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 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.

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.

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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.

Nolan Catholic High Lady Vikings catcher Martha Thomas zeroes the apparent acceleration of a pop-up

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.

The Chapman strategy tested

Chapman, a physicist, pointed out that, if a catcher is standing at the right distance from the batter to make a catch, the acceleration of a parabolic hit in his or her visual field will be zero. If the ball appears to the catcher to be decelerating, the hit will fall short of him or her; apparent accelerating indicates that the ball is about to sail over the catcher’s head. If the catcher must move to get under the ball, running at the correct velocity to intercept produces the same effect. If the ball is accelerating in the visual field, the catcher better step on the accelerator as the run is not sufficiently fast to make the intercept. If the ball appears to be decelerating, the catcher should slow down as he or she is about to over-run the catch.

Chapman’s description of how a fielder might track the ball, and it’s general fit with observed behaviour, led to this ‘strategy’ for fielding being dubbed the ‘Optical Acceleration Cancellation’ strategy. I put ‘strategy’ in quotes only because the word might imply that baseball players and others who use it actually have any conscious awareness that they are doing this, which I don’t think they do. As far as most are concerned, they’re just running to where they think the ball will come down.

Empirical, virtual and theoretical research supports the general principle of the ‘Chapman strategy’ model, although there are some issues, such as the fact that a fly ball does not travel in a true parabolic arc because of drag. Some researchers suggest that it isn’t so much that the catcher ‘zeroes out’ the perceived acceleration as it is that the catcher uses a more general qualitative approach. That is, the running velocity toward the point of the catch may be constant, and the catcher knows the direction to run — forward or backward — and when to stop running, by the apparent direction of the ball’s apparent acceleration. In addition, some theorists point out that as the ball nears the ground, catchers seem to switch out of the Chapman approach to fine tune the position of their bodies and gloves.

Sam Peterson has a great post on Optical Acceleration Cancellation (and a later development, Linear Optical Trajectory theory) on his own website, Sports Are 80 Percent Mental: Baseball Brains – Fielding Into The World Series. Peterson does an especially good job sorting out how both approaches suggest an ecological psychology approach to the basic problem rather than a view of the brain as an ‘information processing’ organ.

That is, a model of the brain as an information processing and memory retrieving machine that manipulates information suggests catching a fly ball is a calculation and comparison problem; calculating the path and recalling previous experience to compare the current situation with previous experiences of catching (or failing to catch). In contrast, an ecological psychology approach ‘argues that the fielder observes the flight path of the ball and can react using the angle monitoring system.’ According to ecological psychologists, the fielder is not so much remember and calculating as it is monitoring sensory input and responding with patterned action to shifting perceptions. (If you’re interested, definitely check out the piece by Dan Peterson on the Sports Are 80 Percent Mental weblog.)

The new article by Kistemakera and colleagues doesn’t reopen the empirical question — they use the trajectories recorded in earlier video-based research of catching provided by McLeod and Dienes (1996). The Kistemakera research team took into account a number of variables, such as the delay in reaction from expert fielders and factored in a minimum threshold for perceiving the acceleration of the hit ball, to test the fit of Chapman strategy-based intercept pats to the routes actually run by expert fielders in the McLeod and Dienes study. Kistemakera et al. found that intercept paths to chase down fly balls predicted by their versions of Chapman’s model matched pretty closely to actual fielders’ trajectories, except for a few factors.

Among the exceptions, the delay in starting to move in actual fielding behaviour was slightly longer than anticipated by the model, up to 500 milliseconds, but this hardly undermines the overall pattern matching closely to what Chapman’s theory predicts. It turns out that the model suggests it will be easier to detect a trajectory destined to take the ball over the head of the fielder than falling short, but it’s also likely that running velocity forward and backward would not be identical, although that’s an empirical question (and probably answered somewhere else in the literature that I’m not aware of). In addition, I wonder what the role of sound perception is in the anticipation of where the ball will go, but that’s for another post.

Okay, so what’s your beef?

If I like Peterson’s discussion and the Kistemakera et al. article in general so much, what’s my issue? It’s actually with the very end of the Science Daily article. In particular, when I read, I was struck by this section:

Will those first few steps forward doom the Little Leaguer to years of fly ball nightmares? Actually, it might be our brain’s method of improving its viewpoint.

“For a fielder, making a step is a way of changing the magnitude of the optical acceleration, while preserving its informative value,” Kistemaker clarified. “A faster rise of the optical acceleration above the detection threshold may outweigh a possible initial step in the wrong direction. Making an initial step forwards is not only easier than making an initial step backwards, but might also be a better choice.”

So, if you’re now coaching Little Leaguers, be patient. Their brains may still be learning the math.

Okay, so I know that the last paragraph is a bit of hyperbole — Person’s a clever writer, and it’s a good ending. Because I’m so hypersensitive about the difference between ecological psych approaches and ‘thinking machine’ approaches to the brain, I probably over-react to some metaphors. Peterson is much more agnostic about whether ecological psychology or information processing theory is more plausible, but I’m pretty convinced that, in the case of fast actions and motor control, the brain is better modeled by ecological psych (though not necessarily for some other functions). The ‘learning the math’ joke, however well placed, is not an eco psych metaphor.

But that’s not really my issue. My issue is with the explanation of the odd first step, toward the batter even when the ball might be going the other way. Kistemakera and colleagues write:

A second characteristic that is irreconcilable with a straightforward interpretation of the Chapman strategy is the initial forward motion of a catcher irrespective of landing position. However, this appears not to be a general feature as McLeod and Dienes noted that not all fielders stepped forwards. Furthermore, Oudejans, Michaels, and Bakker (1996) found that primarily non-experts moved initially in the wrong direction, suggesting these initial movements were based on a wrong judgment. However, an alternative explanation would be that novices make a step to change the magnitude of the optical acceleration thereby facilitating its detection. At ball release, the ball is relatively far away rendering the optical acceleration relatively small. (Kistemakera, Faberc and Beek 2009)

Peterson presents both but focuses on this later interpretation, that by moving, athletes exaggerate the apparent motion so that, in some sense, they can get a clearer read of where the ball is going. That’s possible, but I think that the first explanation, that the first step forward regardless of trajectory, is a ‘rookie mistake,’ is more likely for a number of reasons, and holding onto the possibility of systematic, patterned error is important for thinking about neuroanthropology.

Explaining the forward step as an adaptive strategy seems improbable, first, because if the relative acceleration in the visual field has to reach a specific threshold before the fielder can detect it, moving forward would increase the acceleration more for balls traveling in a trajectory taking them over the fielder than those falling short (at least, as best as I understand the perception of the ballistics in the visual field). The problem is that catchers have a harder time detecting the short fly ball than the long one, meaning that taking a step forward would skew their accuracy in the direction in which they are already more accurate. If stepping is a good strategy, perhaps stepping backward would make more sense, or experts would demonstrate the step more than novices.

Second, and more importantly, is that the forward step might be a formulaic behaviour ‘released’ by the sound of the hit before the catcher can perceive the direction. I think that this was what Dr. Wickersham was trying to teach the Ascension Steamrollers; he was coaching us not to do a relatively instinctive motor pattern when, after standing for a long time in the field, the sudden crack of bat on ball caused us to react.

It would be interesting to learn if, in other settings of whole body reaction, there was also a tendency to step forward in novice practitioners, before sufficient inhibitory counter-responses developed. I suspect that there might be from reflection on my own teaching of martial arts and other sports-related experiences; that is, I think that there might be a tendency, when a person is learning relevant stimuli in a sports setting, to move forward or toward the stimuli until a person learns to inhibit this behaviour.

The pattern of stepping forward would not necessarily be a ‘mental’ response; it might rather be a motor pattern, an ease, or just a tendency, to move forward to initiate movement (rather than moving sideways or backward, which might be marginally more difficult). For a neuroanthropology of movement, we need to consider the way that enculturations of various sorts — including learning to inhibit formulaic motor patterns — play a role in developing skills. In the case of learning to catch a fly ball, gaining skill might not simply be filling an empty vessel with skillful actions but might also include gaining the ability to inhibit or modify basic movement patterns into more useful, refined reactions.

The disagreement with Peterson is pretty insignificant, a matter of emphasis more than substantial disagreement, but it also reflects a potential for neuroanthropological analysis. If we find forward stepping errors in a range of activities, even when the motion does not offer any potential advantage (such as in learning to avoid being kicked in capoeira, where I’ve seen the reaction), then this cross-cultural or cross-activity pattern would suggest that it was not necessarily an adaptation to the current perceptual problem. I certainly would like to believe that my steps toward the batter in Little League were a well-considered strategy, but with my recollections of having to run after the hit after it flew over my head, bouncing toward the outfield fence, I kind of doubt it. I’m sure Dr. Wickersham would probably agree.

Enculturation is not just impressing expertise on a ‘blank slate’ of a human being. Rather, skilled enculturation is also shaping existing patterns of motor response, some of them likely quite neurological ‘primitive,’ even existing from very early in development, into new actions for specific contexts. As the late Esther Thelen’s studies of infant walking have shown, children learn to work, in part, by harnessing the dynamic properties of their own body, building steps in part out of basic, rudimentary motions of their bodies present long before they take their first steps.

References
Chapman, Seville. 1968. Catching a baseball. American Journal of Physics 36(10): 868–870. (abstract)

Kistemakera, D. A., H. Faberc and P. J. Beek. 2009. Catching fly balls: A simulation study of the Chapman strategy. Human Movement Science 28(2): 236-249. doi:10.1016/j.humov.2008.11.001

McLeod, Peter, and Zoltan Dienes. 1996. Do fielders know where to go to catch the ball or only how to get there? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and performance 22 (3): 531–543. (abstract)

R.R. Oudejans, R. R., C. F. Michaels and F. C. Bakker. 1997. The effects of baseball experience on movement initiation in catching fly balls. Journal of Sports Science 15(6): 587–595. doi:10.1080/026404197367029 (abstract)

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.

Couples who fight, self-centered adolescents, people who prey on others like rapists, all could take on the perspective of another body. Seeing “the encounters in their daily life from others’ point of view” can help prompt change. Kristene Doyle, head of clinical services at Albert Ellis Institute, says, “This is especially true for adolescents, who are so self-involved, and also for people who come in with anger problems and are more interested in changing everyone else in their life than themselves.”

But will this really work? As Ehrsson notes at the end of the report, the sensations are strange. Strange sensations are not quite therapeutic change. Part of the work to be done will be through virtual reality. Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab have studied the Proteus Effect (pdf) or “transformed digital self representation.” People can get morphed in physical attractivess, weight, age and gender, and the effects of the experimental linger into the real world. Suddenly old people start contributing more to retirement (see pdf). Those with a fit image exercise more.

Still, producing identification with others is a difficult task. It’s not just about perception. So even virtual reality and body swapping will have its limits. But over time it might even be able to help with problems like autism. Jessica and Robert Hobson have proposed identification as a crucial component to intersubjective engagement, arguing in this 2007 paper that “the propensity to adopt the bodily anchored psychological stance of another person is essential to certain forms of joint attention and imitation, and that a weak tendency to identify with others is pivotal for the developmental psychopathology of autism.”

Rachel Brezis, who presented at our Encultured Brain panel, takes this sort of research a step further, linking it back to what Ehrsson does – the identification is also about the self and not just others. This move brings us to disorders like anorexia where body image also plays a role. And that brings us to gender, relationships and culture, explored so well in Caroline Knapp’s book Appetites.

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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Wheeler, Michael, and Andy Clark. 2008. Culture, embodiment and genes: unravelling the triple helix. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363(1509): 3563-3575.

Koch wrote the popular book The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach based on his collaborative work with Francis Crick. Here is Michael Shermer reviewing the book at Scientific American:

A rock climber adorned with a tattoo of the Apple Computer logo on his arm, Koch takes an unabashed neurobiological approach, the natural extension of what his longtime collaborator Francis Crick started in 1994 when he wrote in The Astonishing Hypothesis “that ‘you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” To me, the most astonishing aspect of this theory is that it is astonishing to anyone. Where else could the mind be but in the brain? Nevertheless, finding the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) has proved elusive, so instead of concocting a grand unified theory, Koch and Crick undertook a very specific research program focusing on the visual system, to understand precisely how photons of light striking your retina become fully integrated visual experiences. Koch and his colleagues, for example, discovered a single neuron that fires only when the subject sees an image of President Bill Clinton. If this neuron died, would Clinton be impeached from the brain? No, because the visual representation of Clinton is distributed throughout several areas of the brain, in a hierarchical fashion, eventually branching down to this single neuron. The visual coding of any face involves several groups of neurons–one to identify the face, another to read its expression, a third to track its motion, and so on. This hierarchy of data processing allows the brain to economize neural activity through the use of combinatorics: “Assume that two face neurons responded either not at all or by firing vigorously. Between them, they could represent four faces (one face is encoded by both cells not firing, the second one by firing activity in one and silence in the other, and so on). Ten neurons could encode 210, or about a thousand faces…. It has been calculated that less than one hundred neurons are sufficient to distinguish one out of thousands of faces in a robust manner. Considering that there are around 100,000 cells below a square millimeter of cortex, the potential representational capacity of any one cortical region is enormous.” Given that the brain has about 100 billion neurons, consciousness is most likely an emergent property of these hierarchical and combinatoric neuronal connections. How, precisely, the NCC produce qualia remains to be explained, but Koch’s scientific approach, in my opinion, is the only one that will solve the hard problem.

Reducing symbols and qualia to just neural connections forgets that there is a body and environment involved, and that the dynamic and emergent property emerges in conjunction with those. This approach to consciousness is also rather blind to evolution. Nicholas Humphrey’s book A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness is foundational there. Still, the brain does most of the heavy lifting, I imagine…

Koch also has a Glossary of Consciousness on his website (not a direct link – you’ll see where to click on the left hand side). You can even get this 56 minute lecture by Koch on his quest at You Tube – wow, did his hair grab my conscious attention! Koch also gives us a clip of Francis Crick discussing consciousness and then takes us through his ideas and research.

The hattip for this particular entry goes to Deric Bownds, who covered this Scholarpedia entry earlier.

Sway meter, subject on foam

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).

The problem of falling in older people

As the Falls and Balance Research Group website details, falls are a serious health issue for older people:

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related hospitalisation in persons aged 65 years and over and account for four percent of all hospital admissions in this age-group. Hospital admissions resulting from falls are uncommon in young adulthood but with advancing age, the incidence of fall-related admissions increases at an exponential rate. Beyond 40 years, the admission rate due to falls increases consistently by 4.5% per year for men (doubling every 15.7 years) and by 7.9% per year for women (doubling every 9.1 years). In those aged 85 years and over, the levels have climbed to 4% per annum in men and 7% per annum in women. Falls also account for 40% of injury-related deaths and one percent of total deaths in this age group.

Depending on the population under study, between 22-60% of older people suffer injuries from falls, 10-15% suffer serious injuries, 2-6% suffer fractures and 0.2-1.5% suffer hip fractures. The most commonly self-reported injuries include superficial cuts and abrasions, bruises and sprains. The most common injuries that require hospitalisation comprise femoral neck fractures, other fractures of the leg, fractures of radius, ulna and other bones in the arm and fractures of the neck and trunk.

With such serious potential consequences and such a clear trend towards increased likelihood as people age, Lord’s group fights the sense that falling is somehow inevitable. As he pointed out, some older people maintain stability, and the reasons that others lose stability can vary. The group’s Fall Assessment tests not only seek to predict the likelihood of falls (already pretty cool), they highlight which part of the complex system that regulates equilibrium is the weak link.

Understanding and disarticulating the equilibrium system

This last part — the differential evaluation of the various parts of the equilibrium system — is the dimension of Prof. Lord’s discussion that I find most interesting. The tests de-couple the contributions of visual system, vestibular system, proprioception, and musculo-skeletal strength to create a kind of ‘balance profile,’ showing clearly the difference between instability produced by failing strength, decreased leg sensitivity (from something like diabetes), visual problems (like glaucoma), and other issues. In my continuing attempt to model how cultural-behavioural variation affects the assembly of equilibrium, Lord’s group has come up with one of the most comprehensive discussions of the elements that contribute to a balance system. Even better, they’ve started to conduct research on where and how that system can start to come unstuck.

Lord’s presentation covered a range of issues, not all of which I can discuss, but I want to highlight a few, not only because they’re separately interesting but also because they give some sense of the subtle way that the research teases apart contributions to equilibrium. I don’t think it’s a satisfying statement to simply say that the equilibrium system is ‘complicated,’ and leave it at that; Lord’s group not only points out that the system is complicated, they also start to sketch out its parts, how they can go wrong, how disfunction can spread or compound across several components, and then how preventitive care or rehabilitation can address specific deficiencies.

One thing that Lord pointed out is that most falls were caused by slipping, tripping, or stumbling, not by dizziness or disorientation. That is, most falls seem to occur, not because the person loses awareness, but because some part of the mechanics of walking or standing goes wrong, and the person cannot recover quickly or effectively enough to stop from falling. The ‘margin for error’ when moving and standing decreases as reflexes slow and strength decreases, so a weakening of the balance system can’t be compensated. Starting to fall is normal; every step is a type of controlled fall. The question becomes why some people can’t stop themselves.

Problems in the equilibrium system

Vision issues:
As Lord pointed out, decreasing vision contributes to the chance of falls in older people, but it’s not just vision in a general way that most affects how people balance. In their screening, his research group specifically targets visual contrast acuity, depth perception, and peripheral vision, all of which can fall off more quickly than overall vision. Contrast vision is important because it’s what allows people to see changes in the height or angle of a surface, especially if the surface is a uniform color and material (like a concrete curb); obviously, decreased depth perception can severely affect mobility and even our attempts to stop ourselves from falling.

Peripheral vision can be diminished by conditions like glaucoma, Lord discussed, but what I was most interested in were his comments about bifocal glasses. Lord discussed how the design of bifocals actually exacerbates the problem with peripheral vision in the lower part of the visual field, precisely the area needed to navigate while walking. One of the interventions that the group recommended was simply giving older people who have indications that peripheral vision in the lower visual field might be an issue an extra pair of non-bifocal glasses — ‘walking glasses’ — inexpensively decreasing the chance of a severe fall that could result in hospitalization or incapacitation. (Just the kind of brilliantly simple preventitive treatment that might create huge savings in cost and suffering that we often wish our health systems did better.)

Interactions between senses:
In a series of experiments where the group shook the heads of subjects (sounds worse than it feels apparently), Lord and his team studied the vestibulo-ocular reflex, the way that the vestibular system stabilizes vision even when we are moving (that’s why the world doesn’t jump around visually when you’re running). They found that the vestibulo-ocular reflex can become less capable of compensating for movement as we age, although the variation in its degeneration was quite great. Some people don’t seem to lose much of the ability to compensate for movement in vision while others get quite lousy at tracking objects when on the move.

Leg and knee strength:
When Lord’s team did profiles of different people at risk of falling, some of them seemed to be disproportionately affected, not by vestibular problems or visual issues, but by leg strength problems. The variation in strength in the legs was enormous, according to some information he presented, and very simple things like lifting one’s leg high enough to clear an obstacle or change in surface height could be affected. Knowing that this was the ‘weak link’ in the balance system suggested relatively simple interventions to increase leg strength and flexibility. Most approaches to balance wouldn’t even consider ‘leg strength’ to be part of the system, but Lord’s team’s approach embraced the action part of the perception-action system and found that this was clearly where some people had their problems, especially after previous falls when injury had affected strength (so this might be a special risk factor in those suffering repeated falls).

Proprioception and sensitivity:
The falls research team tests proprioception and leg sensitivity in a number of ways. They found that certain conditions, such as diabetes, can severely affect the sensitivity of the lower limbs and feet and that some people become less aware of where their bodies are in space. Lord described how some people, when tested for vibration sensitivity at the knee, simply cannot feel the experimental stimulus, even when the vibration meter is set to its highest intensity. With numbed legs or feet, balance becomes a lot tricker, especially on uneven surfaces or when a person has a high degree of inherent bodily sway.

I asked Lord during the question time about de-afferentiation of the feet. That is, is it possible that, due to the wearing of hard shoes or thick soles, over time patients simply become desensitized to differences in pressure across the feet. In my own work, I’m wondering about the sensory impact of shoes. He said it probably wasn’t a serious factor, especially in comparison to the problems faced by those who were really losing all sensitivity in the lower limbs and feet. Fair enough.

But I still think that this may be an issue at certain levels of sensitivity, although it would be difficult to observe in a population that all wore shoes constantly and all spent most of their time walking on artificially smooth surfaces — in other words, our environment and clothing likely make us all a bit desensitized so the effect would wash out in the data. (I did notice that the Falls Prevention site does have assessment forms for footwear.)

Vestibular sensitivity:
The screening test also checks to see how much people sway inherently while standing, and Lord reported that there is wide variety in this factor. The group tests people with an apparatus that looks like one of those ‘remote drawing’ machines; people stand attached to an arm that holds a pen. As they sway, they sketch out a little random figure on a sheet of paper. The group tests people on a solid surface and standing on a sponge pad to see how they respond to different situations. The resulting sway-o-grams pretty convincingly showed just how much inherent wiggle some older people had to contend with — it wasn’t just that they were getting worse at balancing, the inherent sway was making the whole system work harder to maintain vertical position.

The group has found that by increasing stimulation to the lower leg linked to swaying with passive stimulators decreases the amount of sway in older people, especially those who are losing sensitivity in their lower limbs. That is, if you create a way for people to feel when they are swaying on their calves (like lace up boots), they get sensory input that decreases the amount of swaying that they do, thereby decreasing the likelihood of falling down.

Conclusion

I’m not covering all the parts of the balance system that Lord’s team tests — for example, they do reaction time tests with a normal computer mouse and with a foot pedal in the long version of the test — but you get the idea. Overall, the wealth of information the group has produced and the comprehensive testing are a really admirable example of taking on a complex human perceptual-action system and patiently teasing out the different contributing factors. The approach seems to me to be harmonious with both a dynamic systems modeling of perception and action as well as an ecological approach to sensing.

The bonus, in this case, is that the robust modeling of the way that these different factors contribute to balance leads to very concrete interventions after a person’s specific ‘balance profile’ has been determined. That is, used well, this testing and diagnosis can really target why a person is becoming more unstable with time, and then address the specific weakness involved. Lord showed us some samples of profiles when he gave his talk, and it became quickly apparent that the preventitive exercises or treatment given to one patient wouldn’t help all the others. In all, the talk left me feeling that I had seen a role model, not only for integrative research, but also for application of the findings to improve people’s lives.

Stumble It!
Experimenting with inserting a Stumble function in this post seemed particularly appropriate…. GD

Further reading:

The group has a host of papers out on various dimensions of their research if you want more than you can get on the website (see their publications list, keep going down the page to find a complete list by individual topics). For example, you can check out:

Lord, Stephen R. 2006. Visual risk factors for falls in older people. Age and Ageing 35-S2: ii42–ii45. doi:10.1093/ageing/afl085 (abstract, pdf download) (Note: the whole supplementary edition is on research on fall-related fractures)

Menz, Hylton B., Stephen R. Lord, and Richard C. Fitzpatrick. 2006. A tactile stimulus applied to the leg improves postural stability in young, old and neuropathic subjects. Neuroscience Letters 406:23-26. doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2006.07.014 (abstract, pdf download)

Menz Hylton B., Meg E. Morris, and Stephen R. Lord. 2006. Foot and ankle risk factors for falls in older people: a prospective study. Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences 61A:866-870. (abstract, pdf download)

Voukelatos, Alexander, Robert G. Cumming, Stephen R. Lord, and Chris Rissel. 2007. Randomized, Controlled Trial of tai chi for the Prevention of Falls: The Central Sydney tai chi Trial. Journal of the American Geriatric Society 55:1185–1191. doi: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2007.01244.x (pdf download)

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.

Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation in one sensory channel causes involuntary sensations in another. For example, in grapheme, or color synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as having inherent colours; in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months are perceived to have personalities; and in spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, days of the week or months elicit precise locations in space, or are perceived as occurring in topographical relationships (this is closely paraphrased from the Wikipedia article on synesthesia). Although the condition (it’s not really a ‘disorder’) was once thought very rare, but now some sources say that it may occur in around 4% of the population.

Synesthesia has been getting a lot of press of late for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. There’s a small (and probably not terribly lucrative) cottage industry on the boundary zone of social sciences and humanities where ‘synesthesia’ gets a lot of mileage. It appears to me to be part of a rethinking of psychological disorders into analogues for large-scale socio-cultural processes or global ethos, such as looking at Western society as schizophrenic or economics as autistic. While this has the agreeable side effect of pointing out that the gap between ‘disordered’ and ‘ordered’ development is perhaps not so great (and it can be great fun), it’s not clear that it always provides perfect analogues.

Part of the confusion produced by treating synesthesia as a metaphor for metaphor seems to stem from its use by Marshall McLuhan to discuss the effects of media (see James C. Morrison, Hypermedia and Synesthesia). While evocative, it’s not really a fair metaphor, in my opinion, and the farther we follow its implications, the worse it gets.

For example, if I say that many people are ‘paralyzed’ by fears about global climate change, that doesn’t necessarily mean that studying they neurological phenomenon of paralysis will necessarily get me any better understanding of the psychological reaction to fear of the planet warming. That is, a metaphor is a limited cognitive tool, an annalogic lens that highlights certain characteristics, but also with many other non-comparable traits; the metaphoric equation of synesthesia to creative metaphor may be implying many traits that are not equivalent.

In fact, cross-modal sensory associations are pretty damn interesting, and they are robust neurological phenomena; Ramachandran’s work has elsewhere helped to highlight how the human brain might be making this cross modal connections. But synesthesia is a very peculiar cross-modal connection, unlike metaphor in several crucial ways:

First, synesthetic associations are stable: two is always blue to a person, or Monday always has a particular personality, say grumpy.

Second, synesthetic associations are involuntary; there’s no getting around experiencing blue when you count two, and you can’t have a madcap Monday if that’s not your association.

Third, synesthetic associations are cross-modal and unidirectional; my sensory conflating between number and personality does not switch but keeps to a particular pairing of sensory channels, and it only tends to work in one direction. Two is blue, but it doesn’t necessarily suddenly seem to exist in a particular space or develop an impatient personality. And I don’t perceive the reverse: perceiving ‘two’ when I see blue.

Fourth, synesthetic associations are idiosyncratic; even if we’re both color synesthetes, you and I will associate different sensory qualities to letters or words (‘no… “T” is not mauve; it’s lavendar!’).

Fifth, synesthesia, by definition, associates sensations from different sensory channels.

Finally, as Ramachandran himself argues (see Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001a), synesthesia is a perceptual effect, not a memory association, a symbolic link, or an analogy.

Metaphor has none of these traits: it is unstable and varies widely; associations are voluntary, even creative; and metaphor can be crossmodal, but it does not always flow from one channel into a specific other one. Unlike synesthesia, metaphor is typically used in communication and might even be considered ineffective if the association does not successfully communicate to an audience. And metaphors very frequently operate within a single sensory channel, for example, highlighting similarity in visual sensations or sounds. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, metaphor is not perceptual — metaphoric analogy may highlights perceptual qualities, but it is driven by elective choices to highlight qualities that may involve symbolic meanings or create meaningful analogies.

Unlike synesthesia, metaphor is the creative ability to summon up multiple associations to highlight different characteristics; far from being compulsory, many of the most evocative metaphors are novel and unexpected, and they are motivated by some perceived similarity, unlike the arbitrary, compulsory associations made in synesthesia.

Ramachandran himself would no doubt emphasize these differences if asked to contrast synesthesia with metaphor. For example, in their piece on synesthesia in Scholarpedia, Ramachandran and David Brang write:

The link between synesthesia and metaphor (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001b) has already been alluded to. The nature of the link remains elusive given that synesthesia involves arbitrarily connecting two unrelated things (e.g. color and number) whereas there is a non-arbitrary conceptual connection between Juliet and the sun. One potential solution to this problem comes from realizing that any given word only has a FINITE set of strong first order associations (sun = warm, nurturing, radiant, bright) surrounded by a penumbra of weaker second order associations (sun = yellow, flowers, beach, etc.) and third and fourth order associations that fade way like an echo. The overlapping region between two halos of associations (e.g. Juliet and the sun; both are radiant, warm and nurturing) – the basis of metaphor- exists in all of us but is larger and stronger in synesthesia as a result of the cross-activation gene. In this formulation synesthesia is not synonymous with metaphor but the gene that produces synesthesia confers a propensity towards metaphor. A side- effect of this may be that associations that are only vaguely felt in all of us (e.g. masculine or feminine letters or good and bad shapes produced by subliminal associations) may become more explicitly manifest in synesthetes, a prediction that can be tested experimentally. For instance most people consider certain female names, e.g. Julie, Cindy, Vanessa, Jennifer, Felicia, etc. to be more “sexy” than others e.g. Martha and Ingrid. Even though we may not be consciously aware of it, this may be because the former involve pouting, tongue, lips etc. with unconscious sexual overtones. The same argument would explain why the French language is often thought of as more sexy than German. It might be interesting to see if these spontaneously emerging tendencies and classifications are more pronounced in synesthetes.

In this passage, I think Ramachandran and Brang recognize differences, highlight some similarities, but then posit an improbable ‘gene the produced synesthesia’ that also ‘confers a propensity towards metaphor.’ Although much of the research leading up to this passage is persuasive, this is where I draw the line.

A more promising approach to thinking about how these intriguing patterns of association (like names being ‘sexy’ or shapes being ‘kiki’ or ‘booba’) arise consistently and remain stable is not so much to look at synesthesia, in my opinion, but to look more closely at the phenomenology of these sensations. For example, Ramachandran and Brang describe how movements of the mouth might make certain names sound ‘sexy’; the easier explanation is to look to these movements, not to point to synesthesia, which typically involves arbitrary, unimodal sensory associations.

In other words, in this case, the explanation might be more phenomenological than neurological, as is the case with much of metaphor. Metaphors are compelling to us, and may successfully communicate, because they usually focus on some sensory or conceptual association, not because, like synesthetes, we invariably and compulsively associate the metaphor with the reference. (And the phenomenological explanation wouldn’t need to ignore the fact that the same names likely aren’t sexy in every language…)

One of the things that makes metaphors work is that, when we share them, they are persuasive to other people because those people, too, can perceive the analogy. Synesthetes don’t associate things because they share some resonant perceptual quality (that is, to anyone BUT the synesthete). In fact, even synesthetes themselves don’t agree on what things are linked when they have the same sort of synesthesia; not all graphemes think three is red. None of this would be news to Ramachandran, who knows far more about synesthesia than I ever will. It’s just that he thinks synesthesia is a useful metaphor for metaphor; like any metaphor, however, we can disagree about whether it’s a good one. The fact that it produced conjectures of a shared metaphor-synesthesia gene suggests to me that it’s not one I want to employ.

References

Hubbard, Edward, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. 2005. Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Synesthesia. Neuron 48 (3): 509-520.

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M. Hubbard. 2001a. Neural cross wiring and synesthesia. Journal of Vision 1(3):67 doi:10.1167/1.3.67

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M. Hubbard. 2001b. Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(1): 3-34.

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.’

Dr. Anjan Chatterjee of Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania (who I think was not part of the original research team), explained to Hurley that, ‘The left hemisphere does language in the narrow sense, understanding of individual words and sentences. But it’s now thought that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal, puns and jokes, requires the right hemisphere.’

The research seems to support earlier work that suggests perceiving sarcasm, like so many mental abilities, requires a network of brain regions, and disruption of one can throw off the whole ability. See, for example, The anatomy of sarcasm: Researchers reveal how the brain handles this complex communication, a notice of an article by a research team at the University of Haifa that appeared in Neuropsychology in 2005.

What I’m struck by as an anthropologist though is that the perception of sarcasm is actually pretty subtle and can vary across cultures. I’ve noticed, for example, that Australian humour seems to include a lot more of what I would call ‘ambivalent’ or ‘unresolved’ parody; what I mean is that, in American parody (which I’m more accustomed to), there seems to be a very clear framing of something as ironic or sarcastic. In contrast, it’s much less clear in Australia. Movies and television, for example, seem to feature a lot more gentle sarcasm and parody, with the polyvalence of the interpretation left open; someone can be both a rube and a hero, a kind of characteristic that I don’t commonly see in American humour.

In contrast, I found Brazilian humour, especially television humour, pretty over the top when I was there. Television satire was so slapstick and ludicrously stereotypic that it was almost hard to find it very funny; some popular shows were utterly incomprehensible to me, not because I couldn’t understand them but because I just could NOT comprehend why someone would voluntarily watch them for any extended period.

I’m just wondering aloud if there might be a difference in the sensitivity of the ‘sarcasm’ network depending on one’s humour enculturation. Would the research at both Haifa and UCSF provide a possibility of comparative work?