Archive for the ‘Perception and the senses’ Category
Posted by gregdowney on May 20, 2009
A young Andre Agassi
Studying sports training and skill acquisition, I often run headlong into the concept of ‘talent.’ When I suggest that athletic achievement demonstrates the extraordinary malleability of the human nervous system, the ability of our muscles to remodel, the refinement of athletes’ perceptual acuity, and even how our skeletons can be reconfigured by training, audience members often respond,
‘Yeah, but what about innate talent?’
Or, confronted by the yawning gap between elite athletes’ performances and the ability of the average person, sceptics still want to focus on the slight differences among elites athletes (for example, Jon Entine’s book Taboo), suggesting that this tiny fraction of difference is the ‘innate’ part, the ‘talent.’ I can describe the years of arduous labour that go into producing elite-level achievement, the countless hours of training and sophisticated coaching, and someone will inevitably say, ‘Okay, but some people are just inherently good at sports, aren’t they?’
But as psychologist K. Anders Ericsson said in an interview in Fast Company (cited here by Dan Peterson), ‘The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that’s different is their innate abilities. There’s little evidence to support this. With the exception of some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body constrains an individual from reaching an expert level.’
Obviously, certain dimensions of the body can affect one’s ability to participate in a sport like basketball or sumo at an elite level, or a genetic abnormality may create an unusual wrinkle in a metabolic or even a neural process, but research like Ericsson’s suggests that these sorts of traits are likely the exception rather than the rule. That is, even if there is a genetic trait that helps some Kenyan runners to excel, or gives an individual with photographic memory, or helps a free diver to endure oxygen deprivation, these cases do not confirm the folk idea that talent is innate (and thus likely genetic).
In this post, I want consider the difference that makes a difference. That is, how the concept of talent itself actually affects the unfolding and compounding of developmental variation, helping extreme ability to emerge (and de-motivating those who don’t demonstrate early ‘promise’). Whether or not ‘talent’ exists—and I’m profoundly skeptical—believing that it does is a good foundation for exaggerating variation in skilled ability.
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Posted in Embodiment, Human variation, Neural plasticity, Perception and the senses, Skill acquisition, Sport | Tagged: expert performance, K. Anders Ericsson, rugby research, scouting, sports, talent, talent identification | 4 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on April 4, 2009
Nolan Catholic High Lady Vikings catcher Martha Thomas zeroes the apparent acceleration of a pop-up
Dan Peterson, probably my favourite blogger on sports science, has a recent piece in
Science Daily on
How Baseball Players Catch Fly Balls. He usually posts on his excellent blog,
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental. His post, as usual, is excellent, but I wanted to take issue with the slightest of details (because that’s just how I am): why do novice outfielders often take a step forward when the crack of a bat and the launch of a ball indicates that a fly ball has just been hit in their direction?
As a former and largely inept outfielder for the Ascension Catholic Church ‘Steamrollers,’ 2nd grade and under team (I was more of a junior soccer player), I well remember our coach, Dr. Wickersham, telling us repeatedly, and to little effect, ‘don’t start running forward until you know the pop-up is going to fall in front of you.’ I also clearly remember the sinking feeling when, after failing to heed his advice, a fly ball flew over my head as I charged toward it, ultimately landing almost precisely where I had been standing the instant that ball was hit.
Peterson discusses a recent paper in the journal, Human Movement Science, ‘Catching fly balls: A simulation study of the Chapman strategy,’ by Dimant Kistemakera and colleagues. Kistemakera and his team set out to test the slight variations between the trajectories fielders took when running to intercept a fly ball, and the trajectories predicted by Seville Chapman’s ’strategy’ of using the acceleration of the ball in one’s vertical field to control whether one was too close or too far from home plate to make the catch.
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Posted in Perception and the senses, Skill acquisition, Sport | Tagged: baseball, catching, dynamic systems theory, skill, sport psychology | 5 Comments »
Posted by dlende on December 2, 2008
Do psychotherapists now have a new trick? Or is it all smoke and mirrors? The New York Times reports today on Standing in Someone Else’s Shoes, Almost for Real, where neuroscientists have shown that “the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own.”
The article “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping” by the Swedish researchers Henrik Ehrsson and Valeria Petkova appears this week in PLoS ONE, and is ably summarized over at Neurophilosophy. You can also read Ehrsson’s previous article on the virtual arm illusion and his Science piece on the experimental induction of out-of-body experiences.
The approach in all of this research is rather simple. You can see the out-of-body experiment design pictured to the right. Body swapping adds another person with goggles.
A subject stands or sits opposite the scientist, as if engaged in an interview.. Both are wearing headsets, with special goggles, the scientist’s containing small film cameras. The goggles are rigged so the subject sees what the scientist sees: to the right and left are the scientist’s arms, and below is the scientist’s body. To add a physical element, the researchers have each person squeeze the other’s hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see and “feel” the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete.
This “switching” happens because the brain is literally embodied – after growing up with this particular body, it’s a fair assumption to assume that one’s eyes and one’s hand are getting feedback about the same interactive phenomenon. For a first-person view of this, see Karl Ritter’s AP article today on the body-swap illusion, which includes this photo of the two-goggle set-up.
Ehrsson is excited about being able to trick the brain in this way: “You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black and vice versa.” The NY Times article pushes the uses body swapping can have in therapy.
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Posted in Brain Mechanisms, Mental Illness, Perception and the senses, Psychological anthropology, Relationships | 1 Comment »
Posted by gregdowney on November 30, 2008
Way back in January, I posted ‘Equilibrium, modularity, and training the brain-body.‘ At the American Anthropology Association annual meeting, I presented my current version of this research, significantly updating it with ethnographic material from Brazil, a comparative discussion of different techniques for training balance, and a series of graphics that I hope help to make my points. The title of that paper was ‘Balancing Between Cultures: A Comparative Neuroanthropology of Equilibrium in Sports and Dance.’
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
As a cultural anthropologist interested in the effects of physical training and perceptual learning, I see ‘neuroanthropology’ as a continuation of the cognitive anthropology advocated by Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn (1997).
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?’
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Posted in Brain Mechanisms, Embodiment, Ethnography, Human variation, Learning, Neural plasticity, Perception and the senses, Skill acquisition, Sport, general | Tagged: equilibrium, physical education, training, vestibular sense | 13 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on July 21, 2008
Sway meter, subject on foam
Daniel isn’t the only guy at Neuroanthropology who gets to go to good conferences; last week, while in the throes of a cold brought on by fieldwork with the 15-and-under Sydney city select rugby team, I got to go to the
HCSNet Workshop on Speech, Perception and Action held at Western Sydney University.
HCSNet is funded by the Australian Research Council to promote research on human communication. I only got to go to the second day of the two-day conference (because I was cooking meals for 20 hungry rugby hopefuls the first day), but I saw a number of great presentations, including talks by Catherine Best, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, UWS, Beatriz Calvo-Merino, University College London, and Stephen Lord, Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute. I’ll blog soon on Dr. Calvo-Merino, one of the high points of the day, but today I want to make some notes on Prof. Lord’s fascinating research and talk.
Prof. Lord heads the Falls and Balance Research Group. Visit the group’s website for publications and some great information about risk factors for falling. At the conference, Lord discussed the group’s extensive applied research examining different factors that contribute to older people falling and experimental interventions to decrease the contribution of any single factor. The project has created a screening procedure for use by general practitioners to evaluate an older person’s likelihood of falling.
As regular readers know, I’m particularly interested in the way humans maintain equilibrium (see earlier posts, Kids falling down and Equilibrium, modularity, and training the brain-body, and Daniel’s post of some great parkour video, Free Running and Extreme Balance). In the longer of these posts (Equilbrium, modularity…), I specifically discussed how the ’sense of balance’ is actually a much more complex synthesis of multiple sensory inputs, both exteroception (perception of the world) and interoception (perception of the self).
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Posted in Embodiment, Medical anthropology, Perception and the senses, general | Tagged: Aging, equilibrium, fall prevention, falls | 6 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on June 5, 2008
Wired online carried a story recently on a talk by ‘neuroscientist extraordinaire’ V.S. Ramachandran, one of the folks responsible for a lot of creative thinking in the brain sciences. Brandom Keim writes on a recent talk Ramachandran gave at the World Science Festival in a story, Poetry Comes from Our Tree-Climbing Ancestors, Neuroscientist Says. While I typically find his stuff both fascinating and resonant, this particular piece left me unpersuaded.
Normally, I might take issue with the sloppy logic of the title (’poetry’ coming from ‘tree-climbing ancestors’ being a dangerous conflation between non-proximate contributing factors and eventual effects — you could just as logically say that ‘poetry comes from spinning disk of post-stellar material in proto-solar system’…), but I’ve got bigger fish to fry: synesthesia.
Rmachandran’s work on synesthesia is excellent; for example, his piece with in Neuron on synesthesia is essential reading, and the piece he co-authored on the condition in Scholarpedia is my source for a fair bit of what I will write. The problem is that I don’t think that synesthesia is a good metaphor for, well, metaphor.
Although there may be some ways that metaphor is like synesthesia, when we add up the pros and cons, synesthesia as a metaphor for metaphor may not help us too much to understand the latter, and I seriously doubt that the two are linked in a more profound causal fashion (like a ‘gene’ for both synesthesia and metaphor). Similarly, attention-based failure to perceive something may be like blindness, but using one to try to explain the other is futile. In other words, not all metaphors are equally useful, and I’m concerned that the synesthesia metaphor for metaphor might do more harm than good.
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Posted in Evolution, Perception and the senses | 18 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on June 3, 2008
The New York Times ran a story on brain imaging studies of sarcasm, The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care), by Dan Hurley. That’s right — that favourite rhetorical tool of the snarky adolescent has been subjected to brain imaging studies. The Pearson Assessment video — of an actor delivering the same lines twice, once sincerely, and once dripping sarcasm — is fun. I found myself thinking that I could have been MORE sarcastic.
Hurley, the author of the NYTimes article, does a pretty good job of explaining things, although I think that the idea that perceiving sarcasm requires a ‘theory of mind,’ alluded to in the article, is a bit of a problem — but I have that issue with a lot of the ‘theory of mind’ material because I think it ‘over-cognizes’ social perception (that’s my own issue, so I won’t dwell on it). Hurley discusses the research of Katherine P. Rankin, using MRI scans and the Awareness of Social Inference Test, or Tasit. I have looked on the website for the Memory and Aging Center of UCSF, and through PubMed and EurekAlert, but I can’t find the original report on this research (please post a comment if you know where it is).
“I was testing people’s ability to detect sarcasm based entirely on paralinguistic cues, the manner of expression,” Dr. Rankin said. What seems particularly interesting is that the part of the brain which seemed to be linked to sarcasm — damage to it by dementia impeded the ability to recognize sarcasm — was in the right hemisphere, not usually associated with language or social interaction (which are generally associated with the left hemisphere). Instead, sarcasm seemed to require activity in ‘a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.’
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Posted in Brain imaging, Mental Illness, Perception and the senses | 3 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on May 27, 2008
Two of the pieces that I have wanted to discuss appear together in Current Biology, both on evidence of sensory integration in adults compared to their integration in children. Nature News carried a story about both articles, One sense at a time, by Matt Kaplan. As Kaplan explains, the research generally supports the idea that: ‘Adults readily integrate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in their everyday lives without a second thought. But research is revealing that this is not the case with children. Two new studies hint that children under the age of eight only use one sense at a time to judge the world around them.‘
As I started to discuss in an earlier piece on human equilibrium (long ago — still working on parts two and three), adults learn how to weight different sensory information depending on context and the task at hand, evaluating one stream against another if they conflict. When confronted with two contradictory impressions from different senses — such as video of a person saying one thing and audio of a slightly different word — adult sensory systems figure out a way to integrate the sense world, sometimes creating ’sensory’ compromises or syntheses. The ability to integrate sensory information is fundamental to normal human functioning, but it tends to undermine certain conceptions of brain ‘modularity,’ as I argued in the earlier post.
But with these two articles, I want to explore something a bit different, so I’m going to tackle each one individually, and then reflect on one issue that I think is important: the tendency to see child development in a teleological framework, that is, as an incomplete version of an adult system rather than as a deployment of the child’s distinctive neural resources. Before you click on ‘read more’ below though, be warned; this piece is a bit long…
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Posted in Developmental psychology, Learning, Perception and the senses | 3 Comments »
Posted by dlende on April 17, 2008
Do we really know what’s going on? Or do we just see what we want to see?
The Data
Larry Bartels, director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton, has an op-ed Who’s Bitter Now? which shows us a stereotype of rural voters in action. His argument? “Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.”
Bartels sets out to actually define the “small-town working class,” making less than $60,000, living in small towns or rural areas, never graduated from college. He compares them to cosmopolitan voters, college graduates who live in the suburbs or cities making $60,000 or more. The first group makes up about 16 percent of voters, the second 13 percent.
Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.
Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.
Bartels finishes by telling us the larger pattern behind it all. “It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.”
The Interpretation
So why the problem in perception? Is it because he clings to a stereotype, as Bartels seems to suggest?
Nicholas Kristof’s column today, Divided They Fall, offers us better than a yes/no. He wants to take on “how our biases shape our understanding of reality.” Of course the candidate you favor won the debate last time… Or did he or she?
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Posted in Perception and the senses, Politics, general | 1 Comment »
