I didn’t get to stay for the whole conference because I was running around doing preparation things for the Australian Anthropological Society Conference that we held in December. Nevertheless, I saw some really good papers, and some of the others are especially interesting for those of us interested in neuroanthropology. Please peruse the whole list, but for a discussion of cultural variation in cognition, of special interest might be: Nian Liu’s Tuesday, Threesday, Foursday: Chinese names for the days of the week facilitate Chinese children’s temporal reasoning, Zhengdao Ye’s Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A lexical-conceptual analysis, Collaborative remembering: When can remembering with others be beneficial? by Celia B. Harris, Paul G. Keil, John Sutton and Amanda J. Barnier, and Expanding expertise: Investigating a musician’s experience of music performance by Andrew Geeves, Doris McIlwain, and John Sutton.

I also like the look of Evaluation of a model of expert decision making in air traffic control, by Stefan Lehmann and colleagues, but I haven’t had the time to really read it (and won’t get time for a few days). Ben Jeffares’ paper was excellent in presentation, but I haven’t yet checked out the written version yet: The evolution of technical competence: strategic and economic thinking.

My paper from the conference, Cultural variation in elite athletes: Does elite cognitive-perceptual skill always converge?, is available as a pdf. I have to admit, it’s a shallower paper than I usually like to present, but I had to cover a LOT of turf, and it’s primarily a proposal for a research program, reviewing the neurological and behavioural places where I expect we might find the clearest evidence of cultural difference in neural dynamics. I’ll take the liberty of reposting the abstract:

Anthropologists have not participated extensively in the cognitive science synthesis for a host of reasons, including internal conflicts in the discipline and profound reservations about the ways that cultural differences have been modeled in psychology, neuroscience, and other contributors to cognitive science. This paper proposes a skills-based model for culture that overcomes some of the problems inherent in the treatment of culture as shared information. Athletes offer excellent cases studies for how skill acquisition, like enculturation, affects the human nervous system. In addition, cultural differences in playing styles of the same sport, such as distinctive ways of playing rugby, demonstrate how varying solution strategies to similar athletic problems produce distinctive skill profiles.

I’d love to hear any responses to the piece. I don’t usually present in cognitive science, as I’m more comfortable in my home discipline of anthropology, working from a pretty solid base of anthropology into the border of brain-culture research, so I’d be interested to learn what scholars situated more confidently in cognitive science think of the piece.

1984 Women's 3000 meter

Although Budd had been setting the pace, she faded to seventh in the end and was booed by the partisan LA audience (Decker would later say that she was inexperienced at running in a pack and, as the trailing runner, was responsible for their contact). Maricica Puica of Romania won the event, and Britain’s Wendy Sly took the silver in a final that was seared into my memory by the televised replays of a stricken Mary Decker, hip injured from her fall, shattered and crying on the infield.

In all of the drama, one of the things that left the greatest impression on me as a high school student and sometime athlete was the simple fact that Zola Budd ran without shoes, an almost unimaginable idea to me at the time. Budd was one of a handful of famous barefoot runners, including Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian marathoner who won his first Olympic gold in 1960 without shoes, Tegla Loroupe, the Kenyan women’s running legend and multiple world record holder, and Ken Bob Saxton, aka ‘Barefoot Ken Bob,’ a marathoner and guru to the shoeless.

I’ve been thinking about barefoot running for a while, oddly enough since I started writing about bare-knuckle punching in no-holds-barred fighting (or ‘mixed martial arts’ like the Ultimate Fighting Championship in its early days). Barefoot running, even more than bare-knuckle boxing, reveals the ways that very simple technologies, if used consistently enough, become part of the developmental niche of the human body, shaping the way that our bones, muscles, tissues, and nervous system develop.

Although this post is not strictly neuroanthropology, I thought I might share some of what I’m working on, in part because I’m interested to hear any feedback people have. In particular, this will focus on how hard it is to sort out what’s ‘natural’ when activity patterns, incredibly variable, are necessary ingredients in the development of biological systems. But also, as it will become clearer in the post, the ways that our nervous system adapt to different situations, such as having heavily padded feet or being barefoot when we run, illustrates well how even unconscious training is a form of phenotypic, non-genetic, adaptation.

Before I go any further, though, if you have anything to say in response to this, I would love to read it. This is my first attempt to put down some thoughts that will be in a chapter of an upcoming book…

I was sparked to finally put this down and post it by an item in Wired Science: ‘To Run Better, Start by Ditching Your Nikes,’ by Dylan Tweeny. (See below for a number of other recent articles online.) Tweeny writes:

Strong evidence shows that thickly cushioned running shoes have done nothing to prevent injury in the 30-odd years since Nike founder Bill Bowerman invented them, researchers say. Some smaller, earlier studies suggest that running in shoes may increase the risk of ankle sprains, plantar fasciitis and other injuries. Runners who wear cheap running shoes have fewer injuries than those wearing expensive trainers. Meanwhile, injuries plague 20 to 80 percent of regular runners every year.

The article shares quotes by a number of barefoot running advocates who argue strongly that running in minimalist shoes, or unshod, reduces the likelihood of injury: ‘After all,’ Tweeny writes in a discussion of the work of Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, ‘we evolved without shoes.’

In the passage, Tweeny refers to a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (Clinghan et al. 2008) that found cheap running shoes correlated with better long-term health outcomes than more expensive footwear. Runners who used more expensive running shoes had a pretty shocking 123% higher rate of injury than those in less expensive shoes (see Robbins and Waked 1997). The Robbins and Waked (1997) study directly focused on the relation between deceptive shoe advertising and the force of barefoot subjects’ footfall when they came down on a surface designed to look like shoe padding. Led to believe that the surface was protecting them, people changed their running style in ways that increased impact.

The rate of injuries among runners, including the relatively consistent injury rate despite ‘improvements’ in shoe technology, make some observers suspicious that shoes might be causing, rather than protecting against, injury, even if the link is indirect through shifts in technique or even the population that can participate. Ross Tucker and Anthony Dugas of The Science of Sport point out that there are, in fact, many possible explanations for changes in injury rates – or changing reasons why rates remain constant – such as the demographic factor that many runners in the 1990s might be in significantly worse physical condition than runners in the 1970s as the hobby spread to less-fit individuals. But Tucker and Dugas, too, conclude that certain types of running shoes may not be good for all distance runners, a conclusion supported by a range of research (see, e.g., Richards, Magin and Callister 2009).

In a review of research on barefoot running and training, Michael Wharburton (2001) suggests that running and walking without shoes may decrease acute injury rates from accidents (sprains), diminish chronic injuries from repeated shock (among them, plantar fasciitis), and increase movement economy, because additional weight on the feet is harder to carry while running than weight elsewhere (see Divert et al. 2008). Wharburton asks in his conclusion why more runners don’t opt to run barefoot, suggesting it might be fear of puncture wounds, thermal problems, or even misperceptions about the dangers. He does allow that in inclement weather and with certain biomechanical problems, shoes would be essential to compensate for lower limb issues (see Burge 2001 for reservations about Wharburton’s advice, especially with a range of medical conditions that she details – highly recommended if you’re considering running barefoot but have some pre-existing foot problems or other health issues).

A number of groups advocate barefoot running for a host of reasons: health, injury prevention, greater sensation, enjoyment, and overall well-being (e.g., Driscoll 2004; Robbins and Gouw 1990). Especially prominent websites include
Barefoot Ken Bob, Barefoot Ted, and evangelist Barefoot Rick (who’s all about saving soles… I know, ‘ouch.’ Sorry, Rick.). A recent book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall specifically discusses the Tarahumara Indians, who run extraordinarily long races through rough country in sandals or barefoot. The interest in barefoot running and the possibility that some types of shoes may be increasing problems for devoted runners has produced a spate of articles (see the list at the end of this article for a few).

As Ross and Jonathan have written of their own series of posts on running shoes, the topic is extremely controversial, provoking heated discussion, enthusiastic discussion, and strong opinions, no doubt because ‘shoes, more than any other topic, touches runners where it counts – their feet! And, unfortunately, their wallets, for it’s still the largest expense a runner incurs for the sport.’

They suggest that the trend in shoe design is toward very neutral (not motion controlling), cushioned shoes that are lighter than previous generations of footwear. In addition, virtually every shoe company has produced a ‘barefoot’ shoe design, minimalist footwear designed to mimic the dynamics of barefoot running. The Vibram Five Fingers, a glove-like light shoe, for example, was named by Time Magazine one of the Inventions of the Year in 2007. Vibram is even recruiting research subjects for Prof. Lieberman’s research on barefoot running dynamics.

I should point out that I have no personal interest in any shoe company, or in criticizing any shoe company. I run with shoes (when I run), but I do like to run barefoot on the beach whenever I can. And my border collie, Louie, is a fanatic about barefoot running…

Shoes, padding and running technique

The padding in running shoes changes the way that we run, even though we may be completely unconscious that our gait has compensated for the change in the biomechanical properties of the feet produced by footgear (see Divert et al. 2005; but c.f. De Wit et al. 2000).

Robbins and Gouw (1991) argue that, with padded shoes, ‘a perceptual illusion is created whereby perceived impact is lower than actual impact, which results in inadequate impact-moderating behavior and consequent injury.’ That is, the perception of impact that is diminished by modern ‘protection’ causes runners to neglect basic biomechanical adaptations to decrease stress on the legs, such as shortening the stride, changing the point of footfall, or increasing bend in the knees slightly.

Joseph Froncioni, an orthopedic surgeon, describes at length the way that shoes change the dynamics of running. Although the assertion that barefoot runners come down on the ball of the foot is controversial (some proponents and scholars argue that barefoot runners come down on the middle-outside of the foot; see Ross Tucker’s post on this debate), quite a bit of his description stands up:

During barefoot running, the ball of the foot strikes the ground first and immediately starts sending signals to the spinal cord and brain about the magnitude of impact and shear, getting most of its clues about this from the skin contact with the surface irregularities of the ground. Take away this contact by adding a cushioned substance and you immediately fool the system into underestimating the impact. Add a raised heel and the shod runner is forced to land on it. Strap the cushioning on tightly with the aid of a sophisticated lacing system and you block out shear as well, throwing the shock-absorption system even further into the dark…. The cushioned midsole of the modern running shoe robs the system of important sensory information necessary for ankle, knee and hip response to impact. The arch support (or orthotic) in modern running shoes not only prevents the arch suspension system from absorbing energy by preventing flattening but eventually leads to intrinsic muscle atrophy and complete loss of active muscular control of the arch leaving only the inelastic plantar fascia as a checkrein to flattening. The barefoot runner’s ‘foot position awareness sense’ which relies heavily on sensory input from the sole of the foot minimizes his risk of sustaining an ankle sprain on uneven ground. The shod runner is at marked increased risk of ankle sprains because his ‘foot position awareness sense’ is handicapped by the paucity of sensations coming from his soles.

Froncioni highlights here three distinctive problems with shoes in the dynamics of running: the first, a decrease in sensory information available through the foot; second, a shift in the position of the foot from a changed motion including an earlier heal strike and longer stride; and, third, an erosion of the impact-absorbing dynamics of the lower body, especially of the arch of the foot arising from both mechanical properties of the shoe and the previous two problems. Some of these detrimental effects are immediate, but others are gradual and cumulative, conditioning the body in patterns of behaviour and reaction that amount to a kind of adverse training that can result in chronic injury.

After a lengthy discussion in the comments on the Science of Sports blog posting on barefoot and shod running, Ross Tucker concludes that, in his opinion, the primary reason shoes cause injury is not the placement of the foot when it strikes the ground but the fact that heavily padded, stiff-soled shoes diminish sensation in the feet from the ground (similar to what Robbins and Gouw 1991 conclude, though they do so on the basis of less data). Without sufficient sensation, the foot and leg do not compensate as well for the mechanics of running; the feedback cycle is stifled and the dynamic suffers.

Research on foot impact by Robbins and Waked (1997) suggests that balance and impact are closely related, that a person coming down on a soft surface (like a gymnast landing on a thick pad or runner on a spongy shoe) intentionally, though non-consciously, comes down harder in order to find a stable surface. The spongier the landing material, theoretically, the harder the impact because the body seeks to compress the material to find some sort of stable footing.

According to Froncioni, shoes don’t simply disrupt the sensory feedback-control cycle through proprioception or the sense of impact through the legs, but also because wearing shoes changes the way that runners actively pursue sensory information through vision and use their bodies. That is, when we run in heavily cushioned shoes, we look differently and hurl our body against unknown surfaces.

The barefoot runner is constantly alert scanning the ground before him for irregularities and dangers that might cause him injury. The barefoot runner is a cautious runner and actively changes his landing strategy to prevent injury. He treads lightly. The shod runner is bombarded by convincing advertising stating or implying that the shoe he is wearing will protect him well over any terrain and he becomes a careless runner. He is heavy footed.

The loss of sensation in the feet is analogous to the effects of a degenerative disease, ironically enough. That is, by mimicking the long-term effects of neuro-degenerative conditions, shoes may bring on other forms of degeneration in the lower limbs. As Froncioni writes:

Finally, certain diseases in humans can cause a gradual destruction of the sensory nerve endings in the foot (and elsewhere) resulting in a significant increase in lower extremity injuries. Diabetes and tertiary syphilis are two. Extremities so affected are termed ‘neuropathic’. The shod runner, because of his sensory deprivation and high risk of injury may be termed as having ‘pseudo-neuropathic’ feet, a term coined by Robbins.

This and previous two drop quotes from Athletic Footwear and Running Injuries by Joseph Froncioni.

Conditions such as diabetes can throw off the fine orchestration of muscles in the feet that absorb and transfer force, as decreased sensitivity and response cause delays of dynamic reactions in the foot muscles (see Abbound 2002: 171, and for a review). As we’ve already discussed here on Neuroanthropology.net, some researchers who study loss of stability in older people point to diminished sensitivity in the feet as a potential contributing cause of falling. Not surprisingly, one of the prescriptions for people with this condition is to wear thin-soled shoes or, if the condition is worse, ‘high-tops’ so that sensation on the ankles can substitute for sensation on the soles of the feet.

Shoes as developmental niche for feet

People who habitually wear shoes wind up shaping their feet developmentally in distinctive ways. From the point of view of our feet – if I can be so anthropomorphizing – the shoe becomes the ‘environment’ in which feet are grown. Factors like temperature, abrasion, constriction, and the like become the environment with which the foot must contend adapt to, and rely upon. Shoes are a kind of developmental niche for feet, and like any ecological niche, exert their own influence on the anatomical unfolding of the foot’s anatomy. Of course, other factors in addition to shoes make up the foot’s ‘environment’, such as the very act and amount of walking we do, the surfaces we walk on, the sorts of forces exerted upon the bones in the feet by factors like our body size, built environment, athletic activities… and all of these can be affected by shoes, too.

In other words, from the point of view of the feet, a whole constellation of things make up the developmental environment, some of which are truly ‘outside’ us – like cold or wet or surfaces – but some of which are very much under human control, including activity patterns and habitual footwear. To the foot, the leg is part of the environment, and how the leg is used becomes one of the environmental factors feeding into how the feet develop. If we wear a pair of shoes that changes how our legs work (such as high heels or thickly-soled running shoes), these shoes affect the feet directly, but they also impact the feet indirectly through what they do to the leg and the dynamics of our gait and our patterns of activity.

In the simplest sense, shoes are designed to address what the shoe designers perceive as inadequacies in the human foot, whether these inadequacies are mechanical or aesthetic. Adam Sternbergh (2008) explained:

For decades, the guiding principle of shoe design has been to compensate for the perceived deficiencies of the human foot. Since it hurts to strike your heel on the ground, nearly all shoes provide a structure to lift the heel. And because walking on hard surfaces can be painful, we wrap our feet in padding. Many people suffer from flat feet or fallen arches, so we wear shoes with built-in arch supports, to help hold our arches up.

Of course, other design elements enter the mix along the way: the desire to be colour coordinated, the elongation of the leg provided by high heels, the undeniable cool of the tassel, the practicality of Velcro quick-release closures on kids shoes. But the basic ‘functional’ design elements of shoes are relatively consistent since the advent of modern, protective footwear (that is, providing more than simply insulation against cold by wrapping fabric or skin around the foot).

The basic effect of shoes on feet is relatively consistent as well. First, the sole of the shod foot does not develop the hardness that the unshod develop. Anyone who has ever lived in a variable climate (like I did growing up in St. Louis) probably has the experience of their feet fluctuating seasonally in toughness, going from soft and tender when constantly protected during the winter, swaddled in thick socks and insulating shoes, to toughened when barefoot or wearing sandals in the summer. When I worked as a lifeguard, by mid-July I could walk across the sun-heated asphalt parking lot at midday without my shoes. At the start of the summer, pampered winter feet were sensitive to every pebble or crack in the pavement.

In a study of shoe-wearing and habitually barefoot Chinese populations, Sim-Fook and Hodgson (1958: 1059) found:

The feet of the non-shoe-wearing populations showed thick soles with prominent skin creases apart from many minor lacerations due to traumata. The pachydermatous [!!] skin on the sole of the foot had an extraordinarily thick keratinized layer about 0.5 to one centimeter thick which permitted the individual to walk about without any discomfort. Although thick and tough, the skin was pliable and was marked by deep transverse folds which were similar to the lines of joint flexion found on the palm of the hand…

(Before I go any further, ‘pachydermatous’ is the coolest word EVER…)

Even though the groups studied spent quite a bit of time standing in water and unshod, Sim-Fook and Hodgson did not find many complaints about foot health, in part because their soles were so resilient and pliable, but also because the unshod did not have the constant low level friction on their feet provided by shoes. Ironically, this constant, low pressure against the foot can produce more severe chronic injury and malformation than the once-in-a-while and completely varied traumas of walking around with naked feet. Since the bones and tissue are, in a sense, being grown inside the shoes, they struggle to conform to some of the spaces and mechanical environments that we give them.

The second effect of shoes on foot development is that they influence the performance and architecture of the arch of the foot. As Dudley Morton (1964: 145) argued decades ago:

The natural foot is the naked, unclothed foot; and its arched conformation is not an element of weakness in design calling for artificial help, but of structural strength acquired through countless generations of unaided weightbearing. Occasionally we hear shoes referred to as a “natural support for the arch.” The suggestion should move our hearts in pity toward all primitive peoples were it not for the fact that they have no foot troubles, as well as no shoes. The phrase is one of many in which glibness overshadows accuracy, and unfortunately tends to promote erroneous ideas about the foot and its welfare.

The arch of the foot absorbs force when the feet impact the ground, stretching tendons in multiple directions, flattening and deflecting momentum. ‘Supporting’ the arch of the foot by placing it on a convex orthotic would make it virtually impossible for it to function as a shock absorber.

The arch support, which is present in all running footwear, would interfere with the downward deflection of the medial arch on loading. Furthermore, the use of orthodics, or other structures that are fitted to the mold of the soft tissues of the foot, could cause similar difficulty. Such designs occur when an engineer looks at the foot as an inflexible lever which is delicate and thus requires packaging. Various myths persist about foot behavior due to poor understanding of its biology. (Robbins and Hanna 1987)

Shoes also bind together the toes, making it very difficult for them to move, let alone engage in the grasping motions that habitually unshod people make when they walk (see Robbins and Gouw 1990; more on this below). To return to Morton (1964: 218), the bare toes move relative to each other to bear the weight of the body, and shoes affect their angle of spread: ‘The toes of non-shoe-wearing natives are separated when weight is borne on the feet; but any light, closely fitted foot covering will prevent their separation, owing to the lateral mobility of the toes and the small size of the muscles that abduct them.’ Sim-Fook and Hodgson (1958: 1060) also found ‘a tendency to spread’ in the forefoot, especially between the first and second toes (see also Funakoshi 2005).

Normally, the big toe (or hallux) diverges from the second toe at an angle of 5 to 10 degrees. But, in a condition referred to as hallux valgus, the big toe angles toward the small toes. When the condition is also accompanied by hypermobility, it is often congenital and referred to as ‘atavistic’ (although I suspect that this designation is not evolutionarily accurate). But the condition is often caused by wearing ill-fitting shoes, and it occurs 10 times more often in women as in men according to Richardson, Hansen, and Kilcoyne (2000; see also this source for astonishing X-rays of the effects of shoes on bone configuration… I was gobsmacked by a couple of the images). Morton believes that shoes have no noticeable effect on the functioning of toes, but we do know that habitually binding together the toes does affect the skeletal structure of the feet, and the evidence of pathology from shoes seems to me to be pretty compelling.

Patterns of bone growth and remodeling due to use (commonly referred to loosely as ‘Wolff’s law,’ see Ruff et al. 2006) suggest that a shift in toe use and the increased support for the bones of the feet provided by habitually worn shoes, will lead to differences in bone structure between habitually shod and unshod populations (see, for example, Sim-Fook and Hodgson 1958). Bound together laterally and ‘supported’ by an arched shoes, the foot cannot act as efficiently as a shock absorber; at the same time, less dynamic loading on the bones means that the bones will be less robust. Shoes, then, have a range of developmental effects, from low-level, constant pressure and abrasion to a form of protection which leads to greater fragility.

As a result, Zipfel and Berger (2007) recorded substantially higher rates of bone pathology in the feet of shod populations that they studied (European, Sotho and Zulu) than in pre-pastoralist South African populations who likely were habitually barefoot foragers. Although Erik Trinkaus’ work (see below) suggests that pathologies caused by shoes might be uneven distributed among the bones of the feet, Zipfel and Berger (ibid.: 209) found ‘the foot on the pre-pastoralist group is uniformly “healthier” than the modern groups.’

Ironically, even though Zipfel and Berger acknowledge that pre-pastoralist people show some signs of ‘wear and tear’ that might arise from much greater amounts of walking, constant travel and nomadic foraging, this heavy use pattern did not correlate with higher rates of a wide range of bone pathologies.

The results presented here suggest that the unshod lifestyle of the pre-pastoral group was associated with a lower frequency of osteological modification. The influence of modern lifestyle including the use of footwear, appears to have some significant negative effect on foot function, potentially resulting in an increase in pathological changes. (ibid.: 212)

I found it especially curious that the relative rates of pathology types and locations tended to be pretty similar across the different groups, but the overall frequency of pathological conditions varied, with shod populations’ rates of most disorders higher. This suggests that the wear pattern on feet is pretty similar, whether a population wears shoes or not; they get the same sorts of disorders, but less frequently without shoes.

The only way I can explain this is to assume that the shoes themselves don’t cause pathologies (otherwise, we’d notice some abnormally frequent disorders), but that shoes uniformly make the foot susceptible to disordered development. In other words, it’s not the shoes doing the damage, it’s that they throw off the foot’s ability to cope with normal movement, making the organ more fragile and susceptible to all pathologies (but note that this was only a study of bones, not soft tissue lesions).

The problem is not simply that we wear shoes, but that we often don’t wear the right shoes. Abboud (2002:176) reports that,

Since its inception in 1993, most patients seen at the Foot Pressure Analysis Clinic (FPAC) in Dundee, regardless of how minor or complex their problem was, were using ill-fitting footwear with discrepancies in shoe width and size when compared to their feet. In some cases, there was a difference of up to 3 UK sizes and 4 cm in width across the metatarsal head area, needless to say causing abnormal biomechanical force through the foot joints. The cumulative damage caused by footwear over the years goes inmost cases unnoticed and gets ignored despite clear signs of pain and dorsal callus formation, the latter can only develop as a result of friction with the inner shoe.

I probably don’t need to remind you that, as an anthropologist, I make little distinction between what people ‘should’ be wearing and what they actually are wearing. From the point of view of the feet, ill-fitting shoes are just as much a part of the developmental niche as perfectly chosen footwear.

Sternbergh explains the developmental influence of shoes simply: ‘This is the shoe paradox: We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for wearing shoes.’ Shoe designers are convinced that feet need to be protected against the ground, and the result is that our feet are so sheltered that they do become fragile.

The earliest shoes

Otzi's shoe

Archaeologist Erik Trinkaus has written a number of articles on the evidence for footwear in prehistoric populations, arguing that, in order to survive the cold of glacial periods, hominins would have necessarily figured out how to create insulating protection of some sort: a kind of prehistoric Ugg boot. But more modern-style, mechanically supportive shoes would have been a later development, evident in the bones of the feet because a semi-rigid sole will alter the distribution of force on the foot (see Trinkaus 2005: 1516). When walking barefoot, the toes flex, making the bones on the outside of the foot stronger through remodelling (as mentioned in the previous section); Trinkaus hypothesized that a shift in the robusticity of bones in the hallux (big toe) relative to the smaller toes (or the outside of the foot) would be a possible sign of habitual hard-soled shoe wearing.

Trinkaus compared bones from three different recent North American populations to test the hypothesis that shoes caused shifts in the relative strength of the toe bones (Pecos Pueblo Native American, Inuit, and Euro-Americans). Within these samples, predictions about the robustness of the phalanges in the feet based upon their shoe-wearing patterns turned out to be accurate; Pecos Pueblo Native Americans wearing soft-soled moccasins had the most robust lateral toes, Inuit in harder soled boots had more gracile bones, and Euro-Americans in hard-soled shoes had the most marked disparity. The more support offered by the footwear, the less robust the bones of the feet associated with the smaller toes (especially the pedal proximal phalanges in the middle of the foot).

Trinkaus has used beam model analysis, a technique that scans cross sections of bones across their axis to get some idea of their density and configuration. These donut-like images gives some sense of the stresses placed upon the bones because they remodel to compensate for these stresses, get stronger, in general, to withstand habitual strains.

A similar comparison might provide insight into the earliest rigid footwear because, as Trinkaus puts it, ‘relative robusticity of human lateral toes might provide insight into the frequency of use of footwear’ (2005: 1515). Because the organic materials likely used to make the first shoes would not endure in the archaeological record, Trinkaus’ method is as intriguing as it is ingenuous. In the archaeological remains Trinkaus examined, the evidence from the feet suggest that shoes became more and more prevalent from the Middle Paleolithic to the middle Upper Paleolithic; he suggests supportive footwear is likely around 30,000 years old in his earlier work (2005), but some of his later work with Shang (2008) may push that date back closer to 40,000 years.

I’m not going to go into all of Trinkaus’ analysis here. Blogger Afarensis has a number of posts on the issue of prehistoric footwear including here, here and here. Please read Afarensis, especially What You Can Learn From Bones: When Did We Start Wearing Shoes? for a more complete discussion of Trinkaus’ work.

By comparing the shoes to an ‘environment,’ I don’t mean to suggest that 40,000 years of being shod is a form of ‘unnatural selection’ that has shifted the genetic contributors to the anatomy of our feet. Rather, I just mean to suggest that, if shoes are affecting the anatomy of our feet, we have been transmitting certain kinds of crucial traits through the artificial environment that we’ve created. We place our children in little training shoes so that their feet are sculpted into a configuration that fits within, and virtually demands the support of shoes. So should we lose our shoes and go back to ‘natural’ feet, unwinding perhaps 40,000 years of non-genetic biophysical heredity?

Paleo-nostalgia and lifestyle advice

from barefooted.com

I suspect that I usually disappoint my students, who can be pretty fervent about these ideas. Most paleo-nostalgia movements seem to me to be very selective – for example, the whole Paleolithic Diet movement seems to overlook a host of problems, such as changes in activity patterns, the difference between wild and domesticated meat animals, the high incidence of parasites and low life expectancy in prehistoric periods, and the likelihood that much of human protein was not coming from delicious medium-rare steak or grilled chicken breasts but rather invertebrates, shell fish, small vertebrates, offal and carrion (that’s right, maybe it should be the ‘Bugs, Clams, Lizards and Roadkill Diet’ – not quite the same marketing potential as ‘Eat All the Steak and Chicken You Can!’). I’ve discussed this in Paleofantasies of the perfect diet – Marlene Zuk in NYTimes.

So what about shoes and foot health? Is there anyone out there preaching the Paleolithic Podiatry program? Zinjanthropus shares my scepticism of podiatric paleo-nostalgia, asking why one period of our evolutionary history is privileged over others. Zinjanthropus writes:

Either way, I’m usually very cautious about shaping my lifestyle to fit the needs of a paleolithic savannah-scape. We’ve done a lot of evolving since then, after all! If I push my lifestyle back to the Paleolithic, then who’s to say that I’m not even BETTER evolved for the Pliocene?

If a hunter and gatherer diet, for example, is allegedly ‘healthier,’ why not push back to a diet of astringent fruit like our arboreal ancestors (as Richard Wranger points out, you’d be able to look forward to hours every day of chewing to get enough calories, for example).

Paleonostalgia suffers from a number of deep problems. As Zinjanthropus suggests, how to choose which period in time to use as a model. Hominins have evolved over millions of years through a whole range of environments; paleonostalgia tends to arbitrarily pick a point of time in the past, which is not necessarily more valid as a lifestyle model than any other. In addition, paleonostalgists tend to ignore the likelihood that human niches were varied – not as varied as later humans – but the ability to occupy diverse environmental niches has been a hallmark of our ancestors. Too much dietary and environmental specialization hasn’t really been a hallmark of our genus; arguably, the members of our genus and closely allied ones who have become too specialized and inflexible, have all gone extinct (I don’t want to argue this too strenuously, as many of the ones we tend to consider highly specialized a) lasted a hell of a long time, longer than Homo sapiens in some cases, and b) we’re increasingly uncertain that we can know for certain adaptive behaviours from anatomy, as the case of Paranthropus teeth suggests.).

Similarly, discussions of evidence from foraging peoples is often just as selective and slanted. Although we hear about the running capabilities of foraging people (and I, too, firmly believe that they were much more active than technologically-dependent sedentary people), we don’t hear about their injuries, including disabling ones, or their chronic health problems, including things like parasites that enter the body through the feet.

Alfred Gell, for example (I’m pretty sure, but I can’t remember in which text), wrote about travelling quickly through the rainforest with barefoot colleagues; although they were swift and sure-footed, they also had to stop every once in a while when one of them had to dig a thorn out of his or her foot.

One problem with paleonostalgia for barefoot running is the fact that we do not run in a paleolithic environment. As Trimble writes in Popular Mechanics:

The problem modern-day runners face, according to Hugh Herr, Popular Mechanics 2005 Breakthrough Award winner and head of the biomechatronic group at MIT, isn’t presented by our bodies but by the evolution of running surfaces. Humans that ran to scavenge or hunt for their food weren’t pounding concrete.

Running shoes offer a trade-off:

In his research, Herr focused on two problems with both shod and barefoot running-pronation angle and impact force. While barefoot running is best for a natural, stress-free pronation angle, Herr says, it is not ideal for coping with roads and sidewalks that can lead to stress-impact injuries. Shoes, on the other hand, excel at diminishing the force of impact on hard ground. But they do so at the cost of the natural stride-all the padding added to the shoe exaggerates the foot’s rotation.

So just throw away your shoes, right, and let your feet be free? Well, even the proponents of barefoot running caution that the transition from being habitually shod to running around au naturale can take some time because ‘the change in biomechanics and loading of joints, muscles and tendons threatens injury if you’re not careful’ (Tucker and Dugas, Running Shoes).

If running barefoot is so ‘natural’ to humans, why do we have to take it slowly? Because our feet become well adapted, as best they can, to wearing shoes. For all of the discussion of evolution having shaped human bodies and our feet for running, the body that habitually walks and runs in shoes has very much adapted to that niche. (See, for example, Tucker on attempts to change running techniques.)

But an interesting example of just how adaptable the feet can be comes from Shulman’s (1949) study of Chinese and Indian populations, in particular some individuals who might be expected to have the most damaged feet (if shoes were necessary to save our feet):

One hundred and eighteen of those interviewed were rickshaw coolies. Because these men spend very long hours each day on cobblestone or other hard roads pulling their passengers at a run it was of particular interest to survey them. If anything, their feet were more perfect than the others. All of them, however, gave a history of much pain and swelling of the foot and ankle during the first few days of work as a rickshaw puller. But after either a rest of two days or a week’s more work on their feet, the pain and swelling passed away and never returned again. There is no occupation more strenuous for the feet than trotting a rickshaw on hard pavement for many hours each day yet these men do it without pain or pathology.

Weren’t our feet designed for running barefoot?

In fact, a number of recent articles suggest that some of the traits of the foot (and other parts of the body) indicate that an ability to run barefoot might have offered a selective advantage during human evolution (e.g., Bramble & Lieberman 2004; see also Wired Science, These toes were made for running). But I don’t think that the issue is simply a debate between the running shoe industry and the growing ‘natural’ barefoot running movement. Instead, the anatomy of the foot, its sensitivity in development to the presence of shoes, and the evolutionary development of shoes and bipedalism, all illustrate how hard it is to talk about the natural human body at all or what the human body is ‘designed’ to do.

Patterns of activity, the most minimal technology, and the way we restructure our living environments all shape our physiological development. In fact, the role of activity, motor experience, and sense perception is so crucial in the development of so much of the human body and nervous system that I suspect we cannot even imagine how a person ‘without’ these sorts of influences might develop. Because humans are inherently adaptable — through culture, learning, technology, and even physiological change – it makes sense that plasticity itself would be a trait likely selected for in humans (an idea I take from Mary Jane West-Eberhard [e.g., 2005]).

Faced with the evidence that something as simple as wearing shoes can affect our soft tissue physiology, skeletal structure, gait kinetics, and the like, we can ask whether being shod or unshod is our ‘natural’ state. In a number of the internet postings about barefoot running, I find assertions about what sorts of surfaces or types of locomotion the human foot was ‘designed’ to accomplish. I think it’s too easy to just say, ‘barefoot is natural; shoes are artificial; feet were designed to run.’

In fact, the human foot and lege were not ‘designed’ for running or walking, barefoot or otherwise. They were not ‘designed’ at all. Evolution doesn’t design anything. Legs and feet are built by natural selection out of an appendage that, a very very long time ago, was a fin. If you were going to ‘design’ a limb and foot for running, you could do a lot better than the human architecture. Our knees, for example, are really lousy; they’re basically a rejiggered hinge joint and could certainly have been engineered better by a benevolent Creator. And She could have given us a more elastic set-up of tendons, too, something like kangaroos have. Oh, man, if some genetic engineer could just work on that kanga-human hybrid (a ‘kanga-hu’?), Olympic steeplechase would be so cool; no more of that stepping on top of the jump and landing in the water – but I digress.

Most of our readers will, of course, be completely familiar with the problems of the ‘Natural Selection as Designer’ metaphor, but it’s one that still crops up again and again in discussions of the evolution of traits. Normally, we can get by with the ‘design’ metaphor without too much trouble, but in the case of something like the role of activity in shaping the emergence of a physiological trait.

You see, human feet aren’t just good for running. They’re good for walking, standing, swimming, lifting, kicking, and a host of other functions. Like most primates, our limb use is actually pretty versatile; the arboreal niche of our ancestor presented a wide variety of challenges – hanging, swinging, walking on top of branches, standing bipedally, standing on all four. In addition, our primate ancestors, like us, don’t just use their limbs for locomotion; they use their limbs to manipulate objects, process food, hold offspring, interact socially, protect themselves, and a host of other activities.

Wait, you say, but we don’t use our feet this way. We’re humans. Feet are for walking and running…

Well, here’s the thing. Feet aren’t just ‘designed for’ walking or running; they turn out to be useful for all sorts of things. In the Chinese populations that Sim-Fook and Hodgson (1958: 1061) studied, habitually unshod people used their big toes often ‘to hold fishing nets and fishing lines taut so that the hands were free.’ The result was that these individuals developed ‘a remarkable degree of prehensile strength’ in the big toe (ibid.: 1060-1061). They conclude their discussion of the ‘unshod foot’ with the summary: ‘The unshod foot had laxity of the joints and tissues producing, in its natural form, a flexible foot with a degree of metatarsus latus, metatarsus primus varus, and hypermobility.’

You or I or the next guy may not be using our feet for things like peeling fruit or dialing the phone, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In fact, many individuals congenitally born without arms or unable to control their arms due to a condition like cerebral palsy develop extraordinary dexterity with their feet, not only using them to do everyday tasks, but even activities like painting or playing an instrument. Painter Chan Tung-mui, for example, paints watercolours with her feet because she cannot control her hands due to cerebral palsy.

Simona Atzori

In most humans, especially shoe-wearing humans, the hallux is adducted, that is, in line with the other toes; but some degree of abduction is present in many of us, especially if habitually unshod, and may even develop to a slightly greater degree with use. Of course, no one approaches the abduction angles of our primate cousins who dwell in trees and have fully-functioning prehensile feet, but this crucial detail of human anatomy, one that distinguishes us from others, may be more variable than we think.

Shulman (1949) makes an off-handed remark about this that I found incredibly interesting: ‘Almost everyone surveyed showed a marked spacing between the first and second toes such as that found on young babies.’ I don’t know about the developmental dynamics, but it wouldn’t surprise me too much if, absent the adducting influence of shoes for more than half of our lives, and an even greater proportion of the time in which our feet were weight bearing, the angle of the toes found in infants was closer to the habitually unshod.

Although we may think that the Chinese practice of foot-binding is a kind of aberration, Zipfel and Berger (2007: 205-206) suggest on the basis of previous research that many Asian populations reveal the degree to which conventional shoes bind feet: ‘Studies of Asian populations whose feet were habitually either unshod, in thong-type sandals or encased in non-constrictive coverings have shown increased forefoot widths when compared to those of shod populations.’

As I wrote in the paper I presented at Univesité Montpellier (Downey 2009), just as Clifford Geertz (1973:67-68) argued that an uncultured human being would be a ‘mindless and consequently unworkable monstrosity,’ a skill-less human would not be capable of the most basic, defining ‘human’ physical acts. The fact that skills like foot painting or feeding oneself with one’s feet are rare does not mean that our feet were not ‘designed’ to do them.

If we were looking for a ‘natural’ foot, one without any influence of activity, we should probably focus on infants or on those who are disabled. We should realize that our feet were not ‘designed’ to do one thing or another; caring for them, and shaping them in ways that we desire, requires more than just figuring out what our ‘nature’ might be.

UPDATE: In January 2010, this issue was in the news due to the release of a new study suggesting that knee, ankle and hip damage might be greater for shod than unshod runners. Some sources have made the leap to the likelihood of osteo-arthritis, although the original study was biomechanical in nature. For a popular version:
Running Shoes May Cause Damage to Knees, Hips and Ankles, New Study Suggests
The original article (and abstract) is available here for download as a PDF:
Kerrigan, D. Casey, MD, Jason R. Franz, MS, Geoffrey S. Keenan, MD, Jay Dicharry, MPT, Ugo Della Croce, PhD, Robert P. Wilder, MD. 2010. The Effect of Running Shoes on Lower Extremity Joint Torques. PM&R 1 (12): 1058-1063. DOI: 10.1016/j.pmrj.2009.09.011

Stumble It!

More reading
Bare Feet by Zinjanthropus at A Primate of a Modern Aspect

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas at The Science of Sport published a whole series on running shoes and running dynamics in 2008:
Part 1: Do shoes cause injury?
Part 2: Shoes, injuries and training
Part 3: Running barefoot – the intelligent biomachine
Part 4: The footstrike – how should your foot land?
Part 5: The market and evolution of the shoe industry

Dylan Tweeny. 2008. Your Shoes Are Killing Your Feet. Wired Science (23 April). http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/your-shoes-are/

Amby Burfoot. 2004. Should You Be Running Barefoot? Runner’s World. Available at: http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-240-319–6728-0,00.html

Adam Sternberg. 2008. You Walk Wrong. New York Magazine (28 April). Available at: http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

Tyghe Trimble. 2009. The Running Shoe Debate: How Barefoot Runners are Shaping the Shoe Industry. Popular Mechanics (22 April). Available at: http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/sports/4314401.html

Joseph Froncioni. 2006. Athletic footwear and running injuries. Quickswood weblog (22 August 2006, but Froncioni admits to writing it much earlier).

Runner’s World’s ‘barefoot running’ forum.

Barefoot Ken Bob’s website http://runningbarefoot.org/
Barefoot Ted’s website http://barefootted.com/
Barefoot Rick Roeber’s website http://barefootrunner.org/ (Is it just me, or is there a pattern here?)
…El gringo sin los zapatos … Barefoot running blog
Barefoot vs. the Shoe blog, which hasn’t been updated in a while, but the truly obsessive might find interesting
And if anyone else wants to read it in Portuguese, there’s Correndo Descalço.

Credits
Photo of runners in the 1984 Olympics from the site, Barefoot Concepts.

Painted foot. Photo by Tom Schierlitz; makeup by John Maurad and Jenai Chin.
From You Walk Wrong, by Adam Sternbergh, the New York Magazine.

References

Abboud, R. J. 2002. Mini-Symposium: The Elective Foot: (i) Relevant foot biomechanics. Current Orthopaedics 16(3): 165-179. doi:10.1006/cuor.2002.0268 (abstract)

Bramble, Dennis M., and Daniel E. Lieberman. 2004. Endurance running and the evolution of Homo. Nature 432 (18): 345-352.

Burge, Caroline. 2001. Comment on Barefoot Running. Sportscience 5(3), sportsci.org/jour/0103/cb.htm

Clinghan, R., G. P. Arnold, T. S. Drew, and L. A. Cochrane. 2008. Do you get value for money when you buy an expensive pair of running shoes? British Journal of Sports Medicine 42(3): 189-193. doi: 10.1136/bjsm.2007.038844

De Wit, Brigit, Dirk De Clercq, Peter Aerts. 2000. Biomechanical analysis of the stance phase during barefoot and shod running. Journal of Biomechanics 33: 269-278

Divert, C., G. Mornieux, H. Baur, F. Mayer, and A. Belli. 2005. Mechanical Comparison of Barefoot and Shod Running. International Journal of Sports Medicine 26(7): 593-598.

Divert C., G. Mornieux, P. Freychat, L. Baly, F. Mayer, and A. Belli. 2008. Barefoot-shod running differences: shoe or mass effect? International Journal of Sports Medicine 29(6): 512-518.

Downey, Greg. 2007. Producing Pain: Techniques and Technologies in No-Holds-Barred Fighting. Social Studies of Science 37(2):201-226.

_____. 2009. ‘Interculturality, body & movement: On studying someone else’s skill.’ Keynote lecture. Conference: Le Corps em Mouvement 2, Francophone Association for Research on Physical and Sportive Activities, Université Montpellier 2 and Santésih Laboratory (Health, Education and Disability Situations), 4 June.

Driscoll, Dennis G. 2004 (2003). Barefoot Running: A Natural Step for the Endurance Athlete. Track Coach 168: 5373-5377. Available in several forms online, such as in manuscript form here.

Funakoshi, Kimitake. 2005. Secular changes in the angle of divergence of the first two metatarsals in the Japanese. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 75(3): 341-345.

Morton, Dudley J. 1964. The Human Foot: Its Evolution, Physiology, and Functional Disorders. New York and London: Hafner Publishing.

Richards, Craig E., Parker J. Magin, and Robin Callister. 2009. Is your prescription of distance running shoes evidence based? British Journal of Sports Medicine 43(3): 159-162. doi:10.1136/bjsm.2008.046680

Richardson, Michael L., Sigvard T. Hansen, and Ray F. Kilcoyne. 2000. Radiographic Evaluation of Hallux Valgus. From the University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Radiology website. Accessible at http://www.rad.washington.edu/anatomy/halluxvalgus.html (accessed on: 27 June 2006).

Robbins, Steven E., and Gerard J. Gouw. 1990. Athletic footwear and chronic overloading. Sports Medicine 9(2): 76-85.
_____. 1991. Athletic footwear: unsafe due to perceptual illusions. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 23(2): 217-224

Robbins, Steven E., and Adel M. Hanna. 1987. Running-related injury prevention through barefoot adaptations. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 19(2): 148-156.

Robbins S, and E. Waked. 1997. Hazard of deceptive advertising of athletic footwear. British Journal of Sports Medicine 31: 299-303. doi:10.1136/bjsm.31.4.299. (Abstract and full text.)

Ruff, Christopher, Brigitte Holt, and Erik Trinkaus. 2006. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolff?: ‘‘Wolff’s Law’’ and Bone Functional Adaptation. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 129: 484-494. doi 10.1002/ajpa.20371

Shulman, Samuel B. 1949. Survey in China and India of Feet That Have Never Worn Shoes. The Journal of the National Association of Chiropodists 49: 26-30.

Sim-Fook, Lam, and A. R. Hodgson. 1958. A Comparison of Foot Forms among the Non-Shoe and Shoe-Wearing Chinese Population. Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery 40: 1058-1062.

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Trinkaus, Erik, and Hong Shang. 2008. Anatomical evidence for the antiquity of human footwear: Tianyuan and Sunghir. Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (7): 1928-1933. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2007.12.002

West-Eberhard, Mary Jane. 2005. Developmental plasticity and the origin of species differences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102 (suppl. 1): 6543-6549. www.pnas.org cgi doi 10.1073 pnas.0501844102

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

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

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

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

How They Work

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

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

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

How They Are Being Used

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

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

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

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

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

Arguments FOR Use with the General Population

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argument AGAINST Use with the General Population

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Bibliography

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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)

Jennie Finch can strike you out.

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

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

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

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

Do all women throw like girls?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning to throw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The brain assembling the motion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Degrees of freedom as a problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why do they throw differently?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References cited:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Charles Whitehead

I especially like his piece with Prof. Robert Turner, downloadable here, on the effects of collective representations on the brain. In particular, the Turner and Whitehead article argues that the idea that certain areas of the brain are networked into a ‘social brain’ — implying that the rest of the brain is ‘not social’ — is hard to support. I’ll admit that I don’t necessarily use the same language or conceive of how the brain works in the ways described by Turner and Whitehead, but it is well worth the read to check it out, if for no other reason that it provides a corrective to some emerging ways of theorizing brain enculturation.

Turner and Whitehead take the multiple senses of the word, ‘representation,’ especially the conflicting use by anthropologists and social scientists, on the one hand, and brain sciences, as a point of departure. Normally, I just find the overlap annoying and have argued that it is one reason that anthropologists don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to neurosciences (for example, in Beyond Bourdieu’s ‘body’ — giving too much credit?). But Turner and Whitehead have something more constructive to say about the unstable term (from their conclusion):

We have tried to emphasize the contingent nature of much of our experience as social actors — which must qualify the way that we perceive ourselves, each other and the world — as we refer to a collectively defined system of concepts, rules, beliefs and even physical structures in order to givemeaning to our actions and find meaning in each others’ actions. Durkheim characterized this system by the term ‘collective representations’. In neuropsychology the term ‘representation’ has become commonplace for the action of the brain in forming material counterparts for mental processes, and so it is attractive to consider the relationship between these two types of representation: the collective and the cortical. We think it is well demonstrated that some collective representations can have well-defined cortical representations. (Turner and Whitehead 2008:54-55)

One section I did strongly agree with discusses the evidence for the idea that the same skills can be achieved through different areas of the brain, depending upon how a person learns a task (see page 52).

Dr. Whitehead’s own research is on play, social display, Some of the pages aren’t yet fully functioning, but it looks like he’s going to take on some topics that I fear to broach, including religion and ‘anomalous experience’ from a neurosciences, anthropological, and evolutionary perspective. From his bio:

Charles Whitehead was creative director of an advertising agency for twenty years before gaining his PhD in social anthropology at University College London. He teaches anthropology to cognitive science students at the University of Westminster, and is currently involved in brain imaging research on pretend play at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience. His research interests include self-consciousness, social display, and the evolution of the human brain. A central aim is to bridge the extraordinary conceptual gulfs dividing the various disciplines that attempt to understand human thought, behaviour, and consciousness.

References
Turner, Robert, and Charles Whitehead. 2008. How collective representations can change the structure of the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10/11): 43-57. (download pdf)

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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Bach-y-Rita, Paul, C. C. Collins, F. A. Saunders, B. White, and L. Scadden. 1969. Vision substitution by tactile image projection. Nature 221(5184):963-964.

Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds. 1992. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Boyden, Edward S., Akira Katoh, and Jennifer L. Raymond. 2004. Cerebellum-dependent learning: the role of multiple plasticity mechanisms. Annual Review Neuroscience 27: 581-609.

Broussard, D. M., and S. G. Lisberger. 1992. Vestibular inputs to brain stem neurons that participate in motor learning in the primate vestibuloocular reflex. Journal of Neurophysiology 68: 1906-1909.

Cheng, K., and R. Gallistel. 1986. Testing the geometric power of an animal’s spatial representation. In Animal Cognition, ed. H. Roitblat, T. Bever, and H. Terrace. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chiao, Joan Y. and Nalini Ambady. 2007. Cultural Neuroscience: Parsing Universality and Diversity across Levels of Analysis. In Handbook of Cultural Psychology. S. Kitayama and D. Cohen, eds. Pp. 237-254. New York: Guilford Press.

Chiao, Joan Y., Zhang Li and Tokiko Harada. 2008 (forthcoming). Cultural Neuroscience of Consciousness: From Visual Perception to Self-Awareness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15(10-11).

Chomsky, Noam. 1980. On cognitive structures and their development: A reply to Piaget. In Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. M. Piattelli-Palmarini, ed. Pp. 35-54. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
_____. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clement, G., T. Pozzo and A. Berthoz. (1988). Contribution of eye positioning to control of the upside-down standing posture. Experimental Brain Research 73: 569-576.

Clement, G., and D. Rezette. 1985. Motor behavior underlying the control of an upside-down vertical posture. Experimental Brain Research 59: 478-484.

Danilov, Y. P., M. E. Tyler, K. L. Skinner, R. A. Hogle and P. Bach-y-Rita. 2007. Efficacy of electrotactile vestibular substitution in patients with peripheral and central vestibular loss. Journal of Vestibular Research 17: 119–130.

Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown.

Doidge, Norman. 2007. The Brain That Changes Itself; Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. New York: Penguin.

Fahle, Manfred, and Tomaso Poggio, eds. 2002. Perceptual Learning. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fodor, Jerry. 1983. Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
_____. 1998. In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
_____. 2000. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gauthier, G., R. Thouvaecq, and D. Chollet. 2007. Visual and postural control of an arbitrary posture: The handstand. Journal of Sports Sciences 25(11):1271 – 1278.

Gibson, Eleanor J. 1963. Perceptual Learning. Annual Review of Psychology 14: 29-56.

Gibson, James J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
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Grasseni, Cristina. 2004. Skilled vision: An apprenticeship in breeding aesthetics. Social Anthropology 12 (1): 1-15.

Green, A. M., Y. Hirata, H. L. Galiana, and S. M. Highstein. 2004. Localizing Sites for Plasticity in the Vestibular System. In The Vestibular System. Stephen M. Highstein, Richard R. Fay, and Arthur N. Popper, eds. Pp. 423-495. New York: Springer.

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

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Tyler, Mitchel, Yuri Danilov, and Paul Bach-y-Rita. 2003. Closing an open-loop control system: vestibular substitution through the tongue. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 2:159-164.

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Val Curtis

She knew that over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors — habits — among consumers. These habits have helped companies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks, apply lotions and wipe counters almost without thinking, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues.

“There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” Dr. Curtis said. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.”

The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to — Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever — had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins — are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of canny advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands advertising that no morning is complete without a minty-fresh mouth…

“Our products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable.”

Habits

Habitual behavior is one topic that concerns brain science, psychology, economics and anthropology, each with disciplinary specific ways of trying to explain these everyday patterns. However, most of those explanations have two flaws: some variety of rationality as the way to understand habits, and some causal force (e.g., genetics, reward, subjective utility, culture) as forming the pattern. But things are not quite so simple, as “Habits May Be Good For You” shows:

Those and other studies revealed that as much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual — that is, performed almost without thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually because of subtle cues.

For example, the urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is likely a habit with a specific prompt. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories: a specific location or time of day, a certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific people. The e-mail urge, for instance, probably occurs after you’ve finished reading a document or completed a certain kind of task. The cookie grab probably occurs when you’re walking out of the cafeteria, or feeling sluggish or blue…

“Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods,” said Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”

The researchers at P.& G. realized that these types of findings had enormous implications for selling Febreze. Because bad smells occurred too infrequently for a Febreze habit to form, marketers started looking for more regular cues on which they could capitalize.

The perfect cue, they eventually realized, was the act of cleaning a room, something studies showed their target audience did almost daily. P.& G. produced commercials showing women spraying Febreze on a perfectly made bed and spritzing freshly laundered clothing. The product’s imagery was revamped to incorporate open windows and gusts of fresh wind — an airing that is part of the physical and emotional cleaning ritual.

“We learned from consumer interviews that there was an opportunity to cue the clean smell of Febreze to a clean room,” Dr. Berning said. “We positioned it as the finishing touch to a mundane chore. It’s the icing that shows you did a good job.”

In a sense, a product originally intended for use on piles of smelly, dirty clothes was eclipsed by its exact opposite — a product used when women confronted a clean and tidy living room. And the more women sprayed, the more automatic the behavior became.

Today, Febreze is one of P.& G.’s greatest successes. Customers habitually spray tidied living rooms, clean kitchens, loads of fresh laundry and, according to one of the most recent commercials, spotless minivans. In the most recent fiscal year, consumers in North America alone spent $650 million buying Febreze, according to the company.

Here we have cues, meaning (doing a good job), specific contexts, business and more, all wrapped up in one. Proctor & Gamble have a pragmatic knowledge of what works and what does not. While still not an explanation for habitual behavior, it does prove useful in applied anthropology.

The Anthropologist at Work

Val Curtis saw potential for this sort of approach, for trying to generate habits that would lead to public health outcomes rather than for-profit behavior change. The situation she confronted was not one of lack of resources or lack of cultural knowledge—providing more soap or educating them about germs were not the best solutions. Rather, it was taking advantage of what was already there.

For Dr. Curtis and the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap, such tactics offered enormous promise in a country like Ghana.

That nation offered a conundrum: Almost half of its people were accustomed to washing their hands with water after using the restroom or before eating. And local markets were filled with cheap, colorful soap bars. But only about 4 percent of Ghanaians used soap as part of their post-restroom hand-washing regime, studies showed.

“We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn’t change behaviors,” Dr. Curtis said. So she and her colleagues asked Unilever for advice in designing survey techniques that ultimately studied hundreds of mothers and their children.

They discovered that previous health campaigns had failed because mothers often didn’t see symptoms like diarrhea as abnormal, but instead viewed them as a normal aspect of childhood.

However, the studies also revealed an interesting paradox: Ghanaians used soap when they felt that their hands were dirty — after cooking with grease, for example, or after traveling into the city. This hand-washing habit, studies showed, was prompted by feelings of disgust. And surveys also showed that parents felt deep concerns about exposing their children to anything disgusting.

So the trick, Dr. Curtis and her colleagues realized, was to create a habit wherein people felt a sense of disgust that was cued by the toilet. That queasiness, in turn, could become a cue for soap.

A sense of bathroom disgust may seem natural, but in many places toilets are a symbol of cleanliness because they replaced pit latrines. So Dr. Curtis’s group had to create commercials that taught viewers to feel a habitual sense of unseemliness surrounding toilet use.

Their solution was ads showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched.

The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn’t really sell soap use. Rather, they sold disgust. Soap was almost an afterthought — in one 55-second television commercial, actual soapy hand washing was shown only for 4 seconds. But the message was clear: The toilet cues worries of contamination, and that disgust, in turn, cues soap.

“This was radically different from most public health campaigns,” said Beth Scott, an infectious-disease specialist who worked with Dr. Curtis on the Ghana campaign. “There was no mention of sickness. It just mentions the yuck factor. We learned how to do that from the marketing companies.”

The ads had their intended effect. By last year, Ghanaians surveyed by members of Dr. Curtis’s team reported a 13 percent increase in the use of soap after the toilet. Another measure showed even greater impact: reported soap use before eating went up 41 percent.

In other words, changing a proximate behavior was the key to getting a larger outcome. The process mattered. Not changing the genetics, psychology, economics, or culture. The one-cause approach did not prove useful in trying to design an effective campaign. Instead, Val Curtis, as she argues in a recent article, focuses on behaviors and emotions in context and how those get connected into belief systems—biological anthropology and cultural anthropology need to work together.

Larger Application

Other researchers and public health officials are already getting on the bandwagon, as Charles Duhigg reports in the conclusion to his article:

Today, public health campaigns elsewhere for condom use and to fight drug abuse and obesity are being revamped to employ habit-formation characteristics, according to people involved in those efforts. One of the largest American antismoking campaigns, in fact, is explicitly focused on habits, with commercials and Web sites intended to teach smokers how to identify what cues them to reach for a cigarette.

“For a long time, the public health community was distrustful of industry, because many felt these companies were trying to sell products that made people’s lives less healthy, by encouraging them to smoke, or to eat unhealthy foods, or by selling expensive products people didn’t really need,” Dr. Curtis said. “But those tactics also allow us to save lives. If we want to really help the world, we need every tool we can get.”

Here at Neuroanthropology, Greg has addressed how understanding behavior, particularly skilled, habitual actions, can lead to improvements in physical education and in preventing falls in elderly people.

I have not spoken much here about how this sort of approach applies to addiction (it does!), but certainly compulsive substance abuse represents a cycle of behaviors and experiences that proves very difficult to break (especially when reinforced by inequality). However, I did lay out some larger patterns in globalization in Cellphones Save the World, and habits represent one major proximate (or everyday) aspect of those people-driven processes.

And for those of you wondering about the ethics of such a move, there is an interesting debate among readers over at the Economist’s View about the Duhigg article. Greg, in providing his own take on the article, speaks of his “ethical vertigo” in the switches back and forth between marketing “new needs” and public health campaigns. My off-the-cuff take? These techniques are already being used against us. Why don’t we put them to use in some more positive ways?

There are some major public health problems out there, and changing laws and raising awareness and all the other rationally-derived approaches have not had as much impact as we might hope. The habit approach might prove more effective.

As the BBC report describes, driving a cab in London is difficult and demands a well-developed knowledge of urban geography:

In order to drive a traditional black cab in London drivers have to gain “the knowledge” – an intimate acquaintance with the myriad of streets in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.

It can take around three years of hard training, and three-quarters of those who embark on the course drop out, according to Malcolm Linskey, manager of London taxi school Knowledge Point. “There are 400 prescribed runs which you can be examined on but in reality, you can be asked to join any two points,” he told BBC News Online.

As the BBC story explains, this on-the-job geographic education has distinctive, observable effects on the way that the cabbies’ brains seem to handle geographic information. In particular, the extensive training seems to affect the actual size and shape of the hippocampus.

The tests found the only area of the taxi drivers’ brains that was different from the 50 other “control” subjects was the left and right hippocampus.

Dr Maguire said: “One particular region of the hippocampus, the posterior or back, was bigger in the taxi drivers. The front of the hippocampus was smaller in the taxi drivers compared to the controls. This is very interesting because we now see there can be structural changes in healthy human brains.” [Again, I've taken out some of the paragraph returns.]

Prof. Maguire’s earlier research has covered a range of related topics, including studies of the navigational abilities of cabbies with hippocampal lesions (turns out that they lose track of side streets but not primary arteries); whether bus drivers’ brains develop in similar ways (short answer: no); and whether the hippocampus is helping navigation by remembering geography or plotting spatial relations (short answer: seems like it’s mapping). (Note: the lead author on the last article is Dr. Dharshan Kumaran, who according to the University College London website is a former clinical research fellow continuing his clinical training at King’s College Hospital, London.)

This research on London cabbies has a number of interesting implications for neuroanthropology:
1) Other groups of people with extensive working geographical knowledge likely have similar brain development (although London cabbies may have a particular well-developed geographical sense — I don’t know). That is, foraging peoples, migrating herders, Aboriginal groups who have elaborate geographical systems of social memory and mythology might have brains that allocate additional resources to spatial memory. The shift in the hippocampus may be a pervasive developmental trait in cultures, professions, or other roles that demand this kind of knowledge.

However, one thing that I really like about Prof. Maguire’s research is that she has also looked at how the cabbies remember “the knowledge” of London geography. That is, her papers suggest that the cabbies are actually remembering geographic places rather than plotting spatial relations among them when they navigate. We might find that other groups with extensive geographical memory solve this problem in a different fashion. The evidence from ethnographic work (such as in the collection, Senses of Place, by Steven Feld and Keith Basso) is that there are significant differences in modes of remembering of places. For example, in Feld’s extensive research on the Kaluli, song seems to be crucial to remembering paths, traveled or imagined, between landmarks in the Papuan rainforest; in Basso’s work on Western Apache storytelling, places seem more tightly tied to particular stories. These performative differences in remembering might be linked to distinct neurological strategies for recalling geography.

2) Spatial knowledge is frequently treated as a form of ‘intelligence,’ with some theorists arguing it is largely fixed. The data from Prof. Maguire’s research would certainly cast substantial doubts on this conclusion, perhaps even on some sex differences in brain structure. Again, it’s not clear; men’s and women’s brains might respond differently to the same long-term stimuli when it comes to processing spatial or geographic information (again, they might even store the information differently), or some differences may be the result of long-term patterns of training and use.

I’d be deeply suspicious of naturalizing any gender differences in geography without substantial comparative data. I know that my wife, for example, has uncanny spatial and geographic sense, in part because her knowledge of the New South Wales countryside is so damn extensive, and also because of her background in outdoor education, where orienteering and long-distance hiking are essential. How she recalls space and directions might be very different than they way that I do.

In Salvador, I was always struck by the way that vertical displacement affected people’s sense of distance and proximity. Because the city is shot through with very steep hills, many of which are very hard to traverse (or even dangerous), low-lying areas and ridge-top regions are ‘separated’ in many people’s sense of geography. Only by learning to navigate the bus routes in low-lying areas was I able to begin traveling about the city quickly, but I sense that in doing so, I had to learn to navigate social spaces that many upper-class Baianos (the residents) didn’t really frequent at all. In other words, geography was organized by routes of travel, and it was definitely a learnable, flexible skill, differentiated more by experience and social boundaries than by innate ability.