The article discusses a river trip including five neuroscientists who took time away from their typical routine of digital interaction, dwelling in built environments, and conducting research to float down a river valley in Utah and spend some quality time with bats and cliffs as well as each other. To be honest, this sounds pretty idyllic to me, and I think far more conferences should be held outdoors in tents rather than in rented hotel meeting rooms with PowerPoint slides, 15-minute papers and cellophane-wrapped muffins. A whole new industry of Adventure Academic Meetings could allow physicists to discuss new breakthroughs while spelunking or philosophers to reflect on Continental theory while snowshoeing. Sign me up for the Anthropologists Hike the Appalachian Trail conference, but count me out of International Neuroanthro-Bungee 2012!

The participants in the white-watering brain sciences tête-à-tête seem to share my enthusiasm for a change in conference formats:

“There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you,” Mr. Braver says. He echoes the others in noting that the trip is in many ways more effective than work retreats set in hotels, often involving hundreds of people who shuffle through quick meetings, wielding BlackBerrys. “It’s why I got into science, to talk about ideas.”

One of the first things that irritated me in the NYTimes piece, however, was the conflation of living the ‘life uninterrupted’ — having a small, intimate retreat with a handful of people — and being ‘in Nature,’ as if the two were inherently inextricable. Of course, one wouldn’t have to invite hundreds of people to the hotel for a conference, and the conversations would likely be a lot more intimate and less distracted, even if your small group was at a spa or dude ranch. Likewise, you can go to Nature at an outdoor music festival and feel completely over-stimulated, even though you have no access to electricity or indoor plumbing.

Technology makes us do it: The obligation to connect

One of the effects of their rafting vacation is simply the ‘power is out,’ temporarily incommunicado, feeling of having all of your ongoing social interactions through technology suspended. It’s the same effect my colleagues sometimes report when they say that they get their best reading done on planes. Obviously, the effect is not ‘Nature’ if you can get it in a giant metal tube hurling high above the earth’s surface (hardly ‘natural’).

The effect is in large part social, although it’s the remission of social engagement that you get, either while rafting in a remote river or while sitting with hundreds of anonymous human beings enjoying the fact that you don’t have to interact with any of them except to choose your cold beverage and whether your delicious in-flight meal will consist of chicken or beef. As Daniel put it in his post, ‘…that dichotomy of technology as bad and nature as good is a false one.’

I think that the scientists are clear on this, but the Times article seems lazily to juxtapose being social to being in nature; to me, they’re separate issues and can vary independently. One could just as easily be ‘in Nature’ with lots of people, or be in a digital environment where one was largely isolated and free from obligatory over-engagement. Nature is only relatively free of social engagements because most urban people don’t spend much time there, so you can escape them by going outdoors.

Natural settings — and airplanes — are a relief, in addition, because we aren’t very good at giving each other, or taking for ourselves, time to think and just share ideas. Virtually everyone I know currently working in academe will say the same thing: we feel that the time and space to work on ideas and have discussions is constantly being encroached upon, not because of technology, but because of creeping managerialism in our lives, the sense that we have less and less authority to ignore those who want to impinge upon our time.

Daniel elaborates very nicely on how the article confounds the social expectation of how we should use technology with the technology itself; for example, email demands instant reaction, or mobile phones mean you have to be available to take calls. As Daniel points out, it’s not the phones or the emails making the demands, but the annoying people who use them to get to you. The expectation is generated socially, not by the technology, and we tend to be complicit in these expectations rather than actively resisting them (something Melissa Fisher and I discussed in the introduction to our book on the anthropology of the New Economy).

Your brain in ‘Nature’

But what’s really happening when urbanized neuroscientists get out ‘into nature’ while rafting? Are they gaining access to a de-technologized or pre-technologized state of mind? Or are they just taking their technology-familiar, even technology-dependent brains into an unfamiliar setting in which they are suddenly deprived of familiar stimui? The article seems to imply that the rafting trip traces a route across a kind of territorial conflict between Nature and our-crazy-distracting-technological-modernity; once the rafts float under a bridge, beyond the reception of mobile phones and Blackberries, the neuroscientists have crossed into Nature Territory, out of Technology Country.

Richtel conflates built environments and digital living with distraction, and assumes Nature includes the absence of distraction. It’s subtle, but the following couple of passages capture what I mean:

The study indicates that learning centers in the brain become taxed when asked to process information, even during the relatively passive experience of taking in an urban setting. By extension, some scientists believe heavy multitasking fatigues the brain, draining it of the ability to focus.

Mr. Strayer, the trip leader, argues that nature can refresh the brain. “Our senses change. They kind of recalibrate — you notice sounds, like these crickets chirping; you hear the river, the sounds, the smells, you become more connected to the physical environment, the earth, rather than the artificial environment.”

Let’s stop for a moment. In the first passage, we hear that the brain becomes ‘taxed when asked to process information,’ and the implication is that multitasking fatigues the brain, making it harder to focus. Even just being passively in an ‘urban setting’ without multitasking is liable to tax the brain because experience of urban environments, the very sensations, are inherently tiring.

No information overload in Nature

So, in the ‘natural’ setting, is there no brain-taxing multitasking or demands to process information? In fact, Mr. Strayer describes a sensory rich environment, with a lot of potential ‘information’ in myriad sounds, smells, even ‘the earth’ itself. Admittedly, the participants are no longer ‘multitasking’ as they have a few relaxing days to float down the river (not even having to work against a current). But this hardly means that urban settings are full of ‘information’ and ‘natural’ settings are free of stuff to perceive or to think about.

The article, like in a lot of Western discussion of natural environments, is shaped by a romanticization of Nature and a failure to recognize what’s happening when urbanized people go into forests and other outdoor environments. I would argue that they are not ‘returning to Nature,’ in the sense of undoing the effects of technology, but rather moving into a setting which, although admittedly beautiful, is also full of information and often human-affected in all sorts of ways. From a sensory perspective, I doubt that Nature and the environments Westerners normally live in are so different in intensity except that we perceive them as profoundly different.

The inclination to relax is not coming just from the Nature, but also from the profound ignorance and sensory naivite of urban people in bushland or forests as well as the social distribution of responsibility that frees up some individual from worry (the neuroscientists) while imposing it on others (raft guides and even previous generations of outdoors-people who, for example, have virtually exterminated large predators in North America).

Do most people find a rafting vacation relaxing? Absolutely. As long as you’re not terrified by white water, afraid of spiders or other animals, or too worried about other threats, you could easily find rafting down a valley in Utah to be a wonderful and relaxing time away from your normal routine.

Do white water rafting guides find rafting trips relaxing? Probably not. Is this because they’re not in ‘the Nature’? Hardly.

When a white water guide is on a trip down a valley in Utah, he or she has to be thinking about a range of things that the people on the trip don’t have to concern themselves about: food, the changing weather conditions, the idiot who’s had a few too many Tecates in the group, whether or not the Federal Marshals will realize that he’s actually gone into hiding with the rafting company… but I digress…

The scientists on the rafting trip can experience enormous reductions in their stress level, in part, because they’ve moved socially, from directors and professors and lead researchers and course convenors and PhD project supervisors to… guys with paddles doing what they’re told and getting pushed by the current. It’s not that there’s less information in the Natural environment to deal with, it’s that the role of being on a relaxing rafting vacation is profoundly different to being in the social roles that the neuroscientists inhabit back home. They haven’t just moved into Nature; they’ve moved, temporarily, out of some pretty demanding duties. In contrast, the rafting guide may still have a fair amount of responsibility and has to search the environment for important information.

In addition, most urbanized individuals in Nature are immersed in an environment in which few stimuli have any learned significance to them. The river is just a rush of water, the trees are non-descript, noises are unfamiliar and undifferentiated. Some people may actually find this swarm of indiscernible sensations stressful (they might not find a rafting trip the least bit relaxing), but others apparently find it quite enjoyable.

I would argue that, for an urban individual in nature, the effect is hardly ‘natural’ but a reflection of individuals’ varied responses to the novel (for example, recognizing that some will find this environment frightening because it is unfamiliar). Most romantics assume that their aesthetic responses to Nature are innate to humans, but they may be over-estimating the degree of innateness and universality. The romantic approach projects the learned stance of treating Nature as an aesthetic object, when many people, especially people who do not normally live in urban environments, don’t experience bush or forest environments as meaningless and beautiful scenery.

For example, the rafting guide is likely to be aware of important information in the environment and, although also trained at times to treat Nature as Awesome Aesthetic Object, generally experiences it as full of sensory stimulation that is useful. As James Gibson has suggested, the ‘information’ in an environment depends very much on the capacities of the perceiving agent; environmental opportunities or affordances are defined by the intersection of environment and organism.

Greater ability to kayak and work in white water will affect how people perceive the environment. Speed of currents and directions of flow point to both underwater hazards and potential fishing or swimming places; clouds suggest possible issues with weather; sun’s position and landmarks in the river help estimate whether a group is on schedule in a familiar section of a valley; places along the bank offer up opportunities to stop and successfully moor if necessary.

As Daniel writes in the earlier post:

So the main premise of the article is mistaken: the need for “studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected.” We cast our lives today as deluges of data, and the step back to nature as resting our brains. It’s a dichotomy that is not actually true.

In his post on camping, Daniel offers a rich account of his own experience outdoors that shows the inadequacy of thinking of Nature as information-light, but I’d push the argument still further.

If the rafting guide is an experienced outdoors-person, still more information is available in the forest and bush. Plants indicate what types of animals might be nearby, soil qualities, or microclimates – some are useful for their products or as food sources; sounds indicate the invisible presence of animals, shifts in wind on the forest canopy above that might signal shifts in the weather (westerly winds bringing different weather systems than northerly, for example); the seasonal change in the plants can suggest what food sources are available, the possible presence of animals who seek those foods, or even a different likely trajectory to the day’s weather. In other words, the relaxing ‘away from it all’ feeling is, in part, the effect of having no idea what’s around you. For a person familiar with the bush, Nature is not information free.

I’m no survivalist or Grizzly Adams myself, but I’ve been around enough Aboriginal guides and outdoorsmen to realize that there’s a hell of a lot going on around a person in deep bush. If anything, our pre-urbanized ancestors would have been even more alive to this environmental richness than modern guides, even more primed with accumulated knowledge about the opportunities, threats and resources available. They wouldn’t have been in Nature, in the sense that we think of ‘natural’ environments as being free of human influence, aesthetic objects and relaxing.

On the contrary, in the bush they would be surrounded with an immense amount of human-generated information about virtually all dimensions of the diverse ecological niches, with an acute awareness of the human consequences of what they were sensing. The natural environment would also be a human one, with sensations cuing lessons learned from other people, layered with individual history, as well as folk tales or even mythology in all probability.

For example, if I were going to go rafting into a steep-walled canyon, I’d be damn aware of the clouds and sky, knowing that a shift in weather could quickly turn a canyon river into a meat grinder. I’ve heard enough horror stories through my wife who teaches Outdoor Education: school groups or adventure tours that have found themselves in canyons or deep ravines when the heavens split open and the beautiful ‘natural’ rock formations turned into potential raft crushers when suddenly filling with water.

Like Daniel, I’m suspicious of the Nature v. the City narrative that the story imposes, especially the idea that we’re now suddenly drowning in a flood of information when before, we only had a trickle with which to contend. I think we’ve always been surrounded with ‘information’ of all sorts, receiving it through different channels. We have much greater choice now about what to attend to. We have new channels available due to technology, and we find these channels invasive and distracting, in part, because of the social rules we’ve imposed on ourselves for using them (You MUST check Facebook every few hours; You MUST NOT turn off your mobile phone).

Getting out of reach

Personally, the story of finding rafting in Utah very relaxing resonates strongly with me because I don’t much care for urban environments. I, too, find them a bit overwhelming, over-stimulating and crowded, and I look forward to retreating to my farm on the weekends after struggling with traffic and all the people. But I also know I’m not retreating to an information-free Nature.

On the farm, I monitor the changing clouds because we need rain, notice how the grasses change in the paddocks (clover coming back at the moment, much of the kikuyu grass still too dry), keep an eye on the horses (had to spend five hours with the yearling last weekend because he was behaving oddly), notice the return of invasive weeds in the bush (need to get on top of that), and dip in and out consciously to a constant flood of information from the environment. And I’m a real amateur in terms of my environmental awareness, coming from suburban Midwestern upbringing and being completely new to the Australian bush. But I’m learning to recognize scat (that’s animal poo), to see subtle differences in the trees that indicate what sort of microclimate or environment I’m in.

Of course, the environment I live in is far from human-influence-free. The bush is regrowth after logging stripped off all the forests that were along the New South Wales coast prior to the arrival of Europeans, which were already shaped profoundly by Aboriginal land care practices such as burning. The animals I watch, such as horses, are alien species; the birds are affected directly and indirectly by humans; animals are missing that might otherwise be here (we smile when we see kangaroos and wallabies on the property, hoping that they are doing well). The trees are often exotics, and even the grass is exotic (or native grass in proportions it would not be without human intervention). The fences and power lines, etc. etc.

Even the pockets of greatest ‘wildness,’ the old growth forests on the steep sides of the coastal escarpment here, are hardly without the effects of ‘Civilization,’ as Richtel calls it; the feral goats and deer that roam the forest here in Australia are as much the product of human intervention as the pavement and plowed fields down below. I’m not sure the floating neuroscientists would find the Utah river valley at night so relaxing if generations of humans before them had not waged a constant war of attrition, since the first Americans, on the original megafauna and virtually every species on the continent capable of treating humans as prey.

What I think may be different is that, in Nature (and I’m being skeptical about that term, as you can tell), it may be easier to shut out some sensations, not only because most urbanized individuals are largely ignorant of what those sensations mean, but also because irrelevant information does not have the same purchase on our mental resources as irrelevant social information in urban settings, especially because people are involved. Being around other people, including through technological channels, is hard in part because Westerners can’t just shut them out when the information they are generating is not really that important due to our own cultural standards of politeness. Our cultural compatriots get upset with you if you demonstrate that you find their ‘information’ irrelevant.

Without social obligations to pay attention, you can do a kind of sensory triage, see if anything is worth paying attention to, and then stop paying attention. You’ve still got to be partially aware if some new sensation does emerge, especially something that indicates a threat or risk, but you don’t have to worry that you will be committing a major faux pas if you just screen out social information.

I say this in part because I realize that I’m growing increasingly rude as I age, hardly unusual, and that one reason for it is that it’s an information management technique. If I can get rid of a student with a 30-second conversation or a one-line email, I can return to a head space that I control. Being polite imposes a high sensory tax. Increasingly I appreciate professors at Chicago who seemed to have various mild social dysfunctions; I knew see these quirks as quite sophisticated adaptations to contend with the information landscape of life in an over-stimulating academic environment.

Driven to distraction: withdrawing to concentration

Richtel synthesizes and collapses what as no doubt a very long, on-going conversation among the neuroscientists on the rafting trip, so I think we need to pull apart a bit of what gets lumped together when he writes that the ‘believers’ in nature as cognitive adjustment ‘argue that heavy technology use can inhibit deep thought and cause anxiety, and that getting out into nature can help. They take pains in their own lives to regularly log off.’

This seems to collapse separate points about nature, which I’ve been critical about, and the dangers to ‘deep thought’ posed by interruptions, technological or otherwise. In that sense, I agree, but not because I think humans are naturally ‘deep thinkers’ who have only become distracted due to new-fangled ring tones on their iPhones. Rather, I see deep thought as a major accomplishment. Concentration, especially on thoughts rather than immediate stimuli, is likely a distinctive human ability that requires a fair bit of environmental engineering to support the practice.

‘Nature’ may not be the best place to encourage deep thought. In fact, being in an environment full of potential predators, environmental risks and resources vital to your survival — if you didn’t have boats loaded with coolers, sleeping bags, flashlights, pork chops, Tecate, and, seriously, a portable toilet (how’s that for ‘back to Nature’?) — could conceivably make a person profoundly reactive and shallow thinking. Walking around lost in ‘deep thoughts’ might be a maladaptive behaviour pattern in some ‘natural’ environments.

One of the scientists on the trip, David Strayer of the University of Utah, says, ‘Attention is the holy grail,’ and I would agree. But the problem, for me, would not be that we are undermining our innate ability to concentrate for long periods of time, an ability that can be restored by getting into Nature. Rather, because we don’t appreciate how hard it is to concentrate, we’re not sufficiently careful about the sorts of environments we create for thinking and working. Worse, we are now carrying around personal portable interruption units of all sorts, wiring interruption programs into the basic tools of our trade, and assuming that the environment around us is not going to affect our cognitive abilities when we all know that’s not the case.

Mr. Braver poses the problem as one of ‘restoring’ cognitive ability. As Richtel writes, quoting Braver the guide on the trip: “If we can find out that people are walking around fatigued and not realizing their cognitive potential… What can we do to get us back to our full potential?” I agree with everything about this except the idea that we’ve somehow left behind our concentration and can get back to it by Returning to Nature (I capitalize these things to highlight the degree to which they are freighted with symbolic implications). Nature is not the answer to our cognitive problems; but at least when we’re out of range of the cell phone towers and email, we can hear ourselves thinking about the questions.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

The whole technology vs. nature theme is a hit, as the NY Times article, Your Brain on Computers: Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain, is the most popular article there right now. But that dichotomy of technology as bad and nature as good is a false one. Worse, the prism of the brain proves to be dangerous rapids rather than a river of explanation.

I’ll start with the money quote for me:

Back in the car, Mr. Kramer says he checked his phone because he was waiting for important news: whether his lab has received a $25 million grant from the military to apply neuroscience to the study of ergonomics. He has instructed his staff to send a text message to an emergency satellite phone the group will carry with them.

Mr. Atchley says he doesn’t understand why Mr. Kramer would bother. “The grant will still be there when you get back,” he says.

“Of course you’d want to know about a $25 million grant,” Mr. Kramer responds. Pressed by Mr. Atchley on the significance of knowing immediately, he adds: “They would expect me to get right back to them.”

It is a debate that has become increasingly common as technology has redefined the notion of what is “urgent.” How soon do people need to get information and respond to it? The believers in the group say the drumbeat of incoming data has created a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s ability to focus.

The anthropologists among you should already know where I am going – the conflation of a social expectation, a social reality, with a technological cause. The money quote really is just this, “They would expect me to get right back to them.” But rather than dwelling on that, the piece then asserts that “technology has redefined the notion of what is ‘urgent’.” Sorry, but it was actually people who did that, people and their social expectations. Technology doesn’t come to us unmediated by culture. Rather, technology is culture.

Unfortunately a good ethnographic moment, which says one thing about human life, is turned into a reductive, brain-oriented explanation in the next paragraph – the expectation to get back to someone becomes the drumbeat of incoming data. Yet they are two very different things.

So the main premise of the article is mistaken: the need for “studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected.” We cast our lives today as deluges of data, and the step back to nature as resting our brains. It’s a dichotomy that is not actually true.

Instead, it is the step into nature, away from daily demands, that is the novelty. It also deluges us with data, just different types of data than we normally think about. Take this quote from my post Camping and the Brain:

The noises of the night surrounded us through the fabric walls of the tent, the wind amid the leaves, the lap of waves, a nightly fight between two raccoons, the birds in the morning. Smoke from our campfire filled our nostrils and stung our eyes, the warm and slightly acrid smell of burnt wood clinging to our clothes and our hair. The sun poured down on us, turning my boys nut brown and myself a reddish brown. No walls to shut nature away; my first night back I woke up feeling odd, realizing that it was too quiet, too enclosed, too soft…

[However], I have felt a similar sense of stimulation and involvement in big cities, for example, Bogotá, where walking was the norm, intense social interaction marked everyday life, and the sights and sounds and smells and even the language all were potent and different.

Rather, I came back from Michigan thinking about neuro-anthropology as too split. Even if we know better most of the times, we fall back on the brain as center—the thing that does the processing, the thing involved in senses and experiences and doing. It is too analytical a view. Camping, it was senses and experiencing and doing that mattered. These were the things that integrated the brain and the local environment, not the brain itself nor the constructive power of culture.

Where Brain Research Might Help

To return to the NY Times Rafting Brains piece, I am actually in considerable agreement with a major point about planned research, as it is more modest and focused:

The quest to understand the impact on the brain of heavy technology use — at a time when such use is exploding — is still in its early stages. To Mr. Strayer, it is no less significant than when scientists investigated the effects of consuming too much meat or alcohol.

That type of research is important. We do need to know how technology might be positively and/or adversely affecting us. But we need to do it right. And here I’ll let Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks fame in his post Scientists Go Rafting speak:

Scientifically, the trip is next to useless, as even if the team was doing research in the wild it tells us nothing specific about technology.

There is a whole host of studies that tell us contact with nature has psychological benefits, so any effects of being in the wilderness could be equally due to immersion in the natural world rather than lack of technology.

If you really wanted to see if there were any differences related to technology you’d want people to live their regular lives without the devices they usually rely on. Sending people on holiday just isn’t useful because you can’t tell whether any differences are due to changes in diet, sleeping patterns or sunset banjo playing.

The piece is also based on the bizarre premise that technology = multi-tasking and this is a new and ‘unnatural’ form of mental activity that may be ‘changing us’.

As we’ve mentioned before, this is an odd myth that ignores the fact that in the majority of the world, and for the majority of human history, we have multi-tasked without digital technology.

Anyone who thinks multi-tasking is novel should spend a day looking after four children, a small collection of animals and cooking on a stove at the same time (that, by the way, is an easy day).

But to be more critical, I’d actually say the whole “technology is killing us” thing is just not as important as lots of other research programs on the intersection of brains & society.

“If we can find out that people are walking around fatigued and not realizing their cognitive potential,” Mr. Braver says, then pauses and adds: “What can we do to get us back to our full potential?”

Well, here’s a list. We know exercise helps (as Mr. Kramer has established). We know significant social relationships help. We know that poverty poisons the brain. We also know that inquality kills, that our personal behavior can be extraordinarily damaging, and that gender and race limit much more than technology. Yes, I could have put in links to all the posts we’ve done on those different topics. But I don’t want to overwhelm you with distactions.

Digital fatigue? Well, there are lots of other things out there that limit people’s cognitive potential.

On Research and Explanation

There is nothing wrong with brain scientists taking an important and narrow perspective for their research. Being brain centered, both theoretically and methodologically, is actually quite useful for testing hypotheses and getting substantive results. Their science is kept on a leash.

But then their explanations get unleashed. The “brain explains society” sort of thing. They raft into areas that they are not at all prepared to handle – they haven’t navigated the white waters of rigorous academic training and debate in areas that would help them understand the relationship between nature (or society), people and brains better, and how to also project their explanations in ways that take into account the factors that matter so much outside their laboratories.

But enough. I think I’ll go take my dog for a walk. Out in nature, on a leash.

…

No, no, I can’t help it…

I am drawn back.

You must need some links. The expectation is so urgent.

Camping and the Brain

Is Facebook rotting our children’s brains?

Fear of Twitter – Technophobia Part 2

Cellphones Save the World

Solastalgia, Soliphilia and the Ecopsychology of our Changing Environment

UPDATE: Hey, if you ACTUALLY want to get away, and not just read about its effects, I highly recommend Nicholas Kristof’s piece, How to Recharge Your Soul. As he says:

So this is a how-to column: Here’s how to pry yourself and your family off the keyboard and venture into the wild — without feeding a bear. In the same way that you recharge your BlackBerry from time to time, you also should recharge your soul — by spending part of August disconnected from the Web and reconnected with the universe.

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.

Mind & Its Potential is your opportunity to hear the world’s top scientists, psychologists and philosophers explain how to apply the new science of the brain in education, medicine, business and your life.

After we previewed it, Paul wrote up a nice review of the conference. Now SlowTV is featuring the videos of several of the talks.

Michael Valenzuela, Neuroplasticity and the ‘Use it or Lose it’ Brain

“Dr Michael Valenzuela describes the concept of neuroplasticity in the brain. He cites the tangible benefits that mental and physical activity have on the development and ongoing functioning of the brain to demonstrate how our neural pathways work on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis.”

Dr Daniel Siegel MD on We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Neuroscience of Social Emotion.

Here Siegel speaks about “Interpersonal Neurobiology…an interdisciplinary view of life experience that draws on over a dozen branches of science to create a framework for understanding of our subjective and interpersonal lives.”

Baroness Susan Greenfield, The Brain, the Mind and Life in the 21st Century.

“A lively presentation” on “mind function and dysfunction in the modern world,” i.e., technology is killing your brain, but within the broader context of how the brain helps you be you (snarky, I know, but actually it’s a good presentation on relating plasticity with individuality and experience up until 14:50 or so).

And a group discussion featuring Susan Greenfield, Daniel Siegel, Michael Valenzuela, and Jane Burns that is hosted by Alan Saunders, Changing the Brain: Mind over Matter?

“This expert panel addresses how recent discoveries in neuroscience have changed the way we conceive of brain function. Recent thinking proposes that the brain is an infinitely malleable organ, constantly changing and heavily influenced by its surroundings and by the functions that it is required to perform.”

As a bonus, you can also get Prof Jason Mattingley on SlowTV speaking on What Can Neuroscience Tell Us about Consciousness?

“Mattingley looks at the different understandings of consciousness and what the field of neuroscience can add to our collective understanding of how the mind works.”

Barry Bonds elevated his game to the next level with “the clear” and “the cream”, shattering legendary records in the process. Are scientists, students, and other academics about to do the same?

While stars such as Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi continue to defend themselves against their alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs, a new debate over the use of a different kind of performance-enhancing drug has begun to rage in the scientific world.

Cognitive enhancers like Adderall and Ritalin have commonly been used as a treatment for behavioral disorders such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. However, these drugs are now becoming popular “performance enhancing” substances for healthy individuals trying to gain a competitive edge by boosting their overall cognitive function.

Henry Greely, a Stanford Law Professor, advocates for unrestricted availability of these drugs, claiming the enhancers will level the “cognitive playing field” and spark a new era of increased innovation. But Greely and other advocates fail to recognize the severe personal and societal consequences that such availability would generate, looking instead to a pharmaceutical solution that would, in the end, cause more problems than it would solve.

How They Work

Ritalin and Adderall have been on the market since the 1960s to treat conditions like ADD and ADHD (Center for Substance Abuse Research, 2005). While the specific mechanisms of these disorders have yet to be fully elucidated, cognitive enhancers have been successful in controlling or mitigating symptoms in patients. Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Adderall (dextroamphetamine) both inhibit dopamine reuptake, allowing dopamine signals to remain active for longer periods of time (Jones, Joseph, Barak, Caron, & Wightman, 1999). Provigil (modafinil), an alternative to the potentially addictive dopaminergic drugs, operates in similar fashion, but instead blocks reuptake of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.

The increased neurotransmitter activity induced by these drugs stimulates many areas of the brain (see right), including the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for a person’s ability to focus and strive toward a specific goal. This stimulation theoretically counters fragmented synaptic signaling in the brain, one suspected cause of ADD and ADHD.

While these drugs increase focus and concentration for people with attention disorders, they can also increase prefrontal cortex stimulation among people without such disorders (Devilbiss & Berridge, 2008). The increased ability to focus and concentrate on specific tasks is clearly of great social utility. These benefits, however, are not without negative consequences; numerous side effects including hallucinations, headaches, nausea, and depression have been documented.

How They Are Being Used

A growing number of healthy Americans are using cognitive enhancers in an attempt to gain a mental edge in our competitive society. The popularity of these drugs is rapidly increasing in many areas of society and has become particularly prevalent among corporate executives, academics, and college students.

An article in the January issue of TIME Magazine describes a high-level executive who uses Adderall to “continue the lightning pace and constant multitasking his job requires” (Szalavitz, 2009). Since receiving the prescription from his doctor, he says he has been better able to maintain his high level of performance, a development he attributes to his use of cognitive enhancing drugs.

The TIME article also addresses the rising use on college campuses (Szalavitz, 2009). Studies have found that 7% of college students have used a cognitive-enhancing drug for non-medical purposes, and on some campuses up to 25% of students have used enhancers to aid studying. Unsurprisingly, usage rates are higher at prestigious institutions, where students feel the need to keep pace in an overly-competitive academic atmosphere. Taking a cognitive enhancer the night before a final can help you focus for an extra hour or two, and many students believe that hour may mean the difference between an A and a B.

Improving academic achievement, however, is a complex issue—popping pills may not be the cure all for low grades. Studies have shown the association between sleep and learning; shorting on sleep to study may still lead to lower grades even with cognitive enhancers (Curcio et. al, 2006).

Among the scientists polled in a Nature study conducted in 2008, nearly 20% reported having used cognitive enhancing drugs for non-medical purposes (Maher, 2008). The most popular motivation was the desire to increase concentration, with other reasons including increasing focus, counteracting jet lag, and other miscellaneous responses. Interestingly, over half of the respondents reported experiencing negative side effects yet still continued taking the drugs.

Arguments FOR Use with the General Population

Stanford Law Professor Henry Greely is a leading proponent for making cognitive enhancers available to the general population. In his hotly-debated article in Nature, he argues that research into the benefits of the use of cognitive enhancers among the healthy population should be explored. Greely claims that the term “enhancement” has been marred by its comparison to athletics, saying “better-working brains produce things of more lasting value than longer home runs” (Greely, 2008).

In one of his main points, Greely argues that using a cognitive enhancer is analogous to any other practice intended to improve mental function, such as sleep, nutrition, and exercise. Just as these practices provide cognitive enhancement, so would the use of drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, and Provigil. These drugs have the potential to be very beneficial, and “we should welcome new methods of improving our brain function,” says Greely.

Greely further contends that cognitive enhancers may potentially “level the playing field,” allowing disadvantaged students to overcome educational gaps. Take the example of standardized tests like the SAT, which many colleges like Notre Dame use in evaluating applicants. These tests have been shown to be statistically biased against African Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities (Freedle, 2008). It is possible that the use of cognitive enhancers could help them overcome this bias, promoting greater acceptance rates of minorities at prestigious universities. Used in this way, the drugs would be elevated beyond the individual desire to gain a competitive edge, and be employed as a tool to remove educational barriers, a significant cause of socioeconomic inequality.

Research focusing on the use of cognitive enhancers by healthy individuals is sparse. Greely recommends that studies in the area of cognitive enhancement be developed in order to build a knowledge base concerning usage patterns, benefits, and associated risks of these drugs. These studies could then be employed in developing an informed legal policy aimed at preventing coercion and mitigating the potential for abuse.

In a recent New Yorker article entitled Brain Gain, Margaret Talbot presents a more moderate defense for the legalization of cognitive enhancers. Talbot compares the use of cognitive enhancers to elective cosmetic surgery—both are personal choices, with inherent risks and benefits, designed to enhance particular attributes.

While not as far reaching as Greely’s assertions, Talbot’s arguments against a ban on cognitive enhancers focus on practicalities; cognitive enhancers are already in wide circulation and are being used responsibly among academic and business professionals. While cognitive enhancer use may not be ideal, Talbot argues that people should be allowed, after being informed of the risks and benefits, to make their own decisions about enhancement of their minds and bodies.

Argument AGAINST Use with the General Population

While many support Greely and Talbot’s positions, they are not without opposition. Our arguments against popular use of cognitive enhancers stem from ethical, medical, and social concerns. We believe that promotion of cognitive enhancers in the manner described by Greely is irresponsible and neglects the more fundamental issues at the root of the problems he addresses. Talbot, while more moderate than Greely, still fails to consider the social and cultural consequences of widespread usage.

Among the many troubling aspects of cognitive enhancers are the potential negative side effects. Little is known about the long term effects of these drugs, and many of the documented short term side effects would likely affect healthy users as much as those with disorders. Imagine getting a headache from taking Provigil when you are trying to prepare for an exam the next day. In this case, the drug you are using to improve your cognitive ability is ultimately hindering it.

More serious side effects such as depression and insomnia, while not fully understood, can cause severe harm to someone who would not have otherwise developed these conditions. The striking recent instance (April 22) of a young boy hanging himself while taking ADHD meds and other incidents like it raise significant questions about the safety of these drugs, especially among people for whom the drug is a luxury and not a necessity.

Also, because Ritalin and Adderall act on the mesolimbic dopamine system, the pathway commonly associated with addictive substances such as cocaine, users run the risk of developing a dependency or becoming addicted (Volkow, Fowler, & Logan, 2009). Addiction is a high price to pay for using a drug that provides limited benefits.

Of further concern is the likely inevitable consequence that widespread use of cognitive enhancers would lead to intense social pressure and even forms of coercion. It is already clear that some executives feel these substances are necessary to remain competitive. More students at competitive universities would likely be pressured to use these drugs when they see other users getting better marks. General availability of cognitive enhancers in our society could easily make these drugs a necessary component for success rather than an optional boost.

Furthermore, the disparity that Greely proposes would be overcome by cognitive enhancers may instead be exacerbated. The financial means that are required to obtain these substances restricts their availability to those who can afford them. Look back at the earlier example of ethnic minorities using cognitive enhancers to improve SAT scores. Traditionally these minority groups are also economically disadvantaged and would lack the means necessary to acquire these drugs.

The real benefactors from widespread availability would be the rich, who already perform better on standardized tests. Promoting the use of cognitive enhancers would likely serve to widen the already significant divide between socioeconomic groups. Reducing the disparity within a population cannot be accomplished by using cognitive enhancers; the drugs would only reinforce the present socioeconomic barriers.

Talbot, on the other hand, places too much emphasis on personal freedom as a justification for legalization, glossing over the social and cultural implications sure to follow from widespread usage. Within her own article she recounts the story of a poker millionaire who made his fortune with the help of cognitive enhancers. His use of these substances was an isolated personal choice but had social consequences as well, allowing him to gain an unfair competitive advantage over the other players.

Justifying cognitive enhancement in the academic and business worlds on the basis of individual freedom ignores the social consequences of unfair neurological advantages in the extremely competitive context of these cultures. Cognitive enhancer legalization cannot be framed in a purely individual context; legalization will have widespread social consequences.

Conclusion

Greely and others are right in asserting that the debate over cognitive enhancers is not entirely analogous to baseball’s steroid scandal. Cognitive enhancers do provide significant long term mental benefits and arguably some social benefits. However, as we have argued, these benefits are outweighed by the physical side effects and social ramifications that such use would entail.

Moreover, any suggestion that these drugs could level the playing field fails to account for the complexities inherent in such problems. Issues like educational disparity and social pressure to boost achievement demonstrate these complexities and are fundamentally socioeconomic and cultural problems. Throwing drugs at these issues will not bring resolution. Rather a cultural- and sociological-based approach is best suited for this task. While we recognize the benefits of these cognitive enhancers, their use should be restricted to the treatment of cognitive disorders.

Bibliography

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Curcio, G., Ferrara, M., & De Gennaro, L. (2006). Sleep loss, learning capacity and academic performance. Sleep Medicine Reviews , 323-337.

Devilbiss, D. M., & Berridge, C. W. (2008). Cognition-Enhancing Doses of Methylphenidate Preferentially Prefrontal Cortex Neuronal Responsiveness. Biological Psychiatry , 626-635.

Freedle, R. O. (2008). Correcting the SAT’s Ethnic and Social Class Bias: A Method for Reestimating SAT Scores. Harvard Educational Review , 1-43.

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Maher, B. (2008). Poll Results: Look Who’s Doping. Nature , 674-675.

Szalavitz, M. (2009, January 6). Popping Smart Pills: The Case for Cognitive Enhancement. Time.

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A young Andre Agassi

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

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

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

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

What is talent and how to identify it

‘Talent’ or ‘potential’ are ways that some of us think about inequality in ability, or variation in the way that different people seem to benefit from training. ‘Talent’ is alleged a potential trait, a symptom of nascent ability, a foreshadowing of future greatness, or a way of explaining someone’s early achievements or performance advantage. On the other hand—paradoxically—the concept of talent is a way of understanding why some experts are more proficient than others; unlike a concept like jeito, a Brazilian term for something like a ‘knack,’ ‘talent’ is usually quite task specific or specialized, even though a ‘talented’ person is often quite versatile.

‘Talent’ is typically contrasted with ‘hard work’ or ‘determination,’ suggesting skill is some mix of natural ‘talent’ and ‘hard work,’ in various proportions. The cultural concept of ‘talent’ is a bit unstable; no one would expect a talented musician to simply pick up an instrument and play. Rather ‘talent’ is usually an idea that some people learn quicker, more effortlessly, and with greater effect. In some ways, ‘talent’ can be like a multiplier, allowing a person to get more out of formative experiences and instruction.

At times, ‘talented’ seems to mean little different from skilful, but ‘talent’ also has a bit of an edge: it can be an evaluation tinged with disappointment, ‘squandered talent,’ a suggestion that a person has potential which may not have been fully developed because of other failures, like an absence of hard work or discipline.

In sports, there’s sometimes the suggestion that ‘talent’ might have biological or even genetic roots, although there is little evidence (yet?) to support this assumption. We sometimes think of talent as running in families, one way to explain sports dynasties other than role modelling, expert in-house coaching, or increased opportunities from association with a successful predecessor.

Howes et al. (1998:2) offer five properties alleged to be true of ‘talent,’ and compare each with extant research that either demonstrates or undermines these propositions implicit in folk ideas of ‘talent’:

1. It originates in genetically transmitted structures and hence is at least partly innate.
2. Its full effects may not be evident at an early stage, but there will be some advance indications, allowing trained people to identify the presence of talent before exceptional standards of mature performance have been demonstrated.
3. These early indications of talent provide a basis for predicting who is likely to excel.
4. Only a minority are talented; if all children were talented, then there would be no way to predict or explain differential success.
5. Talents are relatively domain-specific. (This summary of Howes et. al. 1998, appears in Helsen et al. 2000: 728).

An entire specialized research literature, much of which is not published but held privately by various sports organizations, is dedicated to ‘talent identification,’ to the incredibly difficult business of figuring out which young athletes will reward serious investment of training resources. Especially as states spend scarce resources trying to achieve high prestige athletic outcomes, most extravagantly focusing on Olympic medals, the energy and research focused on talent identification, already great, is likely to increase. And judging from what I’ve read, this is still likely to be a hit and miss endeavour for reasons that will become clear .

For example, the Australian Sports Commission provides a series of resources intended to help coaches identify promising athletes as young as twelve years of age. Their website has a self-administered eTID, an electronic talent identification test.

eTID is the brainchild of the Australian Sports Commission’s successful National Talent Identification and Development (NTID) program which seeks to identify and develop Australia’s future sporting talent. This interactive website allows users to enter in results for a series of simple ‘home based’ performance tests and measurements which can be used to help identify athletes for selection in NTID development programs….

If your results are identified as above average you will be encouraged you to visit a Talent Assessment Centre (TAC) to have your results verified. After assessment, you may then be able to enter the elite sporting system, where you could be supported with coaching, equipment and travel.

Likewise, in the lead up to the 2012 Olympic Games in London, UK Sport has rolled out an ambitious talent identification program, but these sorts of programs are hardly knew; ‘talent identification’ and state support for athletic training was a battleground for prestige during the Cold War, producing generations of world class athletes, sometimes in conditions that amounted to gilded slavery.

But talent identification is tricky business, and it’s unclear whether tests or screening do anything other than confirm what coaches and spectators already know (‘hey, that kid is fast), or expose physically fit kids to sports that they might otherwise not consider doing. Neither of these two really confirms that ‘talent’ exists; one simply means that people who are good at athletics tend to stay good or get better with support, the other that skilful athletes are sometimes better than other beginners at sports they’ve never tried. As the SPARC-commissioned Talent Identification and Development Taskforce of New Zealand reports:

The Taskforce’s conclusion, consistent with findings by sports science researchers world wide, is that there is no simple way to accurately identify future talent as talent is multi-dimensional. It can emerge at any point during an athlete’s development, and is affected by factors such as genetics, environment, mental, physiology and support. However, it is possible to create an environment that increases the chances of athletes fulfilling their potential.

That is, in other words, we don’t know exactly what it is or how to identify, or even when exactly it would show up, but we know talent exists. So we should give everyone support because eventually, we’ll see who gets good and those are the ones with talent. Fair enough, but hardly proof that ‘talent’ even exists.

Some of the examples of successful ‘talent identification’ in sports are hardly compelling proof that we are close to some consistent diagnostic for talent. Stories about successfully converting sprinters with good upper body strength into pushers for an Olympic bobsled, or of training a champion beach sprinter who must accelerate in slippery sand and dive after a baton into a world-class skeleton rider who must accelerate on slippery snow until diving onto a sled face first, hardly demonstrate a penetrating perception of untapped athletic ability. In fact, it’s more likely a commentary on how core techniques may be closely related in diverse sports.

Studies of expert performance

Although the idea that excellence is innate, at least as some kind of hard-to-define ‘potential,’ dies hard, research by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson strongly suggests that skill emerges out of deliberate practice rather than being born in a person.

Popular lore is full of stories about unknown athletes, writers, and artists who become famous overnight, seemingly because of innate talent—they’re ‘naturals,’ people say. However, when examining the developmental histories of experts, we unfailingly discover that they spent a lot of time in training and preparation. Sam Snead, who’d been called ‘the best natural player ever,’ told Golf Digest, ‘People always said I had a natural swing. They thought I wasn’t a hard worker. But when I was young, I’d play and practice all day, then practice more at night by my car’s headlights. My hands bled. Nobody worked harder at golf than I did.’ (Ericsson, Prietula and Cokely 2007)

K. Anders Ericsson, FSU

When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

The problem for many people is that they’re not practicing deliberately; if they did, they would see a bigger improvement in their performance.

Ericsson and Lehmann (1996), for example, discuss a host of studies that converge on the realization that ‘talented’ individuals take virtually the same amount of time to achieve expert performance as their less gifted colleagues, we just don’t tend to notice it. The physical and neurological traits necessary for expert performance tend to be the result of, not the precondition of, increasingly skilful performance and this extended apprenticeship in physical techniques (Ericsson and Lehmann review a host of examples, such as ‘perfect pitch’ in music, chess ‘prodigies,’ ballet ‘turn-out,’ and ratios of fast twitch to slow twitch muscles, all of which appear malleable given the right timing and conditions).

An article in The Australian describes how Ericsson’s research undermines the idea that ‘talent’ exists at all:

Ericsson’s theories confound the beliefs of thousands of years. Now as Conradi eminent scholar at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he has been based since 1992, his basic argument is that there’s probably no such thing as innate talent or, if there is, it’s overrated. The only thing he will allow is that very occasionally certain physical gifts, such as height in a basketballer, will help. But in every other case, what’s at work in such massive successes as golfer Woods is a complex cognitive process that pushes the body and mind to extraordinary heights. (From ‘Success is all in the mind,’ by Shelley Gare)

In fact, Ericsson and Lehman suggest that the kinds of basic testing involved in much ‘talent identification’ may not be an indicator of success at specialized, skill-demanding activities:

Reviews of adult expert performance show that individual differences in basic capacities and abilities are surprisingly poor predictors of performance (Ericsson et al. 1993, Regnier et al. 1994). These negative findings, together with the strong evidence for adaptive changes through extended practice, suggest that the influence of innate, domain-specific basic capacities (talent) on expert performance is small, possibly even negligible. We believe that the motivational factors that predispose children and adults to engage in deliberate practice are more likely to predict individual differences in levels of attained expert performance. (Ericsson and Lehmann 1996: 281)

Even in seemingly simple tasks that would require basic differences in neurophysiology, ‘talented’ individual don’t tend to measure that differently from normal people on general measures. For example, ‘Numerous studies of basic perceptual abilities and reaction time have not found any systematic superiority of elite athletes over control subjects,’ even in athletes doing high speed interception tasks, an area where we might expect to find these differences (Ericsson and Lehmann 1996: 280; see also Abernethy 1987; and Starkes and Deakin 1984 for reviews). Legendarily, for example, Sir Donald Bradman, possibly the greatest cricket batsman ever to play the game, had reaction times on normal tests that were similar to a researcher’s control subjects who were college students.

For many readers, Ericsson’s work is a revelation, a way to—as Ericsson, Prietula and Cokely (2007) put it—‘demythologize’ the legend of the ‘natural’ expert or the gifted ‘prodigy.’ They point out that even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart actually trained vigorously from the age of four, and benefited from having a father who was not only himself an accomplished composer and famous music teacher, but also author of one of the first books on violin instruction. A number of recent books, including Geoff Colvin’s (2008) Talent Is Overrated, and Daniel Coyle’s (2009) The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How, provide popular versions of Ericsson’s research, which has appeared in a number of forums. I’ve sampled some Coyle’s, and he highlights the environments that produce extraordinary hotbeds of ‘natural’ talent, such as the high intensity ‘salon soccer’ in Brazil that shapes players legendary ball handling skills.

Talent: A difference that makes a difference

Some frequent readers may think that, since I seem to often argue for the influence of ‘nurture’ or environmental effects on emerging traits, I would fall into line with Ericsson’s work, so powerful a case does he make for the production of expertise by systematic practice. What I will suggest instead is that, in a neuroanthropological model of talent, we must take account of how very early differences in ability or behaviour intersect with cultural conceptions of ‘talent’ to feed the dynamics that Ericsson describes. That is, as Ericsson is so clear, access to coaching and motivation are crucial to the emergence of expertise, and both of these resources are culturally shaped to intersect with early physiological and neural traits.

Cultural notions of ‘talent’ and very early differences in children both play a crucial part in the practical processes that produce expertise, even if only as a gateway variable preventing many from ever getting the resources necessary for deliberate practice.

In what is perhaps an overly glib description, I would say that from a neuroanthropological perspective, ‘talent’ is a difference that makes a difference. That is, my research on ‘talent’ across cultures—admittedly still very much in the developmental stage—suggests that different societies, diverse approaches to coaching or athletic environments, and various sporting regimes label different traits ‘talent’ or cause an athlete to stand out. That is, what one coach might call ‘talent’ another might not consider the clinching detail; a trait that might make an athlete stand out in one style of competition might not be salient in another.

For example, I remember very clearly being in grade school and playing a lot of soccer; at one point, ‘juggling’ a soccer ball became a measure of aptitude for playing in elite teams. That is, being able to stand in one place and keep the ball in the air by playing it off the feet, knees, chest, head and shoulder, emerged as the gold standard of ‘talent’ or excellence. Those soccer players who did not juggle as well as their peers were ‘less talented,’ even though they might be extraordinarily fleet of foot, have great endurance, have a vicious shot, or have excellent anticipatory ability for playing defence. Juggling was actually a separate skill, learned outside of playing, but it was taken as an index of ‘potential.’

This particular difference trumped other types of difference that might be seen as indicating future promise. In fact, the trait highlighted as a marker of ‘talent’ might be linked to future expert performance or skill, but not necessarily in a direct way. That is, unlike Ericsson’s model, I’m agnostic about ‘talent’ because I believe it is possible—possible—that very early differences in ability might be linked to later differences in experts’ abilities, but my observations lead me to be deeply dubious.

So how do we understand the links between early and later differences in abilities? Bear with me while I provide a diagram.

‘Talent’ as a cultural model

(c) 2009 Greg Downey

The three arrows across the whole diagram are intended to indicate a difference of scale; factors at the top are socio-cultural in scale, in the middle are psychological or individual, and at the bottom are neurological or physiological. Developmental time is meant to stretch from left to right so that the middle arrow is a kind of biographical trace.

The diagram is intended to suggest how cultural notions of talent, coupled with physiological, neurological and behavioural difference, lead some individuals to be labelled ‘talented.’ On the cultural side, there’s a complication which arises with specialized coaches or ‘talent scouts,’ who often possessing specialized knowledge or techniques, but are also influenced by predominant ideas of talent, just as they impose their own on young athletes.

One area I’m trying to study is how the front-line of contact with coaches, the individuals working with junior athletes, do or do not incorporate new research and ideas disseminated by sports governing bodies, researchers, professional coaches and the like. I suspect that there may be enormous inertia against, or even outright defiance of, sophisticated models of how expertise emerges coming from the actual coaches doing the athletic ‘triage’ in clubs, junior teams, and the like.

Once a young athlete is identified as ‘talented,’ he or she is then, to varying degrees, separated from ‘non-talented’ or ‘less talented’ peers and given access to resources that less promising young athletes will not receive. The initial difference, the symptom of ‘talent’ or ‘promise,’ leads through social and coaching mechanisms to a later difference, elite skill, whether or not the initial difference is organically or developmentally linked to the elite skill that eventually develops in any direct or causal way.

This divergence is represented by the two possible developmental trajectories in the middle register (in red and pink). The blue and green line separating them, I’ve called the ‘cultural “talent” barrier’ because of my natural knack for zippy names. This second version of the diagram focuses on some of the factors that make up, and arise because of, the cultural ‘talent’ barrier.

The cultural ‘talent’ barrier

(c) Greg Downey 2009

The resulting experts will look different than more normal, under-achieving peers. For example, Dan Peterson discusses a recent article using brain scans of golfers in his piece, Tiger’s Brain Is Bigger Than Ours. The original article in PLoS ONE, The Architecture of the Golfer’s Brain, by Jäncke and colleagues (2009), makes two key points: first, that practice time directly correlated with golfers’ expertise (measured by their handicap) and that there was a stepwise quantitative difference in gray brain matter area in sensorimotor and cognitive areas linked to precision swinging (the left dorsal pre-motor and parts of the posterior parietal cortex in right handers). Jäncke et al. write,

the current finding supports the idea that neuroanatomical changes are induced by intensive golf practice…. These data are consistent with the view that the anatomical changes might have occurred at some point after the first 800–3000 practice hours or after a practice impact of more than 310 practice hours per year. In other words, anatomical changes may be induced by decreasing the golf handicap in early training phases to a handicap of approximately 15, whereas further practice, which is evidently necessary to achieve the proficiency of an elite golfer (associated with an average total of 27,000 practicing hours or 1,730 practise hours per year in this study), does not contribute any further to neuroanatomical reorganisation.

A cultural ‘talent’ barrier may be high in a particular sport, then, because of the peculiarities of the neuroanatomical adaptations that have to be made, or because of social and cultural factors that make it appear early promise is necessary to gain later expertise.

If the cultural barrier is low, we would expect that adults assume some kids don’t show promise until later, don’t give too much extra training or expertise to those youngsters with early advantages, and keep a broad segment of the population engaged, even if everyone involved isn’t convinced that they will be very good. Given this ‘low barrier’ condition, we would anticipate movement of individuals back and forth across the ‘talent’ barrier, less anxiety about being left off of a select team or failing at a try-out, and encouragement to keep trying as well as widespread opportunities to train systematically.

The promotion of ‘talent identification’ early in athletes’ development could theoretically lead the cultural ‘talent’ barrier to grow less permeable: those identified young would be given much greater opportunities for increasing expertise with very real physiological and neurological consequences. ‘Untalented’ individuals would also be clearly identified with corresponding impact on their development. The best coaching resources would be put at the disposal of a small group. If the young people believed their diagnoses, and then trained (or ceased to train) based on these assessments, the designation would profoundly affect the extraordinary motivation needed to undergo 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

To put it simply, talent identification can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, pernicious because it widens the gap between those who are ‘promising’ from those who do not show early signs of ‘talent,’ even if those alleged markers of talent do not actually feed directly into the final expert result. That is, talent identification may focus on variables that are irrelevant for future accomplishment and yet still produce both enormous disparity and achievement in those labelled ‘talented,’ although the labelling is empirically incorrect (outside of the socio-cultural coaching system itself).

What may be a small initial difference, even a neurological advantage, can be compounded and exacerbated in many cases by the culturally-based perception that the small initial difference represents ‘talent,’ some innate superiority waiting to reach fruition. Once a person is identified as ‘talented,’ the socio-cultural mechanisms around sport that embrace and seek to develop that talent, to varying degrees fix that early diagnosis by transforming it into a distinctive developmental niche. In part, I take as evidence of this the well researched observation that children who are older for their age brackets are more likely to ‘excel’ at sports and be considered talented controlling for other factors; the slight differences—and sometimes not-so-slight differences—arising from less than 12 months increased physical maturity lead to a self-fulfilling bias in the older athletes’ favour (see the discussion of this research in A Star Is Made by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, with links to original papers at Freakonomics in the Times Magazine:
A Star Is Made).

Given Ericsson’s work on the effects of deliberate practice, including the neurological and physiological consequences, whichever trait is singled out as symptomatic of ‘promise’ will have an effect as a gatekeeper to resources or provocation for support mechanisms that encourage the development of skill. For example, if talent scouts looking at junior tennis players focused primarily on the velocity of a young player’s serve, those who matured fastest, becoming the biggest, would tend to be classified as ‘talented.’ Ironically, systematic study of junior tennis players who achieve success actually shows that they tend to be under-sized as junior players, catching up to their peers later, just the opposite of one potential way to identify ‘talent.’ Likewise, Helsen and colleagues (2000) suggest that much of what is identified as ‘talent’ in junior soccer may be physical precocity rather than a permanent advantage in dexterity, body control, or skill. Or from my earlier example, juggling ability in soccer may (or may not) be linked to later expertise; it may even be a secondary indicator, a symptom of a young athlete having the motivation or perceptual skills necessary to learn more important skills. Juggling would correlate well with success even though the skill itself might be irrelevant to later accomplishment (and the time spent on it, in some sense, wasted).

The initial advantage may be surmountable in neurological terms, but buttressed by cultural expectations. Draganski and colleagues (2004), for example, found neurological changes in adults who trained to juggle. As two of the authors later reviewed (Draganski and May 2008), these findings are part of an emerging recognition in brain sciences that plasticity exists in the adult brain, outside of what were once believed to be critical developmental windows. As a cultural belief, however, the idea that the adult brain cannot change was (and is) part of a ‘talent’ barrier, discouraging late-developers from believing that they have a chance to develop skill.

Dan Peterson in Science Daily discusses How to Pick Athletic Superstars at Age 1, and comes to similar conclusions: although genetic tests for ACTN3 variations met with initial excitement, as variants of the gene have sometimes been linked to the prevalence of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibres, follow-up research has made the excitement about ACTN3 seem a bit premature. Predicting future athletic greatness on the basis of a genetic marker, or even on the basis of early achievement, runs contrary to basic research about how expertise emerges, including the extraordinary motivation, support, and commitment that development takes.

Through circuitous mechanisms of ‘talent,’ however, differences among novices can lead to elite abilities, but not because those elite abilities are already present, inchoate in the novice. Paradoxically, for some athletes, early rejection or frustration can help provide the stimulus for determined training and self-development. By the time the developmental trajectory reaches elite levels of refinement, extracting the effects of training, social selection, positive (and negative) reinforcement through affirmation (or discouragement), and self-fulfilling prophecy, is impossible.

The future research

The research project that I am working on right now, the one I’m writing grant applications for and doing all that sort of time-consuming, hair-pulling sort of work, includes work on cultural differences in the identification and development of ‘talent.’ That is, I suspect the traits that get a young person identified as ‘talented’ vary across cultural contexts.

9-year-old Fotu Luani, 85 kg

Here’s a case where the initial variable that may make a child appear ‘talented’ or ‘not talented’—precocity of child development and onset of growth spurt—may or may not be linked to a later relevant physical advantage in the sport. Not only is bigger not necessarily better in rugby, but a lot of late developers catch up to and bypass their bigger peers. Polynesians make up something like 40% of all professional rugby league athletes in Australia, but they occupy a range of positions, demonstrating that their size is not necessarily always the key foundation for their elite-level skills. Moreover, if the nervous system is faster developing in boys with early growth, the extreme plasticity of adolescence, when so much coaching work can be done on skill development, might end more quickly (this is purely a hypothesis). But if small boys are chased out of the sport for fear of injury, the cultural barrier to developing their skill is quite great, but one that could be surmounted by a number of simple mechanisms (such as weight-graded teams or lower contact variants of the sport to encourage skill development).

In another rugby-related example, some sporting systems are quite selective at an early age. I’ve watched my nephew move through multiple layers of ‘select’ or ‘representative’ squads, being chosen to play for his quarter of the city, for Sydney ‘city’ against New South Wales ‘country,’ for our state against other states, and then for Australia, all before the age of sixteen. For a person making it through this extraordinary system, the affirmation is enormous and the accumulation of access to coaching resources at each stage of this process helps to crystallize and widen any initial advantage the successful young athlete might have possessed. In contrast, the vast majority of rugby-playing hopefuls have had to face rejection at some stage of this process, told to ‘keep trying for next year,’ but given the implicit message that they are inadequate already at an age when most of them are far from physically mature.

Other sporting systems may not be nearly as selective. I marvel at extraordinary participation levels for men in rugby in New Zealand; even at the relatively senior age of 35+, participation in full-contact rugby is 11% (see SPARC 2001). Even more strikingly ‘democratic’ than the New Zealand case are some of the figures I have heard for participation in Australian-rules football in the Tiwi Islands, where it is rumoured that 40% of the whole population is involved in playing.

Although I have yet to really do the ethnographic fieldwork I need to put this in perspective, I have a strong sense that the ‘club’ approach to rugby in New Zealand contrasts with the severely age-graded selective environment I saw in Sydney, or in many sports in the United States. In the US the collegiate sporting system simultaneously encourages elite athletes to concentrate even harder (with scholarships at stake) while it demotivates many people from continuing to participate (for example, among those who do not go to university).

I suspect that ideas about ‘talent’ and socio-cultural arrangements of childhood sport affect each other. The rise of select teams or the contrary development of more widespread participation in sports can both help convince people that talent is either rare or widespread, with real physiological consequences for how the initial differences among children either become exaggerated or mitigated by training techniques.

Although this is only one dimension of the project, I think it’s one that has clear applications in youth sport and other social mechanisms that produce expertise over time. Clearly, there are initial differences in ability, some of which may be due to innate advantages in some individuals. But I suspect that a cultural system designed to identify ‘talent’ early and concentrate coaching resources on those with early promise can actually make the expert skill more rare as it demotivates those who might develop expert skill without the early advantage or mature more slowly. Rigorous talent identification may produce a handful of highly skilled individuals, but it may concentrate training resources so much that it makes the overall skill more rare than in a more open developmental program.

Conclusion

In summary, although I agree with Ericsson that expert performance clearly requires extraordinary efforts at development, strong coaching, and intense motivation, I don’t want to underestimate the importance in this process of very early differences in ability. Far from being irrelevant, early differences may contribute to future expertise, as they are compounded, exaggerated, or even leveraged into entirely unrelated abilities. If resources are allocated depending upon early diagnosis of ‘talent,’ then talent matters. The more a society believes in ‘talent,’ the more likely it is to become a reality, and the greater disparity we are likely to find between those designated as promising from those who don’t show early promise.

Given this approach to ‘talent,’ I don’t think it can be divided into a portion that is ‘innate’ and another that is ‘learned’ or ‘developed.’ Talent is a difference that makes a difference, either because it lays the foundation for future skill or because it unlocks access to socio-cultural structures that help a person to generate greater skill, but more likely because it does both. It’s not easy to separate those differences that are ‘foundations’ from those that are more social ‘keys.’

Part of the problem with the idea of ‘talent’ is that it discourages researchers from looking more closely at which developmental factors might produce the initial difference that gets compounded or what makes some people respond to one type of training when others do not. ‘Talent’ becomes a garbage variable, a way of explaining the unknown without really studying it more closely. ‘Talent’ locates all the cause for differential outcome in the individual, making it very hard to conceive of any other way to increase expertise than to look harder for ‘talent’ and spend more on developing it when it’s identified. In some cases, ‘talent’ may be a match between a distinctive pattern of motor control or style of perceptual processing with the task at an early stage or the selection structure, one that, if we understood it better, we could compensate for in others or even coach its development better.

Although it might be possible to develop more precise tools for identifying talent, discarding cultural concepts that are misleading or just wrong about which sorts of early developmental difference are actually predictors of future success, I don’t think that this is the best strategy. Ericsson’s research suggests very strongly that what is really in short supply in the cultivation of expert performance is not initial ability, but rather expert coaching and motivation to continually develop greater skill. In some ways, the popular versions of Ericsson’s work may help to fire more motivation; I’m hoping that some of the other dimensions of my research might help address the shortage of expert coaching, but I’ll save that discussion to another post.

Credits:
Thanks to Dan Peterson at Science Daily and Sports Are 80 Percent Mental for continually providing excellent discussions of the implications of sports science research. Thanks also to John Sutton and the folks at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, for their feedback and thoughts on the project.

If you’re interested in the work of K. Anders Ericsson, definitely check out his website and publications, or consider reading one of the popular books based on his work.

For more on the controversy about large boys in junior rugby, see Is Fotu, 9 and 85kg, too big for his teammates’ boots? at ourfootyteam.com

Please cite this materially responsibly as this is, like everything on Neuroanthropology.net, an intellectual labour of love for the authors.

Stumble It!
References

Abernethy, B. 1987. Selective attention in fast ball sports. II. Expert-novice differences. Australian Journal of Science and Medicine in Sports 19(4): 7–16. (abstract)

Colvin, Geoff. 2008. Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else. Portfolio.

Coyle, Daniel. 2009. The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How. Random House.

Draganski, B., C. Gaser, V. Busch, G. Schuierer, U. Bogdahn, and A. May. 2004. Neuroplasticity: Changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature 427(6972): 311–312. doi:10.1038/427311a

Draganski, B., and A. May. 2008. Training-induced structural changes in the adult human brain. Behavioural Brain Research 192:137-142.

Entine, Jon. 2001. Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It. New York: Public Affairs.

Ericsson K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. 1993. The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review 100(3): 363–406. (pdf available here)

Ericsson, K. A., and A. C. Lehmann. 1996. Expert and Exceptional Performance: Evidence of Maximal Adaptation to Task Constraints. Annual Review of Psychology 47: 273-305. (pdf available here)

Ericsson, K. Anders, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely. 2007. The Making of an Expert. Harvard Business Review 85:114-121. doi 10.1225/R0707J online version available here.

Helsen, W. F., N. J. Hodges, J. Van Winckel and J. L. Starke. 2000. The roles of talent, physical precocity and practice in the development of soccer expertise. Journal of Sports Sciences 18: 727-736.

Houghton, Philip. 1990. The adaptive significance of Polynesian body form. Annals of Human Biology 17(1): 19-32. (abstract)

Jäncke, Lutz, Susan Koeneke, Ariana Hoppe, Christina Rominger, and Jürgen Hänggi. 2009. The Architecture of the Golfer’s Brain. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4785. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004785

Regnier G, Salmela J, and Russell SJ. 1994. Talent detection and development in sports. In Singer R. N., Murphey M., Tennant L. K., eds. Handbook of Research on Sport Psychology. Pp. 290–313. London/New York: Macmillan.

SPARC (Sport & Recreation New Zealand/IHI Aotearoa). 2001. SPARC Facts: Rugby Union. Information from Sport & Recreation New Zealand’s (SPARC) 1997/98, 1998/99 & 2000/01 Sport & Physical Activity Surveys. Available at: www.sparc.org.nz/research-policy/participation-in-sport

Starkes JL, Deakin J. 1984. Perception in sport: a cognitive approach to skilled performance. In Cognitive Sport Psychology, ed. WF Straub, JM Williams, pp. 115–28. Lansing, NY: Sport Sci. Assoc.

Taylor, Peter. 2001. Distributed Agency within Intersecting Ecological, Social, and Scientific Processes. In Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray, eds. Pp. 315-332. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Today, I want to write briefly about ‘neuroanthropology’ as a badge, but spend more time on ‘neuroconstructivism,’ as it’s a term that sometimes gets associated with the sort of research and thinking that we are advocating here at Neuroanthropology.net. In a sense, this piece is written for non-anthropologists, to help them understand why they might get a really strange reaction from an anthropologist colleague if they start talking excitedly about new ‘neuroconstructivist’ perspectives.

We’ve obviously decided that ‘neuroanthropology’ is one of the labels that we find helpful. We stand by the neologism, even though some of our readers have described our choice of terms ‘deplorable,’ and we’ve sometimes had to struggle against the term’s use elsewhere. For example, Oliver Sachs, the wonderful chronicler of the lived worlds of people with severe brain lesions, often calls himself a ‘neuroanthropologist,’ as Jovan Maud at Culture Matters pointed out to me and Daniel highlights in a recent, more thorough post on the relation of what we’re doing to what Sachs has done (see also Neuroanthropology).

For Sachs, the emphasis is on the ‘neuro-’ with the ‘anthropologist’ part of the term referring more to the genre or style in which he writes and his humanistic concern for the sufferer’s-eye-view in neuropathology. That is, Sachs uses the term to inflect ‘neuro-’ with a sympathy for the sufferer’s own perceptions, what in anthropology we call an ‘emic’ or ‘experience-near’ perspective. I’m not sure when he started using the term, but one of his subjects, the brilliant and autistic Temple Graddin, used it to describe her sense of being an outsider in everyday interactions, like an ‘anthropologist on Mars.’

Unlike anthropologists, Sachs doesn’t really consider the range of normal (non-‘pathological’, with all the challenges that this label brings along). He also tends to study cases in isolation, without much of a focus on the social relations, cultural influences, and interplay between factors like environment, education, inequality, ideology, and the like that is a hallmark of contemporary anthropology. So although I’m very happy to be associated in any way with the remarkable Oliver Sachs, I would say that we are putting the ‘neuro-’ in the ‘anthropology’ to get neuroanthropology, perhaps working in the opposite direction and on slightly different terrain than the good Dr. Sachs. Still, if there’s any guilt by association, he’s good company to keep.

Still, the fact that we’re trying to bring the ‘neuro-‘ to ‘anthropology’ helps me to explain why I don’t like the term ‘neuroconstructivist’ even though I like nearly everything about neuroconstructivists themselves.

Okay, so I admit I was over-reacting…

What really got me thinking about intellectual labels and this issue was a one-line remark that pissed me off a while back when I first read it. Oliver Morin, who writes great stuff for the Cognitive and Culture Institute weblog, posted a veeeeeery short comment on a piece that I wrote on an article by Andy Clark and William Wheeler. Morin wrote: ‘Neuroanthropology dwells at some length on a paper published by Andy Clark and William Wheeler in the latest PTRS special issue. It is basically a celebration of neuroconstructivism. [emphasis added]‘

For a while, that brief comment by Morin kept irritating me, but I knew his work enough to know that he is a sophisticated thinker, not one to simply consign what I found to be a really interesting article by Clark and Wheeler with a shallow label (I know, I know – it was only a one-line description. A propensity to mull things over extravagantly is likely an adaptive trait for an academic.). I had to dig a bit into the literature to find what specifically was meant by ‘neuroconstructivism,’ in the process running into a bibliography that included a number of my favourite thinkers on subjects like emergence, cognitive development, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. It also occurred to me that there was likely to be a serious translation problem when the term ‘neuroconstructivist’ crossed over into anthropology if it set my teeth on edge, and I’m both reasonably neuro-savvy and trust the person who used the term.

Neuroconstructivism: not just another constructionism

The term ‘neuroconstructivism’ bothered me at first because of its close proximity to ‘social constructionism’ and ‘cultural constructionism,’ and, by extension, ‘deconstruction.’ (Although some proponents draw a distinction between social constructionism and social constructivism, I’m going to ignore that distinction because it’s inconvenient for my argument, at best. Besides, it’s already an overly-long blog post.)

Various forms of social constructionism have encouraged contemporary cultural anthropologists to focus on the degree to which important collective social products such as ideologies, narratives, languages, imaginaries, and discourse are social fictions. The short definition of ‘social constructionism’ (and it is anything but ‘short’ on internal disagreements and variations) is that social constructs, the products of human interaction – whether they be ideas, material artifacts, or practices – persuade socialized actors of their reality and independence from the actors’ perception of these fictions. Social constructs appear to be objective reality.

Social constructionists focus on the arbitrariness and implications of constructs, even if actors take them to be accurate representations of reality often precisely because the users of constructs don’t recognize that they are not operating with simple reflections of a reality external to culture. For social constructionists, these social fictions can then be seen to have all sorts of consequences, some of them quite material and even detrimental to those who believe in the fictions.

Clearly, certain facts or objects, however persuasive, are culturally specific and sufficiently autonomous from brute reality that it’s hard to disagree that they are social constructs. That is, it’s very hard to argue that, without customs, belief, and social consensus, entities like money, law, language, nations, reputations, and the like have much existence prior to human conviction that they exist. As we’ve seen in the recent financial crisis, some social constructs are quite precarious; rattle the markets a little, and ‘assets’ like mortgaged-backed securities or financial derivatives, even some ‘corporations,’ turn out to be shaky fictions indeed (‘Wasn’t there just a Fortune 500 corporation here a minute ago?’).

Observers sometimes draw a distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘week’ social and cultural constructionism. Strong varieties of social constructivism, in the work of philosophers like Jean-François Lyotard and some anthropologists, argue that reality itself is a product of social consensus, that we interact, not with a reality external to us, but with social fictions that we have created. In truth, strong social constructionists are rare, although a fair bit of contemporary cultural anthropology has a tendency to look like strong social constructionism because writers often skirt the thorny problem of how ‘real’ native concepts are and don’t really grapple with some of the materiality of cultural life.

For example, many anthropologists are much more comfortable talking about indigenous concepts of illness and healing than asking hard questions about causes, consequences of different therapies, and mechanisms for understanding how they work. Since we started Neuroanthropology.net, I’ve actually grown more sympathetic to this approach because I now better recognize how deep the theoretical water is and how difficult the empirical questions are if you want to think about the relationship of cultural concepts to things like biological causation.

But most social and cultural anthropologists, although they may write extensively about social constructions, are not strong social constructionists. They acknowledge that material reality is obdurate, that biology plays a part, that genes influence development, that language is both social creation and response to an objective world, but they tend not to focus on these parts of the mangle of everyday experience because the field has spent so much of its time trying to disabuse other people, academics and civilians alike, that reality wasn’t as simple and objective as they might think. That is, I suspect that, although they spend much of their professional lives working in constructionism, anthropologists don’t wander around in their off hours spiraling in existential contemplation of the fictions that surround them.

Looks like a neuroconstructionist, quacks like a neuroconstructionist…

To neuroscientists, ‘neuroconstructionism’ is an analytical perspective that focuses on the emergence of neurological abilities out of less complex neurological abilities. As Westermann and colleagues (2007:75) describe, many developmental psychologists tends to explore ‘children’s abilities at specific ages without devoting equal attention to the question of the mechanisms by which these abilities unfold and change over time.’ In constrast, neuroconstructivism tries to ‘link the observed abilities of infants and children at different ages into one developmental trajectory’ (ibid.).

Neuroconstructivism is also discussed in the two-volume collection of that name (Mareschal, Johnson, Sirois, Spratling, Thomas & Westermann 2007; Mareschal, Sirois, Westermann, and Johnson, eds. 2007).

One of the crucial characteristics of neuroconstructivism is the recognition that neural activity, affected by the environment, behaviour patterns, and a host of other influences, effects change in neural architecture: ‘cognitive processing itself shapes the neural networks that are responsible for this processing in the first place’ (Westermann et al. 2007:75). Acknowledging the fact that no specific level of analysis is determining the others (neither gene determining behaviour, nor behavioural independence from biology), means treating cognitive and neural levels of description as inseparable; neither can be studied in isolation from the other. As Westermann and colleagues (ibid.:76) write, neuroconstructivism calls, not for reduction of phenomena to neurological correlates, but for ‘consistency between the neural and cognitive levels in characterizing developmental trajectories.’

Westermann and his colleagues (ibid.) highlight six levels of interrelated phenomena, but I don’t think they have any intention of suggesting these are exhaustive:

1) insights from epigenesis on the probabilistic relationship between gene and expression, including the impact of behaviour on gene expression;
2) how experience affects the development of different neural structures;
3) how regional brain specialization emerges through interaction among brain regions;
4) how bodily experience affects cognitive development;
5) how the child’s own activity and active pursuit of its own goals affect its cognitive development; and
6) how social environments affect the developing child.

There’s so many problems with the old organism-environment dichotomy that it’s a bit of dead horse abuse to flog it anymore, but one thing that comes out of Westermann et al.’s discussion is that, depending on the scale of the analysis, what is the ‘environment’ can be radically different. For the gene, the cell is the environment; for the individual organ, such as a brain region, the body is the environment; but at the scale of the organism as a whole, these smaller scale ‘environments’ are, of course, the organism which is nested in still greater concentric environments. Westermann and colleagues (ibid.:77) write, ‘As the brain is embedded in a body (embodiment [note: not what anthropologists mean by ‘embodiment’]), so an individual functional brain region is embedded in a brain where it co-develops with other brain regions.’

Westermann and colleagues offer the following figure to outline some of the relations in embodiment:

Westermann et al. 2007: 79, Fig. 3: 'Embodiment'

In a sense, neuroconstructivism is a synthesis of some of the most promising integrative research that we have been exploring on Neuroanthropology.net. Although I could cite a number of passages to highlight the type of thinking that the neuroconstructivist perspective offers, I’ll just leave you with one from Westermann et al.’s discussion of ‘interactions between constraints’:

Interactions with a social environment have effects on both neural development and on the expression of genes (Eisenberg, 1995). These effects can either be mediated through direct experience with the environment or through altered caregiver behaviour in a specific environment (Sale, Putignano, Candedda, Landi, Cirulli, Berardi & Maffei, 2004).

That is, social environments affect biological development through several different mechanisms, some of them direct environmental contact and some of them indirect through the environment’s effect on the caregiver.

What’s in the name, neuroconstructionist

This is why I have reservations with Olivier Morin’s use of the label ‘neuroconstructivism,’ even though he’s spot on and has every right to label accurately (in other words, he’s right, and I still have a problem). After the AAA conference and some of the conversations I’ve had, I’m not content with the term, not because of what it means to neuroscientists but because of how it will likely be understood by anthropologists. The gap between our field’s understanding of ‘constructionism’ and this conception of ‘neuroconstructivism’ is huge and yet it may be invisible to anthropologists.

I can almost hear my colleagues right now: ‘Neuroconstructivism’? What would that be? ‘Constructivism’ plus ‘neuro-’, I suppose. Sounds like ‘social constructionism’….

Then, there’s a moment of hesitation as the anthropological reader tries to decide whether to attack (‘They’re saying our neurons construct us!’) or to prematurely agree with an incorrect understanding of what we’re about (‘Oh yeah, neurons are a social construct; that’ll really piss off the neurologists. I’m down with that!’). Especially when what follows is likely to be complex material on multiple scales, some of which might be unfamiliar to an anthropologist, I’m afraid that the response is liable to be either entrenched, knee-jerk resistance to ‘biological reduction’ (it’s obviously not reductionist from even the short description) or overly-quick acceptance without digesting the real significance of what’s being argued (this is not your retired thesis supervisor’s ‘constructionism’).

Either way, we don’t get what we want, which is really a more subtle discussion of the interaction between different scale processes, from the cellular and neural to the developmental, social and cultural. That is, I fear that the closeness of the label ‘neuroconstructivist’ to a set of older terms might signal battle… errr, business as usual.

In anthropology the label ‘x-constructivist’ (following the examples of ‘cultural constructionist’ and ‘social constructivist’) indicates that the person being tarred with the brush places the overwhelming emphasis in any model on the ‘x-’ against ‘y-innatist’ or ‘z-determinist.’ That is, there are two poles in some anthropological thinking, one ‘constructivist’ that emphasizes ongoing influences (culture, social interaction, upbringing, environment…) and the other ‘determinist’ that emphasizes innate traits (genetic, biological…). Part of my own strategy as a neuroanthropologist is to try to avoid saying things that let my readers off the hook, allowing them to engage in old-fashioned, one-sided, reductionist thinking that has made biocultural synthesis hard to imagine.

I don’t think Morin has ANY intention of dragging this tired constructivist v. determinist dichotomy into the new territory, but this may be a difference between European and American anthropology. Or maybe Morin is sufficiently recovered from the Constructionist-Determinist War and I’m still suffering from the lingering fear that the conflict will re-ignite. (‘The horror!’) The terms we use have to be carefully chosen, and translation between fields is sometimes hairy, especially if we see a term and don’t realize it even needs translation.

For example, one term that I’ve brought up before is ‘representation’; in the neurosciences, the term means the physiological neural correlates that produce a percept, concept, or other neural activity. Westerman and colleagues (2007:75), for example, offer the following: ‘Representations are here defined as neural activation patterns in the brain that contribute to adaptive behaviour in the environment.’ The term is debated, in some quarters of the brain sciences, though it is widely accepted, because it may imply a degree of stability, fixity or clear structural location that some theorists argue is unwarranted.

My problem with ‘representation’ like my problem with ‘neuroconstructivist’ is that I’m worried about how they will cross over into an anthropological audience; in particular, I’m concerned that these terms will blunt the potentially positive theoretical challenges that research in the brain sciences might pose for anthropological theory. Anthropologists talk about ‘representations’ and ‘construction’ a lot, but they do not mean the neural activation pattern that contributes to adaptive behaviour nor do they mean a sensitivity to the complex unfolding of organism-environment interactions in developmental timeframes (see, for example, the discussion in Beyond Bourdieu’s ‘body’ — giving too much credit?).

I personally prefer ‘neurocultivationist’ to ‘neuroconstructionist,’ but I feel like we’ve likely used up our neologism allotment for the year here at Neuroanthropology, so I probably won’t get my way. ‘Cultivation’ has a bit more organic implications, a bit less of a metaphoric extension to teleological or plan-driven development. One ‘constructs’ a house from a plan, digging out a foundation with a backhoe and tearing out trees to realize a pre-existing vision; one must work with nature and over time to ‘cultivate’ a garden, never sure how or even if everything will grow.

So even though Morin is right, and I was wrong to get testy about being called a ‘neuroconstructivist,’ I still won’t use the term around anthropologists too much. I don’t want them to think they actually know what I mean.

Stumble It!

Credits: Graphic from iStockphoto.

References
Eisenberg, Leon. 1995. The social construction of the human brain. American Journal of Psychiatry 152 (11): 1563–1575. (abstract, pdf available here)

Mareschal, Denis, Mark Johnson, Sylvain Sirois, and Michael Spratling, Michael Thomas, and Gert Westermann. 2007. Neuroconstructivism: How the brain constructs cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Amazon)

Mareschal, Denis, Sylvain Sirois, Ger Westermann, and Mark Johnson, eds. 2007. Neuroconstructivism vol II: Perspectives and prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sale, Alessandro, Elena Putignano, Laura Cancedda, Silvia Landi, Francesca Cirulli, Nicoletta Berardi, and Lamberto Maffei. 2004. Enriched environment and acceleration of visual system development. Neuropharmacology 47(5): 649–660. (abstract)

Westermann, Gert, Denis Mareschal, Mark H. Johnson, Sylvain Sirois, Michael W. Spratling and Michael S.C. Thomas. 2007. Neuroconstructivism. Developmental Science 10(1): 75–83. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00567.x (pdf available here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve decided to post a version of this paper here, with the caveat that it’s still a work-in-progress. I’d be delighted to read any feedback people are willing to offer.

Introduction

Boca d' Rio does a bananeira

The new label, however, reflects engagement with a new generation of brain research, what Andy Clark (1997) refers to as ‘third wave’ cognitive science, or work on embodied cognition.1 Much of the ‘third wave’ does not focus strictly on what we normally refer to as ‘cognition,’ that is, consciousness, memory, or symbolic reasoning. Rather embodied cognition often highlights other brain activities, such as motor, perceptual and regulatory functions, and the influence of embodiment on thought itself; this is the reason I’m thrilled to have endocrinologist Robert Sapolsky as part of this panel, as his work is part of the expanded engagement of neuroanthropology with organic embodiment.2.

My own entry into neuroanthropology results from three influences: a phenomenological interest in cultural variation in human perception, anthropological study of embodiment, and apprenticeship-based ethnographic methods. This method posed an odd question during my field research on the Afro-Brazilian martial art and dance, capoeira. Simply put, as a devoted apprentice-observer, I failed to maintain hermeneutical agnosticism and started to ask, ‘Is what my teachers and peers report — and I too seem to be experiencing — plausible?’

That is, capoeira practitioners, capoeiristas, claim their arduous training regimens produces perceptual, psychological and physiological transformations (Downey 2005; see also Grasseni 2004). I started to wonder if these reported changes were empirically observable or neurological plausible.3. The question of plausibility drove me to consult research on perceptual plasticity, skill acquisition, and, eventually, neuroscience.

At the same time, fortuitously, the brain sciences have also seen an efflorescence of interest in cultural differences in cognition that extends to cultural neuroimaging.4. Unfortunately, much of this research frames cultural difference in unsophisticated ‘East v. West’ terms. The old anthropological fears of ‘neuroreductionism’ likely will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, if anthropologists—who have more sophisticated understandings of enculturation and non-innate variation—do not participate actively in the emerging collaborations.5.

This paper presents a neurologically plausible account of how capoeira training affects one dimension of skill—learning to balance in a handstand—before offering a brief ethnology of diversity in equilibrium training across cultures. The goal is to highlight plasticity, diversity, and enculturation in the equilibrium system.

Some theorists of mind have suggested that the neurological apparatus maintaining balance is among the ‘best examples’ of a neural module, that is, a specialized, pre-programmed part of the brain. The ethnological diversity of equilibrium training, and the plasticity of what I will describe as a ‘nodular’ system, however, severely undermines the argument that a pre-programmed equilibrium-maintaining mental module is unaffected by outside information, demonstrating instead that even this basic and largely unconscious neural function can be encultured.

Learning the bananeira in Brazil

Mestre Cobra Mansa

Gymnast in handstand

Equilibrium as a perceptual system

To understand why this difference is significant, we must examine the neurology of equilibrium. Although psychologists typically say that the organ of balance is the vestibular system, located in the inner ear, in fact, equilibrium is what psychologist James Gibson called a ‘sensory system’ (1966, 1979). In day-to-day activities, people maintain upright posture by using a number of senses and a range of largely unconscious postural adjustment strategies (Horak and Macpherson 1996; van der Kooij et al. 1999).

Normal upright posture, for example, is maintained by sensations from the vestibular system, the semicircular canals in the inner ear (three to a side) and the otoliths (pairs of small bones in either ear); but also by vision, proprioception, especially at the ankles and joints, and pressure sensation on the soles (Mergner, Maurer, and Peterka 2003).

Sensory input to equilibrium system

Equilibrium system, simplified.

Confronted with challenges like running, moving in the dark, or standing on a shifting surface, the equilibrium system must ‘re-weight’ the various inputs, sort out disparities between sensory flows, discount or wholly ignore misleading proprioceptive, vestibular, graviceptive, or visual information (See Mahboobin et al. 2008; Oie et al. 2002). For example, as we walk, our otoliths sense acceleration, but proprioception that our legs are moving leads the equilibrium system to discount the vestibular indication that we might be falling.

In addition, different contexts limit the ways that the body can respond to instability; for example, carrying a child, we cannot use stereotypical movements of the upper body to prevent ourselves from falling when we slip. Training affects these patterns: gymnasts on the balance beam, penalized for obvious movements to right themselves, have to switch between primarily ankle-based or hip responses to stay on a narrow surface, and I found my vestibulo-spinal reflex suppressed after several years of falling over into capoeira techniques (See Marin et al. 1999; Downey 2005).

The handstand and bananeira as perceptual challenges

This fact that the bananeira and an Olympic gymnastics handstand demand distinctive motor-perceptual ways of achieving balance was brought home especially vividly for me when a visiting Swiss capoeirista, a long-time practitioner of circus-arts, complained bitterly that the different head position prevented her from transferring expertise in circus handstands to the bananeira. I had assumed circus would be an ideal form of cross-training.

Equilibrium system in handstand.

Most gymnasts focus their eyes on the ‘cliff edge,’ a visual anchor point about five centimetres in front of the wrists and equidistant between them (Clement, Pozzo and Berhoz 1988). Gauthier and colleagues (2007) found under experimental conditions that vision, both focal and peripheral, accounts for approximately 47% of balance in a handstand, but that the proprioceptive sense of one’s own neck was also significant, helping maintain balance when the head is flexed backwards (the Olympic head positioning) (see also Clement and Rezette 1985). Steven Vogel (2001:82-83) points to the high concentration of muscle spindles in the nape of our necks, the stationary position of the head in vigorous movements, and the head-first righting reflex of many animals to suggest that head position is a crucial link between vestibular information in the head and the whole body’s position.

How then do capoeiristas balance? Although comparable laboratory data on the bananeira simply is not available (yet?), ethnographic observation and apprenticeship do offer some likely candidates. With head position fully inverted and vision essential to tracking an adversary, both vestibular and visual information are severely compromised for balancing purposes. The only other candidates are touch, proprioception, and righting behaviours; I suspect capoeiristas maintain inverted balance by relying more heavily on proprioception and sensitivity through the hands, coupled with a very quick, refined learned pattern of hand-stepping reflexes.

Equilibrium in bananeira, speculative.

For example, unlike gymnasts, capoeira practitioners trained hard at walking on the hands, artificially forcing themselves to practice variations, such as turning in a circle, hand-walking in place, or lifting each hand high, even touching the chest. In addition, studies of gymnasts find they avoid bending their elbows to shift their centres of gravity up or down, employing this righting strategy only as a last resort (Gauthier et al. 2007; Marin et al. 1999:624). In contrast, capoeira practitioners frequently bend their elbow to maintain balance in a bananeira; training drills require it, such as jumping over a chair into a handstand or lowering and raising oneself between hand- and headstand.6.

Equilibrium training across cultures and disability

A wider survey of sports and dance finds a range of other challenging activities in which people balance, shifting the weighting of sensory input for maintaining equilibrium or motor patterns for maintaining balance. For example, dancers in ballet and jazz dance must learn to use visual ‘spotting’ when spinning as centrifugal force in the vestibular system confounds it. In contrast, break-dancers and ‘whirling dervishes’ must find non-visual ways to maintain upright positions when spinning with their heads rapidly rotating. ‘Spotting’ is not simply the automatic, non-conscious result of the task constraints; teachers explicitly instruct and then systematically drill novices in order for their equilibrium systems to function properly in this technique.

Expanded 'equilibrium system' showing channels for modification.

Perhaps the most radical demonstration of plasticity in the equilibrium system, however, is from the work of neuroscientist, Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, who has developed prosthetic devices for people who have lost their vestibular sense, a condition that makes them feel that they are perpetually falling.7. Bach-y-Rita’s remarkable prosthetic links a construction helmet mounted with an accelerometer to a set of electrodes placed under the tongue; the vestibular nuclei learns to interpret the sensation of soft electrical shocks on the tongue. Sense of touch on the tongue, in this extreme example, can be integrated into the synthetic sensory system of equilibrium.

Equilibrium: modular or nodular?

This plasticity, however, runs contrary to the argument that equilibrium is an innate human capacity. Philosopher and cognitive theorist Jerry Fodor, for example, writes that the ability to recover equilibrium is ‘a new contender for “best example of a module”’ (Fodor 2000:118, fn. 9).8. A ‘module,’ according to Fodor, is a domain-specific, encapsulated, quick, fixed functional system in the mind, which is inaccessible to conscious thought or information from outside its’ specific domain (Fodor 1983, 1988). Fodor and others interested in modularity build upon arguments in Chomsky’s work (esp. 1980, 1988), but also draw evidence from optical illusions, theory of mind, and localized neuropathology. Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker, like a number of evolutionary psychologists, have claimed that the brain is ‘massively modular,’ composed of myriad innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms shaped by evolutionary pressures.9.

Given the evidence of multiple, variable inputs, trainability, cultural variation, and task-specific re-weighting, the equilibrium system looks more ‘nodular’ than ‘modular’; that is, rather than being encapsulated, inaccessible, innate, and pre-programmed by evolution, the equilibrium system looks like a plastic network of sensory inputs differently weighted, neural resources that can learn to interpret different information streams (even from the tongue!), and trainable behavioural patterns.

This dynamic systems modelling of the equilibrium system helps us also to see the many ways that cultural regimes, patterns of experience, explicit coaching, conscious training, and unconscious conditioning might affect the system any one person assembles, and the way that it handles specific sorts of conditions. Malleability can arise in a number of different places in the network.10. For example, extensive training might strengthen connections between certain kinds of visual inputs and the body’s network of perceptual and reflex actions that maintain equilibrium; or the network dedicated to equilibrium could be trained to provide stimulation to the hands, shoulders, arms and other parts of the body necessary to maintain a bananeira, rather than just the legs in normal bipedal posture. The enculturation might happen in modified weighting by the vestibular nucleus, or it might happen in more immediate peripheral modifications to the nervous system (see Notman et al. 2005. Boyden et al. 2004; Broussard and Lisberger 1992; Lisberger et al. 1994.).

Looking at the organic dimensions of cultural embodiment, the way that enculturation affects neurological development and functioning, better allows anthropologists to participate in cognitive science debates. Neuroanthropology can bring to brain sciences a more sophisticated sense of how long-term developmental patterns such as skill training affect profound change in participants. But the effort also brings to anthropology a much more thorough consideration of individual-level experience and embodiment, replacing implausible (and often startlingly simplistic) implicit psychological models with testable, robust biocultural accounts of enculturation.11.

Acknowledgements

Queda de rins ('fall on the kidneys')

This paper is only a draft. Please contact the author if you would like to receive a copy of the eventual finished version. The paper is written as an oral presentation and has accompanying slides to diagram these transformations in the equilibrium system.

Please note that even the schematic diagrams of the equilibrium system provided in this post are simplified. For a more complete discussion, see the excellent discussion of the vestibular system in Scholarpedia, curated by Profs. Kathleen Cullen and Soroush Sadeghi of McGill University. For example, there are actually four vestibular nuclei, although for the purposes of this article, differentiating them does not add significantly to the discussion.

Notes:
1. On embodied cognition, see also Noë 2004; Thompson and Varela 2001; Varela et al. 1991; Wheeler 2005. On this site, see also Andy Clark & Michael Wheeler: Embodied cognition and cultural evolution and The Boston Globe on embodied cognition.

2. This is the short version of the rationale for my use of the term ‘neuroanthropology,’ which I took from Juan Dominguez, although he credits a long line of predecessors including Oliver Sachs and Charles Laughlin (e.g., 1992). For a longer version of the rationale, see the post here.

3. My movement toward neuroscience was also a form of what Daniel Dennett (1991) calls ‘heterophenomenology,’ although I did not know the term at that time. Dennett describes a phenomenology, much more akin to the work of early theorists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which takes into account a wide range of data to understand human experience, rather than privileging exclusively introspective reflection. The term is cumbersome, but it highlights the degree to which early influences on phenomenological philosophy, such as gestalt psychology and case studies of brain injury sufferers, have been neglected in contemporary anthropological ‘phenomenologies.’ On this site, one of the best discussions of the different facets of addressing experience is Daniel’s post, The Cultural Brain in Five Flavors.

4. For a review, see Han and Northrop 2008 (see Daniel’s discussion here). Earlier influential work includes Nisbett and Masuda 2003; see also Chiao and Ambady 2007; Chiao, Li and Harada 2008. For a critical discussion of cultural neuroscience, see my earlier discussion, Welcome to new readers: Why brain science needs anthropology.

5. For example, Martin 2000; see also Quinn and Strauss 2006 on anthropologists’ aversion to psychology.

6. John Sutton (2007) highlights the difference between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ skills, drawing on a distinction made by Poulton (1957). The gymnastics handstand is a ‘closed’ skill in that the environment is static, uniform and controlled, and the skill itself is in maintaining a precise motor pattern. In contrast, the bananeira is an ‘open’ skill requiring constant adjustment and improvisation in a changing environment, with a shifting adversary, unpredictable stream of events, even the possibility of interaction with ‘non-playing’ spectators (see Sutton 2007).

7. See Bach-y-Rita 1972; Danilov et al. 2007; Doidge 2007:1-26; Tyler et al. 2002; see also Bach-y-Rita et al. 1969. (More from Neuroanthropology on Doidge here, here, and here, the first by Paul Mason.)

8. Fodor draws on the work of Cheng and Gallistel (1986) and Hermer and Spelke (1996), which actually seems to be much more ambivalent about the ‘modularity’ of equilibrium. On other forms of sensory integration that undermine the argument for strict modularity, see my earlier post, Children integrating their senses.

9. Anthropologists (except neuroanthropologists, perhaps) have typically encountered modularity theory through either the ubiquitous works of Steven Pinker (especially How the Mind Works [1997]) or the evolutionary psychology of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (See Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1992; also Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994; Pylyshyn 1999). For an incisive critique and constructive proposal for a revision of evolutionary psychology, see Wheeler and Clark 2008. For a critique of part of Pinker’s project, see Daniel’s earlier post here, Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct.

Similarly, Dan Sperber has been a proponent of evolved, task-specific modularity in the human brain—arguing for the likelihood of a ‘snake detector, a face recognition device, a language acquisition device,’ for example (Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004:41).

Ironically, Fodor criticizes proponents of evolutionary psychology who argue for ‘massive modularity’ scathingly (Fodor 1988; see also Samuels 1998).

10. For example, Fahle and Poggio 2002; Gibson 1963; Green et al. 2004; Vaina et al. 1998. For another example of sensory learning, see Smell, fear and sensory learning here at Neuroanthropologyy.

11. See also Quinn and Strauss 2006:272.

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In this Perspectives piece in Nature Neuroscience Reviews, Han and Northoff review the evidence on how culture influences neural mechanisms, highlight the need to integrate social neuroscience and cultural cognition research, argue for transcultural neuroimaging as an effective method for cultural neuroscience, and lay out implications for the future of this emerging field.

But if you don’t take my word for it, here’s their abstract:

Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.

Cultural Effects on Cognition

Han and Northoff systematically cover research on “cultural effects on cognition,” including perceptual processing, attentional modulation, language and music, and number representation and mental calculation. Their Figure 1, presented below, summarizes research on culture and attention, highlighting context-dependent differences in attention between Americans and East Asians.

Another example that I found particularly striking was the difference between native English speakers and native Chinese speakers while reading. English readers showed activation in the superior temporal gyrus, while Chinese readers had activation in the dorsal extent of the inferior parietal lobe. This difference is attributed to the contrast in language structure and representation, and not to cultural ideology or linguistic meaning:

“Rather than being an effect of culture in a broad sense, this finding might reflect a basic difference between non-phonetic and phonetic written language: alphabetic words, such as English words, can be ready by assembling fine-grained phonemic units, whereas Chinese characters consist of intricate strokes and map onto phonology at the mono-syllable level (648).”

Cultural Effects on Social Cognition

Han and Northoff also review research on “cultural effects on social cognition,” going over emotional processing, mental attribution, and self representation and self awareness. Figure 2 shows how culture can shape the neural correlates of sense of self, in particular the difference between more individualistic and contextual selves. One fascinating result is that while Westerners showed activation of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex only in association with self judgment, Chinese study participants had activation with both self and mother.

Cultural Cognition and Social Neuroscience

Besides the excellent summary of ongoing research, Han and Northoff make a crucial argument about integrating cultural cognition and social neuroscience at the beginning of their paper. Below I have pasted their two boxes on each field.

Cross-cultural psychological work has largely examined differences in human cognition through behavior experiments, while social neuroscience has aimed to establish the “neural correlates of interpersonal and social behaviours.” Cultural neuroscience ties cultural cognition and social neuroscience together.

“As cross-cultural psychology has offered accumulating evidence that social cognition and social behaviour depend greatly on sociocultural context, social neuroscientists are now beginning to consider cultural effects on the neural substrates of human cognition… The meaning of ‘cultural differences’ could be extended to include not only groups with different social contexts and languages, but also groups with different religious beliefs (647).”

Transcultural Neuroimaging

Transcultural imaging is presented by Han and Northoff as the method of choice for this sort of research. Box 3 summarizes this work.

It is a powerful method, as long as we realize that fMRI is not a mind-reading machine (or culture-reading machine) and like any method, has its own increasingly recognized limitations. One real danger is reverting to cultural phrenology, where one brain area is seen to have a specific cultural function. Hints of this thinking lurk in the paper.

A non-phrenology imaging example is to examine “individuals from one group after they have been primed with different cultural knowledge.” Chinese subjects were primed with independent or interdependent self construals through reading essays filled with “I” or with “We.” In interpreting others’ faces, individuals primed for the interdependent self showed greater right middle frontal activity—the area associated with interpreting pictures of one’s own face.

The use of priming and framing, similar to the technical effects of language representation and the examination of mother in relation to self, point to different ways “culture” might achieve effects. This is a crucial methodological point that is quite different from the more monolithic Westerners vs. East Asians dichotomy that has prevailed in this sort of research.

Despite assertions that “of course there is no such thing as a homogeneous ‘Western’ or ‘East Asian’ culture” the convenience of this sort of dichotomous sampling still creates a homogenizing effect.

It also ignores other ways people might differ “culturally,” for example, rural vs. urban populations, people exposed to globalized media and consumption and those who are not, and those in highly unequal societies and those in less stratified societies. To really advance cultural neuroscience, sample and methodological convenience will have to give away to research that examines “cultural difference” as effectively as it examines neural substrates.

The Effects of Culture

In their concluding remarks, Han and Northoff address how to think more broadly about the effects of cultural processes on neural substrates, and outline some of the basic questions that cultural neuroscience faces.

In terms of neural activity, they propose three basic effects: (1) culturally-different task-solving strategies, with related strategy-dependent neural activation patterns (for example, different strategies of number representation leading to different patterns of neuronal activation); (2) changes in neuronal function, for example, the level of activation of a particular region; and (3) structural changes in neuroanatomy, for example, the volume of grey matter.

They also add an important caveat about meaning, writing “it is important to remember that even though the same brain region might be recruited by different cultural groups during the same cognitive task, two cultural might have different meanings for the concepts involved in the task (652).” For example, the self concept appears to consistently activate the ventral medial prefrontal cortex in a cross-cultural sample. But the meaning attributed to that self concept, such as more independent or interdependent, can still differ even with the same general pattern of activation.

A fourth type of neural correlate not considered by Han and Nortoff would be (4) changes in systemic activation, where it is the consistent pattern of activation of different areas of the brain that corresponds to some aspect of culture. In my mind, this sort of approach would prove useful for ritual, rather than looking for task-based, functional activation or structural “difference.” Different rituals will tend to activate different series of brain regions and to create different patterns of links between brain regions.

Put differently, timing, location and duration of activation make a large difference in development. The same basic processes could also apply to how cultural achieves difference—the timing of activation, the links between regions, and the sequence of different areas of activation could all add up to synergistic effect.

Han and Northoff also work with a rather abstract and knowledge-based notion of cultural difference. This is not the only way to think about culture. Cultural practices, social contexts and physical symbols can all have effects without having a mediating “cultural psychology” (like concept of self) component. Symbols can extend cultural differences outside the brain; social contexts can elicit dramatically different scripted behavior; and cultural practices can entrain motor and motivational areas, alongside perceptual and social cognition.

Cultural neuroscience will also need to develop what it means by “culturally different task-solving strategies” in a more systematic way. Is this something like Bourdieu’s habitus, which we’ve examined before? Is it about the cultural embodiment of language and of categorization? What do they mean by “strategies” in a cultural sense, rather than just a cognitive sense?

Without addressing different senses of the cultural brain or the interactive effects that inequality and stress can have vis-à-vis the brain, cultural neuroscience will not quite position itself to have the integrative effects that potentially exist.

It will also need to address experience and the everyday brain in a more explicit fashion if it hopes to match up to the opening sentence in the abstract: “Our brains and mind are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live.”

Basic Questions

In describing the basic areas where cultural neuroscience might delve, Han and Northoff provide us with five areas, all focused on neural substrates rather than on culture and experience.

Cultural effects as modulatory or constitutional. “Do cultural experiences only modulate pre-existing and pre-established patterns of neural activity, or do they determine the patterns? (652)”

Brain systems as culture invariant or culture sensitive? “[T]here are some brain regions in which activity is the same across different cultures; for instance, the lateral occipital cortex seems to be implicated in object-processing tasks [across different cultural groups]… On the other hand, the neural activity in some brain areas strongly depends on a person’s cultural background: for example, that of the premotor cortex during mental calculation (652).”

Nature vs. Nurture. “Future transcultural neuroimaging studies could investigate alleles that do or do not differ between cultural groups and then relate their findings to the neural activity that is associated with culture-invariant and culture-sensitive tasks and stimuli… Studying second generation immigrants would provide a way to investigate the interaction between genetic and cultural backgrounds (652).”

Cultural adaptation. “What are the neural differences between native people and newly arrived, short-term and long-term immigrants? fMRI studies of immigrants might help us to understand where, how and on what timescale the neural substrates of cognitive processes change as a function of cultural influence (653).”

Cultural psychiatry. “Another interesting question is whether there are culture-specific symptoms of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression and, if so, whether these are reflected in structural or functional neural differences. For example, the specific form of delusion that is experienced by a patient with schizophrenia might depend on the patient’s cultural background (653).”

Strong dichotomies, lack of emergent interactions, little consideration of population dynamics and variation at either the neural or cultural level—it would be easy to level criticisms against the paper, as it is for most papers that are ambitious and synthetic.

The one thing that bothers me the most in the end is that we have “culture” and “brain” without context, body, experience or behavior. Neural substrates and cultural cognition are a poor substitute for the role of the body, everyday practices, and potent symbols in our lives. Does motor cortex have muscle substrates in the body? That sort of question does not really capture the systemic interactions and the specialization in both brain and muscle that leads to skilled action.

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

Stumble It!