Month: March 2008

Recent Deric Bownds

Deric Bownds has some recent entries which I’ve quite enjoyed.  Our Motor Adaptation as a Process of Reoptimization covers an article on how motor adaptation is not to return to some baseline, but to “maximize performance in that environment.”  An argument closer to both an evolutionary and an embodied view. 

Influence of Language on Brain Activity provides us with an article arguing that “language-processing areas of the brain are directly involved in visual perceptual decisions.” 

Awareness and Attention: Different Brain Processes points out that “subjective visual experience is shaped by the cumulative contribution of two processes operating independently at the neural level, one reflecting visual awareness per se and the other reflecting spatial attention 

And A Primer on Executive Function in the Prefrontal Cortex covers the functional neuroanatomy behind “flexible responses to situations with alternative choices.”

Wednesday Round Up #4

Books

Dr. Ginger Campell and her Brain Science Store
Ginger provides a handy Amazon collection of the books covered in her podcasts

Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time
Building schools amid the Taliban, Americans and more…  Recently covered in the Diane Rehm show.  800+ reviews on Amazon, averaging in at the max 5 stars 

Brian Fagan, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Drought is our great historical enemy, especially in dense populations… Recently reviewed in the NY Times 

Sandra Blakeslee & Matthew Blakeslee, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better
One reviewer: “The brain and the body are not separate entities, but are intertwined, interdependent, and interfunctional. Understanding this fact is essential to understanding how and why body maps work. This book explains that lucidly.” 

Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought
Literary murder and social history—how we view the causes of ourselves

Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
Pharmaceuticals killing people, and companies marketing them more.  See an illuminating review here  

Vision 

Cognitive Daily, Fun With Point-Light Displays—And What That Says About The Visual System
Creating order out of dots… includes some good QuickTime videos

Mixing Memory, Language, Neuroscientific Evidence for the Influence of Language on Color Perception
Critique of imaging, importance of evidence, and our visual system

General 

Cordelia Fine, Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism
Critique of the at times popular view that gender differences are “hard wired”

Brandon Keim, Brain Scanner Can Tell You What You’re Looking At
Functional imaging and a good computational program can “decode” the different photographs people see, reconstructing the content.   Worth a look!

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #4”

Snakes and spiders on the brain

A little while ago, I wrote a piece, ‘Innate’ fear of snakes?, in which I took issue with a University of Virginia study that was described by a science writer (and perhaps by the researchers) as showing that humans have an ‘innate’ fear of snakes. At the time, I argued that what their research had shown was a propensity to pay attention to snake shapes, and not that this was an ‘innate’ fear, for reasons that I banged on about for a fair few words (go to the original if you’re a glutton for snake-related musings).

And now, vindication. Well, as much vindication as you can get considering that psychological research is liable to be undermined by another study in the next few months. According to a posting today on Science Daily, ‘Unlocking The Psychology Of Snake And Spider Phobias,’ researchers at the University of Queensland have tested both snake experts and those who are naive about the creatures to see if there is an innate fear.

In the study, researchers compared the responses to stimuli of participants with no particular experience with snakes and spiders, to that of snake and spider experts.
“Previous research has argued that snakes and spiders attract preferential attention (they capture attention very quickly) and that during this early processing a negative (fear) response is generated… as an implicit and indexed subconscious [action],” Dr [Helena] Purkis said.
“We showed that although everyone preferentially attends to snakes or spiders in the environment as they are potentially dangerous, only inexperienced participants display a negative response.”

Continue reading “Snakes and spiders on the brain”

Contagious stress and children redux

Sandy G at The Mouse Trap reviews my earlier post on how parents’ stress can affect their children in a posting entitled Stress contagion: from parents to the child? It’s a thoughtful response — thanks, Sandy G. And there’s lots more interesting stuff at The Mouse Trap to check out for our readers. I especially enjoyed a rambling, but incredibly engaging piece, Catch 22: Psychosis, Culture and the Mind Wars; it’s a great read with so many fruitful tangential thoughts that I may have to come back and post on it again.

Sandy G. does a nice job of summarizing the four channels I suggest might be operative in transmitting stress effects to children from their parents. I think he unfairly dismisses the ‘other communication channels’ (#3); there’s some evidence, including even cross-species effects, that there are ways we affect each other’s emotional states that are not imitation and ‘chameleon’ effects. I give the example of pheromones, but that’s not the only way that this could happen. But, fair enough, Sandy doesn’t think it’s plausible, I do. The evidence is hardly conclusive so this kind of disagreement is exactly the sort of thing we need to inspire new research (‘SandyG laughed at my theories… wahahahaha, this will show him!’).

Continue reading “Contagious stress and children redux”

Two languages, one brain and theory of mind

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchAt first, when I read this journal article in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, I thought, ‘Stop the presses; this one’s a barn burner.’ Since then, I’ve backed off my enthusiasm a bit, but I still think it’s fascinating. Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, and Elise Tem have a really intriguing piece on brain-imaging studies done on bilingual Japanese-English speakers, when the subjects worked on false belief questions that tested their ability to solve ‘theory of mind’ problems. The piece, entitled ‘Switching language switches mind: linguistic effects on developmental neural bases of “Theory of Mind”‘ (abstract available here), comes to a number of conclusions, some of them needing to be confirmed by other research, but they’re worth mulling over at Neuroanthropology.

I discussed “false belief” (FB) tests and how they indicate developmental changes in children’s ability to perceive the thoughts of others in my post, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of? Kobayashi and colleagues asked bilingual subjects to solve FB problems in either Japanese or English, and they compared both younger and older subjects, who had learned their second language later in life than the younger subjects.

Different theorists disagree about how important language is to the development of ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) ability, affecting how children solve (or fail to solve) FB problems. For this reason, different experiments have sought to distinguish whether language ability supports the development of ToM or vice versa, but, as Kobayashi and colleagues summarize, ‘the evidence is mixed on this issue’ (62). Children improve on FB tests when given language training and yet pre-verbal children seem to be able to solve some ToM problems that are not based on language. I feel that the authors’ conclusion is warranted, that the evidence seems ‘to support a conjecture that some aspects of language affect ToM throughout development and adults may process ToM more verbally than children’ (63).

Continue reading “Two languages, one brain and theory of mind”

Genetics and Obesity

In my medical anthropology class, we’ve been reading Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss and the Myths and Realities of Dieting.  Kolata argues for a biological approach to obesity, that weight is largely under genetic control and that there is no ideal diet which is going to help all people lose weight.  In other words, Kolata is taking up the “nature” side of the nature/nurture debate, with a direct critique of the idea that if overweight people could simply use their willpower and follow the age-old recommendation of eat less and exercise more, they would be ideally thin like the beautiful people we see on television—the Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies of the world. 

Kolata sums up these points in a very amusing interview on The Colbert Report.  As Fat Fu summarizes about Kolata, “you can actually learn something about the state of the science. And which don’t conclude with exhortations to diet or insinuations that fat people are lazy and ignorant. In fact she doesn’t think diets work.” 

I like Kolata’s book, which is why I assigned it in my class.  And I certainly see the weight of the evidence as supporting many of her main points: heritability and biological regulation of body weight, as well as the absurdity of an “ideal diet” that will simply work for everyone (that’s called ideology, folks).  But Kolata gives us an approach that recreates the mind/body and culture/biology dichotomies, and resorts to a genetic determinism that both obscures the genetics and doesn’t leave much room for anthropology.  For example, she uses one study, a classic one by Stunkard et al. in 1990, to tell us that “70 percent of the variation in people’s weight’s may be accounted for by inheritance,” which is greater heritability than with “mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.” 

I’ll admit, I am not the biggest fan of twin studies.  They are generally done in western populations without much variance in environment or development and with relatively homogenous populations.  In public, these researchers generally claim the higher range of heritability estimates.  And perhaps most bothersome, these studies seem to provide us with a “why” that is not really there—“genetic” becomes tantamount to cause. 

Continue reading “Genetics and Obesity”