It had a great line-up: Steven Rose, Douglas Hofstader, Maxine Sheet-Johnson, Timothy Ingold, and a host of Danish scholars whose work we can now all expore. The three days of the conference each addressed a different theme: Brain Plasticity, Awareness and Intentionality, and Beyond Dualisms.

You can read the Introductory Statement on the conference. Here’s one paragraph from the end:

Neuroscience seems to have learned from its critics. Reductive and neurocentric positions have to give way to the ideas that the plastic brain is capable of learning for life, and that both bodily movement as well as social activity leaves clearly formed traces in the development of the brain. Whenever we pray, learn to ride a bicycle, or read a book, the brain changes. The brain is not destiny. Are there no limits, human and neurobiological, to how much we can learn and to the extent that upbringing might effect changes in the brain?

The best thing is that you can get the videos from all the talks. So here is Steven Rose on The Future of the Brain – Promises and Perils of the Neurosciences (preceed by an intro to the conference), Jesper Morgensen on Any Limits to Neuroplasticity?, and Tim Ingold on The Social Brain.

You can access the entire program and all the videos at the Great Expectations conference website.

Video games are used in almost every classroom setting in the United States. Many games, like Math Blaster and Star Fall, focus on promoting students’ cognitive development and strengthening problem-solving skills.

Even seemingly non-educational games such as Sonic the Hedgehog have found their way into the classroom where students play the game in order to better understand Odysseus’ journey home. Playing an adventure game like Sonic the Hedgehog where the player must complete a series of missions or tasks and overcome various obstacles, students can learn not only by simply reading the Odyssey but also by interactively participating in their own quest.

Professors are even proposing the idea of developing a new public school with a game-centered curriculum, as this Christian Science Monitor article Video Games Start to Shape Classroom Curriculum states. Katie Salen, an associate professor of design and technology at the Parsons School of Design, describes this new approach:

“Kids are challenged to step into identities—mathematicians, scientists. They are immersed in and interdisciplinary setting, and instead of completing units, they go on a series of missions or quests, each of which has a goal.”

The Development of Interactive Video Games

The progression of interactivity throughout the history of video games plays a central role in current research of the potential benefits of video games. As video games have become more interactive over time (especially in the last decade), they have increasingly become a medium for the development of cognitive and problem-solving skills.

The first video game, Tennis for Two, was introduced on October 18, 1958. William Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist who also worked on the Manhattan Project, created the game as an interactive science exhibit. Developed on an analog computer, Higinbotham’s basic goal was to cure the boredom of the visitors of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

With the release of Tennis for Two, relieving boredom through computer technology quickly transformed into entertainment. Hundreds of visitors stood in line to play the game during its first debut on October 18, 1958. The game contained motion and graphics within the system and allowed the visitors to interact with an exhibit rather than just look at it.

While the first games were more interactive than staring at a television or an exhibit, they were both graphically challenged and clunky in how they engaged the players. The progression, however, would be incredible as games would develop into an extremely advanced technology.

Video Games began as commercial entertainment in 1971, as the first-ever coin operated system, Galaxy Game, was installed at a student union in Stanford University. Bill Pitts and High Tuck programmed the game, and based it off the existing computer game Spacewar! Students and other players waited in line to play for up to one hour and it cost them 10 cents a play or 25 cents for three turns.

By 1979, color was introduced and more familiar games were developed such as Pac-Man. These early arcade games were two-dimensional and present-minded. They had no plots, stories, planning or any other type of cognitive testing. Each game focused on meeting one task repeatedly, often with increasing speed or precision.

Video game systems arrived in the late 1980’s and in 1992 Dune II hit the market. Dune II became the first real-time strategy game to go mainstream. The players of Dune II had the ability to interact with the game on a variety of levels, including for the first time using a mouse to control units. As strategy came into play, users were not just focused on a mundane task (such as hitting a ball on a screen) but were forced to use reason and thinking to beat levels. The ability to plan, strategize, operate and execute became an integral part of gaming.

As game generations passed, graphics improved at an alarming speed (for more history, see the books The Ultimate History of Video Games and The Video Game Explosion). This technological progress allowed the games to become more realistic and even more focused on interaction. Improved graphics allowed for more realistic characters and levels, which in turn created a superior base for interaction.

Many researchers have investigated the effects of these improved graphics in providing a dynamic learning environment for the player. For example, Jan Plass and his research team believe that more sophisticated and engaging graphics help create a more conducive environment for learning.

In their paper Design Factors for Educationally Effective Animations and Simulations, Plass et al. (2009) state, “Because these dynamic visual environments are gaining increasing importance for the representation of complex ideas and communication of our thoughts in higher education as well as in professional settings, we are interested in empirically validated design principles that assure their educational effectiveness.”

Game systems have also introduced controllers that promote interaction whether by being shaped like actual objects (like a Guitar controller for Guitar Hero) or by tracking player’s movements.

One of the most recent revolutions in this type of interactive gaming is the Nintendo Wii. Using controllers that follow their every move, gamers can play sports on screen, fight off bad guys in their living room, and get exercise while doing it.

Wii is as interactive as gaming has become, including Wii Fit which works your body as well as your mind. Innovations like Microsoft’s Natal look to take this trend even further (besides the video below, here’s the E3 Microsoft comprehensive presentation, another promo featuring some fascinating interactive painting, and Milo the interactive boy). With this addition to gaming, and the future looking brighter than ever, games will become more and more integrated into our daily lives.

Video Game Music

Music and sound has also developed throughout the progression of interactive video games. Sound engineers and music editors have created full soundtracks for games that allow users to actually feel a certain way at different points in the game.

Video game composer Tommy Tallarico stated in this NPR piece on the Evolution of Video Game Music:

“If you remember in Space Invaders, you know, as the ships started to come down, with the aliens, and as they got closer and closer, the sound got faster and faster. Now, what the game programmers did was that they took the person’s heart rate, and as they’re getting closer and closer, people would start to panic.”

This is an example of the simple effects that a music composer can do to create a specific response from the gamer. Video game composers are so talented and advanced now that they are even performing concerts on grand scales.

In summary, the structure of games, the graphics, the controls, the sound, and the learning capabilities have all influenced how video games have become more interactive. As video game interaction grows, so do the benefits that result from playing them. Interactive gaming, as long as it is mixed with other healthy activities, can help develop certain skills and knowledge that are needed later on in life.

Benefits to Child Development

James Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and, has long argued that video games can be stimulating and help exercise the mind. Steven Johnson from Discover writes in regards to Gee’s arguments:

“These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the rewards circuits of the human brain. But they are now beginning to recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.”

Just as physical activities like running, golf, chess, and hiking can be all-absorbing for people who love challenging themselves, video games can provide a similar feeling because gaming can constantly give children challenges to overcome. Games can also provide growth opportunities in our new social and technological human ecology as Marc Prensky, a leader in the field, argues in his book, Don’t Bother Me Mom – I’m Learning.

The absorption and challenge of video games can have benefits. In the 2002 article “The Educational Benefits of Video Games (pdf)” Mark Griffiths writes about the research done that provides evidence for some of the positive impacts of video games. The studies found that video games reduce reaction times, improve hand-eye coordination, and raises the gamers self esteem and confidence.

For more recent work, see Sharp Brains’ description of recent research on video games and learning – Playing the Blame Game – as well as this review of Grand Theft Childhood, a 2008 book on the stigmatization of gaming and what children and adolescents take away from games, including violent ones like Grand Theft Auto. Neuroanthropology also put together a very popular round up on video games, the brain, learning and psychology.

Games for Education

Because video games have such a good base for interaction, they have been made into high quality educational systems as well. Certain gaming systems as well as computers have focused on making educational games for children.

Some of the most popular examples include Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, The Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, and Reader Rabbit. These games were all released during the 1980s and contributed to creating a powerful link between education and video games. These games not only provide a fun environment for learning, but also focus on specific skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and comprehension. For example, Math Blaster teaches math skills throughout the game while students defend the human race and defeat the robots from taking over the world.

Michael Abbott from The Brainy Gamer talks about the importance of using video games in education.

“[Professor James] Gee sees two separate educational systems operating today: one a traditional approach to learning; the other what Gee calls ‘passion communities.’ In Gee’s view, the latter produce real knowledge. Video games, virtual worlds and online social networks provide environments in which theses passion communities can form and thrive.”

Gee’s thinking, outlined in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, is similar to that of Katie Salen mentioned above. Salen has helped push forward the Institute of Play: Game School, a planned 6th to 12th grade school in New York City.

Researcher Jan Plass also believes that the more interactive and visual the learning experience is, the more effective it is for the learner. In his recent article (pdf), he and his colleagues write, “There is mounting evidence that the educational efficacy of visualizations depends on how well its design reflects our understanding of human cognitive architecture.” He covers much of this research in his course, Cognitive Science and Educational Technology, which has an online syllabus, class slides, and list of readings and related sites.

Can the Good Outweigh the Bad?

The following bullet points are just a few of the conclusions researchers such as James Gee, Katie Salen, and Jan Plass have made after studying the potential benefits of videogames and the development of children:

• Videogames provide elements of interactivity that stimulate learning
• They allow participants to experience novelty, curiosity, and challenge
• Videogame technology brings new challenges that can be incorporated into the education arena
• The most popular games are not simply difficult in the sense of challenging manual dexterity; they challenge mental dexterity as well
• Videogames can assist children in setting goals, ensuring goal rehearsal, and providing feedback and reinforcement

Today it is evident that video games can be beneficial to players in a number of ways. A child can learn and refine many skills through the use of video games that target specific areas of development, as well as through those that offer broad-scale enhancement.

For many people, these benefits can outweigh the seemingly negative effects of the violent nature of many video games on the market today. While children can be negatively influenced by graphic and violent games, they are also learning better cognitive and problem-solving skills, among many other skills.

We believe these dynamic and interactive learning environments created through video games can outweigh the negative perception society has on them. So the next time you hear someone say, “Stop wasting your time playing video games,” think about all the positive effects we have discussed above and ask yourself, “Am I really wasting time, or am I learning?”

- Eminem, Drug Ballad

Drug strewn lyrics and references are found in much of today’s popular music. What effect do these words have on the average listener? Would you let your 10 year old listen to this? Why not… they’re just lyrics right?

School House Rock: Monkey Hear, Monkey Do?
John Markert: Two Schools of Thought

1) Reflection Theory : “Music is popular because it reflects the values and beliefs of those who consume it.” Proponents of Reflection Theory examine cultural forms such as music lyrics to gain insight into social beliefs. Here music is used to probe the connection between society and culture. Supporters of this intellectual tradition see the audience consuming with a critical eye, selecting songs because the theme relate to them and their world.

2) Arnoldian Theory : “Music is didactic and acts as a socializing agent by teaching behavior.” The concern by those at the other end of the intellectual tradition is that song lyrics may teach inappropriate social behavior. Mathew Arnold laid the foundation for this perspective in the last century, and his initial assessment continues to remain popular.

This is where the real debate can begin. Are the music and lyrics of songs with drug, alcohol, sex, and violence references putting adolescents at a greater risk of alcohol and drug use? Or is it simply the culture that these songs and music are created and engulfed in?

Pros and Cons of the Two Schools

One can make a case for both opposing ideologies. On the one hand, it is easy to see how the music and general lyrics can influence adolescents into using drugs and alcohol. For example, when browsing for songs that contain any type of alcohol or drug reference it is not hard to find hundreds of songs that contain one if not both. “White Lines”, “Fight for Your Right to Light the Bong,” and “Crack Monster” are just a few of the songs that diminish the dangers and actually commemorate the use of drugs and alcohol.

Yet many artists use drugs in their music videos and on stage at their concerts like there is nothing wrong with the illegal use of substances (Blueberry Yum Yum – Ludacris) – just a reflection of the way these artists live. Even so, it remains relatively easy to see how adolescents can be influenced by both the music and by the artists’ lives.

Just a Hypothetical Lifestyle?

So is this music showing off an attractive lifestyle, or is it simply showing an artist’s habits? Let’s actually look at dollars and cents. In today’s competitive music market, just as sex sells in visual media, explicit music sells platinum records.

For example, the Any Town, USA record store is generally void of “cleaned up” versions of albums that have explicit lyrical content warnings. This is due in part to the low appeal on part of the consumer. No store will market it if it is not going to create revenue.

Case in point: Amazon.com is one of the few places to buy the clean version of Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, and it ranks #60,536 in Amazon record sales at the moment. The unedited version sells of Tha Carter III currently ranks #554. Regardless of factual or fictional drug within an artists’ lyrics, the sales show that the gritty, unclean lyrics are preferable to customers than the watered down counterpart.

Yet drugs have always been there, in one form or another, during the cultural emergence of popular music. Even before this music can be packaged and sold on sites like Amazon, specific types of drug use have often involved in the emergence of new genres of music.

From the hippies of the 60’s (think Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock) to the ravers in the 90’s, drugs have followed generations of people through their life, and their music. Certain musical genres garner demographic bodies of listeners who are inclined towards anti-establishment behavior. One avenue to express anti-establishment behavior is to deviate from the norm, or the status quo, through drug experimentation.

Take for example, the ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ generation of the 60s, a cultural rebellion against the rigid social structures in place, encompassing most of the post-WWII – 1950s American epoch. The era’s rigid social structures discouraged individuality, emotions, and sexual desires, in order to strengthen traditional orthodoxy. The 60s were a time for restlessness and rebellion. Teenagers of the 60s were more willing to experiment with alternative lifestyles, a.k.a. drugs. They were tempted to define their individuality through the 60s Counter Culture.

Mozart Classical Music – The New Lipitor?

It would be easy to blame bad drugs or alternative lifestyles. But the truth is more complicated than that. Let’s take classical music for example…

A study done on rats entitled “Music improves dopaminergic neurotransmission” shows that when exposed to classical music, the rats release dopamine, often associated with reward. Is the music manipulating the behavior of these mice? Well… Sugar can do the same thing… So once we ban classical music, we can go after the big red Kool Aid Man!

After all, more than a quarter of UK classical music fans have tried cannabis, says a study from the University of Leicester. Indeed, this research showed that fans of every style of music have taken drugs. In summation, the study points to the commonality of drug use across all social demographic groups. Classical music, which can be defined as benign in its lyrical content, attracts a body of listeners who dabble with drug use, just as other musical genres do.

To Each His Own

Music is more complex than the lyrics. Music is more complex than the culture behind it. Drug users of all walks of life listen to a whole slew of genres of music. When a person listens to music it turns into a personal experience between them and the music. There is not a specific correlation between drug users and a certain genre.

Did Michael Phelps’s recent run in with the authorities over marijuana use have anything to do with his partiality to Lil’ Wayne and other hip hop stars?… Probably not. The fact that he was partying with a bunch of frat bothers from the party-hard University of South Carolina probably did. This atmosphere was conducive towards his drug use.

What is certain is that listening to Lil’ Wayne before competition helped bring the US 8 gold medals. His music put him the mood for domination and enabled his mind and body to get pumped up.

Just like Phelps, every person has their own experiences with music and interpretations of music. A person chooses a certain genre to match their moods. Each person connects with certain lyrics and certain genres. The act of listening to music has different meanings for all, and the context of when one listens to his or her music is significant.

The two schools of thought (Reflection and Arnoldian Theory) are not taking these variables into account, nor the economics of selling albums. The circumstances and environment a person is in helps to determine what music they choose to listen to. These are the variables that need to be acknowledged before condemning a particular genre and its propensity for its listener’s drug use.

Variables THAT SHOULD be Taken into Account

Does the break down of weakening American institutions like the nuclear family, secularization of America of society, and weakening of public education lead to greater impressionability of youth towards lyrics containing sensitive, drug laced rhetoric? Decline of said traditional American institutions can lead to youth more receptive to drug experimentation.

In short, other at-large socializing factors also make youth more impressionable to drugs. The verdict: no single factor can be held solely accountable for inducing a person to take drugs. Artists who reference drugs in their music – your songs are vindicated!

-John Barany, Abby Higgins, Melissa Lechlitner, Joanna Schultz

Here are a few of our favorite songs that came out of working on this post… WARNING: This may or may not induce the listener to experiment with mind-altering substances. We DO NOT condone drug use without supervision under the care of a physician.

Because I Got High

Ayo for Yayo

I Gotta Stay High

Blueberry Yum Yum

For more research, see:

John Markert, Sing a Song of Drug Use-Abuse: Drug Lyrics in Popular Music — From the Sixties through the Nineties (pdf)
Also, accompanying Guardian article summarizing some of this research by John Markert.

KM Thomson, Addicted Media: Substances on Screen

Sarah Diamond et al., What’s the Rap About Ecstasy?

Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics. After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong.

Kristof cites Richard Nisbett’s new book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. I covered some of Nisbett’s work in the post IQ, Environment and Anthropology, and Jim Holt gave a strong review of the book recently in the NY Times. The publisher’s home page simply says that this book is a “bold refutation of the belief that genes determine intelligence.”

From the damning research of The Bell Curve to the more recent controversy surrounding geneticist James Watson’s statements, one factor has been consistently left out of the equation: culture…

World-class social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett takes on the idea of intelligence as something that is biologically determined and impervious to culture— with vast implications for the role of education as it relates to social and economic development. Intelligence and How to Get It asserts that intellect is not primarily genetic but is principally determined by societal influences.

Well, not quite. As Kristof notes, “While I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life. Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back. ‘Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,’ Professor Turkheimer said.”

First, for those interested in understanding IQ measures, I strongly recommend Greg’s posts Girls Closing Math Gap? Troubles with Intelligence 1 and The Flynn Effect: Troubles with Intelligence 2. In the first post, Greg takes on the idea of “natural” differences in male/female math ability, discusses problems with how IQ gets measured, and discusses how the “changing status of women seems to correlate pretty strongly with the math gap.” In the second post, Greg discusses James Flynn’s work on the steadily rising IQ scores seen around the world, what intelligence actually means, and how best to measure it.

Turning to the inequality side, Kristof’s point is that on a level-playing field genetics can become a primary factor in IQ scores. But just like low-quality nutritional environments can lead to stunting of physical growth, so too can unequal environments stunt the growth of brain function and intellectual growth, as we’ve written about before in Poverty Poisons the Brain and Poverty and the Brain: Becoming Critical.

Eric Turkheimer has a recent paper with K. Paige Harden and John Loelin entitled, Genotype by Environment Interaction in Adolescents’ Cognitive Aptitude (pdf). Using 839 twin pairs from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, the paper shows that “Shared environmental influences were stronger for adolescents from poorer homes, while genetic influences were stronger for adolescents from more affluent homes.” In an accompanying press article, Turkheimer says “[This research] suggests that if you’re going to work with people’s environment to try and increase IQ, then the place to invest your money is in taking people in really bad environments and making them OK, rather than taking people in pretty good environments and making it better.”

Better outcomes are also a concern for Kristof. He notes that Nisbett “strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes.” The Milwaukee Project showed that in a randomly assigned study, “By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group. Even years later in adolescence, those children were still 10 points ahead in I.Q.”

Nisbett also pushes a simple idea: “tell junior-high-school students that I.Q. is expandable, and that their intelligence is something they can help shape. Students exposed to that idea work harder and get better grades. That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; deprived of an excuse for failure, they excel.”

For more on these types of interventions, see Nisbett’s recent op-ed Education Is All In Your Mind. The one thing I would add is that motivation needs to work hand-in-hand with opportunity. Working harder to no effect, with little sense that one’s effort will lead to a better outcome, is pernicious.

Kristof has addressed education and intelligence in other columns, which I also recommend. He wrote about DC schools and the reform efforts of Michelle Rhee in Education’s Ground Zero. Earlier he argued for education as our number one national priority, and a needed focus for both stimulus money and for making the US globally competitive. And in Raising the World’s IQ he discussed the environmental side of generating change, in this case the importance of iodized salt. I’d add lead to that as well, which even at low levels is linked to lower IQ scores.

Recent fears about the negative cognitive consequences of the social networking site Twitter, which I mentioned in an earlier post, Is Facebook rotting our children’s brains?, led me to recall Steve and Pete’s battle for high FQR. In both cases, concerned observers might wonder whether patterns of mental activity can lead to long-term neural degeneration; I haven’t checked in on Steve or Pete in more than 20 years, but I suspect they’re both locked in institutions living out a cruel Chevy Chase imitation from which they can no longer escape.

Twitter, even more than other Internet-based social networking applications, seems to provoke apocalyptic fears of mass mental degradation. Over at Alternet, for example, Alexander Zaitchik asked Twitter Nation Has Arrived: How Scared Should We Be? In the piece, Zaitchik wonders whether what was ‘once an easily avoided subculture of needy and annoying online souls’ was bringing about the apotheosis of all that is loathsome in American pop culture: ‘look-at-me adolescent neediness, constant-contact media addiction, birdlike attention-span compression and vapidity to the point of depravity.’ Rob Horning of Pop Matters warns about ‘Twitterification’ in a piece titled, Foucault’s Facebook. Keith Olbermann named Twitter ‘worst person in the world,’ …for the one episode at least (see video at You Tube); Olbermann found someone already Twittering in his name, even using his email address. And if you’re not already convinced that Twitter is the unmentioned fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, John Mayer’s Twitter obsession is blamed for Jennifer Aniston pulling the pin on their relationship.

Fortunately, even if we are on the non-stop plane to cognitive Armageddon, Web 2.0 assures us that we will have clever guerilla videos about our own immanent destruction as our in-flight entertainment. From SuperNews, we have a helpful cartoon, ‘The Twouble with Twitters’, to explain to us ‘the latest socially networking micro-bloggy thingy,’ especially if you’re a slow-on-the-uptake parent not sufficiently worried about adolescent technology use (are there any?).

More after the jump…

But first, a caveat or two…

Before I go any further, I have to offer a couple of caveats so that my own position in this particular moral panic is a bit clearer. However, if you want to cut to the chase, skip to the next heading below the ‘fail whale’ picture:

1) Although status as a geek blogger may normally be a symptom of an early technology adopter — I am not one. Old mobile phones maintain my loyalty even when offered snazzy new ones because adapting to new ones is so frustrating. My old laptop on which I’m writing this has worn off keys and several irreparable structural problems, but I’m slow to upgrade. And in general, new technologies only hold interest when it’s obvious that they can make easier some essential task in my life (seldom to add new functions to daily life) or when a dependable piece of technology must be laid to rest.

2) I do not have a Twitter account, nor do I plan on getting one. A Facebook account in my name was put up by a student, but I’ve never figured out how to use it or update it. (Do any of my former students know my password since they put up the account?) If anyone wants to stalk me, you are going to have to used old-fashioned techniques like just Googling me or waiting until I blog. It seems hard enough keeping up with the constant onslaught of email without monitoring tweets. In general, communication seems an impediment to serious writing, so I will frequently hide from all communication (including conversation) when I need to get something done in my intellectual life.

3) My 19-year-old daughter is (was?) a heavy user of My Space, and like many adults, when I’m inhabiting the parental social role, social networking strikes me as a staggering waste of time and energy. Of course, my mother said the same about Dungeons and Dragons. Parents will likely always say this about adolescent activities unless they involve happy completion of household chores or meaningful child labour, preferably heavy physical labour or piecework producing significant income streams.

Even though a registered Techno-Curmudgeon and Grumpy Father-of-Teenager, I won’t be hating on Twitter in this post because my own refusal to participate in a particular wave of communication technology need not be justified by disparaging the technology itself. I’m more interested in the particular shape technophobia takes in attacks on Twitter, and asking whether these fears are neuroanthropologically plausible or, in fact, overblown in light of cross-cultural and evolutionary evidence about the development and variability of human cognition.

I’m also not going to comment on the latest technophobic rants by the Lady Susan Greenfield (see, for example, the frightening Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist in The Daily Mail). She still can’t site any evidence, and, in a recent interview on ABC (the Australian network), she demonstrated she still can’t tell a social networking site from a video game (these problems are discussed in the previous post, Is Facebook rotting our children’s brains?).

For example, in the recent interviews, Greenfield tries to pin an increase in the rate of autism on online communication, which is so preposterous it beggars the imagination: how many people become autistic after using social networking websites?

Fail whale

One thing that a number of commentators have pointed out is that Twitter acts as a bit of an inkblot for an older generation, either declaring it a harbinger of the demise of complex thought or proclaiming it a revolution in human social life. Samantha Bee and John Stewart at the Daily Show got into the act, especially after it became widely known that Congress was busy Tweeting — even notorious late tech adopter John McCain! (see stories at Time or on McCain’s Twitterview at cnet).

Bee makes the point that some of the technoenthusiasm among — how shall we say this? — older adopters in politics and media appears to be a desperate attempt to claw back some relevance to a younger generation that just does not seem to care. With a nineteen-year-old daughter, I’m abundantly aware that this is a recipe for severe parental pathos (just give it up – we’re ancient in their eyes, and no amount of techno-hipness is going to fix that). As Bee explains to Old Man Stewart, young people love Twitter,… according to older people.

But it’s also the case that some older people loathe Twitter, so perhaps it behooves Neuroanthropology to contemplate the potential effects of the technology, specifically…

Can Twitter make you stupid?

Critics of Twitter bemoan the tight constraints that the 140-character-limited format places on communication, the mangled grammar, SMS-style abbreviations, emoticons, and other character-economizing techniques that result. Alexander Zaitchik, of Alternet, for example, is emphatic in his critique of the cognitive consequences of Twitter:

What was once just a colorful special-needs classroom on the Internet is starting to look like a steel spike aimed at the heart of what remains of our ability to construct and process complete grammatical sentences and thoughts.

The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee has a bit of fun with the short attention span allegedly evidenced by Twitter-users by suggesting that there will eventually be Grunter for those who can’t even be bothered to write or read 140-character Tweets. And Slate video brings us Flutter, a parody web-based company for those who find 26 characters enough to capture their thoughts or actions.

In contrast, enthusiasts see the short length as one of Twitter’s primary selling points; ‘micro-blogging’ is alleged to be more efficient, faster, more democratic, and less demanding of time-starved users. For example, Anita Hamilton at Time Magazine argues that it is precisely because Twitter is ‘totally silly and shallow’ that it is ‘on its way to becoming the next killer app.’

Like SMS and texting, Twitter forces users to economize on the many superfluous articles demanded in formal English, generating a simplified grammar like a pidgin. Some of the same quirks of English that are eliminated in Twitter-speak are also neglected in different vernacular dialects, things like helping verbs or articles. For example, my own least favourite is dropping ‘to be’ in expressions like ‘this room needs cleaned,’ but that’s also one I hear in conversational Aussie and upper Midwest US English, too. The most technophobic version of this fear is that, through writing mangled Koko-the-gorilla level grammar in Twitter, users will gradually lose the ability to form more complex grammatical constructions, and then lose the underlying capacity to think in any structure more complex than Subject-Verb-Object-☺.

For the fear of grammar’s annihilation to be proportional, critics would have to demonstrate that simply using a reduced, abbreviated communication format leads the user to lose grasp on grammar. I’m a little suspicious about this because the much-maligned degradation of grammar began long before the advent of Twitter. As an academic with writerly pretensions, I’ve been amazed at the poor quality of student writing for as long as I’ve been reading it; recent examples are no worse than what I remember seeing in the early 90s, when email was new, the Internet hadn’t gone graphic, and Twitter was still a distant nightmare over the virtual horizon. I suspect that the inability of some students to write is one of those complex, multi-causal phenomena, with contributions from all sorts of angles: changes in curriculum, a shift away from focus on traditional grammar instruction, alterations in student ambition and motivation, changed communication practices, even the democratization of university access.

The dangers of mangled grammar, in speaking, for example

One of the clearest bits of evidence that Twittering (or texting or some other yet-to-be-discovered network communication, like Grunting) will not permanently impair our ability to form thoughts negatively is the very gap between written and spoken language. In studies of children, for example, Harrell (1957) found that past the age of 13, the average length of a written sentence exceeded that of spoken language, and across all ages, written grammatical complexity tended to be greater than spoken linguist complexity. Even though writing was especially complex, Harrell found that orally narrating stories tended to be longer than written ones. That is, the simpler grammar of spoken English did not necessarily impoverish narration; rather, the effort of writing tended to decrease the length of stories and lead to greater economy of words (much like texting does to language).

If one looks at Twittering or texting, not as a degenerate form of written language, but rather in relation to spoken conversation, one gets a very different picture of its inadequacies. Close analysis of naturally-occurring conversations reveals that spoken language is seldom built with the same grammatical care and consistency as written text. Utterances are rarely complete sentences, and feature such non-grammatical constructions as abundant fragments, mis-starts, odd ellipsis and verbal pauses (ummm…). Spoken language tends to be more expansive, less efficient, but also more lexigraphically constrained, with a smaller vocabulary and greater word repetition.

Conversational English is heavily dependent upon context, with indefinite pronouns and deixis (‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘there’) which can become incomprehensible in transcription because the words are taken out of context. Anyone who has ever waited too long to transcribe a conference audio tape or recorded interview knows well that even a high quality recording can be hard to follow without the context to draw upon to make sense of utterances. In contrast, written language is self-contained and overly definite compared to speech, with no interactive elements (such as questions and dialogue) and an independence from context that speech does not have.

In other words, if using non-grammatical English endangers thought, we all need to take an immediate vow of silence, or learn to speak in fully blown sentences. Of course, if we talk that way, we’ll sound like classic movies, when the dialogue seems impossibly artificial and rehearsed, before script-writing became more naturalistic.

One thing I’m curious about is the way that Twitter and texting, although they are speech-like in their lack of containment (in part simply due to length), still travel without context. I wonder to what degree the lack of context leads to patterns of inaccurate inference or poses cognitive challenges for both texter and recipient. What I suspect is that interpreting texts likely demands of the reader a projection of context that is probably mostly accurate given that both texter and recipient share patterns of social context but that might become impenetrable or misinterpreted when this is not the case (for example, with celebrities texting fans).

In the same way, conversation is a multi-modal form of communication, with dialogue occurring not only through audible interaction, but also through visual perception of facial expressions, gestures, and body language. David McNeill’s brilliant book, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (1992), discusses how even children communicate different sorts of information through speech and through gesture when trying to recount what happened in a Tweety and Sylvester cartoon. Gestures, according to McNeill, form a kind of parallel language, linked to mental images in an imaginary story-telling space. How do texters or Tweeters compensate for the radical reduction in available communication channels, or do they? What I suspect is that many texts and Tweets are formulaic, less about communicating information than about establishing co-presence or social connection, as I’ll discuss below.

If you’re interested in the contrast of spoken and written English, there’s a nice online unit on the subject from Open University, English grammar in context.

Linguistic innovation: is texting a new pidgin?

Twitter and other abbreviated codes are hardly unprecedented; telegraph Morse code, naval flag signaling, hand signaling in some professions (like around aircraft), trade languages or pidgins, even writing prescriptions as a doctor often involve highly reduced forms of communication. In fact, rather than cognition being reduced by the restricted format, we find instead that these limited codes often become richer and richer the more that they form dominant modes of communication.

For example, deaf sign languages, while they may have once been reduced derivative of spoken language, have become languages in their own right, with grammatical principles, inflection, and the characteristics of aural language. Likewise, the more a pidgin becomes a dominant mode of communication, the more complex it grows; the generation that grows up with a pidgin as a first language will usually transform it into a stable, complex creole, as researchers on pidgins and creoles such as Jared Diamond (1991, before his recent apotheosis) have described (see, for example, John Holm’s work [2000]).

Like Twitter-speak, pidgins, creoles and sign languages were long looked down upon by outsiders who considered them debased, degenerate versions of their contributing languages. So the example from language formation is that, the more people Tweet, the more likely Tweeting (or texting more generally) will develop stable grammars of their own with rules for use not included in the ‘trunk’ language. One clear case of this is the adoption of abbreviations and emoticons that are widely employed by users but impenetrable to the Twitter-illiterates (not to be confused with the fear of someone becoming Twitterate).

We find evidence of the sort of linguistic invention that we would expect in an area of rapid communication change in text-speak. For example, the rise of emoticons and abbreviations to inflect the short phrases is, in a way, pushing the orthography of English in new directions. Emoticons have certain similarities to pictographs (like hieroglyphics) and ideographs (like Chinese characters). The abbreviations remind me of the sorts of formulaic Latin codes that I was forced to write on my papers by some of my Jesuit instructors (for example, ‘AMDG’ in the top left corner of the page for Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, ‘for the greater glory of God’ – ironic considering some of the stuff I was writing…).

The pictographs evidence a kind of open innovation and visual intelligence whereas the abbreviated formulaic phrases, to me at least, look like an insiders’ code, a kind of specialized argot that only the Twittagentsia will understand. (Again, in confessional mode, I thought ‘lol’ stood for ‘lots of love’ for several months when I first saw it, demonstrating my abject outsider status.) Subcultural groups frequently generate their own slang, meaning that it becomes increasingly ‘costly’ in terms of learning and time in order to join them and allowing in-group members to signal each other their depth of knowledge. So, although abbreviations may be especially valuable in character-limited genres, they’re hardly unprecedented or a sign of cognitive collapse. Both Australia and Brazil, for example, favour abbreviations to a much greater degree than I found in the US, in part because both have extraordinary bureaucratic proliferation, another in-group where specialized knowledge is hard-won and signaled extravagantly.

It would be interesting to compare different emergent Twitterlects or text codes – say Japanese, HK English, American English, and different European languages – to see if there are any patterns among them in terms of shortening strategies, or shared code. Because Twitting is likely to occur mostly within a language group, rather than between users of different first languages, I wouldn’t expect a pidgin-like dialogue to arise, but an example like Hong Kong or Singaporean English might be an interesting counter-example.

Living online: cognitive consequences of interruption

Okay if grammar is likely not to be a casualty of Twitter, what about the possible deleterious effects on thinking and interaction behaviour of all those constant Tweets bleating away at us? Won’t the constant intrusion of social interaction or electronic stimulation into nearly every waking moment of one’s life have consequences for the way we think and behave?

Although we may have confidence in our ability to ‘multi-task,’ for example, our attention is strictly single-tracked, as a number of studies have found (see, for example, John Medina’s website for his book Brain Rules). At Crucial Thoughts, a poster worries that Twitterfox is ‘dangerous for your cognitive health.’ Vaughan at Mind Hacks points to a similar article by Brandon Keim, Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains, in Wired Magazine (which also has a graphic that I find pretty disturbing.

Keim’s article is based on an interview Maggie Jackson about her recent book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, in which she cautions of the effects of our ‘high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society.’ Jackson warns that a ‘never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively’ (from Keim’s article). The effect could undermine civilization as we know it:

Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we’ll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.

Vaughan takes this technophobia on with elegant examples from his own life, not least of which is the most distracting of all old – very old — media, in his post The myth of the concentration oasis:

If you think twitter is an attention magnet, try living with an infant. Kids are the most distracting thing there is and when you have three of even four in the house it is both impossible to focus on one thing, and stressful, because the consequences of not keeping an eye on your kids can be frightening even to think about.

Normally I don’t quote at length in my posts – after all, why not just read the original – but why rewrite this section when Vaughan does it so well? He points out that, in fact, the time and space to concentrate may be the anomaly in the history and sociology of human cognition:

For people trying to work and run a family at the same time, not only are the consequences of missing something more important and potentially more dangerous, but it’s impossible to take a break. A break means your kids are in danger, your family doesn’t get fed and you’re losing money that buys the food.

Now, think about the fact that the majority of the world live just like this, and not in not in the world of email, tweets and instant messaging. Until about 100 years ago everyone lived like this.

In other words, the ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, is the strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.

New technology has not created some sort of unnatural cyber-world, but is just moving us away from a relatively short blip of focus that pervaded parts of the Western world for probably about 50 years at most….

The past, and for most people on the planet, the present, have never been an oasis of mental calm and creativity. And anyone who thinks they have it hard because people keep emailing them should trying bringing up a room of kids with nothing but two pairs of hands and a cooking pot.

In this post, Vaughan is being particularly ‘neuroanthropological,’ using the tried and tested techniques of cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparison to denaturalize our own condition, pointing out that what we might assume to be the ‘natural state’ of humans is, in fact, a bit of an aberration. (Check out the comments on Vaughan’s post as well.)

As Huberman, Romero and Wu (2009) suggest in a recent article in First Monday, ‘attention is the scarce resource in the age of the Web.’ Although social networks may look vast and distracting, most people do not actually interact or pay much attention to the majority of people in their ostensible ‘networks.’ That is, far from social networking causing a new highly distracted state, we both find that distraction is a more pervasive human condition and that, even when in the distracting environment of social networking, we simply ignore a lot of what is happening.

The point for me is not that being distracted or not being distracted is ‘normal,’ but that both are social products with cognitive consequences. A space free of distraction, in which one can engage in the thinking behaviour that leads to extended arguments, writing, creativity, and the like, is actively created, not just determined by our context, whether that context is children or customers or telephones or Twitter or life-threatening predators. One could say that the interruption-free space that facilitates certain kinds of thoughts is a social and technological achievement, likely open to only some people (non-care-givers, those with access to exclusive spaces). The fact that medieval scholars were often cloistered and that university professors were once required to be celibate clergy members demonstrates that concerns about ‘distractions’ on intellectual work are hardly new.

When my students tell me that they have a hard time putting together a consistent argument in an essay, I ask them whether they wear headphones and how many Instant Message windows they have open on their computer desktop when they try to write (see Grinter and Palen 2002 on ‘multitasking’). Of course, many of them are engaged in active self-distraction; Twitter is hardly unprecedented in this way. But I have the same problem around the farm sometimes (as I write this, my wife and I are both trying to concentrate, but our six-month-old colt is harassing his mother and charging around the paddock outside our window in spite of four inches of rain having just fallen on the sloppy ground – distracting).

To assume that a technology is inherently distracting and so pervasive that it cannot be turned off or tuned out is an odd kind of technological determinism, a sense of powerlessness in the face of our own creation. As Vaughan argues, text messages, emails and Twitter are far easier to shut off than babies, family members, or even foals. If we are alarmed that we are distracted by these media, we should ask ourselves what is so important that we won’t solve the ‘problem’ in the most obvious way.

Privacy and inattention

Another concern about Twitter is that the very need to use it signals the spread of narcissism or some other personality frailty. In an article, A load of Twitter, which appeared in The New York Times, author Andy Pemberton cites a number of psychologists who see Twitter as a symptom of a deeper psychic problem in our society.

Dr. David Lewise, for example, opines that Twitter is a sign that we fear our annihilation by anonymity: “We are the most narcissistic age ever…. Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.’

(Of course, as Steve of Belfast wrote in the comments on Pemberton’s article, ‘If leaving short messages on the internet for others to read is a waste of time, then the Times presumably wouldn’t bother letting readers leave comments here…’ on the webpage for the Pemberton article.)

The desire to communicate, however, is not always a need to spread new information; sometimes we interact simply to feel connected to each other. The vacuousness of most tweets is probably no greater than the vapidity of most conversation. As Dominik Lukeš writes in response to the article, A load of Twitter :

Much of our discourse serves no greater purpose than primate grooming (cf. Robin Dunbar) and that includes a lot of academic discourse – the whole referencing system is based on not much more. So when the journalist [Pemberton] asks “What kind of person shares information with the world the minute they get it?”, the answer is any normal person does. Twitter just makes it possible to share instantly with many people but it relies entirely on well-established social and psychological phenomena that are not only perfectly normal but necessary to the functioning of humans in groups.

In fact, the same social forces that compel socialization may also drive the uptake of new communication media. Research suggests that Instant Messaging and SMS (Short Message Service on mobile phones), for example, become almost a social obligation in certain peer groups, with interactions in school continuing online when children returned home (Grinter and Palen 2002).

Having inadvertently ‘eavesdropped’ (or the visual equivalent) on some of these interactions, the vast majority seem to be a sort of textual equivalent of the kind of pointless verbal play (‘whaddup dawg’ talk) or spiraling post-adolescent social drama that occupies vast amounts of young minds’ cognitive resources in normal speech and interaction. Grinter and Palmer generously refer to this activity as ‘socializing.’ Why would we expect electronic media to be any different? In other words, far from being a sign of psychic frailty, most social communication is banal and mundane, so we shouldn’t be terribly concerned that people are using a ‘killer new app’ to do precisely what they do through much more ancient modes of self expression.

What seems to bother some critics is that this sort of mundane expression would normally be ‘private,’ but that it becomes ‘public’ through Twitter. Like Vaughan’s discussion of thinking space, however, the fear for the erosion of privacy assumes that private space is a universal human endowment, when it is anything but.

As any anthropologist or even world traveler well knows, the boundary between what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’ varies widely across societies. In some, women can only travel in public by transporting a fabric enclosure around on their bodies; in others, the body is even less private than in the United States or Europe (which are not uniform in this regard). In Brazil, for example, people are much more comfortable with body-to-body contact with strangers; the same contact that would demand, ‘Oh, sorry about that,’ in the US elicits no response on a Brazilian bus or at a concert.

In some places, daily life is carried on in close proximity to others, with flimsy walls at best, or no structures all, to separate family members or even neighbours, so that the most ‘intimate’ conversations likely have multiple unacknowledged audience members. When families live in one room, sexual interaction between parents is frequently overheard by children and in some longhouse dwelling communities, couples have to hide in gardens for ‘privacy.’ In some societies, one’s true name is so private that he or she will go to the grave with virtually no one knowing it; in others, the desire for ‘fame’ or ‘renown’ demands that people constantly engage in attention-seeking behaviour and public display. Although we may feel such deep shame that privacy seems ‘natural’ to us, we know that standards for all sorts of ‘private’ behaviours vary widely.

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about ‘sanctioned eavesdropping’ and ‘civil inattention,’ the generally unspoken standards we have for interacting in public in ways that we would prefer people not to observe too closely (see Adrian Chan’s interesting discussion of these concepts on Attention and inattention on Twitter and a follow up Transient conversation networks on Twitter). Goffman felt that urban life was only possible through civil inattention as we are forced by close proximity and restricted living space to avoid deep engagement with everyone we encounter.

Civil inattention allows us to dwell in the midst of masses of anonymous strangers and feel little need to identify them or obligation to interrelate with each other (see, for example, Goffman 1963). Even when forced to interact in public life, minimizing our attention to individuals (how many times to people actually look a bank teller or cashier in the eyes?) allows us to engage in manic, shallow interactions, making purchases, crossing paths in the street, and engaging in everyday life. As Goffman writes (1963:84), civil inattention involves giving a person just enough attention ‘to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present.’ (See also Wayne Martin Mellinger’s weblog post, Doing Modernity through Civil Inattention.)

Privacy concerns often arise when individuals don’t adhere to the same standards we have for public inattention, for politely ignoring interactions that are only partially public. Along the wrong side of this boundary are impolite stares, rude eavesdropping, even stalking. The situation in online communities is that the standards are not very clear at all, and the act of posting information about one’s self online is the kind of behaviour that Goffman suggests might invalidate any claim to anonymity. Just as being or behaving abnormally means that the restraints on others to maintain inattention are lifted (see, for example, Garland-Thomson 2006), posting personal information online can seem to be an ambiguous act, one that might signal the voluntary surrender of one’s right to private anonymity in a virtual public space.

The irony is that, at the same time that modes of public relation invade our daily lives, encouraging us to self-promote, ‘network’ and engage in very public ‘private’ interactions, we also feel our own vulnerability to privacy invasion more acutely with growing concerns about identity theft, routine surveillance, and the security of personal information.

My sense is that those participating in social networking practices like Twitter are responding to ambiguity in the public-private boundary in new media with enthusiastic extension, allowing new parts of their social lives to become public. In contrast, those who are afraid of the new possibilities are responding by trying to tighten the boundary around the ‘private,’ even to extend what is considered ‘private.’ Obviously, new media make it hard to fall back on cultural consensus about what is appropriately defined one way or the other; there simply is vague precedent, with both sides able to cite parallels for their own perspective.

Final thoughts

Perhaps one of the most annoying things about both Twitter proponents and critics is the myopic, presentist assumption that whatever change they (or their children) are currently in the midst of is so utterly unprecedented, so universe-altering, that we are poised on the cusp of either revolution or complete collapse. From a cross-cultural, evolutionary or comparative perspective, these declarations look like the flipside of each other; equally silly and ill-informed, even if diametrically opposed.

The cognitive consequences of Twitter are likely negligible, although Twitter itself may be part of a larger cultural movement with a range of consequences (for example, the neurological effect of hours spent online and thus not engaged in things like exercise). Steve and Pete and their Fletch quotations, like countless other examples, probably demonstrate that the human brain, thankfully, thrives on a stimulation of all sorts, even if it looks asinine to someone who does not share the interest.

My own concern is more that modes of interaction from customer service and public relations are becoming more and more pervasive in a range of places; Twitter and personal webpages seem to me to be a subset of activities that encourage us to consider ourselves as products to be promoted, as portfolios to be built for potential employers, or as candidates for social approval. The stress of treating the self as a sales project, of transforming self-improvement or just enjoying life into a kind of long-term product development, seems to me to be part of an insecure age.

I’m not saying that we are ‘the most narcissistic age ever’ or something like that. Rather, our age seems to be taking its mythology and its spiritual practice from a range of promotional strategies, transforming wholesale a range of activities by reconceiving them as part of a personal marketing campaign. At work, in social life, at school, even increasingly in our personal life, we are encouraged to transform everyday activities into resume-stuffers, network-builders, or chances to add to our profiles, in all the forms these take. In this context, Twittering about the inanity of everyday life to our ‘followers,’ even if they pay us little attention, might even feel like a bit of a relief…

Further reading:

If you still haven’t had your fill on Twitter-related musings, there’s much, much more available on line. The Guardian announces Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink, just make sure to check the dateline before you get too worked up. The best part is the effort to convert their archives into Twitter format: “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

For general information on social networking sites, check out A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 by Jeremiah Owyang. Owyang also also provides a kind of executive summary cum business strategy reading of Huberman, Romero and Wu (2009, below) at Understanding HP Lab’s Twitter Research.

If you’re interested in Lady Susan Greenfield’s issues with Twitter, Facebook and computer technology in general, surf your short attention span over to the ABC All in the Mind website for Computers and your head – Susan Greenfield on All in the Mind.

In the face of the mounting luddite charge on Twitter, Chuck Tryon countered with, Why You Should Be on Twitter. Or check out at least marginally positive stories about Twitter in The Boston Globe (‘All a-Twitter’) and The New York Times (‘Twitter? It’s What You Make It’).

One of the better responses to the Baroness Greenfield and her ilk is provided by Robert Mackey at Is Social Networking Killing You? on The New York Times website. Mackey has a bit of fun with Greenfield’s interviews (she deserves it), but he especially deals well with a recent paper by Dr. Aric Sigman in Biologist on the ‘biological implications of social networking.’

Another take-down on the pseudo-psychology of anti-Twitter technophobia is provided by Dominik Lukeš in Twitter backlash exposes shallowness of modern psychology. I suppose the title sort of says it all…

Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock collects some quotes and links about others’ experiences with news being broadcast through Twitter, especially around recent NASA-related events. See Journalism on Twitter?. Although I agree with some of the sentiments, I also am uncomfortable by the hunger for ‘right now’ news, the demand for coevality with events everywhere, that I feel is already part of the information overload many of us fight to overcome.

I quite like an older post on social networking and sociological analysis, again by Vaughan at Mind Hacks, The distant sound of well-armed sociologists. In the post, he discusses how social network analysis can take advantage of our own online networking practices to understand better how we influence each other in all sorts of online forums. The opportunities might make old school face-to-face social network analysts green with envy (so much data, so little time).

Cartoons from Web Designer Depot and Webasticno.com.

Stumble It!

References:

Diamond, Jared. 1991. Reinventions of Human Language. Natural History May 1991: 22-28. (a version available here)

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2006. Ways of Staring. Journal of Visual Culture 5(2):173-192. (Abstract)

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. Glencoe: Free Press.

Grinter, Rebecca E., and Leysia Palen. 2002. Instant messaging in teen life. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer–Supported Work, pp. 21–30; accessed 13 April 2009. (pdf available here)

Harrell, Lester E., Jr. 1957. A comparison of oral and written language in school age children. (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 22, Serial number 66.) Lafayette, IN: Child Development Publications.

Holm, John. 2000. An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pdf of intro and front material available here)

Huberman, Bernardo A., Daniel M. Romero, and Fang Wu. 2009. Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday 14 (1, 5 January 2009). (available here)

McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It’s too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined… [T]here is no simple reason it happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It’s a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

-Caroline Knapp

Caroline Knapp wrote those lines near the beginning of her powerful memoir Drinking: A Love Story. Every year I use this book in my class on addiction. Students get drawn into Knapp’s clear and close account of how she began to drink so much, what it is like to be an alcoholic, and how she managed to get to recovery. Every year the book challenges my own thinking as well.

I used that last line—alcoholism as a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming—to end my earlier post on Subjectivity and Addiction: Moving Beyond Just the Disease Model. There I argued that our two views of addiction, a popular one of getting hooked on things and a serious one about tolerance and destructive use, are crucial to understanding what addiction is.

For each category my class stuck up exemplars on the blackboard, from Facebook to hard-core drugs. Then I drew a ↔ between the two categories, using a thick two-headed arrow to indicate that the subjective and biological views interact. Both sides matter.

But I’ve realized that is not enough. That double-sided arrow remains woefully inadequate, a place marker that can end being two-faced, saying nothing of consequence, or double-edged, used simply to cut into the other side. That one symbol tells us little about the interactions themselves, about how people and disease mesh. It lends no insight into what Knapp shows us with her book—that addiction is an elusive and terrible becoming.

So how do you become an alcoholic or addict? How do you go from something fun to something all-encompassing? This question matters deeply. One fact, often overlooked in all the moral angst about addiction, is that most people who try alcohol or drugs do not end up addicted to them. They remain on the popular side. But some cross over. In the same passage as the opening quote, Knapp describes the end point: “Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you’re both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you’d die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens… (8)”

There is no simple reason. Knapp is right about that. But we do know much more about the process of becoming than we used to. Here I will outline four important factors that shape the terrible becoming – vulnerability, training, intention, and meaning. My focus will be on understanding the subjective transformations, and I will use Knapp’s own words and experiences to help us grasp how this happens. In a forthcoming post, I will address a core biological process—competitive plasticity—that acts as the complement to this description, a process that has also helped me see the interactions in new light.

Vulnerability

Some people come to their encounter with alcohol and drugs already vulnerable to what these substances can do, both physiologically and subjectively. Genetics is the typical answer that students give for why some people get hooked and others do not. Genetics is complicated – you can see a traditional take in a post by my students last year on genetics and environment, and my more interactive coverage of addiction and our faultlines. But in the end it’s not genetics or societal faultlines. That nature/nurture dichotomy is a lousy one, and doesn’t set up Knapp at all well.

Put differently, what I want to say that vulnerability is more than just genetics and/or environment. Saying that misses how to understand vulnerability to substance use and abuse. Here I outline some of the reasons Knapp describes – family, behavior, and first experiences – that find resonance in the scientific literature and my own work on adolescent addiction.

Caroline Knapp’s father was an alcoholic, a nature/nurture mix if there ever was one. Her father certainly shaped Knapp’s own understanding of how to relate to alcohol. She writes, “You could tell, watching him sip those martinis year after year after year, that there was something central about the ritual, something deeply soothing and needful about it. I liked that ritual long before I started to drink myself… He’d drink his martini, perhaps pour the second one. He’d begin to loosen up, and within a few minutes it would feel as though all the molecules in the room had risen up and then rearranged themselves, settling down into a more comfortable pattern (38-39).”

But Knapp first encountered alcohol with her own susceptibilities. Her non-identical twin sister never developed a drinking problem. What was one thing that marked the sisters as different? Caroline had an obsessive side, marked in her incredible dedication to her work, her anorexia, and her own way of soothing herself. “As soon as I could sit up in my mother’s lap, I started rocking, rocking myself back and forth, and I did this for years… [Later] I’d get on my knees and elbows and curl up in a ball on the bed, facedown like a turtle in its shell, and rock away, for hours sometimes… I can see the rocking now as a first addiction of sorts. It calmed me, took me out of myself, gave me a sense of relief (62).”

Beyond family and individual patterns, first experiences with alcohol and drugs matter. At the most basic level the earlier an adolescent uses alcohol socially or tries drugs, the higher the risk of abusing alcohol and drugs. But beyond that starting point, how young people learn to use shapes subsequent interactions with alcohol and drugs. Knapp illustrates both these problems:

The summer after my senior year in high school, [my father] took me to dinner at a Greek restaurant in downtown Boston. It was the first time we’d ever gone out to dinner alone and he ordered a martini for himself and wine for me… I saw on my hands. I remember feeling that particularly acute brand of teenage awkwardness, unable to think of a word to say, and I remember a thick, interminable silence… But then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us (39-40).

-//-

I told her about the very first time I got drunk in secret. I was sixteen, a senior in high school, and I’d realized over the course of a phone call that the boy I’d been dating was losing interest in me. I forget the phone call, but I remember the feeling: pending rejection, the sense I’d done something wrong. I didn’t kiss well; was that it? I wasn’t pretty enough.
I was in my bedroom, on the second floor of our house, and I stole downstairs and snuck a bottle of wine out of an open case in my parents’ kitchen. Then I took a corkscrew from the kitchen drawer and went upstairs and drank the whole thing, straight from the bottle. This was not the first time I’d ever gotten smashed… Nor was this an alcoholic frenzy, a question of physical craving, the way it would be later on. The drinking felt more like an experiment, an act based on some vague hypothesis I’d begun to form about the connection between liquor and anxiety, liquor and sadness, how one corrected the other (32).

A Training Regime

It would be an easy explanation if vulnerability alone—family and early behavior and first experiences—made some people into addicts and others not. But it would be wrong. For example, we never use this sort of “vulnerability” approach to understand what makes someone a great athlete. It takes hard work and quite often a special training environment for someone to excel in a sport.

Turning someone from a potentially good athlete into a successful performer offers a useful way to think about addiction. Take running. Long, slow walking doesn’t turn someone into a great runner. Doing a sprint once in a while is also inadequate. One of the most accepted ways to build performance, from elite athletes to weekend warriors, is interval training. Intermittent, intense use is a very effective way to build muscle.

It’s also a very effective way to get too involved with alcohol and drugs. A drink or two a day, say at a meal, keeps a person at the same level. A binge at that one holiday party leaves a nasty hangover and not much more. But regular, intense use – that does the trick, just as with interval training. To expand on this concept, I would go further and say that regular training can produce adaptations – a habit – over several weeks or months. Periods of more intense use then provides one main way to ratchet up the level of engagement with alcohol and drugs. And Knapp describes just such a process in different moments in time:

David [her boyfriend during college] and I drank that summer, a lot. We took to buying vodka by the gallon jug, and large bottles of tequila, and we’d have a drink before dinner, then wine while we ate, then more after dinner: vodka-and-tonics, or tequila sunrises (95).

Conveniently enough, my twenties coincided with the 1980s, the decade of excess: if the line of my drinking graph began to creep upward, intake and frequency rising, it did so culturally as well: I had plenty of company. I moved to Boston in the mid-eighties, when I was twenty-five, right around the time fancy restaurants with elaborate wine lists began cropping up all over the city. Everyone drank, or so it seemed (18).

It was late in the evening, and I’d probably had seven or eight glasses of wine by then, maybe more, and I reeled across the [hotel] lobby, bumping into the wall at the top of the staircase. Downstairs, I shut myself in the stall, then leaned over and put my head down on my knees. I was dizzy and drunk and I knew it (153).

At the same time conditioning takes a central part of the increasing specificity of associations and actions that a heavy drinker goes through:

I suppose that [first beer in a restaurant] marked the start of what would become a cumulative process, a Pavlovian phenomenon of persistent reinforcement: this feels good, the way this glass of white wine flows from bottle to glass to throat to brain, the way it tingles and warms and lightens. This feels good, the way a group of us gather around a table, elbow to elbow, united in the camaraderie of drink and laughter and reward. Later, the sensations would grow more specific: this feels good, this snifter of Cognac warming in the palm, and this flute of Champagne, cool and delicate to the touch as mother of pearly, and this tumbler of gin, clear and icy and laced with lime: it feels like me; it feels right (66-67).

Training and conditioning don’t capture the relationships and the searching that facilitate these same processes. Having friends who drink heavily or who use drugs is a major risk factor for excessive involvement (or to take the athlete example, people to train with). Knapp captures this joint process well in the following passage:

For a long time you drink because the drink just seems to be available, and then, at some point down the line, you drunk because you make it available. Without being completely aware of it you organize your life in such a way that alcohol is always there: at the table over dinner, in your cupboard or refrigerator, in the cupboards and refrigerators of your closest friends. You hang out with other drinkers, people who find it perfectly desirable and perfectly normal to down six bottles of wine in a single sitting, people who support for the effort and the denial of its consequences (159).

But to make that happen, to make it a personal achievement, requires pushing yourself – making it your own. In the process of becoming an alcoholic, drinking moves from something social to something personal, something done alone, even surrounded by people but often not.

That fall, after David moved away to Chicago and my parents nearly broke up and I said good-bye to Roger, I learned to drink alone. That’s the year my sister started worrying about my drinking—more than a decade before I finally quit. She came to my apartment one day, opened the refrigerator, and saw a large jug of white wine, nearly empty. “Did you drink all thus by yourself?” she asked. I looked at her quizzically, not sure what the big deal was. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?” (102)

Alcoholic drinking is by nature solitary drinking, drinking whose true nature is concealed from the outside world and, in some respects, from the drinker as well. You think you’re drinking to have fun, to be sociable or more relaxed. But you’re also drinking to shut down, to retreat (103).

Pushed ever higher, with a turn from social to individual use, the use of alcohol becomes a central part of that person’s life. And often after that comes the end of training.

A naturally inhibited person, someone who grew up feeling mystified and insecure about what it means to feel sexual, I turned to liquor the way a dancer turns toward music: it felt central to the process, central to my ability to shut down the voices of self-criticism in my own head and simply let go, move to a different kind of music (87).

And then, tragically, the protection stops working. The mathematics of transformation change. This is inevitable. You drink long and hard enough and your life gets messy. Your relationships (with nondrinkers, with yourself) become strained. Your work suffers. You run into financial trouble, or legal trouble, or trouble with the police. Rack up enough pain and the old math—Discomfort + Drink = No Discomfort—ceases to suffice; “comfortable” isn’t good enough anymore. You’re after something deeper than a respite from shyness, or a break from private fears and anger. So after a while you alter the equation, make it stronger and more complete. Pain + Drink = Self-Obliteration (75-76).

Intentional Use

Even being vulnerable and engaging in heavy drug use is not enough to turn a person into an addict. One of the main tricks is getting them to turn themselves into an addict. Crucial to this process is linking a subjective experience with a subjective action, tying together wanting something and engaging in doing it. They need to have reasons to use – and just as we knit together that sentence so easily, so drug users must engage in each part of that sentence. Specific individuals, the development of compulsive involvement, motivations and expectations and desired outcomes, and the act of using—those things come together through the elusive becoming.

Quite different than older theories which too often relied on “pleasure” as some primal cause. Incentives matter in seeking and wanting alcohol and drugs. Using alcohol and drugs to cope with negative emotions marks a major transition towards problem use. Functional drug use, not simply self medication, provides reasons to keep using.

Some of Knapp’s best writing centers on this area. Here she describes one of her early experiences drinking with her father, an adolescent girl out alone with her father: “Then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during the second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us (40).”

The use of alcohol to subjective effect continues to develop – it is, indeed, part and parcel of the training regimen. It takes conditioning that next step into the realm of subjectivity.

I liked being able to laugh with them [her friends], to sit on barstools and let my own emotions spill out the very same way, the sense of disinhibited high amusement. And I liked the way the drink helped turn me into that kind of person, someone more hardened and rebellious and cynical than the person I was raised to be, someone who could scoff and tell stories and make other people laugh. It was something I’d been looking for all my life… Drinking released me from the compulsion to hold back, gave freer rein to appetites… I wanted that feeling, and I couldn’t seem to generate it on my own, and the amazing thing—the truly amazing and seductive thing—was that the drink could generate some version of it for me, a most convincing replica of ease and connection and relief, at least for a little while.

And there it was again, the connection: Repression + Drink = Openness. At heart alcoholism feels like the accumulation of dozens of such connections, dozens of tiny fears and hungers and rages, dozens of experiences and memories that collect in the bottom of your soul, coalescing over many many drinks into a single liquid solution (73-74).

-//-

In many ways alcoholism has the feel of a psychological safety net, something a drinker constructs over a period of many years by making connections between feelings, like an emotional game of connect-the-dots. Take a difficult, sober feeling—shyness, fear—and connect it to its easier, drunken counterpart—disinhibition, courage. The net gets woven beneath you, a tight set of strings that promises to cushion you when you fall against a hard emotion. That’s exactly what happened when I drank with Sam: dot A, tension; dot B, relief. In my head, out of my head. Disconnected, connected.

There were so many transformations like that, so many strings in the net: self-consciousness to less self-consciousness; inhibition to ease… When the feeling of shyness washed away my voice, there it was, the liquid solution, and there I was beside it, ready to reach for another one. Connect the dots: shy to les shy (69).

Connecting the dots becomes more than simple functional use. It worsens, changes, reaches into other domains of life.

I think my relationship with alcohol began to deepen and shift around that time, my college years, moving from a simple tool of self-transformation—a way to relax and feel less inhibited, a way to be more sexual and open and light—into something more complicated, a more deeply ingrained way of coping with the world. Looking back I can see how certain patterns were beginning to develop, certain classically alcoholic ways of managing feelings and conflicts in relationships that would grow more entrenched and complicated over time.

Almost by definition alcoholics are lousy at relationships. We melt into them in that muddied, liquid way, rather than marching into them with any real sense of strength or self-awareness. We become so accustomed to transforming ourselves into new and improved versions of ourselves that we lose the core version, the version we were born with, the version that might learn to connect with others in a meaningful way (88-89).

Even at the end, in the midst of drinking prodigious quantities due to high tolerance and the gnawing compulsion to keep having more, the intention doesn’t simply vanish from the equation. It doesn’t work that way. It is one of the clearest things from Knapp’s writing, her real strength as a memoir writer. And so she writes:

There is never enough, no such thing. You’re always after that insurance, always mindful of it, always so relieved to drink that first drink and feel the warming buzz in the back of your head, always so intent on maintaining the feeling, reinforcing the buzz, adding to it, not losing it (57).

Meaning

Humans are meaning-making animals. Just become someone becomes more involved with drugs doesn’t mean our sense of self, our use of language, our interpretations of the world suddenly disappeared during that process. Au contraire, they become deeply entwined in that developing involvement. Alcohol itself, the organization it provides, the act of drinking, the experience of drinking – all these are shot through with meaning.

Let us start with the object– the alcohol. See how it becomes part of one’s life:

It’s not at all unusual in AA to hear people refer to alcohol as a best friend, and to mean that on the most visceral level: when you’re drinking, liquor occupies the role of a lover or a constant companion. It sits there on its refrigerator shelves or on the counter or in the cabinet like a real person, as present and reliable as a best friend. At the end, when I started hiding bottles of Scotch around the house, and tucking nips of brandy into my bathrobe pockets, I did so in the manner of a child who’s afraid to be without a favorite blanket or a teddy bear. Protect me. Shield me from being alone in my own head (104).”

But the meaning isn’t just in the object but also in how drinking helps to organize a life, to define it and provide shape to what to do when.

As soon as I got home, I’d crack open the first beer and drink it with a deep relief… I’d understand that the beer, and the one after it and the one after that and the bottle of wine after that, served a very specific purpose: it kept me from that piercing consciousness of self, kept me from the task of learning to tolerate my own company.

Without liquor I’d feel like a trapped animal, which is why I always had it. Without liquor I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I mean that in the most literal sense, as though my thoughts and my limbs were foreign to me and I’d missed some key set of instructions about how to use them. I used to feel that way on Sunday mornings, when I’d wake up alone in the apartment with nothing before me but unstructured time. Here I am, in my apartment. Here I am, puttering through the kitchen. Here I am, washing a dish and setting it on the rack. Here I am… conscious of being alone, conscious of my own breath and my own skin and my own thoughts; here I am, waiting waiting waiting and if I keep doing this, if I don’t find some way out of my own head, I’ll die of boredom or go insane or explode at any moment (114).

Meaning also gets enmeshed into the drinking. Knapp’s words to herself, about deserving it, are literally marked in the next passage through italics. She entered a more vulnerable situation. She drank more. She had reasons. And she deserved it – that too marked the transition into her worst drinking.

I also had a long list of reasons to drink, a growing list. No one would have begrudged me that. Two major losses in the space of two years. A stressful job: deadlines and responsibilities. A messy romantic life: ambivalent and confused. So I drank a little too much; it’s situational. I deserve it. I said that to myself, too, with increasing conviction. Stress. Depression. An exceptionally bad day, or week, or month. Too much going on. Need a little relief. I deserve it (19).

The experience of using itself has meaning. Knapp came to understand this:

That line stuck [from Nan Robertson] with me for many years… She goes off into some little room in her mind and pulls down the shade. Without stating so explicitly, the image has to do with the places alcohol can take you. It has to do with transportation, with the very real—and, to alcoholics, enormously seductive—phenomenon of taking psychic flight, ingesting a simple substance and leaving yourself behind… Many of us drink in order to take flight, in order to pour ourselves, literally, into new personalities: uncap the bottle, pop the cork, slide into someone else’s skin. A liquid makeover, from the inside out (64-65).

Meaning of course exists within a cultural framework. Here is one relevant quote:

You hear echoes of [this yearning for something] all the time in AA meetings, that sense that there’s a well of emptiness inside and that the trick in sobriety is to find new ways to fill it, spiritual ways instead of physical ones. People talk about their fixations with things—a new house they’re looking to buy, or a job they’re desperate for, or a relationship—as though these things have genuinely transformative powers, powers to heal and save and change lives. Searching, searching: the need cuts across all backgrounds, all socioeconomic lines, all ages and sexes and races.

Part of this, of course, is culturally determined or, at least, culturally reinforced. The search for a fix, for a ready solution for what ails, has become a uniquely American undertaking, an ingrained part of consumer culture, as prevalent as the nearest diet workshop or plastic surgeon. In some ways alcoholism is the perfect late twentieth-century expression of that particular brand of searching, an extreme expression of the way so many of us are taught to confront deep yearnings. Fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. Fill up the emptiness; fill up what feels like a pit of loneliness and terror and rage; please, just take it away, now. Our society has become marvelously adept at presenting easy—or seemingly easy—solutions to that impulse (60-61).

But meaning is not simply constant, without tension. In the following quote all I can think is that all three versions of Knapp are the real one. That’s the point of meaning. As a process, it doesn’t discriminate.

One night after work, on my way to a bar to meet a friend for drinks, a sentence popped into my head. I thought: This is the real me, this person driving in the car. I was anxious. My teeth were clenched, partly from spending a long day hunched over the computer and partly from the physical sensation of wanting a drink badly, and I was aware of an undercurrent of fear deep in my gut, a barely definable sensation that the ground beneath my feet wasn’t solid or real. I think I understood in that instant that I’d created two versions of myself: the working version, who sat at the desk and pounded away at the keyboard, and the restaurant version, who sat at a table and pounded away at white wine. In between, for five or ten minutes at a stretch, the real version would emerge: the fearful version, tense and dishonest and uncertain. I rarely allowed her to emerge for long. Work—all the productive, effective, focused work—kept her distracted and submerged during the day. And drink—anesthetizing and constant—kept her too numb to feel at night (17).

So why did Knapp favor this real version, the one she thought could come out but didn’t? Here alcohol itself plays a central role, both contributing to and immediately solving the difficult questions of life.

[In the end] the drinking merely complicated the sense of fragmentation, contributed to the gradual loss of control. And that’s precisely how drinking works. Your life gets ugly and you drink more. You drink more and your life gets uglier still. The cycle goes on and on, and in the process you become increasingly isolated and lost, stuck in your own circle of duplicity and rationalization and confusion, the gap between your facades and your inner world growing wider and wider and more complete (207).

These were tough questions, complicated feelings, but I never addressed them with David, not once. I drank instead and the questions running through the back of my mind faded away, just faded out of consciousness (96).

The end point is even more ambivalent. Alcohol at once helps the person feel more like their self as it continues to deliver the terrible consequences of its own becoming.

At the end I didn’t even feel like myself until I had a drink or two, and I remember that scared me a little: alcohol had become something I felt I needed in order to return to a sense of normalcy, in order to think straight. After one or two drinks I’d feel like I’d come back into my own skin—more clearheaded, more relaxed—but the feeling would last for only half an hour or so. Another few drinks and I’d be gone again, headed toward oblivion (231).

-//-

Almost everyone I know who’s quit drinking describes that feeling, the sense that life has turned stale and colorless and slowly ground to a halt. You’re someplace you don’t want to be—in a bad job, a bad relationship—and you can’t fathom a way out of it, simply can’t see what steps you could take to change things.

The pain becomes acute. With each day you spend in the bad situation, your dignity erodes just a little bit more, keeping your feet glued more firmly to the floor. You cast around for explanations—whose fault is this? Is it your lover? Your boss? Your family? Are you simply doomed, destined to live an unhappy life? Reality clouds. You wake up after another night of heavy drinking and you can’t put the pieces back together, can’t figure out what the fight was about or why you ended up in the bed you’re in or what happened the night before, and you don’t understand—you simply do not understand—why you’re so miserable, so fucking depressed and full of hate. And so you drink again; of course you drink again. You can’t stand this—it’s too much—and drinking is the one sure way, the only way, to kill the feeling.

The circle closes in on itself; the cycle is repeated. You are smack in the middle of the dance of addiction and you can’t find your way off the floor (186-187).

Epilogue

My title is, in the end, misleading. It is about the becoming but not quite about addiction. The four steps—vulnerability, training, intentions, and meaning—do not get us all the way there. The core process of compulsion and craving is not addressed. The lack of control, though certainly related to trained intentional doing, is not really answered by the steps. The rationalizations and the denials that Knapp describes well have been left to one side.

Nor do these four steps capture how individuals often move through a radically changing social landscape as they get deeper and deeper into substance abuse. These individuals often become the worst cases, not just because of the destructive consequences for the person, but also because these marginalized, often predatory landscapes are traumatic and heighten the focus on short-term fixes.

Craving, control, destructive consequences, and difficult situations lead us beyond the insidious becoming to a dangerous and often deadly endgame. But the becoming matters. It is different from the hallmarks of addiction, and has remained obscure because of that, hidden by two-faced arrows and assumptions of disease and moral failure. It takes an entire book to describe such a process, and Caroline Knapp did so with the starkest of honesty. And most certainly with a becoming and elusive elegance.

Jennie Finch can strike you out.

Janet Shibley Hyde, one of the leading proponents of the ‘gender similarity hypothesis,’ concedes that there are some marked differences between men and women, singling out throwing ability as the most pronounced among them (2007: 260; see also 2005).

Thomas and French (1985: 266 & 276), in a meta-analysis reviewing all available research on sex differences in throwing, found that the gap stood at 1.5 standard deviations at three years of age, and increased over time, widening to between three and five standard deviations by puberty. By contrast, the much discussed ‘math gap’ between boys and girls, in Hyde’s meta-analysis of 48 studies, was a +0.08 on problem solving and +0.16 on national math tests (Hyde 2005; 2007: 260). In other words, if you’re impressed by the gap in math scores (I’m not), you should be awestruck at the gap in throwing ability.

I just finished writing the draft of a potential book chapter on throwing ability for a volume Prof. Robert Sands is putting together on biocultural approaches to sports. The chapter steps off from my observations that most of my colleagues in Brazil, men included, ‘threw like girls’ even though they were incredibly talented athletes, some of the most astounding capoeira practitioners I have ever seen. The book chapter is linked to some other work I’ve been doing, so I’ve got notes enough for several chapters – I thought I might put some up on Neuroanthropology.net because they were especially related to some of the things we focus on here.

This is probably going to wind up being at least two or three posts, so in this one, I’m only going to discuss the neurological issues surrounding throwing and the likely mechanical or technical issues that make (some) women (and Brazilian men and others) ‘throw like girls.’ At least one more post is going to deal with physiological plasticity beyond the nervous system, such as the way throwing remodels the shoulder, to explore anatomical plasticity more broadly, but you’re going to have to come back later for that one…

Do all women throw like girls?

The book chapter I just submitted explores the ineptness of Brazilian men at throwing in light of the late phenomenologist and philosopher Iris Marion Young’s (1990) remarkable paper on ‘throwing like a girl.’ Young suggests that the inept throwing motion of girls arises from three signature feminine motor traits: self-consciousness, inhibition, and kinetic dis-unity of the body (although she uses more sophisticated terminology to describe each). If you’re interested in Young’s discussion and related pieces, you may want to look at a book review here and her obituary here.

I have a number of issues with Young’s analysis, although I think her work is incredibly important, a landmark piece for anyone interested in phenomenological approaches to motor learning or embodiment. When I teach about phenomenology in anthropology, it’s one of the first pieces I turn to for its clarity and persuasiveness. I may come back to some of my other objections at a later date, but here I want to specifically focus on the neural and technical dimensions of skill acquisition in throwing to offer a more neuroanthropological perspective on ‘throwing like a girl,’ one that doesn’t argue this throwing style arises from existential or essential traits of being feminine.

The reason for this is simple: since the passage of the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act (commonly known as ‘Title IX’) – and even before, for that matter – many women have learned how to throw very hard, most without significantly jeopardizing their femininity (that’s sarcastic understatement, in case it doesn’t come through in print). (Young also wrote about Title IX in Young [1998], but she came to different conclusions than I do.)

For example, Olympic softball pitcher Jennie Finch regularly struck out any Major League Baseball batter brave (or fool) enough to take the ‘Jennie Challenge’ on This Week in Baseball (here’s a You Tube video from FSN Sport Science testing whether it’s harder to hit a baseball or a Jennie Finch pitch; Finch broke the force plate with her pitching before she dusted some poor prospect from the Arizona Diamondbacks.). And although they do not reach the highest velocities found in men’s throwing, elite female athletes reach velocities far in excess of average men, especially when we take into account their smaller size, shorter arms, and lighter musculature.

(For more on softball pitching see, Why Is It So Hard to Hit a Softball? Rob Neyer in Slate Magazine.)

An ironic footnote to the question of whether or not women can throw is the case of Virne Beatrice ‘Jackie’ Mitchell Gilbert (see the entry for Ms. Mitchell at the Baseball Hall of Fame) who pitched for the Chattanooga Lookouts Class AA minor league baseball team. In a 1931 exhibition game against the New York Yankees, she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back (although the Lookouts went on to lose 14-4), only to have the commissioner of baseball nullify her contract the next day because baseball was ‘too strenuous’ for women. Just this past year, a 16-year-old Japanese knuckleballer, Eri Yoshida, was signed by the Kobe 9 Cruise professional team.

If women can acquire the skill to throw overhand (witness Olympic softball fielders), then the question should be, instead of why do girls ‘throw like girls,’ why do some girls throw so poorly if they are capable of throwing well? Most students of the biomechanics of throwing would argue that it’s a technical problem: women don’t throw properly and the technique that they put together is hampered by a number of kinaesthetic problems, some of which obscure avenues of further skill development.

Learning to throw

In a series of research papers, Mary Ann Roberton explored how children learned to throw. Roberton broke with the influential model of developmental stages in learning to throw that had been proposed first by Monica Wild (1938), and later refined by other researchers. These stage models posited the existence of predictable levels of development from one type of technique to the next.

Wild had used photographs to distinguish among four different stages in the unfolding of skilful throwing. The model of stages, like Piaget’s or Freud’s more general models of cognitive and psychological stages of development, helped to illuminate the progressive nature of skill acquisition; in fact, virtually all novice throwers ‘throw like girls,’ but the more skilful ones go on to develop more sophisticated techniques. (When I say ‘virtually all,’ I simply mean that there are other ways to be incompetent; for example, the novice ‘wild pitcher’ may be overly uninhibited, flailing explosively and launching the ball in an almost random direction.)

The downside of a ‘stage’ model like Wild’s, however, is that it tends to artificially homogenize development and, at the same time, suggest that a contingent process was much more orderly than it might actually be (which was an empirical question concealed by theoretical assumption). If a person did not progress beyond a particular stage, they suffered from arrested development (my phrase, in this case)

Developmental systems theorists like Esther Thelen (see Thelen 1995; Thelen and Smith 1996) have pointed out this general problem with staged developmental models, like those proposed by Piaget; in fact, children often take very different developmental trajectories even in the emergence of basic skills like reaching or walking. Children must experiment with their own bodies and develop different facets of a whole body skill.

The fact that we eventually all learn how to walk leads some theorists to assume that the ability to walk, which emerges from almost all children’s motor learning but not in the same way, is instead pre-programmed into the person. Without a more exacting analysis, it simply appeared that women who ‘threw like girls’ had a kind of derailleur of kinaesthetic development that hampered them or that they were simply evidencing an innate feminine style of movement which could develop no further.

Roberton suggested, based on more elaborate analysis of kinematic data, that throwing ability didn’t demonstrate the clear succession of developmental stages, but rather advanced unevenly in different parts of the body (1977, 1978; Roberton and Halverson 1984; Roberton and Konczak 2001). Roberton recognized that a throw was assembled from different kinaesthetic elements, and that one part could grow more sophisticated while another part lagged behind.

For example, a child might improve his or her arm motion without necessarily developing contralateral (opposite foot) stepping. Even though the physical experimentation was likely not fully conscious (although it might be subject to coaching or self examination), children were in fact experimenting at the envelope of their kinaesthetic ability, which often produced unstable techniques, liable to vary without much control.

Roberton’s approach to throwing ability does not contradict Young’s perspective directly, but it does open up a much more subtle way of approaching the nature and origins of ineptness. Specifically, we can ask where in the throwing motion does female inferiority arise: do women actually do the same motion with less force, or do they do a different motion, as the idea ‘throwing like a girl’ suggests? (I’m not going to deal here with the question of accuracy, but will instead focus on force; if you’re interested in the ‘spatial accuracy’ issue, see especially Duffy, Ericsson and Baluch’s [2007] analysis of dart throwing, where biomechanical ability to generate force is less of an issue.)

The brain assembling the motion

Throwing is a physically demanding task, placing enormous strains on the body at elite levels, as I will discuss in a later post, but it is also a neurologically difficult task in several respects. The first, and most basic challenge is simply the complex motor management of all the muscles and joints in the body that contribute to the throw.

An expert throw is a kinaesthetic cascade that begins with a windup in which the body, counter-intuitively, swivels in the opposite direction from the eventual throw, turns the shoulder on the throwing arm back, and lifts the opposite foot to pivot backwards. The throw progresses to a forward step on the contralateral foot while the arm actually cocks in the opposite direction. Finally, during the acceleration phase, the momentum generated successively by the step, rotation of the pelvis, rotation of the torso, twisting of the shoulder, elbow straightening and wrist extending, must be transferred between body parts, stabilized, and then, suddenly, once the ball is released, decelerated and dissipated in the follow-through.

In summary, the brain and nervous system have to orchestrate a complex sequence of movements in a very short period of time; the whole movement is only around 2 seconds in a major league pitcher, and 1.5 seconds of this is the preparation, before the ball is accelerated to release.

Some recent research highlights how other primates also throw food, for example (see Westergaard et al. 2000), but humans significantly out-perform other primates in overhand throwing. There’s lots of nice things to say about chimpanzee brains, but don’t expect a chimp to be bowling yorkers in cricket or pitching knuckle-balls unless they make some remarkable leaps in control of their limbs.

We tend to think of our neurological difference from other primates as being primarily cognitive; we expect to be better than chimps at chess, math problems, and self-analysis. But we also have significant motor differences from our hairy brethren; the fact that we can train up our nervous system, and have the behavioural and social supports to channel our extended neuroplasticity, makes it possible to develop specialized motor abilities that other apes cannot challenge. Only a human has the brain, as well as the society and technology, to devote hours of adolescence to perfecting skateboard tricks that have no bearing on our survival chances.

When a child – boy or girl – first learns to throw, he or she is confronted by this terribly difficult coordination task, one that requires counter-intuitive motions and precise sequencing of high-speed motions fused into an integrated motor synthesis. Expert technique is quite simply impossible for a beginner to accomplish because the novice has to explore the movements, as it were, from the inside, learning about the capacities of the body and the dynamic links one can make between its parts through experience. Although this process is largely non-conscious, it can be affected by conscious processes such as coaching, self-coaching, and conceptually motivated training techniques (see Downey 2008).

Degrees of freedom as a problem

Russian anatomist Nicholai Bernstein (1996) referred to this coordination problem as an overabundance of ‘degrees of freedom.’ The human body has so many joints that it’s difficult to reliably coordinate their movement; not only do they have too much freedom, but we now know that muscle fibres themselves don’t even respond identically each time to a uniform nerve impulse.

Kari M. Newell (1996:413), drawing on Bernstein, argues that all novices contend with the ‘degrees of freedom’ problem by ‘freezing’ most of the body:

Because the basic problem of coordination is the harnessing of the extreme abundance of degrees of freedom of the system, the first stage in learning is characterized by coordination solutions that reduce the number of degrees of freedom at the periphery to a minimum. The freezing strategy effectively reduces the number of biomechanical degrees that need to be coordinated and controlled.

‘Throwing like a girl’ is not so much a defective technique as it is a normal and even effective strategy for dealing with body management when a person is not experienced coordinating certain sorts of complex whole-body movements. Even experts often engage in ‘girl-like’ throwing when asked to throw for accuracy, at short range, in an activity like darts or many classic carnival games. That is, a person’s strategy for throwing can shift depending upon the demands made of the activity.

As Roberton’s work has suggested, novice technique itself can be unstable, coming together in different kinaesthetic configurations depending upon the task environment. In other words, get a Little Leaguer trying to throw quickly in an unfamiliar position, and he (or she) is liable to lose control of parts of the motion or revert to a less sophisticated technique.

While the brain has to learn how to assemble the kinetic chain of expert overhand throwing, the experience of throwing has to reorganize, recruit, and even generate the neural resources it needs for the task. Improvement in the neurological control over muscles, for example, can lead to strength gain, even in the absence of changes in the cross-section of the muscles, as Yue and Cole (1992) showed by having subjects visualize doing hand exercises.

Research on skill acquisition suggests that training, over time, leads to reorganization of the primary motor cortex, changing its functional organization and excitability (see, for example, Adkins et al. 2006; Karni et al. 1996; Kelly and Garavan 2005; Rosenkranz, Kacar, and Rothwell 2007). Klein and colleagues (2004), for example, found in rats that the late stages of skill learning involved motor map reorganization and the generation of new synapses. They conclude that the brain changes involved in skilful action take significant time and repetition to occur.

As they write: “The results demonstrate the temporally dynamic nature of learning-dependent plasticity that occurs within a single brain region during training on a single task and show how different phases of learning may be supported by different forms of plasticity” (ibid.: 632).

Learning to throw overhand remodels neural resources to make certain forms of coordination possible; from this perspective, the ineptness of some women (and men) at throwing overhand needs less study and explanation than the transformation of bodies and brains that leads to elite athletes’ performance. Ineptness is the normal outcome of not allocating neural resources to a task.

So why do they throw differently?

For a more complete discussion of that question, you’re going to have to come back for another post. This is getting a bit long, but I want to wrap this part up. I’ll give you a bit of the punch line right now, but there will be more on this by the end of the week.

In a forthcoming article in Behavioural Brain Research, Shoshi Dorfberger, Esther Adi-Japha, and Avi Karni (forthcoming) suggest one possible answer to the question of why women throw differently: that male-female differences in performance on motor tasks may arise, not from innate ability, but from a more efficient learning process in men after puberty. They found that male subjects, post-adolescence, benefited more from training, especially after having some time to consolidate learning. Their discussion reports:

Taken together, our results therefore suggest that given a similar amount of motor training, males benefited more than females in the performance of the trained movement sequences. This effect was age dependent with the male advantage becoming significant in the post-puberty group, the 17-year-old participants. Moreover, males from all three age-groups were found to evolve significantly larger delayed (consolidation phase/between session) gains, and these were well retained for 6 weeks. Thus, the male advantage was most significant in the post-training motor consolidation and retention phase; the current results suggest therefore that males, especially after adolescence, may have an advantage, over females, in procedural memory consolidation.

There are some caveats to this research, which I’ll discuss in the later postings, but in general, I like their explanatory approach. Rather than just looking at the tail end of what might be a complex causal chain and saying, ‘Girls throw like girls because of girl-ness,’ they try to sort out more specifically what the differences might be.

To me, the failure to demand this specificity of causation is at the heart of essentialist approaches to answering problems, whether they be genetic essentialist or endocrine essentialist or phenomenological essentialist. Take a complex causal change and just ignore it with some simplistic gloss that fits the categories you already believe.

For example, an essentialist perspective might argue that men and women throw definitely because of ‘hormones,’ and then just drop the question, without explaining which endocrine processes affect what part of the throw or how. Before some commenter writes — ‘you believe there’s no difference between men and women!’ (I don’t) — I’m not against acknowledging differences between men and women; in fact, I think we should be exploring them more carefully. But the resulting story is likely to be a bit more intricate than an essentialist explanations that ‘boyness’ or ‘girlness’ causes something.

To me ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are squishy, culturally-specific gender descriptors applied indiscriminately to biological, ideological, behavioural, cultural, and other traits. To treat either descriptor of a pattern as the cause of that pattern begs all the crucial questions.

For example, in the case of throwing, we know that some of the gap between men’ and women’s average throwing velocity likely arises from limb length and muscle mass. Jennie Finch has a leverage advantage because she’s around six feet tall, and you will often find that baseball pitchers are taller than average. The averages of size and limb length clearly differ between men and women, although there’s a fair bit of overlap, and we have a pretty good understanding of some of the endocrine causes of these overall size differences between the sexes. If you control for size and muscle mass, according to researchers like van den Tillaar and Ettema (2004), you have no residual effect of a person’s sex on throwing velocity. That’s intriguing, but we still have this yawning gap in technique, not just velocity, to study and explain.

If the difference in motor learning described by Dorfberger, Adi-Japha, and Karni were the only significant cause of male-female differences in throwing, we would also expect to see it across all skilled motor activity, not just throwing. As a sometime dance instructor, I can definitively say that men do not always have an obvious advantage over women when it comes to learning motor techniques, even whole-body motor techniques.

Clearly, men and women are different, but how they are distinct, and the developmental processes that actually lead to the manifest divergences, are what I find more interesting. The error of essentialism is not saying that there are differences between men and women, but in being content with flimsy non-explanations, offering stereotypes rather than compelling accounts of the origins of patterns.

Don’t worry, this is just the intro. I want to get into the details more, including research on throwing techniques in other cultures and some of the evolutionary arguments. More soon, and I’ll post links to the successive chapters here in updates as I go…

References cited:

Adkins, DeAnna L., Jeffery Boychuk, Michael S. Remple, and Jeffrey A. Kleim. 2006. “Motor training induces experience-specific patterns of plasticity across motor cortex and spinal cord.” Journal of Applied Physiology 101(6): 1776-1782. doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00515.2006. (pdf available here)

Bernstein, Nicholai A. 1996. “On Dexterity and Development.” Translated by Mark L. Latash. In Dexterity and Its Development. Edited by Mark L. Latash and Michael T. Turvey. Pp. 1-244. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Calvin, William H. 1983. “A stone’s throw and its launch window: timing and precision and its implications for language and hominid brains.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 104:121-135. (online version at Calvin’s homepage)
_____. 1991. “Did Throwing Stones Lead to Bigger Brains?” In The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain. Bantam. (Chapter online here)

Dorfberger, Shoshi, Esther Adi-Japha, and Avi Karni. Forthcoming. “Sex differences in motor performance and motor learning in children and adolescents: An increasing male advantage in motor learning and consolidation phase gains.” Behavioural Brain Research. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2008.10.033. (abstract)

Downey, Greg. 2008. “Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art.” American Anthropologist 110(2): 204-213. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00026.x (abstract)

Duffy, Linda J., K. Anders Ericsson, and Bahman Baluch. 2007. “In Search of the Loci for Sex Differences in Throwing: The Effects of Physical Size and Differential Recruitment Rates on High Level Dart Performance.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 78(1): 71-78. (abstract)

Hyde, Janet Shibley. 2005. “The Gender Similarity Hypothesis.” American Psychologist 60(6): 581-592. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581 (pdf of article)
_____. 2007. “New Directions in the Study of Gender Similarities and Differences.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 16(5): 259-263. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00516.x (abstract)

Karni, Avi, Gundela Meyer, Christine Rey-Hipolito, Peter Jezzard, Michelle M. Adams, Robert Turner, and Leslie G. Ungerleider. 1998. “The acquisition of skilled motor performance: fast and slow experience-driven changes in primary motor cortex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 95(3): 861–868, 1998. (abstract with link to pdf)

Kelly, A. M. Clare, and Hugh Garavan. 2005. “Human Functional Neuroimaging of Brain Changes Associated with Practice.” Cerebral Cortex 15(8): 1089-1102. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi005. (abstract, pdf of article)

Kleim, Jeffrey A., Theresa M. Hogg, Penny M. VandenBerg, Natalie R. Cooper, Rochelle Bruneau, and Michael Remple. 2004. “Cortical synaptogenesis and motor map reorganization occur during late, but not early, phase of motor skill learning.” Journal of Neuroscience 24(3): 628–633. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3440-03.2004 (abstract, pdf of article)

Newell, Kari M. 1996. “Change in Movement and Skill: Learning, Retention and Transfer.” In Dexterity and Its Development. Edited by Mark L. Latash and Michael T. Turvey. Pp. 393-430. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Roberton, Mary Ann. 1977. “Stability of stage categorizations across trials: Implications for the ‘stage theory’ of overarm throw development.” Journal of Human Movement Studies 3: 49-59.
_____. 1978. “Longitudinal evidence for developmental stages in the forceful overarm throw.” Journal of Human Movement Studies 4: 167-175.

Roberton, Mary Ann, and Lolas E. Halverson. 1984. Developing Children: Their Changing Movement. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger.

Roberton, Mary Ann, and Jürgen Konczak. 2001. “Predicting Children’s Overarm Throw Ball Velocities from Their Developmental Levels in Throwing.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 72(2): 91-103.

Rosenkranz, Karin, Aleksandra Kacar, and John C. Rothwell. 2007. “Differential Modulation of Motor Cortical Plasticity and Excitability in Early and Late Phases of Human Motor Learning.” Journal of Neuroscience 27(44): 12058 –12066. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2663-07.2007 (abstract, pdf of article)

Thelen, Esther. 1995. “Motor Development: A New Synthesis.” American Psychologist 50 (2): 79-95. (abstract)

Thelen, Esther, and Linda B. Smith. 1996. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

Thomas, Jerry R., and Karen E. French. 1985. “Gender differences across age in motor performance: A meta-analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 98: 260-282.

van den Tillaar, Roland, and Gertjan Ettema. 2004. “Effect of body size and gender in overarm throwing performance.” European Journal of Applied Physiology 91(4): 413-418. doi:10.1007/s00421-003-1019-8 (abstract)

Westergaard, G. C., C. Liv, M. K. Haynie and S. J. Suomi. 2000. “A comparative study of aimed throwing by monkeys and humans.” Neuropsychologia 38: 1511–1517. (available here as pdf download)

Wild, Monica. 1938. “The behavior pattern of throwing and some observations concerning its course of development in children.” Research Quarterly 9: 20-24.

Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (Google book link)
_____. 1998. “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later.” In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Donn Welton, ed. Pp. 286-290. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Yue, Guang, and Kelly J. Cole. 1992. “Strength Increases from the Motor Program: Comparison of Training with Maximal Voluntary and Imagined Muscle Contractions.” Journal of Neuropsychology 67(5): 1114-1123. (abstract, pdf behind subscription wall — sad, it’s a great piece.)

There’s a number of the posts that are worth checking out, but I appreciated that were some here that I missed the first time around, including Why do You Turn Down the Radio When You’re Lost?, which used an example of something I do all the time (I get lost a lot in Sydney as I’m still unfamiliar with the city), and hadn’t really noticed; and the critical discussion of the concept of ‘brain age,’ Posit Science, Nintendo Brain Age, and Brain Training Topics. But there’s lots more good stuff in this list, especially if you are interested in ‘brain training’ of all sorts.

Intelligence scales are culturally embedded artifacts designed to meet the idiosyncratic needs of postindustrial western societies, and reflect the equally idiosyncratic assumptions found in the west – such as our habit of referring to someone as “brainy” when we mean “intelligent”, and the widely held assumption that brains got bigger during human evolution because of selection pressure for “intelligence” (and/or language: e.g. Deacon 1992). The idea that human intelligence is the ultimate pinnacle of biological evolution may be little more than colonialist propaganda, suggesting that “scientific” societies are the ultimate pinnacle of cultural evolution – and hence morally entitled to dominate others who formerly managed perfectly well without the blessings of “modernity”.

Sir Francis Galton devised the first intelligence test in the late 19th century and this was followed by the scale developed by Alfred Binet and Théophile Simon between 1905 and 1911 (Atkinson et al., 1993: 457-8). As early as 1884 Galton examined more than 9,000 visitors to the London exhibition and found to his chagrin that eminent British scientists could not be distinguished from ordinary citizens on the basis of head size (ibid: 458). From that point on the kind of assumptions made by Galton have continued to pervade scientific thinking with little or no empirical encouragement.

A curious more recent example is the spate of papers attempting to correlate brain size with “intelligence” as assessed by (notably) the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Andreason et al., 1993 ; Egan et al., 1994, 1995; Peters, 1995; Flashman et al., 1998; Rushton & Ankney, 1995, 1996, 2000; Vernon et al., 2000; Thompson et al., 2001; MacLullich et al., 2002; Staff, 2002; Drachman, 2002). Some of this research has provoked controversy over issues of anthropological concern, including ethnocentrism, sexism, and racism (Peters, 1995; Rushton & Ankney, 1995, 1996). Researchers did indeed find a positive correlation and this has been acclaimed as a vindication of the studies and the underlying ideology of “big-brained people are smarter” (McDaniel, 2005). In point of fact, a meta-analysis of 37 studies, involving 1,530 people, yielded a best estimate for the population correlation (r) of 0.33 (McDaniel, 2005), suggesting that the intelligence factors measured are associated with around 11% (r2) of brain volume, and cannot account for the bulk of brain expansion during the last 2.5 million years.

Why the scientists concerned should feel they have achieved something useful becomes all the more mysterious when you realize that many components of the scales used assess culturally acquired skills which were invented in historic times – particularly numeracy and written language (other questions address institutionalized factors such as money and banking, and none can be claimed with confidence to be free from cultural conditioning). Many preliterate societies even today lack numbers higher than two, and others no higher than five. Numeracy and literacy originated with the bureaucratic needs of the first civilizations along the river valleys of the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges, and the Yellow River in China. These of course post-date the agricultural revolution (around 10,000 years ago).

An analysis of 217 fossil crania (De Miguel & Henneberg, 2001) – the largest sample we have to date – suggests that average human cranial capacity just prior to the agricultural revolution was around 1,500 cm3, which is about 12% larger than the average human capacity today (1,340 cm3). In other words, intelligence scales measure abilities that developed at a time when brains were most probably getting smaller, and any correlation between such abilities and brain size is less than informative (since it serves only to reinforce current biases in cognitive science). All these studies would seem to be a prodigal waste of research funding and resources – a waste that could easily have been avoided with a little anthropological input.

Currently the dominant theory of brain expansion in primates is the social or Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, which holds that social intelligence makes greater cognitive demands than object intelligence. So why did all these researchers choose individualistic instruments such as the Wechsler scale (1939) rather than, say, Gardner’s (1983) measures of “six intelligences”? Gardner argued that social, musical, artistic, and “bodily-kinaesthetic” (including dance and sports) skills have been important since the “dawn of civilization” whereas logical scientific thought only came to the fore after the European Renaissance (Atkinson et al., 1993: 476). But the very term we use to define our species – Homo sapiens – presupposes an evolutionary trajectory ultimately directed towards the production of scientists.

The idea of a “general” (as opposed to social) intelligence is at best dubious. The point can be illustrated by a brain scanning study which contrasted “theory of mind” (ToM) with “non-ToM” stories and cartoons (Gallagher et al., 2000). The investigators assumed that brain structures activated by non-ToM stories and cartoons were “general reasoning” areas, and only those uniquely activated by ToM stories and cartoons were “ToM” (i.e. social reasoning) areas. They concluded that ToM involves a rather small area in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. However, the “general reasoning” areas were much more strongly activated during ToM than non-Tom tasks. It would seem more reasonable to infer that “general reasoning” involves a subset of social reasoning areas, and that “general intelligence” is a spin-off benefit of social intelligence. Animals which score most highly in laboratory studies of intelligence and language are invariably highly social – such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and Congo grey parrots.

The discovery of the Flynn effect should have alerted us by now to the culturally conditioned limitations of western intelligence scales. These tests may predict academic performance in western institutions, but they cannot provide reliable information about innate functions of the human brain. More plausible views of the social brain and human brain expansion (in my opinion, of course) can be found at http://www.socialmirrors.org. The Human Evolution page is not yet up, but relevant papers are referenced on the Social Brain page and my own papers can be downloaded from here and from my CV (see About Charles Whitehead: Publications).

References

Andreasen, N. C., Flaum, M., Swayze II, V., O’Leary, D. S., Alliger, R., Cohen, G., et al. (1993) ‘Intelligence and brain structure in normal individuals’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 150, 130–4.

Atkinson, R.L., Atkinson, R.C., Smith, E.E., Bem, D.J. (1993) Introduction to Psychology (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace).

Deacon, T.W. (1992) ‘The human brain’, in Jones, S., Martin, R., Pilbeam, D., eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 115-23.

De Miguel, C. & Henneberg, M. (2001) ‘Variation in hominid brain size: How much is due to method?’, Homo, 52 (1), pp. 3-58.

Drachman, D.A. (2002) ‘Hat size, brain size, intelligence, and dementia’, Neurology, 59, 156-157.

Egan, V., Chiswick, A., Santosh, C., Naidu, K., Rimmington, J. E., & Best, J. J. K. (1994) ‘Size isn’t everything: A study of brain volume, intelligence and auditory evoked potentials’, Personality and Individual Differences, 17, 357–367.

Egan, V., Wickett, J. C., & Vernon, P. A. (1995). Brain size and intelligence: Erratum, addendum, and correction. Personality and Individual Differences, 19, 113–115.

Flashman, L. A., Andreasen, N. C., Flaum, M., & Swayze, V. W. (1998) ‘Intelligence and regional brain volumes in normal controls’, Intelligence, 25, 149–160.

Gallagher, H.L., Happé, F., Brunswick, N., Fletcher, P.C., Frith, U., Frith, C.D. (2000) `Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: an fMRI study of “theory of mind” in verbal and nonverbal tasks’, Neuropsychologia 38, 11–21.

MacLullich, A. M. J., Ferguson, K. L., Deary, I. J., Seckl, J. R., Starr, J. M., & Wardlaw, J. M. (2002), ‘Intracranial capacity and brain volumes are associated with cognition in elderly men’, Neurology, 59, 169–174.

McDaniel, M.A. (2005) ‘Big-brained people are smarter: A meta-analysis of the relationship
between in vivo brain volume and intelligence’, Intelligence, 33, 337-46.
Michael A. McDaniel

Peters, M. (1995) ‘Does brain size matter? A reply to Rushton and Ankney’, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology; 49 (4).

Rushton, J.P. and Ankney, C.D. (1995) ‘Brain size matters: A reply to Peters’, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology; 49 (4).

Rushton, J. P., & Ankney, C. D. (1996) ‘Brain size and cognitive ability: Correlations with age, sex, race, social class, and race’, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 3, 21–36.

Rushton, J. P., & Ankney, C. D. (2000) ‘Size matters: A review and new analyses of racial differences in cranial capacity and intelligence that refute Kamin and Omari’, Personality and Individual Differences, 29, 591–620.

Staff, 2002 Staff, R. T. (2002). Personal communication to Michael A. McDaniel on November 11, 2002.

Thompson, P. M., Cannon, T. D., Narr, K. L., Erp, T. V., Poutanen, V. -P., Huttunen, M., et al. (2001) ‘Genetic influences on brain structure’, Nature Neuroscience, 4 (12), 1253–1258.

Vernon, P. A., Wickett, J. C., Bazana, P. G., & Stelmack, R. M. (2000) ‘The neuropsychology and psychophysiology of human intelligence’, in R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of intelligence (New York: Cambridge University Press) pp. 245-64., brain

James R. Flynn

Flynn gathered tests from Europe, North America and Asia, around thirty countries in all, and discovered that, for as far back as we had data in any case, average IQ test scores had risen about 3 points per decade and in some cases more. Only recently, in some Scandanavian countries, to the gains appear to be levelling off (see, for example, Sundet 2004; Teasdale and Owen 2005).

We’ve been down this road before at Neuroanthropology before, delving into the murky depths of group averages and tests scores. Back in December 2007, Agustín offered neuroanthropology and race- getting it straight, following up on a discussion sparked by Daniel’s post, IQ, Environment & Anthropology. I put in my two cents, and caught an ear-full, for Girls closing math gap?: Troubles with intelligence #1 (the first ‘part’ of this post). I’ve been wanting to re-enter this particular body of hot water since I read a story on Science Daily, Plastic Brain Outsmarts Experts: Training Can Increase Fluid Intelligence, Once Thought To Be Fixed At Birth, so against my better instincts, my shoes are off and I’m poking my toes in.

Ironically, in spite of the fact that children spend longer on average in school than in previous decades, the Flynn Effect does not show up on the parts of standardized tests that measure school-related subjects. That is, tests of vocabulary, arithmetic, or general knowledge (such as the sorts of facts one learns in school) have showed little increase, but scores have increased markedly on tests thought to measure ‘general intelligence’ (or ‘g’), such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices which require mental manipulation of objects, logical inference, or other abstract reasoning.

The Flynn Effect has been one of the most powerful refutations to those who think that intelligence is ‘innate’ or ‘genetically determined’ because it’s very hard to argue that the genetic pool of a population can improve over time; if genes determine intelligence, how can the average in a population be increasing? Theoreticians called ‘IQ fundamentalists’ by some commentators have put forward a number of arguments about innate intelligence, virtually always pessimistic about minority groups, and often seeking to decrease funding for programs like Head Start that seek to ameliorate inequalities in academic achievement (see for example, Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of ‘IQ fundamentalists’ in his review of Flynn’s What Is Intelligence? in The New Yorker from around this time last year.

Jon S. Twing at TrueScores pointed out in a post, IQ and the Flynn Effect, that, when he was working on the Third Edition of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III), he was fascinated with a process called ‘continuous norming.’ Twing writes that continuous norming was a process developed by Prof. Richard Gorsuch and applied by Dr. Gale Roid ‘to improve the precision of empirical norms.’ In other words, people directly involved in the design and evaluation of these tests realized that these scores had to be adjusted, but Flynn noticed these changes and drew more widespread attention as well as some fascinating theoretical conclusions from this trend.

A number of explanations have been put forward for the Flynn Effect, including improved nutrition, smaller families which provide more adult interaction for children, greater familiarity with standardized tests, better schooling, and more complicated cognitive environments. Flynn has offered his own explanations in recent publications, which we will return to in a moment because they offer us a nice entry point into the neuroanthropology of ‘intelligence’.

The Flynn Effect runs contrary to our usual pessimism about the intelligence of ‘kids these days.’ As Steven Johnson wrote in Wired, ‘Despite concerns about the dumbing-down of society – the failing schools, the garbage on TV, the decline of reading – the overall population was getting smarter.’ Asked point blank about the alleged intellectual degradation of contemporary life, Flynn has been very abrupt in pushing back against this (see, for example, Matt Nippert’s story on Flynn from the New Zealand Listener). Flynn’s less cynical about IQ testing (although he recognizes its limitations) than he is interested in the underlying cognitive changes that these scores might reflect.

Four paradoxes of the Flynn Effect

In his book, What Is Intelligence?, Flynn identifies four paradoxes that arise from the steady increase in average IQ test scores given the predominant understanding of ‘intelligence.’

The factor analysis paradox: Prior research suggested that a single factor, ‘general intelligence’ or ‘g,’ underlies IQ. The Flynn Effect, however, does not affect all sections of the WISC and other intelligence tests to the same degree; that is, if we’re getting smarter, some parts of our intelligence are getting smarter faster, undermining our confidence in ‘g.’

The intelligence paradox: The Flynn Effect suggests that we are getting smarter relatively quickly, but it’s not obvious (and some would say flies in the face of certain evidence) that kids today are so much smarter than their parents or grandparents (except perhaps when it comes to home electronics). As Flynn writes:

If huge IQ gains are intelligence gains, why are we not stuck by the extraordinary subtlety of our children’s conversation? Why do we not have to make allowances for the limitations of our parents? A difference of some 18 points in the average IQ over two generations ought to be highly visible.

The mental retardation paradox: If the rate of change in IQ is extrapolated backwards, it suggests that people in 1900 had a mean IQ score somewhere between 50 and 70 judged by today’s standards. An IQ level of 75 is typically considered ‘mentally retarded.’ Flynn puts this one nicely, too: ‘Either today’s children are so bright that they should run circles around us, or their grandparents were so dull that it is surprising that they could keep a modern society ticking over.’

The identical twins paradox: Twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQ scores, typically considered strong evidence for a genetic basis for differences in IQ. The Flynn Effect instead suggests that intelligence, if it is being measured by IQ, is more malleable and subject to environmental effects.

Unraveling the paradoxes

According to Flynn, one possible set of explanations (certainly not the only one) is the following:

Functional independence of intelligences: The appearance of a general intelligence, ‘g,’ underlying all the subsections and different cognitive skills on a test like the WISC, is an effect of the test in a static social context. Over time, because shifts occur in the emphasis placed on different aspects of intelligence, different cognitive skills, the relative strengths of the various dimensions can shift. In his talk at the University of Cambridge, Flynn uses the example of an ‘athletic g’ for all the events of the decathlon to discuss how traits that are functionally interdependent might appear to correlate (see also Dickens and Flynn 2001).

Non-uniform intelligence gains: As Flynn writes: ‘The 20th century has seen some cognitive skills make great gains, while others have been in the doldrums.’ Whether or not our scores are increasing, and how much, depends very much upon which cognitive skill we’re testing. He offers a very interesting discussion of the variation in rates of improvement (or even decrease) here. As Flynn explains:

IQ gains over time describe a dynamic situation in which social priorities shift in a multitude of ways. No better maths teaching, more leisure but with the extra leisure devoted to visual rather then verbal pursuits, the spread of the scientific ethos, and a host of other things all occurring together. The average on Similarities rises but the average on Arithmetic and Vocabulary does not.

Increasing skills in abstract thought: Flynn points out the obvious – our ancestors were not mentally retarded. But they also were adept at different sorts of mental skills, an issue I’ll return to a bit later. Flynn suggests that we have become more adept at certain kinds of formal, hypothetical, and logical reasoning, liberating our problem solving ability from concrete reference (something that can be a detriment in certain sorts of problem-solving, as well).

Twins actually generating shared environment: Part of the reason genetic factors appear dominant in some traits is that some of these genetic traits attract certain environmental factors that compound and reinforce the genetic differences. The example given in the Wired article on the Flynn effect is the way that a genetically-based advantage in height might lead two identical twins, separated at birth, to wind up in environments where they both get pretty good at basketball; see the discussion here, too or in Dickens and Flynn 2001). As Flynn writes: ‘genetic advantages that may have been quite modest at birth have a huge effect on eventual basketball skills by getting matched with better environments — and genes thereby get credit for the potency of powerful environmental factors, such as more practice, team play, professional coaching.’

Flynn, together with William T. Dickens (2001), provided a more rigorous mathematical model of the ways in which reciprocal causation and social multipliers could confound the contribution of genetics and environment to IQ, but also found that many factors that influenced childhood IQ scores might not affect adult IQ without change in adult environment to reinforce changes. Because a person’s genotype affects their environment, a potentially small difference in the genetic contribution to intelligence might, through feedback effects, get compounded into a large difference in performance on a standardized test. In addition, there would be social effects if those around you would be developing more sophisticated cognitive abilities; you would both be influenced by them and expected to live up to the new norm in ability.

So do we give up on IQ tests?

Flynn doesn’t think gains in IQ scores are either trivial or cause for discounting standardized testing; the tests are not fatally flawed, although our understanding of the results may be. Flynn argues that we really need to understand what these changes are measuring. People are not growing ‘smarter,’ they are growing better at very specific cognitive skills:

This solution to our paradox does not imply that massive IQ gains over time are trivial. Aside from the escalation in lateral thinking, they represent nothing less than a liberation of the human mind. The scientific world-view, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial people. This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable. (from this page in the Cambridge talk)

Flynn surveys a number of studies that suggest that the ability to engage in formal or abstract reasoning strongly correlates, not with intelligence, but with the level of schooling; since, in the West, people stay in school longer if they are more intelligent, it makes sense that the correlation between intelligence and the ability to engage in abstract reasoning would be especially strong in industrialized countries. That is, if schooling affects intellectual abilities measured by these tests, at the same time that these tests provide greater access to formal educational opportunities, then the tests would measure intelligence really well, but not just because they transparently reflect some underlying intelligence. Rather, it would be because the tests themselves are tied up in a self-reinforcing cycle of talent (or its lack) being compounded by opportunities, confidence, and motivation (or their opposite).

Innovations in thinking

Flynn argues that certain shorthand abstractions (SHA), formulae for thinking critically, have entered the cognitive repertoire of educated people, expanding their intellectual capabilities. Ironically, none of these SHAs shows up on a standardized IQ test like WISC or WAIS. If we wanted to measure people’s critical thinking abilities, we would have to come up with a new sort of test.

In a brief form, the concepts (along with the date of their creation and intellectual discipline) include: ‘market’ (1776, economics), ‘percentage’ (1860, statistics), ‘natural selection (1864, biology), ‘control group’ (1875, social science), ‘random sample’ (1877, social science), ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (1903, moral philosophy), ‘charisma effect’ (1922, social science), ‘placebo’ (1938, medicine), ‘falsifiable/tautology’ (1959, philosophy of science), and ‘tolerance school fallacy’ (2000, moral philosophy) (okay… the last one is Flynn’s, but it really builds upon some concepts close to our anthropological hearts, like cultural relativism). I won’t go into any detail (you can read about them here), but the idea is that some concepts that become shared representations – although by no means universal – facilitate forms of thought that are otherwise unlikely, or even impossible.

Flynn also offers a short, incomplete list of some of the concepts that resemble shorthand abstractions, but are actually opposed to scientific thought; among the examples he offers are the idea that some human traits are ‘contrary to nature’ (usually something the speaker want so condemn), ‘intelligent design’, ‘gender science’, and ‘reality is a text’, a nice mix of targets guaranteed to irritate a majority of readers: as Flynn writes, they are ‘evenly divided between the contributions of obscurantist churches and contemporary academics.’

Whether or not we agree about any one of these SHAs (or anti-SHAs, call them ‘shorthand errors’ or SHEs), Flynn’s account is a powerful discussion of how cognition might be affected by social invention, cognitive sharing, and even historical development of thought. Rather than getting ‘smarter’ in some vague way, Flynn offers a much more concrete account of specific thinking tools that individuals may or may not successfully integrate into their repertoire. They clearly have blinders as well as lenses, obscuring certain things or making it harder to have some kinds of thought, as well as facilitating others (like the ways of thinking tested on the WISC and other IQ tests). Although I may quibble with this or that SHA, I admire the degree to which he pins them down, even locating their origin and birth. It’s a kind of intellectual history that’s a bit alien to me as an anthropologist, but I think it’s very persuasive.

I’ll come back later and argue about whether ‘modern’ is such a good term to call it, but given this sophisticated, historical, contingent account of the very specific concepts that the term refers to in Flynn’s theory, I think it works. Perhaps it’s not fortuitous as sloppy thinkers are not going to read the details but possibly assume a very old fashioned ‘the West and the Rest’ division of the world into ‘modern thinkers’ and ‘non-modern thinkers,’ but I can’t accuse Flynn of doing that.

Flynn wrapped up his talk at the University of Cambridge with a discussion of wisdom, whether or not the industrial revolution that produced gains in IQ makes us so materialistic that wisdom will not be able to curb destructive desires. He wonders openly about the future:

The 20th century has been the century of rising IQ, the spread of the language and categories of science, the liberation of reason from the concrete, and the enhancement of on-the-spot problem solving. The 21st century will be the battleground of armies for and against the SHAs. It just might culminate in the triumph of critical thinking if universities hold fast to what they are supposed to be all about. Whether we can hope for anything more, I cannot predict.

Now, I still haven’t gotten to that article on Science Daily on the training of fluid intelligence that started me down this path, but don’t worry, I’m just getting warmed up. I’ve got more to come on training intelligence and whether or not rural people are dumber than city-dwellers… Yeah, it’s just getting good.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sue Sheridan who hipped me to the Science Daily piece that made me make my first notes for this posting — and our readers should check out her blog, Life of Wiley, home of the Daily Skeleton Action figure.

Bibliography

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