Author: dlende

Language and Color

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchEdge asked prominent scholars a great question, What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

 Lera Boroditsky, in Cognitive Psychology at Stanford, called her post, “Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world?”  (And just for the record, I got turned onto this great collection at Edge by kerim’s post, Rethinking Language and Culture, over at Savage Minds, so please check what kerim has to say!)

 Here’s the opening Boroditsky provides us:

 “I used to think that languages and cultures shape the ways we think. I suspected they shaped the ways we reason and interpret information.  But I didn’t think languages could shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the way we actually see the world.  That part of cognition seemed too low-level, too hard-wired, too constrained by the constants of physics and physiology to be affected by language.”

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Steven Quartz, Brains, and Meaning

I recently came across this post from Edge: The World Question Center, where Steven Quartz, a neuroscientist also interested in anthropology, answers the following question: “What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?”  

He opens his letter to “the president” with the following summary: “Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and purpose. Yet, our modern way of life seems to provide fewer and fewer opportunities to engage in the group life that satisfies these human needs—indeed, many of its structures and institutions stunts these very needs.”  
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Will Power as Mental Muscle

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchThere’s an interesting blog post here about “How to Boost Your Willpower,” which tells us that “researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.”

 Well, how about a cultural muscle too?  After all, we’re talking about a cultural trait too!  In my research in Colombia, knowing how to manage limits and having reasons to say no help explain lower rates of illegal drug use there, despite plenty of risk factors and access to drugs. 

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Political Animals and Anthropological Brains

Today’s New York Times has an article “Political Animals (Yes, Animals),” which recounts the many lines of research on the politics of animal life.  Rhesus monkeys, dolphins, wolves and yes, even humans make their appearance in the article.  Research has increasingly shown that these “nonhuman animals behave like textbook politicians.  In these “highly gregarious and relatively brainy species,” individuals “engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far-flung social networks.” 
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Puzzles and Cultural Differences

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchHere’s some interesting research where neuroscientists are using brain scans to show that cultural differences reach down to the level of functional activation in the brain.  Americans had a harder time with visual puzzles that required manipulating objects in context than “East Asians.”  Here a quote from the news article:

 

Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They found that both groups could successfully complete the tasks, but American brains had to work harder at relative judgments, while East Asian brains found absolute judgments more challenging. Previous psychology research has shown that American culture focuses on the individual and values independence, while East Asian culture is more community-focused and emphasizes seeing people and objects in context. This study provides the first neurological evidence that these cultural differences extend to brain activity patterns.

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Why We Love, The Time Magazine Version

Too bad Jeffrey Kluger didn’t pay closer attention to Hannibal Lecter.  He might have written a better article on “Why We Love,” out this week in Time Magazine, instead of giving us a flawed view of evolution and brain research.  Still, in furtive glimpses of data, rather than quick quotes and pop theories, another way to think about love glides onto stage. 

As I told my anthropology students yesterday, the initial assumptions we make so often dictate our ideas and our results.  But those assumptions are generally presented as “facts” or assertions of truth, part of an unassailable background.  So here are the ones packed into Kluger’s piece, right there at the beginning: (1) that humans rely on our wits, so “losing our faculties over a matter like sex” needs explaining (in other words, humans are rational, why have primitive passions); (2) that we evolved in a “savanna full of predators,” so getting distracted by love could be potentially dangerous, (3) that our genes have “concerns,” primary among them to make us reproduce as much as possible (“breed now and breed plenty gets that job done”), and (4) that we can extend these sorts of explanations to all “the rituals surrounding” sex, love and relationships (like a bunch of scientists drunk on their own ideas—explanatory expansion gone wild!). 
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