Month: March 2008

(insert clever French grammar title here)

Every once in a while, I drop some comment about language being ‘un-language-like’ when I’m talking about culture. It’s a tick, aggravated by my envy of linguistic anthropology, my wish that bodily practice was studied in anthropology as much (or had produced as much cool theory), and by my secret insecurity that I never took a course from Michael Silverstein when I was at the University of Chicago (what can I say? I was busy…). Most readers probably overlook my comments about language, chalking them up to PGSSD (post grad-school stress disorder) or some moral failing that they don’t want to know any more about. But I feel compelled to explain, especially since I found this great article on French speakers disagreeing on the gender of nouns (thanks to Dr. X’s Free Associations and grant-writing avoidance behaviour on my part).

Too often I think anthropologists use language ‘to think with’ when they are talking about ‘culture.’ Language is a kind of subliminal or suppressed metaphor guiding how they talk about this thing, culture. It leads to various problems, such as ‘code’ metaphors, reification of ‘the language/culture’ in things like meme theory, and the like. That is, people say some pretty daft things about ‘culture’ guided by the analogy with language.

The problem is, they’re not just committing sloppy thinking about human variation, they also don’t generally have a very grounded, empirically based view of language. That is, they assume things about language that linguistic anthropologists would dispute, especially those coming from a pragmatic approach (like Silverstein, from whom i took no courses and thus feel inadequate to be writing this).

Well, every once in a while, web surfing drops the perfect example right in your lap.

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Mind, body and Wiimote

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchI’m not usually the one blogging on video games; this tends to be Daniel’s department. After all, he’s got three boys at home, and I live with two horse-obsessed women, so it’s a bit out of my habitual orbit. I get more interaction with tractors than video game consoles. But Daniel tossed this reference my direction, and I decided to write on it for a number of reasons (thanks to Daniel).

According to a recent post on Psyorg.com, ‘The Wiimote as an interface bridging mind and body,’ a research team led by Rick Dale at the University of Memphis has been using the Wiimote from Nintendo to study how people reach as they learn new tasks. As the Psyorg story discusses, the Memphis team taught people a symbol matching task and used the Wiimote to judge the quality of their movements when doing the task.

As people learned, their bodies reflected the confidence of that learning. Participants moved the Wiimote more quickly, more steadily, and also pressed on it more firmly as they became familiar with the symbols. While everyone knows that you get better at moving in tasks that require intricate movement (such as learning to use chopsticks), these results suggest that your body movements are related to learning other information as well.

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Links to Society for Psychological Anthropology

Although their focus is not specifically on the brain sciences, both Daniel and I are members of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, one of the sections of the American Anthropological Association. In order to become a member, individuals have to join the AAA, which can get to be a substantial investment. But, for no cost, you can check out the website of the Soc for Psych Anth. There’s a number of resources worth checking out, including syllabi generously contributed by members for their courses on psychological anthropology and a list of graduate programs that are particularly strong in psychological anthropology.

The Society for Psychological Anthropology also has a list-serv that doesn’t put too much spam in my inbox (I may regret posting this for that reason). To join the list-serv, go to the sign-up page.

A Round Up

Addiction

Benedict Carey, When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
Addresses the links between heavy drinking and social context, quite a nice piece summarizing some key anthropological and social psychological research  

Jeneen Interlandi, What Addicts Need
The polar opposite of the Carey piece, arguing for a psychobiological approach to understanding addiction.

First Peek into Deepest Recesses of Human Brain
Advances in neuroimaging of the ventral tegmental area. 

Drinking Makes Heart Grow More Sorrowful, Study Finds
Drinking helps lock memories in place, at least in this rat research 

Radley Balko, Better Dead Than High
Death as a social deterrent, based on restricting access of naloxene for overdoses 

Jennifer Vineyard, ‘Harry Potter’ Is Addictive, Study Concludes
Withdrawal and craving after the series ends… 

Mental Health

Paige Parvin, Why Is This Man Smiling
The Dalai Lama and Emory scientists team up to examine happiness 

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was right… about adults

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchNature recently carried a short piece, Perception coloured by language (written by Kerri Smith), on several research papers, including one by Paul Kay at the University of California, Berkeley (well, actually, Kay is also the co-author on another of the three papers, too). The original article, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), is not openly accessible, but the abstract is here (Franklin et al. abstract). We’ve had a number of related posts on Neuroanthropology, including Daniel’s Language and Color, and my piece that the title of this one references, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?

The subject of language learning’s effect on the brain is an especially important one for a number of reasons to us at Neuroanthropology (other than our tendency to flog the occasional dead horse); not only is language a frequent surrogate for more amorphous concepts like ‘culture,’ but it is also one of the capacities that, due to the work of Chomsky, is frequently believed to have innate foundations in the brain. Chomsky’s discussion of a language function innate in all human brains provides one of the foundational texts for much broader, sweeping assertions about ‘massive modularity’ in the brain covering a wide variety of functions.

Work by Kay’s team focused on the brain hemisphere used to classify colours. They tested subjects by showing them coloured targets randomly in their visual fields, and then seeing how long subjects could shift attention to the targets. As Smith writes:

It is well known that in adults, perception of colour is processed predominantly by the left hemisphere, which is also where most people process language. Studies have shown that the language one speaks can have an impact on the colour one sees.

Continue reading “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was right… about adults”

Neuroanthropology Session at the AAA Conference

Greg and I are organizing a session for the annual American Anthropological Association meeting, held this year in San Francisco from November 19 to November 23rd.  The session is called, “The Encultured Brain: Neuroanthropology and Interdisciplinary Engagement.” 

We still have one or two spots that might be open for people interested in presenting on neuroanthropology at the AAAs.  So please contact either me (dlende@nd.edu) or Greg (greg.downey@scmp.mq.edu.au) as soon as possible, as we need complete abstracts before March 10th.  Please let us know what you’d like to present on! 

Here’s our session abstract: 

As a collaborative endeavor, neuroanthropology aims to better integrate anthropology, social theory, and the brain sciences.  In this panel, we explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behavior. Neuroanthropology can help to revitalize psychological anthropology, promote links between biological and cultural anthropology, and strengthen work in medical and linguistic anthropology.  However, recent anthropology has not engaged neuroscience to produce the sort of synthesis that began when Franz Boas built cultural anthropology from psychophysics. 

Neuroscience has increasingly produced basic research and theoretical models that are surprisingly amenable to anthropology.  Rather than “neuro-reductionist” or determinist approaches, research has increasingly emphasized the role of environment, body, experience, evolution, and behavior in shaping, even driving organic brain development and function.  At the same time, the complexity of the brain makes a mockery of attempts to pry apart “nature” from “nurture,” or to apportion credit for specific traits.   Research on gene expression, endocrine variability, mirror neurons, and neural plasticity all beg for comparative data from across the range of human variation — biological and cultural. 

Neuroscientists and other social scientists are already actively working on these sorts of integrated models; books like Wexler’s Brain and Culture and Quartz and Sejnowski’s Liars, Lovers and Heroes actively incorporate anthropological materials.  In the social sciences, books like Turner’s Brains/Practices/Relativism aim to bring neuroscience into social theory, often with critical intent. 

However, these works often leave out the best of anthropology.  Although our research is being borrowed, we are being left out of the conversation precisely at a time when we should speak with authority.  In the present round of integration, simplistic understandings of culture dominate, and, at times, outside authors read our research through unsettling ideological lenses.  And, given the emphasis on experience, behavior, context and development, the absence of ethnographic research and insight into precisely those domains that impact our neural function is startling. 

Anthropology has much to offer to and much to learn from engagement with neuroscience.  An apt model is just how important genetics has become in anthropology, cutting across the entire discipline.  A similar revolution is waiting with neurobiology, if we can draw on our strengths and build neuroanthropology on inclusion, collaboration and engagement, both within and outside anthropology.  To this end, this session explores areas of anthropological research related to the brain where heredity, environment, culture and biology are in complex relations, with human variation emerging from their nexus rather than being determined by a single variable.  Participants explore addiction, motor skill, XXXX, XXXX — brain-related phenomena that can only be explained by dynamic models including both “bottom-up” (biological, neural, and psychological levels) and “top-down” (cultural, social, and ideological) factors.  Participants highlight that no single model of the biological-cultural interface holds for all cases.  The papers in this panel also suggest ways in which anthropologists might intervene in public discussions of crucial human characteristics and make our concerns more persuasive for other academic disciplines exploring the complexity of the human brain.