Month: April 2008

Ethnography and the Everyday: Knapp’s Appetites

In my medical anthropology class we are now reading Caroline Knapp’s Appetites, a memoir of her struggles with anorexia and a meditation on culture, gender, and being a woman. This book is flip side to Kolata’s Rethinking Thin, linking eating and weight to cultural meanings, social relationships, the media, and more. In the end, I hope that my students will realize that both biology and culture matter, and that one of the best ways to link those two is through a focus on experience and behavior. In turn, experience and behavior can be grasped as being the manifestation, concretization and direction of brain and body in context.

On Thursdays the students take charge of half the class, and yesterday was a great discussion. The group in charge began with Knapp’s discussion of the front cover of a Shape magazine featuring Elle Macpherson, perfectly recovered after giving birth just some months before. Then they put all of us to work on creating the covers for other magazines—Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health. We’re on deadline and have to sell, sell, sell

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Doidge on The Brain That Changes Itself

Dr. Norman Doidge has a short column on his own book, The Brain That Changes Itself, over at Science Blog. His book is extremely good, but it’s funny, when you read the column, it sounds like a science ‘travel log,’ as if he went on a long brain science roadtrip. It seems to be a leitmotif in a lot of recent popular science book; traveling around, meeting scientists, having a bit of a chat, getting a bit of personal back story as well as a chance to talk about their research. Or am I the only one who feels this way?

One of the commenters on the Science Blog says something about a book of ‘anecdotal evidence,’ which I think is pretty ignorant. Anyone who regularly reads neuropathology knows that ‘anecdotal evidence’ of human brain injury is not just typical, it’s essential. Singular cases can have an enormous impact on our knowledge of how the brain works by causing such distinctive disruptions of function. Where would we be in brain sciences with Phineas Gage, the folks Oliver Sachs writes about, and this unlucky brotherhood?

Check out Doidge’s column — and his book gets a strong recommendation as well.

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

I just found this collection of on-line videos that come out of the annual conference put on by TED (originally standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design). It’s quite a collection of over 200 talks by leading researchers, entrepreneurs, and the like. The talks can be accessed by theme, for example, there is a How The Mind Works theme and a Rethinking Poverty theme.

They are into “spreading ideas” but also pause to ask themselves, Is Ted Elitist? (Their answer: yes and no. Hey, it does cost $6000 to become a member, but the videos are free.)

Here’s a video from Vilayanur Ramachandran, the neurologist and writer.

Brain doping poll results in

According to Nature, 20% of scientists in an informal survey admitted to using ‘cognitive enhancing’ drugs: Poll results: look who’s doping. Ironically, the original survey was triggered by an April Fool’s prank played on the scientific community. My initial thought was, Do they count caffeine? Of course, they didn’t. If they did, numbers would obviously be different.

We asked specifically about three drugs: methylphenidate (Ritalin), a stimulant normally used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder but well-known on college campuses as a ‘study aid’; modafinil (Provigil), prescribed to treat sleep disorders but also used off-label to combat general fatigue or overcome jet lag; and beta blockers, drugs prescribed for cardiac arrhythmia that also have an anti-anxiety effect.

Check out the Nature site for a more complete discussion, but the conclusion is worth repeating:

The most popular of the drugs used by respondents to Nature’s poll seem to have fairly mild neuroenhancing effects, says Chatterjee, who calls the massive media interest in these drugs “neurogossip”. Nevertheless, the numbers suggest a significant amount of drug-taking among academics. As Eisen’s April Fool’s prank spread from blog to blog, it was hard to tell who was in on the joke and who was taking the announcement at face value. Although tricking people was a goal, Eisen had been aiming for something so ridiculous that most would chuckle. Instead, he worries that he might have hit a nerve: “I think it did make it less funny because it is actually too real.”

The initial discussion that led to the poll was referenced by Daniel a while back in a great piece, Brain Enhancement: Beyond Either/Or, that explored this topic in greater detail. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. Daniel talks about the ‘unintended consequences’ that almost always accompany drug use. I don’t have too much to add to that except that, with what we know about neuroplasticity, this should not surprise us at all. The brain and nervous system tend to adapt to any changes in the overall environment they inhabit: the tasks they do, the condition of the environment (which is both inside and outside of the body), any other chemicals introduced into the equation.
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Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis

I’m too busy to be blogging right now; I’m putting in an application for academic promotion, and like much else in academe, that means reams of paper must be offered up to the cruel, fickle gods of bureaucracy. But this example of the reporting on brain imaging research, drawn to my attention by Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon’s, Using 15 college age boys and some reactionary reporting, we are able to blame the coming depression on boobage, couldn’t pass by without comment. Thank YOU Amanda for getting me worked up enough that I won’t need a morning cup of coffee to get through several hours working on my promotion application, if I can just get back to that. (Thanks also to Echidne of the Snakes.)

The article which inspired this train of commentary is ‘Sex and financial risk linked in brain,’ by Seth Borenstein, who probably needs some sort of award for this piece. I’ll let you decide:

A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported. The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

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Digital Ethnography

Michael Wesch has an on-going project Digital Ethnography with his students at Kansas State University. Looking at what they have done impressed me, and gave me ideas for things that I might do with my own classes and research. I like the engaged, participatory style and with issues like substance use or health care seeking, it proves so useful to show people what it is like. Students doing the work and then sharing that with a broader world, that is a good model.

Wesch has one popular video The Machine Is Us/ing Us, covering Internet 2.0 and the revolution in interconnected digitial communication. In many ways, I found his message about the Internet as quite similar to the message we are promoting here at neuroanthropology, that connections matter, that we drive change in our brains, that we need to rethink traditional concepts. So enjoy that.

His students came up with a great video A Vision of Students Today, which helps justify spending time on a blog rather than traditional papers (hey, students are more likely to actually read this) and also the need to teach in non-traditional but equally effective ways. And it’s just well done.