassi

Studying sports training and skill acquisition, I often run headlong into the concept of ‘talent.’ When I suggest that athletic achievement demonstrates the extraordinary malleability of the human nervous system, the ability of our muscles to remodel, the refinement of athletes’ perceptual acuity, and even how our skeletons can be reconfigured by training, audience members often respond, ‘Yeah, but what about innate talent?’

Or, confronted by the yawning gap between elite athletes’ performances and the ability of the average person, sceptics still want to focus on the slight differences among elites athletes (for example, Jon Entine’s book Taboo), suggesting that this tiny fraction of difference is the ‘innate’ part, the ‘talent.’ I can describe the years of arduous labour that go into producing elite-level achievement, the countless hours of training and sophisticated coaching, and someone will inevitably say, ‘Okay, but some people are just inherently good at sports, aren’t they?’

But as psychologist K. Anders Ericsson said in an interview in Fast Company (cited here by Dan Peterson), ‘The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that’s different is their innate abilities. There’s little evidence to support this. With the exception of some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body constrains an individual from reaching an expert level.’

Obviously, certain dimensions of the body can affect one’s ability to participate in a sport like basketball or sumo at an elite level, or a genetic abnormality may create an unusual wrinkle in a metabolic or even a neural process, but research like Ericsson’s suggests that these sorts of traits are likely the exception rather than the rule. That is, even if there is a genetic trait that helps some Kenyan runners to excel, or gives an individual with photographic memory, or helps a free diver to endure oxygen deprivation, these cases do not confirm the folk idea that talent is innate (and thus likely genetic).

In this post, I want consider the difference that makes a difference. That is, how the concept of talent itself actually affects the unfolding and compounding of developmental variation, helping extreme ability to emerge (and de-motivating those who don’t demonstrate early ‘promise’). Whether or not ‘talent’ exists—and I’m profoundly skeptical—believing that it does is a good foundation for exaggerating variation in skilled ability.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Embodiment, Human variation, Neural plasticity, Perception and the senses, Skill acquisition, Sport | Tagged: , , , , , , | 15 Comments »

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 135 other followers