Month: February 2008

Poverty & Programs

This article, A Home Remedy for Juvenile Offenders, strikes me as relevant to our earlier discussion on poverty and the brain.  While I think the emphasis on “therapy” places too much weight on psychology and the individual, nonetheless I admire the overall idea, as related here:

The basic idea is to reach and help borderline youths at a moment of crisis, and turn them away from a more serious criminal path. By treating them in the context of their families and environments rather than in isolation, officials found that recidivism was usually less than half that of residential correction programs. The city says that it hopes its program will be as successful, but that it will take many years before it can be sure. Still, at roughly $17,000 per child, such in-home therapy programs cost a fraction of the annual expense of keeping a child in secure detention, which can be $140,000 to $200,000. 

My hope is that anthropology can and will add to this sort of work.  Still, I am not sure anthropology has developed enough as an applied science where it can point to clear and specific ways to make a difference in these social and material environments (please comment if you do have some specific ideas or programs).  So the recognition of individual differences (including moments of crisis), the importance of life pathways, and the focus on social context strike me as quite a good start. 

What’s the ‘culture’ in neuroanthropology?

Some cultural anthropologists are afraid of the brain sciences; they fear that neuroscientists want to dissolve culture into the study of the brain, discounting the necessity of studying culture, social interaction, systems of meaning, symbolism, everyday life, and all the things that cultural anthropologists have argued are important for shaping human life. Emily Martin, for example, one of the most interesting anthropologists working on the way that cultural assumptions shape medicine, medical education, and the like, writes in an article on the ‘mind-body’ problem of the dangers of ‘neuro-reductionist’ thought.

Martin’s fear is that, ultimately, although some in the brain sciences explicitly claim to have an interest in cultural differences, they do not grant the social the same degree of ‘reality’ as the cellular and organic. As Martin writes, although they sometimes discuss social and cultural differences; ‘… the levels in neuron man, a figure frequently reproduced in neuroscience texts, begin with molecules, but go no farther than the central nervous system’ (2000:574). I’m sure that Martin is right for a lot of neuroscience texts; but I would argue that cultural anthropology texts, in the main, probably demonstrate the same degree of partiality.

She sees ‘the neuroreductive cognitive sciences as the most dangerous kind of vortex—one close by and one whose power has the potential to suck in disciplines like anthropology, severely weakening them in the process’ (ibid.). Martin encourages anthropologists to unite ‘in opposition to a position in which the dyke between nature and culture has been breached, and all of what anthropologists call culture has drained through the hole and dissolved in the realm of neural networks’ (ibid.: 576).

Normally, I would argue that Martin is over-reacting, worried about a possibility that is too remote. But then, every once in a while, I read something that helps me to realize that Martin’s fear, however exaggerated, are grounded in concrete experiences. Rather than a ‘dyke between nature and culture,’ I find that the real issue is the slipperiness of the notion of culture that some in the brain sciences use. That is, if we look carefully at what they are using as the ‘cultural’ in their own attempts to grapple with cross-cultural differences in the brain, cognition, and development, we find that however well meaning, given the wrong tool, one is likely to wind up with a bit of a mess. Unfortunately, although I like the majority of what they write, I fear that this is the situation with a recent piece I stumbled across by reading Encephalon’s recent posting, Briefing the Next US President on 24 Neuroscience and Psychology Issues.
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‘Giant sleep machines’ and the brain

I stumbled across this article in the Discover website, entitled How To Sleep Like a Hunter-Gatherer. Quite a bit of the piece is clearly based on a discussion with anthropologist Carol Worthman, director of the Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology at Emory University. The article basically considers some of the variation in human sleep patterns, pointing out how rare and extreme American sleeping behaviors are, especially the extreme quiet, isolation, and uninterrupted, single-shot way that we get out eight hours.

I’m struck by this for a number of reasons; Worthman points out how sleep patterns would be different for people living communally, for foraging groups living in less isolation from the environment, and for folks living in very loud cities (she draws on Cairo, where people also sleep twice during the day and often share sleeping space with other people). The implications are intriguing, as my former colleague Jim McKenna has pointed out in his discussions of co-sleeping.

But I’m also struck by the possibility that the ‘American’ pattern she describes (which is likely also restricted — for example, what about those working night shifts…), might fundamentally affect patterns of alertness, body metabolism, memory, ability to maintain attention, and a host of other factors.

Moving to the country has made me more aware of this because I sleep much less than my wife, and I tend not to be ready to go to sleep when she’s nodding off on the couch after dinner. At night, when everyone else is asleep and I’m working, doing dishes, or writing blog posts, the noise is extraordinary. Between crickets and frogs, the noise level is constantly equivalent to a party on the neighbors’ farm. It’s taken some getting used to. I haven’t yet noticed a change in my sleep patterns, but I suspect that the variation Worthman describes likely has significant affects on the human brain. It’s one of those mechanisms that I’m interested in: it’s ‘cultural’ in the sense that it’s socially-based variation, but it’s largely not conscious, non-semantic, and behavioral, something that most current theories of culture don’t handle very well. Anyway, I don’t have much intelligent to say about the piece — maybe I will after I get some sleep. (I know, that was cheap, but I do want to go to bed, and it’s all I’ve got.)

Taking Play Seriously

When I lived in Nigeria, I used to cross the city of Calabar to visit the defunct zoo, taking food for the animals—a constrictor snake, some crocodiles, a male drill monkey—still trapped in cages.  Jacob, a large juvenile chimpanzee, lived in that zoo in a cage roughly ten feet by ten feet.  As I walked onto the zoo grounds, Jacob would greet me with an exuberant pant-hoot and I would respond back (my Intro to Anthro students are endlessly amused when I demonstrate my pant-hooting skills).  Though I carried food for him, what Jacob most wanted to do was play with me. 

Jacob loved to play tag first, swinging back and forth across the front of his thickly barred cage, sticking a hand out to see if I could catch it.  We would rush back and forth together, Jacob generally favoring the role of being chased.  Then we’d settle down for some tickling.  Believe me, being tickled by a chimpanzee is, I am sure, rather what my boys feel when I get overly excited about tickling them. 

Jacob’s fingers were powerful, and his arms more so, but I made myself laugh in the chortling sound of chimpanzees.  If he got too strong, I could simply let out a sound of pain and he’d stop.  Then we’d get started again, because of course I loved to tickle him back.  I remember times, our heads together, pressed against the bars, his hand at the back of my neck, my fingers digging into his ribs.  It was such fun, yet I never could quite shake the thought in that moment that he could crush my head so easily against the bars. 
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Poverty Poisons the Brain

Paul Krugman writes today that “Poverty Is Poison,” building off an article from the Financial Times that discussed last Friday’s session, “Poverty and Brain Development” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Krugman writes: 

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life. So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

The Financial Times article, “Poverty mars formation of infant brains,” provides some more detail about the impact of poverty through stress, inadequate nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins: “Studies by several US universities have revealed the pervasive harm done to the brain, particularly between the ages of six months and three years, from low socio-economic status.  Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s centre for cognitive neuroscience, said: ‘The biggest effects are on language and memory. The finding about memory impairment – the ability to encounter a pattern and remember it – really surprised us’.” 
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Pattern #2

The current issue of Harvard Magazine has a cover article on autism.  In reading through the piece, I was struck by this one line about Asperger’s syndrome: “they shared key impairments in social interaction, reciprocal communication, and imagination (i.e., repetitive behaviors and interests).”  It many ways this description struck me as presenting a similar dichotomy to addiction, where the repetitive behaviors and interests are linked diagnostically with failed social roles, family difficulties and “denial” in communication. 

I am not saying that addiction and autism are the same, or that biologically or phenomenology they come from similar causes or problems.  But I do wonder if the rush to focus in on singular brain circuits leads us to overlook the human dimensions of imagination, sociality, and behavior.  These abilities and practices are linked in profound ways in everyday life, and thus will drive biology in profound ways. 

Sandy G, who linked to us (thanks!) through his post on The Rat Park, has several posts on autism.  In one on joint attention, he relates Tomasello’s recent work: “The authors concluded that, at least at this developmental period, children with autism seem to understand the social components of situations that call for “helping” behaviors and engage in helping behaviors, but only when such help does not require interpersonal cooperation. However, when cooperation is required to complete the task, these children are less likely to correctly engage with another partner, possibly because the unique “shared” component of cooperation. That is, cooperation requires shared goals, shared attention, and a shared plan of action, processes that seem to be affected in children with autism.” 
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