Month: March 2008

Parents’ stress, children’s health

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchTo all the stressed-out parents out there, here, let me just hand you a bit more to worry about. A research team led by Dr. Mary T. Caserta at the University of Rochester (more on her research here) have an article in press at Brain, Behavior, and Immunity entitled, ‘The associations between psychosocial stress and the frequency of illness, and innate and adaptive immune function in children’ (abstract here, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a downloadable version of the whole article). 169 school-aged children and their parents were studied through health diaries and over seven sequential visits, each separated by six months (three years total, by my quick calculation). At these visits, children were tested for human herpesvirus 6 reactivation and general measures of immune function were examined, such as ‘natural killer (NK) cell function and the percentage of CD4 and CD8 cells associated with immune control of cytomegalovirus (CMV).’

The study was to test the relation between parental stress and children’s immune systems:

Family processes have a substantial impact on children’s social and emotional well-being, but little is known about the effects of family stress on children’s physical health. To begin to identify potential links between family stress and health in children, we examined associations between specific aspects of family psychosocial stress and the frequency of illnesses in children, measures of innate and adaptive immune function, and human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) reactivation.

The researchers found that parental stress was associated with the illness rates in their children. Although HHV6 activation rates did not increase, the rate of illness in the children (according to the diaries, presumably) and the activation of the children’s immune systems were both elevated. It’s not entirely clear to me from the abstract, so I’ll have to wait for the full write-up to get a sense for the mechanisms involved. The researchers concluded, ‘There is an association between specific psychosocial stress exposure and rates of illness and immune function in normally developing children.’

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Wednesday Round Up #3

Race 

The New York Times, How Race Is Lived In America
Series of articles focused on how race relations are defined by “daily experience, in schools, in sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the workplace”

American Anthropological Association, RACE: Are We So Different?
“Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race.”

The New York African Burial Ground
“Return to the past to build the future”
Also check out the lead researcher’s report, “An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties”

Jennifer Eberhardt, Imaging Race (pdf)
American Psychologist article on brain imaging and the “social psychological responses associated with race”

Barack Obama’s Speech on Race
Full transcript here; Video, with comments across the spectrum, here
And for those people coming here, seeking more commentary on Obama’s speech, I now have a post on Obama and Race.

Embodiment & Sense Making

20/20, Blind People Who Interact with the World like Dolphins & Bats
Humans can echolocate!  Absolutely amazing.

Mind Matters, Thinking With The Body
Reading, Movement, and Embodied Cognition

CF Kurtz & DJ Snowden, The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World
Challenging three basic assumptions—order, rational choice, and intent—in decision making

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How your brain is not like a computer

At the end of my last post, or the one before that, I had a late-night ‘inspiration’ that must have sounded a bit like an outburst about how our brains are not like computers. There’s lots of good reasons for making that assertion, whether or not it’s an outburst. But one of the key issues is concern about ’embodiment’ in cognitive science and the discussion of embodied cognition. Daniel, in his comments, put a link to the posting by Chris Chatham, 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers, which is excellent. There’s also an interesting discussion of this going on at Dr. Ginger Campbell’s blog on her Brain Science Podcasts, both of which (discussion and podcasts) I strongly recommend. See the first two topics on the list you can find here on ‘Artificial Intelligence.’

For the anthropologists in our audience, however, the term ’embodied cognition’ is a bit unfortunate, not because it’s not a great term, but because an earlier intellectual movement in anthropology already snagged the adjective ’embodied’ and then didn’t push the issue far enough to actually deal with physiological and biological dimensions of being embodied. That is, in anthropology, the term ’embodiment’ has not been allowed to really stretch its wings, and has instead been more narrowly constrained to dealing with phenomenological, interactional, and theoretical issues deriving primarily from feminism, Foucauldian post-structuralism, and Bourdieu-ian sociology. All of these streams are important, but they do not yet engage with the sort of material that cognitive scientists mean when they use the term ’embodied.’ The danger is that anthropologists will see the term, ’embodied cognition,’ and it will not seem quite as disruptive to anthropology-as-usual as it should be.

Chatham’s posting makes this key issue clearer in his tenth reason that brains are not like computers: brains have bodies:

This is not as trivial as it might seem: it turns out that the brain takes surprising advantage of the fact that it has a body at its disposal. For example, despite your intuitive feeling that you could close your eyes and know the locations of objects around you, a series of experiments in the field of change blindness has shown that our visual memories are actually quite sparse. In this case, the brain is “offloading” its memory requirements to the environment in which it exists: why bother remembering the location of objects when a quick glance will suffice? A surprising set of experiments by Jeremy Wolfe has shown that even after being asked hundreds of times which simple geometrical shapes are displayed on a computer screen, human subjects continue to answer those questions by gaze rather than rote memory. A wide variety of evidence from other domains suggests that we are only beginning to understand the importance of embodiment in information processing.

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The history of mind-altering mechanisms

Katherine MacKinnon of St. Louis University just dropped me a line to point out a recent book review in The New York Times, I Feel Good, by Alexander Star. Star reviews the book, On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail (University of California Press). Amazon raters are giving it 4.5 stars at the moment, if you want to check it out through the bookseller. Normally, I’d trust Daniel to write our best stuff about ‘mind-altering’ chemicals of all sorts, but this book review just set me to thinking, so I thought I’d put my own two cents in.

Smail wants to tell the story of humanity as a series of ‘self-modifications of our mental states,’ according to the reviewer Star:

We want to alter our own moods and feelings, and the rise of man from hunter-gatherer and farmer to office worker and video-game adept is the story of the ever proliferating devices — from coffee and tobacco to religious rites and romance novels — we’ve acquired to do so. Humans, Smail writes, have invented “a dizzying array of practices that stimulate the production and circulation of our own chemical messengers,” and those devices have become more plentiful with time. We make our own history, albeit with neurotransmitters not of our choosing.

Smail is really a historian, but his venture into a kind of neuro-history shows the robustness of the emerging awareness that the brain is shaped by what humans do. Star points out that most ‘macro-history’ these days — long, sweeping accounts of human evolution and what is sometimes called something prosaic like the ‘rise and fall of civilizations’ — is not being written by historians, but rather by folks like Jared Diamond. In contrast, Smail is a medieval historian.

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I’m Not Really Running: Flow, Dissociation, and Expertise

The British long-distance runner Paula Radcliffe won last year’s New York City Marathon.  In a later interview, discussing the struggles and pains of running a marathon, Radcliffe said, “When I count to 100 three times, it’s a mile.  It helps me focus on the moment and not think about how many miles I have to go. I concentrate on breathing and striding, and I go within myself.” 

Gina Kolata used that quote in her article, I’m Not Really Running, I’m Not Really Running, which talked about dissociation strategies and peak performances: “The moral of the story? No matter how high you jump, how fast you run or swim, how powerfully you row, you can do better. But sometimes your mind gets in the way.  ‘All maximum performances are actually pseudo-maximum performances,’ Dr. [Bill] Morgan said. ‘You are always capable of doing more than you are doing’.”

Kolata recounts how this applies even to the everyday struggles of training: “Without realizing what I was doing, I dissociated a few months ago, in the middle of a long, fast bike ride. I’d become so tired that I could not hold the pace going up hills. Then I hit upon a method — I focused only on the seat of the rider in front of me and did not look at the hill or what was to come. And I concentrated on my cadence, counting pedal strokes, thinking of nothing else. It worked. Now I know why.  Dr. Morgan, who has worked with hundreds of subelite marathon runners, said every one had a dissociation strategy.”

Besides covering her own experience and having a brief mention of Tibetan monks, Kolata writes about how the brain can affect training and performance: “ ‘Imagine you are out running on a wet, windy, cold Sunday morning,’ said Dr. Timothy Noakes, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town. ‘The conscious brain says, “You know that coffee shop on the corner. That’s where you really should be”.’ And suddenly, you feel tired, it’s time to stop.  ‘There is some fatigue in muscle, I’m not suggesting muscles don’t get fatigued,’ Dr. Noakes said. ‘I’m suggesting that the brain can make the muscles work harder if it wanted to’.” 

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More on persuasive, irrelevant ‘neuroscience’

Continuing on the subject from my previous post, Mark Liberman has a nifty little post on ‘The Functional Neuroanatomy of Science Journalism’ on the blog, Language Log (tip of the hat to Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock for alerting me to this one). Liberman points out some of the same things that I argued in the previous post, but he also brings in a very careful reading of a number of recent pieces in the press that attracted quite a bit of attention while really offering very little in the way of something new, except for the Unexpected Flavor of Neuroscience to spice things up!

One of the pieces that Liberman discusses is an article on the ‘hard-wiring’ of maternal instincts that Daniel explored in an earlier post, ‘Headline: Maternal Instinct Is Wired Into The Brain.’ Liberman nominates the original article by Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times as an example of what he believes is a leading candidate for the ‘Most Pernicious Science Narrative of the Decade’:

1. Consider the hypothesis that (Stereotypical-Observation-X-About-People).
2. Brain Researcher Y used fMRI to show that (some experimental proxy for) X is (somewhat) true. Now we know!
3a. Optional bonus #1: Now we know why! It happens (somewhere) in the brain!
3b: Optional bonus #2: This shows that X is hard-wired and biological, not all soft and socially constructed.

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