Author: dlende

Dopamine and Addiction – Part One

By Daniel Lende 

The Pathway 

In your brain you have a system that comes up from some of the oldest evolved parts of your brain to some of the most recently evolved parts.  Reptile parts to ape parts.  In brain research on addiction, it’s generally called the mesolimbic dopamine pathway or system.  All the main addictive drugs affect this system, making the mesolimbic pathway a core component in addictive behavior.  Addictive experiences—gambling, shopping, eating and sex—also impact the mesolimbic dopamine system. 

In both scientific research and the popular press, the dopamine system is often cast in the role of “bad boy,” a hard-wired brain circuit that has gotten out of control, self-indulging in an orgy of pleasure.  That neat story tells us a lot about how we cast our own morals onto the brain, selectively picking out research to provide a nice scientific sheen.  Hard-wired for hedonism, we have to work even harder at self-control.   

It strikes me as the same sort of story that addicts know how to spin so well.  So let’s be blunt.  Denial! 
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The Stress Eraser. Only $299

Sometimes an example comes along that just captures everything you want to say, yet makes it all so horribly funny, sad and real at the same time.  Do culture, biology, the body, and technology all combine?  Look no further than the Stress Eraser, a gizmo with the slogan, “Finally, Stress Relief that Actually Works.”

Do we really need this?  The answer appears yes, at least according to Men’s Vogue.  Here’s the lead-in: “Last fall, the American Psychological Association released a major study that told us what we already knew—21st-century America is the most stressed-out place on Earth. A third of American adults are living with ‘extreme stress,’ and nearly half believe that their stress levels have increased in the past five years.” 
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Engaging Anthropology and Social Theory

I was recently reading Kay Warren’s chapter, “Perils and Promises of Engaged Anthropology: Historical Transitions and Ethnographic Dilemmas,” where she discusses different strands of engaged cultural anthropology.  Certain approaches—like critical takes on ladino/Maya relations and inequality in Guatemala—struck me as being at quite some remove from neuroanthropology.  But one strand she describes did seem closer to me: 

Another perspective is that we need to move beyond the antagonisms of the past to grapple with new issues: gang violence, alienation, and the mass marketing to the urban underclasses of commodities from foreign clothing styles to mood-altering drugs; the globalization of popular culture that undercuts local authority and parental status in the eyes of many youths and their parents; and consumer expectations and forms of employment that, as they respond to transnational media and forms of production, are independent of local space (Garcia Canclini 2000).

 This chapter raised the question: What are the on-going theoretical and ethnographic discussions in cultural anthropology that are closest to the work we are doing on this blog? 

Or, to take it further afield and include Todd and sociology, what strands of social science research offer the most immediacy to our work?  Where are the fruitful collaborations and theoretical synergies likely to be found? 

I present this as a question to people who read this blog.  I would love to see plenty of comments, and look forward to a fun conversation.

Blogging and Public Intellectuals?

Todd, who commented on the Wending post, has an interesting discussion of “On Being A Public Intellectual” over at his blog Todd’s Hammer.  He engages Russel Jacoby’s argument that public intellectuals have basically perished given the post-modern turn, the professionalization of the academy, and the rise of modern media.  

I might counter that we have a new breed of public intellectual—people like Steven Pinker.  The star professors who write popular books and who appear on television, and who command super-sized salaries from universities.  They sell ideas and, in many cases, reassurances to the American public.  To take a comment by Robert Steele, a top 50 reviewer on Amazon, about Joseph Nye’s book, Soft Power:  

This book, perhaps deliberately so, but I suspect not, is out of touch with mainstream scholarship such as the last 50 books I have reviewed for Amazon. It is one massive “Op-Ed”, and its sources are virtually all “Op-Eds” (a number of them not written by the purported authors), with the result that this book gets an A for a good idea and a C-, at best, for scholarship. One simple example: the sum total of the author’s references on “virtual communities”, one of the most important ideas of this century, is one Op-Ed from the Baltimore Sun.

But in looking at the posts on this blog, the ones that have attracted the most attention are ones in the public domain—the critique of Steven Pinker or the Time Magazine article on love—as well as ones that address issues of everyday discussion—our mood affecting our health, IQ and race, our sense of balance. 
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Wending between Faust and Wimsatt

Is neuroanthropology just “social theory with technical jargon,” giving us “street cred”?  Are we doing anything “different from interpretive anthropology with its system of symbols”?  Why invoke brain biology, we haven’t spent years studying the minutiae of brain circuitry and chemical interactions like real brain experts.  Why even bother with the mention of neurotransmitters and such, which bastardizes the rich contribution that anthropology makes to understanding ourselves. 

These are some of the comments I’ve seen about our site, some on the Internet, some in emails.  In an initial answer to that, I pointed to Greg’s introduction, of listening to our informants and building explanations based on ethnography as well as to some of the limitations we bump up against in the dominant forms of social theory today. 
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Visual Rewards

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchWhy will we study a favored painting again and again?  Or gaze on our lover’s face with such pleasure, even after years and lines have mounted?

 I came across an article, “Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain,” by Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel in American Scientist.  They studied the distribution of mu-opioid receptors, associated with the modulation of pleasure and pain, in the visual cortex.  Their basic result: “The receptors are sparsest in the early stages of this [central visual] pathway, the so-called V1 to V4 areas, where an image is processed as local bits of contour, color and texture.  Intermediate stages of visual processing, such as the lateral occipital area and ventral occipito-temporal cortex, which integrate local information to detect surfaces, objects, faces and places, contain greater number of opioid receptors.  The receptors are densest in the later stages of recognition, in the parahippocampal cortex and rhinal cortex, where visual information engages our memories.”

 Thus, they argue, “a visual stimulus that elicits many episodic or semantic memories should be more pleasing (or more interesting) than a stimulus that brings forth fewer mental associations.” 

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