First, refresh your knowledge of Saint Augustine’s Confessions with this helpful rap video:

In the second book of Confessions, St. Augustine relates to us how he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor’s grove. What bothered Augustine was not the act of stealing, but the pleasure he derived from the act. In fact he and his companions had no practical use for the pears, for they were not hungry, and they threw most of them away. Frustrated, he writes,

But it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. (II.6)

For the rest of the second book, Augustine wrestles with the question of why he and his companions felt pleasure in stealing the pears. He makes two conjectures. The first is that he felt pride from the thrill of breaking the rules. He writes,

Since I had no real power to break [God’s] law, was it that I enjoyed at least the pretence of doing so, like a prisoner who creates for himself the illusion of liberty by doing something wrong, when he has no fear of punishment, under a feeble hallucination of power? (II.6)

By attempting to break God’s law, or more generally, the natural law, Augustine remarks that he was trying to imitate God, by showing that he was God’s equal and free from the jurisdiction of his law.

Augustine’s second conjecture is that his friends greatly influenced the pleasure he felt from stealing. He writes,

I must have got [pleasure] from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin…This was friendship of a most unfriendly sort, bewitching my mind in an inexplicable way. For the sake of a laugh, a little sport, I was glad to do harm and anxious to damage another…all because we are ashamed to hold back when other’s say “Come on! Let’s do it! (II. 8,9)

Had Augustine’s friends been absent, there is no doubt that he would not have thought of stealing the pears. However the presence of bad influences enkindled his desires. Together, these provoked him to action.

The Neurobiology of Stealing

Modern research in psychology, and the brain specifically, sheds some light on Augustine’s conjectures.

In general, thrill-inducing behavior is pleasurable because of the brain’s reward systems, which release neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine. When these systems are functioning normally, the “brain reward systems serve to direct the organism’s behavior toward goals that are normally beneficial and promote survival of the individual (e.g., food and water intake) or the species (e.g., reproductive behavior)” (Bozarth, 1994). These systems reward thrill-inducing behavior because this behavior is tied to evolutionary relevant gains, such as sex or getting food.

However, these systems can be abused. With regard to stealing, the most extreme example of this is kleptomania, wherein one compulsively steals, sometimes unknowingly. Like all addictions, the act is voluntary at first, until one begins to crave the pleasurable experience wrought by the neurotransmitters Dr. Jon Grant, a director of the Impulse Control Disorder clinic at the University of Minnesota Medical School, says, “Kleptomaniacs might have started stealing on a dare as kids, but it becomes so pleasurable that the addiction takes over their actions” (Labi, 2002).

Although we all have reward systems in our brains, different personalities will react differently to thrill-inducing behavior. That is, some will find it pleasurable, while others will dislike it, considering it an ordeal. The habitual roller coaster rider, ready for his next ride or even a bungee jump off the Sears Tower, characterizes the former. The latter, meanwhile, would watch safely from the ground.

In order to discover why these differences exist, psychologists Jane E. Joseph, Xun Liu, Yang Jiang and Thomas H. Kelly from the University of Kentucky, and with Donald Lyman of Purdue University, performed a study wherein they administered questionnaires regarding thrill seeking behavior to volunteers to gauge their personalities, and then they showed images of arousing or emotional scenes (such as erotic and violent ones) along with mundane ones, while performing MRI scans of the volunteers’ brains.

Results showed that in high sensation seekers (thrill-seekers) the insula, the seat of emotion, was most active when the arousing imagery was displayed. In low sensation seeking individuals, the frontal cortex, which reasons and regulates emotion, was most active.

Being more emotionally free and extraverted than their counterparts, high sensation seeking people often coerce low sensation seeking types to “release their inhibition” and follow through with whatever risky behavior they wish to engage in. This, mixed with peer pressure, forms a potent cocktail.

Augustine refers to these types when he says, “[W]e are ashamed to hold back when other’s say ‘Come on! Let’s do it!’ ” A more recent example can be seen in the film Friday, wherein Chris Tucker’s high sensation seeking character, tries to convince Ice Cube’s low sensation seeking character to smoke marijuana.

Susceptibility to Peer Pressure

But why are we so susceptible to peer pressure, or the mob mentality? William Bonner and Lila Rajiva cite five main reasons why we follow mob mentality. Of those reasons, two are universal. Humans prefer to stay with a group, no matter what they are doing, and we tend to allow ourselves to be bullied into following the mob.

We see both of these points in Augustine’s account. His statement, that he found thrill from having “partners in sin”, is related to the first point that we like to stick with the herd. Likewise, his description of those shamed into committing the deed, is related to the second point, in that these kids had no real reason to feel shame, except that they were bullied.

Overall, St. Augustine’s anecdote in which he finds a thrill in stealing pears without any real purpose is very similar to the type of thrill-seekers today who enjoy roller coasters and bungee jumping. These thrill-seekers are able to manipulate more conservative people into doing something risky just for the adrenaline rush that comes along with it. St. Augustine realizes the power of groups and how they can force members of the group to act similarly.

From Flow to Good

In light of all this evidence, how much control do we have over what we do in our everyday lives? For the most part, we have the final decision regarding what we do. However, we do tend to concede control under peer pressure. We go “with the flow.”

Knowing all these things, we can come to a better understanding of human behavior, allowing us to overcome negative external influence, and, like Augustine, become a force for good in the world. For as he said:

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices (City of God IV, 3).

I’ve included the first and tenth images here, but for more, go over to Time Travel through the Brain.

Looking for a “Neuro Revolution”? Zack Lynch wants to offer you one in his new book.

With a title like Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World and the author celebrated as a leading technology consultant and market researcher in marketing blurbs, readers might expect the author’s opinion to be based on the state of the art of neuroscience. However, frequent mistakes and shortcomings in his presentation of the scientific findings and methodology seriously call into question whether Lynch is the right person to sketch a possible “neuro future” and to address the prospects and limitations of neurotechnology.

The first surprise comes on page 3, where Lynch describes his first experience with a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, one of the most frequently-used research tools in contemporary cognitive neuroscience. He explains that “the machine’s computer had recorded and analyzed data about how those loud thumping noises had bounced back from the structures under my skin.” To uninformed people, the noise of high-field MRI scanners will indeed be one of their most salient features. However, it is a mere epiphenomenon subject to the sophisticated technology necessary to change strong magnetic fields in short intervals. The technique itself is based on inaudible electromagnetic waves (like those emitted by a cellphone) to investigate brain structure and function.

Out of the many other examples one could give for Lynch’s superficial misrepresentation of neuroscience, two cases related to important publicly discussed applications of neuroscience are presented here to demonstrate a lack of expertise.

First, when discussing the issue of psychopharmacological enhancement, he refers to “a 2005 survey of more than ten thousand college students” (p. 184). Although the author does not give the reference to this “survey” so that an interested reader might check his claims or read the study himself, a researcher familiar with the debate can guess from his description which academic source is meant (McCabe and colleagues, Non-medical use of prescription stimulants among US college students…, Addiction 99, pp. 96-106).

First of all, the survey was carried out in 2001, and published only in 2005, which one can already read in the study’s abstract. Admittedly, this is just a minor point. What is more serious, however, is Lynch’s presentation of the outcome: “On some campuses more than 25 percent of students had used the pills”, he writes (p. 184). This is literally wrong, because at only one single campus of more than a hundred investigated colleges did researchers find numbers even as high as 25 percent – not more. The vast majority of colleges scored between zero and five percent.

When researchers find such an extreme outlier, it is common to question the validity of this individual measurement. Imagine a blind man were to shoot 119 times (that was the number of colleges investigated in the study) at a target; if he hit the bull’s eye once, how representative were that finding of his overall performance? And how honest would a report focusing on the single hit be?

On average, only four percent of the students stated that they had used such stimulants throughout the last year (i.e. at least once). Lynch commits another mistake when he writes that “between 4 and 7 percent of them had tried attention-deficit-disorder drugs for either all-night cramming sessions or to do better on their exams” (p. 184). The researchers of that survey actually had not asked the students for the motives of their behavior. By contrast, they found out that stimulant abuse was correlated with the consumption of other drugs like alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine, which suggests that many students had used the stimulants for “recreational” purposes, since some stimulants can also induce a “high”. This finding is already presented in the study’s half-page abstract. But Lynch just continues with “informal research”, quoting a nameless professor, one of his “experts”, stating extremely high numbers of stimulant abuse among her students (p. 184).

Second, Lynch devotes much space to the topic of MRI-based lie detection which already created at least two business spin-offs trying to market the technique: Already his description of polygraphy, the tool psychologists are developing since almost 100 years to detect deception, appears as outdated (p. 26f.). He seems to know nothing of the recent advances in that field which were enabled by digital technology. Nevertheless he holds the position that MRI-based methods fare much better. His opinion is based on one single study of Daniel Langleben’s, which Lynch refers to incorrectly, and neglects all of the experiments which were published after 2002. This is unfortunate since these experiments are superior to his example, because they are ecologically more valid and, for instance, employ a mock-crime task instead of Langleben’s abstract playing card paradigm (e.g. Kozel and colleagues, Detecting Deception Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Biological Psychiatry 58: 605-613).

To Lynch’s credit, he later summarizes that “more testing must be completed before any commercial firm can claim that it’s offering a valid truth-detection test” (p. 34), which is true. It would have been nice, though, if he had explained why “No Lie MRI”, the company he reports about, states a contradicting claim on its web page, calling its technology the “first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history” already on its entry page.

Unfortunately, the book does not fare better in its discussion of the ethical aspects related to neurotechnology. Although Lynch refers to incidents where governmental institutions had abused human subjects in the past, for example, when investigating the effects of LSD or high radiation in uninformed persons (p. 174), he does not make a suggestion how they could be prevented from similar abuse of potentially forthcoming neurotechnology developed to manipulate memories or to even control people’s minds. Actually, the author is very enthusiastic about such opportunities in “neurowarfare” (chapter eight) where he celebrates the possibility that neuroscience might soon allow to manipulate an enemy’s mind. If such a means existed, its potential for abuse are great. What the book lacks in terms of ethical considerations, Lynch compensates with his creativity to invent new concepts. Referring to “neuroarchitects”, “neuroenablement”, “neurofinance”, “neurocompetition”, “pleasureceuticals”, to give just a few examples, he demonstrates his creativity. This neuro-ful, sorry, colorful vocabulary marks his major contribution to the discussion of neuroscience, alongside his general and superficial praise of forthcoming neurotechnology.

Unfortunately, the book is not suitable to readers who want to verify its claims themselves or who want to learn more about the original studies. Lynch frequently hides his knowledge behind anonymous “experts”, “neuroscientists”, or “researchers” (e.g. p. 20, 21, 22, 33, 37, and so on), making it almost impossible to check their validity. If he nevertheless gives a reference, it is most likely not a scientific study, but a journalistic report published in sources like the New York Times or Scientific American. Readers already familiar with such reports thus will learn hardly anything new from “The Neuro Revolution”.

Scholarly speaking, Zack Lynch’s lack of scientific understanding, his lack of familiarity with the state of the art of neuroscience, and his neglect of the ethical where societal and military applications are impending, disqualify his book as the basis of informed decision making about the prospects, limitations and perhaps even dangers of future discoveries in neuroscience.

Editor’s Note: Stephan Schleim is at the University of Bonn. He also blogs for the German-language site Brainlogs. His most recent post is Psychiatrie-Bibel unter Beschuss. Last year he covered The Critical Neuroscience conference in Montreal in English.

Vegas baby, Vegas!

So you’ve finally made it out to Sin City, setting aside a few hundreds dollars to gamble. Maybe even a thousand. You’re hoping to get lucky and have some fun. A few hours and a half-dozen drinks into your weekend, you find yourself at the craps table, dice in hand. You’re feeling good, ready to turn your recent down streak into big bucks. Where does that leave you?
Right where the casino wants you.

The game is rigged. Everyone loses money eventually, if not immediately. But just like gamblers grab hold of that lever and pull, society has stepped up to the gambling craze. And now gambling is pulling people for all they’re worth: emotionally, mentally and, most notably, financially.

This post will look more closely at casino’s techniques to draw gamblers back to the slot chairs and the tables, focusing on both physiological aspects and engaged decision making. Ultimately, these observations will demonstrate that casinos create more than entertainment; they develop an entire compulsive experience.

The Gambler’s Rush

The casino’s greatest asset might be the very personal, very intense rush that gamblers experience as they step up to the blackjack table or slot machine, hoping to strike it rich. This characteristic “rush” or “high” stems from the series of steps and actions that are involved in addictive behavior. Stimulation from the surrounding atmosphere and the thrill of a big risk drives the “high”. Ultimately, the “rush” from gambling can be as intense as a drug fix.

Dealing Emotions

Excitement, making a quick buck, or even the possibility of financial independence is enticing. From experience, most people know that emotions are difficult to control. From a neurological standpoint, the amygdala is situated in the limbic system and is one main centers of emotion (pdf) in the human brain. Other parts of the brain, like the prefontal cortex, display less activity (pdf) during the act of gambling.

The response of the limbic system in producing emotion has been supported in studies conducted with pathological gamblers (individuals that exhibit persistent and recurrent maladaptive gambling behavior). A 2003 psychiatric study (pdf) compared the responses of pathological gamblers and control subjects to videotapes depicting happy, sad, and gambling content. Participants rated their emotional and motivational responses in addition to the brain imaging.

For gamblers, the gambling references elicited urges and temporary changes in brain activity patterns in frontal, paralimbic, and limbic brain structures. This evidence points toward a connection between gambling and the limbic system in producing a “high” from an emotional response.

Furthermore, when viewing gambling cues, pathological gambler subjects also showed relatively decreased activity in brain regions associated with impulse regulation. The urges of the gamblers to use (or in this case to go gamble) indicates a signal to engage, not to regulate. Thus, the emotional response that gambling can elicit along with the suppression of impulse control make the gambling rush one fiscally dangerous “high.”

Engaging the Senses

Gambling also engages the senses. Neural pathways extend from sensory locations to the appropriate association areas in our brains. These areas integrate visual, auditory, somatic, and other stimuli into our perception of the world around us. This interpretation of sensory stimuli means that perception is not always reality.

More often then not, the perceived stimulus is different from the actual stimulus. For instance, the multitude of lights and colors seen within the casino are received on photoreceptors as light waves of different frequencies. Ultimately gamblers perceive them as several colors, not waves of energy. In addition, the soothing sounds that are on repeat in the casino hit the ear as pressure waves, quickly interpreted into sound waves.

What we’re getting at is that the atmosphere, which includes the lights and repetitive music, helps in shaping the intended activities and emotions that the casinos want their participants to have. The brain controls emotions, perception, and rational thought. The casino industry uses tactics which seek to manipulate each of these functions, often with devastating results.

So the question is, how do they do it?

Casinos: Experience and Decision Making

With countless algorithms, computer-programmed slot machines, bright lights and enough cameras to protect a small country, casinos work hard to make sure that your gambling experience is both highly predictable and highly profitable. For them.

While the “tricks of the trade ” that casinos use to keep gamblers betting are well-documented (such as absence of clocks or natural lighting, complementary drinks and endless amenities), one of the more intriguing focuses of the casino atmosphere is its encouragement of engaged decision-making. As discussed by William Eadington (1999, pdf), casinos go to great lengths to convince gamblers that they are making rational, reasonable choices with their money while betting.

Eadington provides the example of an amateur craps player who spends three days in a casino, and bets on 1,000 rolls of the dice. Taking the odds of craps into account, the probability that they will be ahead after 1,000 of these craps bets is just 33% (a fact that casinos are well aware of). Casinos must work against the often steep odds that gamblers face in order to keep them gambling. For Eadington, casinos must work to encourage gamblers’ beliefs that they are making smart decisions with their money. To this end, casinos use methods such as slot machines with progressively growing jackpots to promote the illusion that “big money” is just one roll of the dice or pull of the lever away for gamblers.

MIT Professor Natasha Schull describes the casino as a site of “intensified technological stimulation” (pdf), a place where gamblers, amateur and compulsive alike, can lose themselves in their gambling experience. Casinos perpetuate this sensorial gambling experience, as it allows gamblers to enter into what Schull calls a “zone” state, enabling them to “forge an insulated, autonomous space of play in which they can set and reset their own bet level, rhythm, and pace.” According to Schull, the ideal customer is someone who stays until they lose all their money – it’s called “player extinction.”

Once gamblers enter this zone, they can bet for hours without interruption or consideration of the economic value of their decision-making. In order to convince their patrons that they are engaging in productive profit-seeking methods, casinos place a heightened emphasis on engaging gamblers, and making gambling an exceptionally sensorial experience.

Now that you’re in the “zone,” you have everything under control and the jackpot money is yours for the taking…or so you think.

The Illusion of Control

Players literally “hold the cards” in games such as blackjack and poker, providing them the feeling that they have a certain amount of control over events that are, in fact, governed by the laws of mathematics. Just picture the craps player blowing on dice for luck.

Casino chips, for example, are almost laughable in their simplicity. They allow gamblers to part quickly and painlessly with an abstract form of their money. Yet the chips themselves make gambling a corporeal experience – something you touch and control, an idea that sites like Full Tilt Poker actively promote.

Chips must be traded in for cash in order to have any worth in the world outside the exciting casino. Although a seemingly basic task, walking through the casino for a chance to exchange chips may lead to one more game, especially when that certain glowing, beckoning slot machine catches the gambler’s eye. Clearly, casinos use this and other methods to maintain a cycle of continuous, fast-paced gambling while trying to minimize the noticeable effects of losing money for their customers.

In 1975 psychologist Ellen Langer captured the essence of this sort of phenomena when she defined the theory of the illusion of control (Langer 1975). The theory of illusion of control is “an expectancy of a personal success probability that exceeds the objective probability of the outcome.” Langer proposed that this type of overconfidence is likely when an event that is at least partially determined by chance is characterized by factors that normally lead to enhanced outcomes under skill-based situations, such as choice, stimulus or response familiarity, competition, and active involvement.

Applying this theory to casinos, the illusion of control is likely when an individual plays games which are at least partially determined by chance (poker, craps, slots, etc.) and are also characterized by choice (“Hit me!”), competition (beating the dealer), and active involvement (rolling the dice or pulling the lever).

The choice, competition, and active involvement that casinos offer boost an individual’s perceived control over an outcome. According to Langer that leads to an “unrealistic subjective probability of success.” Furthermore, the larger the role that skill can play in determining the outcome (“knowing” how to bet, or performing “winning” rituals) the more pronounced this illusion of control becomes.

In 2006 Langer’s theory was applied to a study done in a natural setting in Reno casinos. In this study, patrons of Reno casinos were observed placing craps bets on their own and another patron’s dice rolls. The hypothesis was that subjects would play riskier by placing higher bets and more “difficult” bets on their own rolls (when they would be under the illusion of control). The results of the study, as well as work on the gambler’s fallacy of the “hot hand” (pdf), help support the Langer hypothesis. The illusion of control is well at work in casinos, and gamblers are most likely losing more money the more they feel like they can affect the outcome.

Against the Odds

But casinos do more than keep you glued to the tables; they set you up to lose. This house advantage grows more likely and inevitable the longer one gambles – it’s the House Edge. Although a gambler may have a “lucky” win, continuing to gamble makes loss almost unavoidable. The techniques of casinos acknowledge this, encouraging gamblers to keep gambling.

From Craps to Keno to Roulette, the house always has an edge that grows more evident as their techniques keep gamblers from leaving the casino. Slot machines, for instance, remain one of casinos most popular draws and clearly demonstrate the manner in which casinos make money. A quarter slot machine, innocently taking only small change from gamblers at a time, results in about a $360 loss within 10 hours. Other popular casino games also post statistics that favor the house.

Clearly, gamblers normally end up paying the casinos instead of hitting the jackpot. It proves easy to look at these numbers when outside of a casino and belittle those who see gambling as a chance to win big. However, when placed in the casino atmosphere, the thrill of entertainment and the seemingly endless possibilities encourage gamblers to go for that one “last” game.

Maybe you could become a millionaire against the odds. But, once removed from the stimulation of casinos, it becomes much easier to acknowledge that the house ultimately wins.

Casinos play the odds, people play the games. In the end, that means the casinos play the people.

For more information:

Getting Help for a Gambling Addiction

The National Council on Problem Gambling

Problem Gambling – A Canadian Perspective

Problem Gambling Guide

Wikipedia – Problem Gambling

Gambling Industry

Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation

Casino Watch

Gambling Industry Association

American Gaming Association

Responsible Gambling Council

Research

E-Gambling (Journal of Gambling Issues)

Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming

Cambridge Health Alliance Division of Addictions

National Center for Responsible Gaming

Gaming Research Weblog

Video Resources (YouTube)

Winning at Slots
Winning at Roulette

Losing at Slots
Losing – “He took everything”

Excalibur Walk-in – see the casino layout

Compulsive Gambler’s Recovery Story – “You always lose more than you win”
Compulsive Gambler’s Story & Critique of Industry – “an ex casino gambling degenerate”

Martha Frankel and Getting hooked on online poker (podcast)

A person reading these literatures could be excused for concluding that there is a very small number of cultural identities (North American vs. East or Southeast Asian), that vary principally on the dimensions of individualism–collectivism or independent–interdependent self-construal—whether people are seen as inherently independent from others or whether social roles are most important in defining the self.

In this post, I want to provide a bit of a bibliography of some of the literature fast emerging on cultural difference in psychology, neuroimaging, and related fields, but also focus a bit on the consequences of this limited imagination in considering cultural difference, the almost exclusive focus on East-West contrasts. Just because I love a bit of controversy with my breakfast, I’ll suggest it’s a form of what Edward Said has called ‘Orientalism.’

Although Cohen brings up the issue and offers a few suggestions for how the problem might be addressed, I think his prescriptions would herald more of the same sickness, although perhaps spreading the infection to more hosts. That is, Cohen puts his finger on a serious problem in the psychological study of culture, but the prognosis won’t improve much unless we actually understand the root of the problem: it’s not studying Europeans (and European-Americans) and Asians (and Asian-Americans) that’s causing the whole problem. Part of it is misunderstanding what is being studied in the first place when cultural difference is under the lens.

This post is based on part of a talk I gave on Tuesday to the Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS) here at Macquarie. When I got into the subject, I realized it was far more than I could possibly share in a 50-minute presentation, so I thought I’d post it here.

The cognitive consequences of cultural difference

A number of prominent neuroscientists have called for greater attention to the neural substrates of cultural variation in human cognition (e.g., Kitayama & Cohen 2007). A while back, in August 2008, Daniel wrote an extremely thorough review of a discussion of the issue by Shihui Han and Georg Northoff (2008): Cultural Neuroscience original Han and Northoff available as pdf here). As Daniel wrote back then, Han and Northoff’s pointed to a growth, not merely Cross-cultural psychology, which ‘has largely examined differences in human cognition through behavior experiments,’ but also in ‘cultural neuroscience,’ an attempt to establish the ‘neural correlates of interpersonal and social behaviours,” especially as they differ across cultures.

Although cultural neuroimaging is relatively young, cultural psychology more broadly has highlighted significant differences between groups in basic cognitive function. One of the landmark articles, a review of a series of experiments by Nisbett and Masuda (2003), discusses variation across a range of activities: causal inference, logic, categorization, attention (focal v. field), perception, change blindness, and esthetics.

What I find especially interesting is that some of this work suggests that there are cultural variations to even some of the most ‘innate’ cognitive functions. For example, researchers have found significant differences in:
face recognition (Chua et al. 2005)
facial expression of emotion (Marsh et al. 2003)
amygdala responses to fearful faces (Chiao et al. 2008)
object processing (Gutchess, et al. 2006)
self consciousness (Chiao et al. in press)
sound perception (Kuhl et al. 1992)
taste perception (McClure et al. 2004)
theory of mind (Kobayashi et al. 2007)

Before I get accused of over emphasizing ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’ (neither terms that I will use in this discussion), all I’m saying here is cultural variation in functioning; that is, environmental influences can inflect or alter basic functions, not that the basic functions necessarily arise whole cloth from environmental influences alone.

The variation is interesting, not because it shows us that genes have no influence or inheritance is nothing, or something overly wrought like this, but because they sketch out some of the possible variation to the ways these systems will emerge. Noticing the variation not only helps us to see the malleability, but it also helps us to understand how these capacities emerge even when they follow an entirely predictable pattern and result in cognitive abilities that perfectly match our expectations.

So who has a culture?

So given that a wide range of cognitive abilities demonstrate some cultural malleability and systematic variation, this would seem to be a really ripe area for research. The only problem is finding interesting research questions to ask. As my colleague, philosopher John Sutton, said in conversation the other day, it seems that these days the challenge is greater in the area of finding the questions to ask and doing the research design to find answers, rather than just in the brute technology of getting brain images or significant data.

Overwhelmingly, the research on cultural differences in cognition have focused on contrasting Western (European or white American) with Asian (Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, typically) populations. Even a partial list of research that uses this population contrast is impressive. I started to work on one, trying to focus on only a single article by any lead author, and quickly got an unmanageable list:

Blais, Caroline, Rachael E. Jack, Christoph Scheepers, Daniel Fiset, and Roberto Caldara. 2008. Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces. PLoS ONE 3(8): e3022. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003022.

Boduroglu, Aysecan, Priti Shah, and Richard E. Nisbett. 2009. Cultural Differences in Allocation of Attention in Visual Information Processing. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 40(3): 349-360.

Chiao, Joan Y., Tetsuya Iidaka, Heather L. Gordon, Junpei Nogawa, Moshe Bar, Elissa Aminoff Norihiro Sadato, and Nalini Ambady. 2008. Cultural Specificity in Amygdala Response to Fear Faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20(12): 2167–2174.

Chiao, Joan Y., Zhang Li, and Tokiko Harada. in press. Cultural neuroscience of consciousness: From Visual Perception to Self-Awareness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15(10-11):?.

Chua, Hannah Faye, Julie E. Boland, and Richard E. Nisbett. 2005. Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 102 (35): 12629-12633. (abstract)

Doherty, Martin, Hiromi Tsuji, and William A. Phillips. 2008. The context sensitivity of visual size perception varies across cultures. Perception 37: 1426-1433.

Gutchess, Angela H., Robert C. Welsh, Aysecan Boduroglu, and Denise C. Park. 2006. Cultural differences in neural function associated with object processing Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience 6(2): 102-109.

Lewis, Richard S., Sharon G. Goto, and Lauren L. Kong. 2008. Culture and Context: East Asian American and European American Differences in P3 Event-Related Potentials and Self-Construal. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(5):623-634.

Masuda, Takahiko, Richard Gonzalez, Letty Kwan and Richard E. Nisbett. 2008. Culture and Aesthetic Preference: Comparing the Attention to Context of East Asians and Americans. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(9): 1260-1275.

Moriguchi, Yoshiya, Takashi Ohnishi, Takashi Kawachi, Takeyuki Mori, Makiko Hirakata, Minoru Yamada, Hiroshi Matsuda, and Gen Komaki. 2005. Specific brain activation in Japanese and Caucasian people to fearful faces. NeuroReport 16(2): 133-136.

Nisbett, Richard E., and Yuri Miyamoto. 2005. The influence of culture: Holistic versus analytic perception. Trends in Cognitive Science 9(10): 467-473.

Park, Denise C., and Angela H. Gutchess. 2002. Aging, cognition, and culture: A neuroscientific perspective. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 26: 859-867.

Tang, Yiyuan, Wutian Zhang, Kewei Chen, Shigang Feng, Ye Ji, Junxian Shen, Eric M. Reiman, and Yijun Liu. 2006. Arithmetic processing in the brain shaped by cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 103(28):10775-10780. (abstract)

Zhu, Ying, and Shihui Han. 2008. Cultural Differences in the Self: From Philosophy to Psychology and Neuroscience. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2(5):1799-1811.

All of these articles focus on contrasting ‘Asians’ and ‘Westerners.’ Like Cohen (2009:194), I think it would be helpful to explore ‘more kinds of variation among more kinds of cultures.’ There are some extremely interesting exceptions, such as Bang and Medin’s research with Native American Menominee (e.g., Bang, Medin, and Atran 2007) and some of the work that Nisbett later did with Uskul and Kitayama (Uskul, Kitayama and Nisbett 2008) on foragers, pastoralists and agriculturalists. (And I’m not going to try to list all the interesting cognitive anthropology work out there by people like Scott Atran because that’s not the topic of this post…)

Neural Orientalism (apologies to Said…)

The dangers of the East v. West research design are many. First, this kind of comparative work often assumes homogeneity within each population, both in how it defines people (Chinese subjects = ‘Asians’; Nebraska college students = ‘Euro-Americans’) and in how it handles the data, such as common amalgamation and data cleaning practices. In addition, the group chosen to represent the whole Culture (Asians, Westerners) may have its own idiosyncrtic traits relative to other members of the same group. As Daniel wrote in Cultural Neuroscience: ‘Despite assertions that “of course there is no such thing as a homogeneous ‘Western’ or ‘East Asian’ culture” the convenience of this sort of dichotomous sampling still creates a homogenizing effect.’

In addition, the experimental design, analysis and interpretation tends to assume that the groups are ‘opposed’ on some key trait, selecting which experimental procedures to run and which questions to ask. A whole field of messy, non-opposed traits, tendencies or characteristics are ignored that would not show the pattern of East v. West, adding to the appearance that there are ‘Two Cultures’ and they are opposite to each other.

This assumption of opposition and the imposition of homogeneity contribute to what I’m suggesting is a kind of neural Orientalism, to borrow from Edward Said (1978). Without getting into Said’s work, or the controversy around it too much, this understanding of cultural difference tends to exacerbate the gap between groups while simultaneously obscuring variation within them.

The search for a global explanation and a cultural entity

But even if we get over these issues, as Cohen advocates, and start exploring other sorts of cultural opposition, I don’t believe we’re going to make too much headway as long as we continue to employ several unexamined assumptions about culture that Cohen still makes: the assumption that culture is overarching, ideational structure and that it can be treated as an entity.

The problem with assuming that culture is an over-arching, ideational structure is that it tends to look for simplistic explanations for a complex multitude of data; for example, we find all kinds of differences between ‘Asians’ and ‘Westerners’ because ‘Asians’ are one thing and ‘Westerners’ are another, not because they have a myriad different customs, divergent historical experiences, different economic contexts, etc. etc.

In the early stages of ‘cultural psychology,’ the East-West gap was chalked up to ‘collectivist’ and ‘individualist’ character types or societies, as Hui and Yee (1994) pointed out. No matter what the experimental result, there had to be some way to stretch the explanation back to this foundational cultural difference, even though as Oyserman and colleagues (2002) demonstrated, the contrast between the two groups was not so great on collectivist and individualist attitudes.

In more recent work, there’s been a shift away from ‘individualist-collectivist’ explanations, toward a contrast between ‘analytical’ and ‘holistic’ thought or perception, but the tendency to dichotomize coupled with the search for an over-arching global explanation for observed differences seems likely to continually produce inadequate explanations that do as much to obscure similarity between cultural groups (as well as variation within them).

The other problem with the overarching global explanation for observed differences is that it tends to severely curtail the domains of experience and activity that get explored, especially concentrating on those sorts of thought or perception that can be readily linked up to one of these explanatory rubrics (to generate testable hypotheses). For example, my favourite area of difference, motor learning, never enters the discussion of culture, even though there’s tons of circumstantial evidence for its importance from studies of everything from juggling and child development, to visual expertise, music, sports, and driving a car.

Kitayama (2002) has produced one of the most effective critiques of this way of thinking that I have come across outside anthropology, arguing that the focus on ‘attitudinal’ interviews is problematic in cultural research and arguing that the confusion generated by thinking of culture as an ‘entity’ is a large part of the problem. I couldn’t agree more.

Treating culture as an entity (Greek culture, Twa culture, Australian culture, Kayapo culture) generates research design that focuses on dubious sampling strategies (get a bunch of Chinese people and test ‘em, and the difference between their average and our baseline white people is The Culture). Anthropologists have spilled barrels of ink writing intellectual demolitions of the culture as entity idea for a whole host of reasons too numerous (and likely boring) to really get into, but they tend to come back to some of the same issues with false homogenizing and selective opposition.

Okay, so does that mean we can ignore culture?

NO! That’s not what I’m trying to say, although the reader might feel like that’s the best strategy (back away from the neuroanthropologist slowly – he seems really upset and we might be able to get away before he notices…).

Part of my conclusion is to echo Daniel’s earlier reflection on the work of Han and Northoff:

But the anthropologist often goes from critique to critique, and freezes when asked, Well, if you don’t agree, how would you test culture using neuroimaging? To answer that question, I would start by paying attention to the work and ideas of people like Shihui Han and George Northoff. They are actually doing the work, learning from their exciting results and from the mistakes made along the way.

That is, the results being generated are exciting, and I do not want to deny or diminish them in any way, although I think we need a better way to understand what the experiments and imaging techniques are actually capturing.

In particular, I think we need a more developmental, dynamic approach to enculturation rather than focusing on ‘culture’ as an entity (see Hong & Mallorie 2004). That is, if we think that we are observing ‘culture’ in these experiments, we are likely to fall into the sorts of logical fallacies and essentialisms that tend to make this work objectionable to a lot of anthropologists as well as to people who fear it sneaks racism or ethnic prejudice back into the research.

Focusing instead on enculturation, on the varying degrees to which specific skills, habits, practices, or qualities of different developmental environments affect cognition, better explains cultural differences, but it also helps us to understand why groups are not homogeneous. We all know that not everyone of us has equal facility or passion for every activity within our own culture; it shouldn’t surprise us that there’s variation within a group and that there might even be similarities between members of diverse groups, given a focus on developmental dynamics.

The irony for me is that, even within my list of articles that concentrate on Asian v. Western cultures, I find numerous examples of more dynamic explanations for the results, explanations that don’t just make reference to cultural ideologies ‘collectivism’ or ‘individualism,’ and that don’t assume every child in a culture has identical experience. For example, the following articles, to varying degrees, offer subtle, developmental and skill- or practice-based discussions of neural difference:

Cantlon & Brannon (2006) discuss the role of using an abacus on mental calculation, the training of visualization as a form of calculation, how the length of number words affects working memory and how different calculation strategies might explain observable imaging differences among subjects doing mental mathematics.

Gutchess et al. (2006) describe the potential ecological role of visual affordances in urban environments and their affect on the ways that people take in visual scenes.

Kanzandjian & Chokron (2008) argue that reading direction itself and culturally patterned action affect which parts of the brain are most active in reading comprehension; that is, which part of your visual field you use to read affects which part of the brain gets trained to interpret written language.

Kobayashi et al. (2008) examined the effects of language and biculturalism on theory of mind in bilingual subjects, highlighting the role of language itself on shaping the way we perceive others’ subjectivity.

Finally, one of the articles that I criticized early in this post, Nisbett & Masuda (2003), also offer a much more detailed discussion of the emergence of different cognitive styles in various historical contexts, especially under the influence of family structure, social mores, and primary economic modes. In other words, the take-away from Nisbett and Masuda may be ‘Asians are holistic thinkers and Westerners analytic,’ but the explanation itself is much more detailed and attentive to how these differences emerged.

Stumble It!

References:
Bang, Megan, Douglas L. Medin, and Scott Atran. 2007. Cultural mosaics and mental models of nature. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 104(35): 13868–13874. (abstract)

Cantlon, Jessica F., and Elizabeth M. Brannon. 2006. Adding up the effects of cultural experience on the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(1): 1-4.

Cohen, Adam B. 2009. Many Forms of Culture. American Psychologist 64(3): 194–204.

Fiske, A. P. 2002. Using individualism and collectivism to compare cultures—A critique of the validity and measurement of the constructs: Comment on Oyserman et al. (2002). Psychological Bulletin 128: 78–88.

Gutchess, A. H., R. C. Welsh, A. Boduroglu, and D. C. Park. 2006. Cultural differences in neural function associated with object processing. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neurosciences 6: 102–109.

Han, Shihui, and Georg Northoff. 2008. Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: A transcultural neuroimaging approach. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9: 646-654. (download pdf)

Hong, Ying-yi, and LeeAnn M. Mallorie. 2004. A dynamic constructivist approach to culture: Lessons learned from personality psychology. Journal of Research in Personality 38: 59-67.

Hui, C. H., and C. Yee. 1994. The shortened Individualism-Collectivism Scale: Its relationship to demographic and work-related variables. Journal of Research in Personality 28: 409-424.

Kazandjian, Seta and Sylvie Chokron. 2008. Paying attention to reading direction. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9(12):965.

Kitayama, Shinobu. 2002. Culture and Basic Psychological Processes—Toward a System View of Culture: Comment on Oyserman et al. (2002). Psychological Bulletin 128, No. 1, 89–96.

Kitayama, S. and D. Cohen. 2007. Handbook of Cultural Psychology. New York: Guilford Press.

Kobayashi, C., G. H. Glover, and E. Temple. E. 2007. Children’s and adults’ neural bases of verbal and nonverbal “theory of mind.” Neuropsychologia 45(7): 1522–1532.

_____. 2008. Switching language switches mind: linguistic effects on developmental neural bases of ’Theory of Mind.’ Social, Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience 3:62-70.

Kuhl, P. K., K. A. Williams, F. Lacerda, K. N. Stevens, and B. Lindblom. 1992. Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months. Science 255: 606–608.

Marsh, A. A., H. A. Elfenbein and N. Ambady. 2003. Nonverbal ‘‘accents’’: Cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. Psychological Science 14: 373–376.

McClure, S., J. Li, D. Tomlin, J. S. Cypert, L. M. Montague, and P. R. Montague. 2004. Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks. Neuron 44: 379–87.

Nisbett, Richard E., and Takahiko Masuda. 2003. Culture and point of view. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 100: 11163–11170. (abstract)

Oyserman, D., H. M. Coon, and M. Kemmelmeier. 2002. Rethinking individualism and collectivism: Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 128: 3-72.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Tang, et al. 2006. Arithmetic processing in the brain shaped by cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 103: 10775–10780. (abstract)

Uskul, Ayse K., Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett. 2008. Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) 105(25): 8552-8556. (abstract)

That is, although I like Begley’s work, some of the ways that she writes about the brain puts her readers, if they’re not already neuroscience savvy, two steps backwards before moving toward greater understanding. It’s sad because I think her book is one of the best works for a general readership on recent research, and the brain imaging projects with Tibetan monks which forms the central narrative of the book are fascinating on so many levels. Begley has a brilliant eye for turning research into story-telling and with the meditation research, she’s picked an ideal subject on which to exercise her skills.

If only she would stop carrying on about ‘Mind’ and ‘Brain’ like they were the two primary characters…

The problem is much like the ritual of Cartesian Castigation, which I find some of scholarly colleagues like to engage in as preparation for delivering a paper on ‘The Body.’ That is, they carry on for a while about how Descartes and Cartesianism divide ‘the Mind’ from ‘the Body,’ and how essential it is to re-integrate them, as if the two are wandering around in a train station looking for each other.

The ritual specialist engaged in the Cartesian Castigation then, with an enormous sense of satisfaction, puts forward some compound term — ‘mindful body’ or ‘embodied mind’ — and then proceeds to stagger along, still labouring under the weight of the conceptual division between ‘Mind’ and ‘Body,’ repeatedly declaring the problem solved while still tripping over every mention of ‘Mind’ and ‘Body.’

‘Mind’ and ‘Brain’ are much the same, treating the actions and experience of the brain as if it were a different thing: Mind. Of course, sometimes it’s helpful to talk about the mind, but not if we then suddenly become freaked out by the existence of the Mind and the Brain, as if there are two entities.

Begley recounts the Dalai Lama’s patient questioning of Western physicians, some of which had a very traditional view that the brain was unchanging beyond a certain age, with thoughts having little or no effect on neural architecture, a view that we now know is out-of-step with some of the more interesting research on activity-dependent plasticity, even in adult brains. According to Begley, the Dalai Lama had learned from neuroscientists that ‘mental experiences reflect chemical and electrical changes in the brain.’ But when he asked about the consequences of thoughts on the brain:

One brain surgeon hardly paused. Physical states give rise to mental states, he asserted; “downward” causation from the mental to the physical is not possible. The Dalai Lama let the matter drop. This wasn’t the first time a man of science had dismissed the possibility that the mind can change the brain. But “I thought then and still think that there is yet no scientific basis for such a categorical claim,” he later explained. “I am interested in the extent to which the mind itself, and specific subtle thoughts, may have an influence upon the brain.”

Begley describes how the ‘neuroplasticity revolution’ overturned the brain surgeon’s argument, demonstrating that perceptual training could affect dyslexia sufferers and physical training could help the motor cortex of a stroke victim learn new functions.

Although Begley is interested to some degree in the way that perception or motor training might affect the brain, she’s more interested in the idea that thought itself could affect neural architecture.

The kind of change the Dalai Lama asked about was different. It would come from inside. Something as intangible and insubstantial as a thought would rewire the brain. To the mandarins of neuroscience, the very idea seemed as likely as the wings of a butterfly leaving a dent on an armored tank.

In The Wall Street Journal article, Begley summarizes research on cognitive-behavioural therapy, in which depressed patients were taught to interpret their own thoughts differently, and brain imaging studies of Tibetan monks engaged in compassion meditation (we’ve discussed these studies before at Meditating makes the brain more compassionate).

The research Begley discusses is fascinating, but she also touches on research done on chimpanzees, in which the animals were asked to pay attention to either a touch or a sound stimulus in order to receive a reward, with the other stimulus as a distractor. Depending on which stimulus was crucial, the part of the brain responsible grew more extensive and the brain area responsible for the other, even though subjected to the stimulus, did not expand without attention focused on the relevant sense.

My issue with Begley’s focus is that, by emphasizing the difference between ‘internal’ or ‘pure’ thought and things like perception and motor control, suggesting that it’s more interesting when ‘just thinking’ changes the brain, Begley creates a troublesome divide, one that mirrors the body-mind dichotomy that has so bedeviled our understanding of human experience. I believe that if we allow this distinction to gain too much weight, it leads us back down the road of the mind-brain division.

Treating thought as ‘intangible’ — whereas perception and activity are presumably ‘tangible’ — divides our mental activities in ways that may not reflect how the brain actually functions. For example, from brain imaging and psychological studies, we know that some of the same brain areas used in spatial navigation are also used in imagined movement, and that imagined movement can take as long as body motions on the same scale. And the discovery of mirror neurons suggests that perception and understanding of another’s actions uses closely related mental processes, even overlapping neurons, as the neural activities that result in the actor’s own movements.

In other words, the gulf between ‘just thinking’ and other sorts of action are not as great as Begley’s argument suggests. I think she would probably concede this if asked; attention, for example, which is one of her examples, is a combination of mental, perceptual and even behavioural components.

The idea that the ‘mind’ shapes the ‘brain’ may help sell the idea to the general public, but it reinscribes the same sort of artificial division that we struggle against with Cartesian dualism. Like ‘the-brain-is-a-computer’ metaphor, the baggage that the mind-brain dichotomy brings along may wish we never invited it on the trip.

And while we might congratulate ourselves for figuring out clever ways that two artificially separated dimensions of the human being — the mind and the brain — are actually related, but that’s only solving a problem we created at the onset. I don’t know how much progress we’ll have made in the end…

The online exhibit will become a traveling exhibition beginning in the new year, starting in London and then moving around Europe. The exhibition is being organized by CORTEX: Cooperation in Research and Training for European Excellence in the Neurosciences.

The hattip goes to Mind Hacks, who just featured the exhibit info in the post The Fire Within. Almost all The Beautiful Mind images use flourescence techniques, which we have shown before in Brainbows and More on Brainbow.

Below I feature some of the images. For more go for a visit to The Beautiful Mind.

Here are the photographers and their images:
-Carlos Barcia, Blood vessel, tumor, and infiltration of T cells
-Veronica Kurscha, Tranverse section of the spinal cord
-Matei Bolbora, Neural precursor cells from the embryonic striatum
-Jean-Marc Fritschy, Purkinje cell in the cerebellum

According to the original story, we learn that in 2002, Pamela Latrimore underwent an MRI that, in the eyes of some, imaged the Virgin Mary where most of us have a cerebellum (although, that would explain if she was having some motor control problems…). The original story, Do you see the Virgin Mary in this brain scan?, appeared in the TCPalm, Florida’s Treasure Coast and Palm Beaches’ news leader.

As the story reports:

Latrimore, a 42-year-old wife and mother without insurance, hadn’t ever really looked at the results of a 2002 MRI scan of her brain. So she didn’t know what her Catholic sister-in-law was talking about a few weeks ago when she said, “Oh my gosh, Pam, you have Mother Mary in your head.”

This story would be unmitigated fun, a chance to spin out all sorts of jokes about which parts of the brain ‘light up’ when we see a pattern of the Holy Mary in our brain images, except for the fact that, if you read a bit further in the TCPalm, you learn why Ms. Latrimore was getting brain scans in the first place, and perhaps why she and her relatives are searching for signs of any divine intervention.

She [Latrimore] prays for strength for her 23-year-old daughter and health for her family, many of whom — like her — are sick with a variety of serious ailments that seem to stem from a childhood in Jacksonville, Ark., a place where Agent Orange was manufactured and which has been investigated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Some Jacksonville residents were exposed to dioxin, a toxin that can cause a variety of illnesses, including cancer, asthma and liver problems.

Latrimore has had cervical cancer. She suffers from fibroidmyalgia, asthma, seizures, liver problems, ulcers and a variety of other ailments. She feels she is dying.

Latrimore does not have insurance, she was denied disability, and her husband is out of work. The medical bills have piled up — according to the story, she doesn’t know the total but suspects that they are now more than $100,000 that she does not have. And she’s apparently been diagnosed with an additional lung problem.

So this is a health care system without a safety net: take your brain scan, which was probably done looking for the cause of your seizures, and, if you’re lucky, it won’t just be used to diagnose your problem, but might get you a bit of money on eBay to pay for your mounting bills. After all, a toasted cheese sandwich with the Virgin Mary took in $28,000 a few years ago.

The listing on eBay for the Mary MRI can be found here. Reading the listing is heart-breaking, not only because of the woman’s own suffering, but also because of her account of how the manufacture of dioxin and Agent Orange has affected health in her community. She writes that she is putting the image up for auction, not only to raise money for her healthcare, but also to attract greater attention to the problem of environmental poisoning in her area of Florida.

A bit of background research quickly pulled up a story in The Nation, ‘Agent Orange’s Forgotten Victims’ from 1988, and other information on the manufacture, storage and dumping of toxic chemicals in Jacksonville, Arkansas, an area that eventually was declared Vertac/Hercules Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site. As Peter Montague writes online at Rachel’s Hazardous Waste News #311: ‘The Vertac site was used for manufacture of DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, toxaphene and the chemical warfare defoliants 2,4-D, Silvex, 2,4,5-T, and Agent Orange.’

In 1986, Vertac declared bankruptcy and left the site to the people of Arkansas to sort out. As The New York Times wrote (here for a more recent story on Jacksonville’s Vertac-generated woes):

Vertac abandoned the plant leaving behind roughly 30,000 barrels of chemical wastes, along with acres of contaminated soil, tanks filled with toxic materials, and miles of poisonous piping. The EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] considers the site one of the country’s worst hazardous waste sites, not only because of [the] extent of the contamination but also because the plant is only a few blocks from a day care center, a hospital, and hundreds of houses. (this passage quoted in Montague)

I won’t go into all the grim details, the political wrangling and community outrage around an incineration project, except to say that, well, they details are damn grim even though some researchers dispute the data on the human toxicity of dioxin (I wonder who funds those scientists?). The National Toxicology Program’s most recent discussion of 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-Dioxin (TCDD) is pretty damning (For a pdf of the section on dioxin in the 2005 Report on Carcinogens, Eleventh edition, click here). For more specific information on the Vertac Superfund site, you can check out Scorecard’s site on it.

In other words, I hope that some good bids come into eBay for the image of Our Lady of the Cerebellum. If you’re in the market, I’ll do what I can at Neuroanthropology to make sure it’s the most famous MRI ever taken…

h/t: Graça ao Vaughn for bringing us the lead on this one.

Still, I find Sivartha’s illustrations quite wonderful. Just like early anthropologists trying to cover all the important domains of one culture in one book, so Sivartha tries to jam everything in, to create an impossible representation. It doesn’t work, but the images do provide much to reflect upon.

As I pointed out in the previous post, however, many commentators suggest that it is not the gap in average test scores that really matters; rather, these critics argue that the different variance in boys’ and girls’ scores explains the disproportionate number of boys who produce exceptional scores (as well as exceptionally bad scores), and thus the marked gap of men and women in PhD math programs, in prestigious prizes for physics and related subjects, and in related fields like engineering. In the earlier post, I argued that even if this greater variance showed up reliably across all testing populations, what exactly was being illuminated was still not clear; that is, many other explanations–other than that men had better ‘math modules’ in their brains, or greater ‘innate’ mathematics ability, or something like that–could explain even very stable differences in math performance. At the time I suggested a number of other possibilities, such as sex differences in stress response during testing, as other possible explanations for even a universal ‘math gap’ (which still had to contend with studies like the two in Science which severely undermined the assertion of universality).

As if on cue, I stumbled upon a video and accompanying article in Science Daily on differences in stress responses among men and women: Neuroscientists Find That Men And Women Respond Differently To Stress (but don’t click on that link — keep reading!). Stress is a good candidate to explain a test-taking gap because the observable physiological processes offer abundant evidence that men and women don’t respond to stress in exactly the same way (although there are underlying commonalities). For example, stress causes different diseases in men and women, and some long-term psychological disorders that demonstrate sex-linked disparities seem to emerge from stress.

Unlike the ‘black box’ explanation that boys and simply better at math or evidence greater variability in innate ability, with no observable neural correlate or plausible explanatory mechanism, in variation in stress response we have a clear candidate for male-female difference that plausibly affects their performance and even physiology (for example, in different stress-related diseases).

Ironically, when I tracked down the original article that the Science Daily piece was likely based on (there’s no citation, so I can’t be certain), I had to delete all the quotes from the Science Daily article from the draft I was writing for this post (that’s why you shouldn’t link to it).

I give science writers a bit of stick from time to time, but in this case, the explanation of the research was not merely misunderstood, it was simply wrong, not even consistent with the abstract from the article I think the popular piece is based on (Wang et al. 2007). So even though the erroneous Science Daily article put me onto this thread, I’m only going to work from the piece published by Jiongjiong Wang and colleagues at the end of 2007 in the journal, Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.

Stress responses in men and women to arithmetic tasks

In the abstract, Wang and colleagues explain that they tested 32 subjects using both fMRI and endocrine salivary screening. In the experiment:

Psychological stress was elicited using mental arithmetic tasks under varying pressure. Stress in men was associated with CBF [cerebral blood flow] increase in the right prefrontal cortex (RPFC) and CBF reduction in the left orbitofrontal cortex (LOrF), a robust response that persisted beyond the stress task period. In contrast, stress in women primarily activated the limbic system, including the ventral striatum, putamen, insula and cingulate cortex.

The researchers also found that the men tended to have more intense responses in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system (e.g., the release of cortisol). According to the researchers, the increased activity in the men’s right prefrontal cortex (RPFC) under the acute stress condition was the most significant finding of their experiment, forming a biomarker for a distinctly masculine acute stress response.

What to make of all this? The researchers use a general description of these two different stress responses, first proposed by Taylor et al. (2000), as ‘flight-or-fight’ in men and ‘tend-and-befriend’ in women. At first read, I just groaned, and I’m still opposed to the essentialist and evolutionary mythology being touted as explaining an observable difference in performance. I’m not even going to start down the well-trod path I’ve beaten criticizing ‘evolutionary psychologists’ for naturalizing observed differences between men and women, simultaneously conjuring away the problem of explaining these differences by assuming that they are ‘inherent’ and attributing them to some dramatic fantasy of evolutionary selection — we’ve been here before (say at Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 or Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1).

In fact, their data is much more interesting. For example, Wang and colleagues point out that the difference in brain activation patterns might result from different stress coping strategies or from different response to high- and low-stress situations (see Wang et al. 2007: 237-8). Ironically, as Wang and colleagues discuss, the difference in men’s and women’s stress responses depended upon the stimulus being used to produce stress: some experiments used social rejection; others, like the Wang-led team, use arithmetic problems to create stress. Likely, different sorts of stressful situations produce subtle distinctions in stress responses, some evoking more social anxiety, for example, and others creating a greater sense of physical peril. The group offers a path for future research, suggesting that neuroimaging studies of stress responses on different sorts of cognitive tasks might help sort out what’s specific to mathematical problems or might be more general difference between men and women: ‘Given the sensitivity of stress responses to specific context and intensity, we are cautious to generalize the current finding to different types of stress’ (ibid.: 238).

These different stress responses likely affect other mental activities in a variety of ways; we know that not all responses, in parallel fashion, affect health or cortisol production or other physiological correlates of stress. In addition, it’s quite likely that men and women don’t read the situations as equally stressful, either for innate reasons or for encultured ones–the two would be very difficult to disentangle in adults as the physiological effects would be identical. For example, girls and boys might interpret a testing situation in different ways because of peer, family, social, or other dynamics.

But I’m just going to hold my nose about the ‘ev psych’ part of this and plow onward (my objection being the ontogenetic simplifications of how a trait might emerge rather than a phylogenetic objection to saying that men and women might have been subjected to different evolutionary pressures — someday I’m going to have to do a post on this). So, onward with nose held…

Differing stress responses: ‘fight-or-flight’ or ‘tend-and-befriend’

The ‘fight-or-flight’ response ‘invokes resources that increase focus, alertness and fear, while inhibiting appetitive goals to cope with the threat or challenge’ (Wang et al. 2007:236). This pattern shows up in the increasingly active RPFC, associated with vigilance and negative emotion, and the suppression of activity in the LOrF, linked to hedonic behaviour and positive feedback. In other words, in the ‘fight-or-flight’ response, according to this interpretation, an individual becomes very alert to potential dangers and anticipating dire consequences, much less capable of focusing on pleasure-seeking.

Female response, in contrast, ‘primarily involves the limbic system including ventral striatum, putamen, insula and cingulate cortex’ (ibid.). This pattern was labeled by Taylor and colleagues ‘tend-and-befriend,’ and included parts of the brain receptive to oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine and endorphin, systems that have been linked in previous research to social relations, attachment, and maternal behaviour. The researchers suggest that this social rewards system may blunt the acute stress response, leading women to respond in similar fashion to both high- and low-stress situations.

Wang and colleagues do point out that there are a lot of parallels between male and female responses, including very similar endocrine response, in spite of the predictions of the ‘fight-or-flight’/'tend-and-befriend’ contrast. The point being that, as in many human traits, male and female differences tend to appear in some lights as oppositions, but upon closer examination often reveal instead a largely common, underlying pattern (although the RPFC response was distinctive of their male subjects). Even the differences that do exist, such as a divergence in cortisol feedback due to the effects of reproductive hormones, may or may not be linked to observable differences, such as patterns of ‘ruminative thinking,’ as the researchers discuss. And the study itself didn’t turn up some patterns of activation that the researchers expected, such as a more prominent role for the amygdala (see, for example, Paul Mason’s discussion of the Role of Emotions in Brain Function).

Stress and cognitive function

Turning away from the more general effects of stress, focusing instead on the parts of the stress response that might affect must profoundly cognitive processing, we find that:

Activation of RPFC and right parietal regions [the pattern more pronounced in men] has been associated with various cognitive control tasks, including working memory, response selection and task switching, as well as inhibitory functions …. Ventral striatum along with several limbic regions [both pronounced in women under stress] have also been involved in learning in addition to tasks related to reward, motivation and emotion…. The different computational roles subserved by these brain regions may contribute to the observed gender differences in central stress responses. Although somewhat controlled in the regression analyses, this possibility (e.g. inhibiting incorrect responses in males and updating task strategies in females) cannot be completely ruled out, especially in the direct comparison of average stress responses between men and women.

Wang and colleagues specifically indicate recent research on mathematics and science ability (Hyde and Linn 2006) and suggest that the variation in stress response might underwrite pronounced differences in test results.

The RPFC, for example, is especially associated with executive functions (such as inhibiting emotional responses) and with strategic thinking, which might suggest a particular pattern of responding to stress. If women were more likely to focus on updating the possibility of reward, their own emotional states, and their motives while under stress, this might lead to lower scores when they were stressed by a time-constrained testing format. I’m still not persuaded that this is innately male or inherently impossible for women to achieve. If this is a pattern of brain activity especially likely to lead to certain test scores, and if some women are able to achieve extremely high test scores, than perhaps some women are able to learn this cognitive strategy. After all, it’s not like women don’t have these same parts in their brains. Likewise, I suspect that you could train patterns of response to stress in boys; certainly, the people I work with in sports training are convinced this is the case.

Implications for test-taking

First off, the experiment was ideal for exploring a possible stress-related contributor to the ‘math gap’ because it actually used mental arithmetic as the stimulus. Although not a perfect fit for a test-taking environment (where you don’t do the arithmetic in your head while holding still in a giant fMRI scanner), I doubt we’re going to get much better than this until the imaging technologies make some major jumps.

Second, in general, women after puberty have a lower threshold for perceived stress. The irony is that perceiving that one is stressed can often exacerbate one’s stress response. If you think you are anxious, you can make yourself more anxious. One can easily see how this might affect women’s performance on standardized tests. I never recall being all that stressed out on things like the SAT or GRE (I think I fell asleep during the GRE when I finished one section early), but for some people, this significantly influences their performance. I need to point out that Wang and colleagues specifically controlled for this effect in their research, so it’s not such a factor in their data, but it’s not hard to imagine that, especially given the length of a standardized test and the possibility that difficult questions might heighten stress during the course of an exam, this might become a factor in test score differences.

But the bottom line is that, if boys’ and girls’ brains respond differently to stress, this might disproportionately affect tests exploring various subjects. Female stress response might make their mathematics problem solving drop off more than men’s in timed tests (of course, we still have the much-less-discussed ‘reading gap’ to deal with, too). This sort of pattern does seem to show up in the gap between women’s performance on standardized testing in relation to men’s, and their across-the-board higher averages in marks on university courses (since broader admission of women into universities).

But stress might also lead to a narrowing of girls’ variance on standardized tests. It might diminish ability to perform at an extremely high level, but it also might lift the scores of the lowest scoring, least-motivated individuals. Lack of stress on a standardized math test — the situation boys might be more likely to find themselves in — might improve some young men’s scores, but it also might lead low performers to be even more blasé about their situation. Even the high RPFC activation in men might show up in boys as a clear-headed strategizing about the irrelevance of doing well on a standardized test if they know that they are not high performers in mathematics.

In other words, even a different pattern of brain activation (elevated activity in the RPFC) may simply provide the emotional environment in s stressful environment in which a boy might perform especially well, or calmly assess that the exercise was pointless given what he already knew about his ability. The result would be indistinguishable from an innatist argument that ‘boys have higher variance in innate math ability,’ but the underlying causal mechanism would be subtly different (and thus require different remedial projects if someone tried to address the variation).

One indicator of the possibility of these sorts of subtle mechanism that a Scientific American article by Halpern and colleagues cites is the fact that preschool children score similarly on cognitive tests of quantitative thinking and geometrical reasoning. The start to diverge when the children get to school. Innatist explanations suggest that the ‘true nature’ of boys and girls emerges when they enter school, but it’s just as likely that peer dynamics, including strong sex-stereotyping among kids, starts to really kick in when they are exposed to school. My point is not to argue that an innatist position is untenable, only that the pattern we see is equally consistent with other ways of thinking about how differences might arrive.

More on higher variance arguments

The Scientific American article also looks at the ‘higher variance’ of math ability argument that a number of proponents of innate ability gaps put forward (which I discuss at length in the previous post on math tests). The gap is profound, but the trend in that gap is also interesting. The authors reflect on data that was first assembled in the early 1980s on SAT scores:

There were twice as many boys as girls with math scores of 500 or higher (out of a possible score of 800), four times as many boys with scores of at least 600, and 13 times as many boys with scores of at least 700 (putting these test takers in the top 0.01 percent of 12- to 14-year-olds nationwide).

Although it has drawn little media coverage, dramatic changes have been occurring among these junior math wizards: the relative number of girls among them has been soaring. The ratio of boys to girls, first observed at 13 to 1 in the 1980s, has been dropping steadily and is now only about 3 to 1. During the same period the number of women in a few other scientific fields has surged. In the U.S., women now make up half of new medical school graduates and 75 percent of recent veterinary school graduates. We cannot identify any single cause for the increase in the number of women entering these formerly male-dominated fields, because multiple changes have occurred in society over the past several decades.

Although 3 to 1 is still a very large gap, it’s also startling to see that the gap can close from 13 to 1 to as little as 3 to 1 in a bit more than two decades. There may be an innate gap in math ability, but with all the change in these figures, it seems a bit premature to suggest that we know for certain that we’ve ascertained it and cannot affect change in the performance gap any further.

In addition, specialized courses designed to remedy the women’s specific deficits in visuospatial skills at the Michigan Technological University led to marked improvement among women in this area, one of the abilities considered to be strongly sex-linked, and to higher retention of women in university science and math programs. (I don’t have specifics on this intervention yet, but I will post more information when I get it.)

Again, this doesn’t prove that there are not innate differences between men and women: the origin of the gap in visuospatial skills is not at all clear. Because I’m more of a developmental systems theorist than an innatist, I would tend to look in the developmental trajectory of boys and girls for the difference rather than assume math ability springs from a gene or hormone. Thinking of the child as a developmental system, the gap may arise in an odd, indirect way; for example, boys relatively lower verbal abilities might lead them to compensate by developing visuospatial skills, or girls play patterns — whether due to innate tendencies or socialization — may give them less experience with visuospatial manipulation. Because the gap is mutable and the skills deficits at least partially remediable, I’d say that the burden of proof starts to fall on the innatists; show us where the innate visuospatial ability actually lives in the brain and how it comes into the world pre-destined if a whole host of studies are showing gaps are mutable.

In the end, I suspect that there are biological differences in girls’ and boys’ brains that contribute to differences in test score variance, but these differences may not be where we expect them. For example, they may have more to do with something that indirectly affects math testing like stress response or motivational structure in education. Innatist thinking is too easy, too inconsistent with the actual way that brains and cognitive abilities develop in an unfolding of the human organism in relation to a social and learning environment. There’s a lot of ‘mights’ in my account, but the fact that there are other plausible explanations for something like the math gap — even if it is universal (which the Science papers question) — shows overly glib assertions of innate difference to be a sloppy way out of what are really a whole set of interesting theoretical and empirical questions.

Stumble It!

References
Halpern, Diane F., Camilla P. Benbow, David C. Geary, Ruben C. Gur, Janet Shibley Hyde and Morton Ann Gernsbacher. 2007 (November). Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement: Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?. Scientific American (available online here)

Hyde, Janet Shibley, and Marcia C. Linn. 2006. Gender similarities in mathematics and science. Science 314 (5799): 599–600. (pdf available here)

Phipps, Alison. 2008. Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: Three Decades of UK Initiatives. Trentham Books.

Taylor, Shelley E., Laura Cousino Klein, Brian P. Lewis, Tara L. Gruenewald, Regan A. R. Gurung, and John A. Updegraff. 2000. Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review 107(3): 411–29. (abstract on Pub Med, pdf available here)

Wang, Jiongjiong, Marc Korczykowski, Hengyi Rao, Yong Fan, John Pluta, Ruben C. Gur, Bruce S. McEwen and John A. Detre. 2007. Gender difference in neural response to psychological stress. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2(3):227-239. doi:10.1093/scan/nsm018