Author: dlende

Headline: Maternal Instinct Is Wired Into The Brain

Sometimes it’s great to see other people make all those arguments that come to mind when brain imaging research gets turned into instincts and hard wiring.  Tara Parker-Pope runs a blog On Health through The New York Times, and while I have liked some of her previous posts (that’s where I found the autism YouTube video), today she really misses the mark.  And the people commenting really let her know it!

 So here’s the quick summary.  TPP reports on imaging research with 13 mothers and their 16-month-old infants (well, toddlers, wouldn’t they be by then?).  They were then shown videos of their own babies and other babies while images were taken of their brains.  “When a woman saw images of her own child smiling or upset, her brain patterns were markedly different than when she watched the other children. There was a particularly pronounced change in brain activity when a mother was shown images of her child in distress.”

TPP then provides a winner quote from the editor of Biological Psychiatry, which published the piece last month: “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior”

First comment, from PlainJane: “This does seem to be proving the bleeding obvious… [But] what happens then to mothers who are shown NOT to have these “natural” responses in their brains to their infants? Will they be locked up as freaks or have their kids taken from them? I can just imagine.  Or will neglectful mothers be able to say “oh its biological, I can’t help not bonding with my child”?  I applaud further research into all aspects of the human brain but you and other non-scientist commentators are vital in directing HOW this is viewed. It would be nice for your blog to put it in some more context.’

Katie: “By 16 months mothers and children must be bonded, and of course the mothers would react to seeing their child in distress – for more than a year they have been reacting to their child to meet its needs… And what about moms who adopt? or use surragates?”

Mark: “I would never have suspected that mothers have a special attachment to their own children. What will they find out next?”

Marcus: “The phrasing is misleading and suggests a common but fundamental misrepresentation of what this type of fMRI research shows — or maybe a misunderstanding that confuses a general audience. “Wired,” “hard-wired,” and “instinct” suggests genetically programmed in, like a reflex. A brain pattern that shows up on fMRI studies, however, can reflect brain “programming” that has been acquired through experience, to use the computer metaphor.”

LJB: “I can’t help but feel like this research is going to be used as the crux of some defense lawyer’s argument as to why his client abandoned her child. While I’m sympathetic to post-partum issues (it took me longer than expected to bond with my son after birth) I was still fiercely protective of him and responded to him, although I was terrified of not doing it right when I went to him. I think the mother-infant bond is more complex and this is just one of the many layers of the proverbial onion.”

JiminBoulder: “Will you please stop turning us into machines?”

Jeanne, mother of five: “The absolute hilarity of the line “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior,” made my day!”

Time Globalized

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchStefan Klein has an editorial, Time Out of Mind, in today’s New York Times, where he writes “the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions.”

 He elaborates on this argument as follows:

Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time… To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. Neuroscientists have observed this phenomenon using computer-assisted functional magnetic resonance imaging tomography. When subjects are asked to indicate the time it takes to view a series of pictures, heightened activity is measured in the centers that control muscular movement, primarily the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and the supplementary motor area. That explains why inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any Tai Chi master knows.Time seems to expand when our senses are aroused. Peter Tse, a neuropsychologist at Dartmouth, demonstrated this in an experiment in which subjects were shown a sequence of flashing dots on a computer screen. The dots were timed to occur once a second, with five black dots in a row followed by one moving, colored one. Because the colored dot appeared so infrequently, it grabbed subjects’ attention and they perceived it as lasting twice as long as the others did. 

Klein then links this argument to stress: “Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash… Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.”

 His conclusion? “The remedy is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. Time is not money but ‘the element in which we exist,’ as Joyce Carol Oates put it more than two decades ago (in a relatively leisurely era). ‘We are either borne along by it or drowned in it’.”

 By coincidence, Kevin Birth, professor of anthropology at Queens College-CUNY, wrote us about our blog recently, highlighting his own work on time, anthropology and biology.  Birth has a recent article, “Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization (full pdf).”  Given that we live on a “rotating globe where each locale has its own cycles of day and night,” our present globalized economic system produces some severe contradictions that people struggle with in everyday life: “temporal conflicts between locations on the globe, desynchronization of biological cycles, and lack of correspondence between those cycles and social life.”

Continue reading “Time Globalized”

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 

Continue reading “A Round Up”

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.

Free Lunch and Iraq

Two very different articles highlight just how little cost-benefit analysis matters sometimes, whether at the highest policy levels or in the most mundane of circumstances.  Humans evolved in a world of threats and status, and oftentimes that runs counter to any sort of logic.  And so we face many opportunities lost and much damage done. 

Bob Herbert writes today about “The $2 Trillion Dollar Nightmare,” the on-going estimate of the total cost of the Iraq war.  He notes the lack of public discussion of the “consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.”  Then he discusses the testimony of a Nobel-prizing winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, and the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert Hormats: “Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. ‘For a fraction of the cost of this war,’ said Mr. Stiglitz, ‘we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more’.” 

Carol Pogash wrote recently about “Free Lunch Isn’t Cool, So Some Students Go Hungry.”  Many students who qualify for federally-subsidized lunches go without:  “Lunchtime ‘is the best time to impress your peers,’ said Lewis Geist, a senior at Balboa and its student body president. Being seen with a subsidized meal, he said, lowers your status’.” 

Pogash writes later, “Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the public schools in Berkeley, Calif., said that attention to school cafeterias had traditionally focused on nutrition, but that the separation of students who pay and those who receive free meals was an important ‘social justice issue’.”

Beyond threats and status, cultural distinctions matter in these sorts of decisions.  The war on terror was framed, from the very first moment, as a war of civilization against barbarians—our very way of life seems to be under threat.  And students know what eating a subsidized meal signifies, that all that effort in having “spiky hair and sunglasses” goes to waste in that moment of being seen on the wrong side of the American Dream. 

In the end the costs do matter, particularly in opportunities lost, as our own biological and cultural heritages conspire together.  That’s more than the market, more than being predictably irrational, it’s the tragic acting out of our own selves at the smallest and largest of scales.  But they are dramas we ourselves write, and so can change. 

But it won’t be easy.  Write what you know best, one writer’s rule goes.  In everyday life it’s what we do all the time.  Breaking free from that, from lamenting what might have been to seizing what could be, will take courage and vision and work.

Decision Making and Emotion

Economists and policy makers are coming to the realization that rationality, in its multiple forms, doesn’t always explain why people make the decisions that they do.  By rationality, I mean both the assumption of “economic man” (a utilitarian cost/benefit analyzer) and the emphasis on education and knowledge as the privileged means of shaping behavior.   

Let’s take three recent headlines: “Why Sadness Increases Spending,” “Craving the High That Risky Trading Can Bring” and “Teenage Risks, and How to Avoid Them.”  All point to the role of emotion in decision making (any surprise here?). 

The first article states, “A research team [of Cynthia Cryder, Jennifer Lerner, and colleagues] finds that people feeling sad and self-focused spend more money to acquire the same commodities than those in a neutral emotional state.” 

The second provides an Aristotelian summary: “The findings, while preliminary, suggest — perhaps unsurprisingly — that traders who let their emotions get the best of them tend to fare poorly in the markets. But traders who rely on logic alone don’t do that well either. The most successful ones use their emotions to their advantage without letting the feelings overwhelm them.” 

The third tells us, “Scientific studies have shown that adolescents are very well aware of their vulnerability and that they actually overestimate their risk of suffering negative effects from activities like drinking and unprotected sex…  ‘It now becomes clearer why traditional intervention programs fail to help many teenagers,’ Dr. Valerie Reyna and Dr. Frank Farley wrote. ‘Although the programs stress the importance of accurate risk perception, young people already feel vulnerable and overestimate their risks.’  In Dr. Reyna’s view, inundating teenagers with factual risk information could backfire, leading them to realize that behaviors like unprotected sex are less risky than they thought. Using an analytical approach of weighing risks versus benefits is ‘a slippery slope that all too often results in teens’ thinking that the benefits outweigh the risks,’ she said.” 

This type of research provides small steps forward vis-à-vis traditional Western assumptions about decision making and rationality.  But my question is, Why don’t they go further?  Why do they simply seem to affirm our common sense view of the world? 

Continue reading “Decision Making and Emotion”