Author: dlende

Monkey Makes Robot Walk!

Where does this leave the evolution of human bipedalism?  Is there some mystery “bipedal instinct”?  A bipedal “organ” in the brain?  I’ll let you decide… 😉 

Here’s the article.  It’s a great piece about the importance of training, the relevance of a body (build it and the brain will come…), and the management of different tasks by different areas of the brain that work in conjunction.  For the culturally inclined, the study authors argue that for Idoya, the monkey in question, her “motor cortex, where the electrodes were implanted, had started to absorb the representation of the robot’s legs — as if they belonged to Idoya herself.”

Re-training the damaged brain

There’s a good article today, “Coaching the Comeback,” about an occupational therapist working with patients recovering from traumatic brain injuries.  From physical training, nerve stimulation and direct social interaction (e.g., maintaining eye contact, talking to them), the therapist helps her patients along.  It’s a nice summary of several themes that we’ve said in different ways about brains.  And, the therapist with her collection of skills, her education of families, her moral views on recovery also shows the importance of culture in interaction.  It’s also a nice story in itself…

Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct

By Daniel Lende 

Steven Pinker is selling something.  Here’s what’s on the table: “the human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity.”  This organ has been built into our brains by evolution, culture-free except for how its five domains (harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity) are “ranked” and “channeled” in different places around the globe.  Ready to buy? 

Let’s sweeten the deal.  Pinker is offering his “deeper look” which will help you “rethink your answers” about life and morality.  He’s providing “a more objective reckoning” to help people get over their moral “illusions.”  And he’s got the data to show it, from people in the lab, Web sites, and brain scanners.  (I can’t help asking, these are his moral examples?  People in artificial situations, people who don’t physically interact, and a series of images?)  Continue reading “Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct”

Loneliness and Health: Experience, Stress, and Genetics

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchFeeling lonely?  Well, that might make you sick.  The mechanism?  Well, here’s the surprise.  Patterns of genetic expression.

 Here’s the press release from Genome Biology, “People who experience chronically high levels of loneliness show gene-expression patterns that differ markedly from those of people who don’t feel lonely.”  The study’s lead author, Steven Cole, notes: “In this study, changes in immune cell gene expression were specifically linked to the subjective experience of social distance.  The differences we observed were independent of other known risk factors for inflammation, such as health status, age, weight, and medication use. The changes were even independent of the objective size of a person’s social network. What counts, at the level of gene expression, is not how many people you know, it’s how many you feel really close to over time.”    Continue reading “Loneliness and Health: Experience, Stress, and Genetics”

Autism, Depression and The Body

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchMental disorders such as depression and autism are generally viewed in one of two lights, either as something neurological or something psychological.  Cultural anthropology obviously has greater affiliation with the psychological side, and biological anthropology with the neurological.  The same split is true in psychiatry, ably demonstrated by Tanya Luhrmann’s Of Two Minds, which, to radically simplify, describes the fight between talk-therapists and pharmaceutical-dispensers.  (Still, at least this anthropologist wishes Luhrmann had gone beyond ethnographic description of fields to tackle the same problem that both anthropology and psychiatry embody—bridging the nature/nurture or biology/culture split.)

 But is this way of dividing things, an enculturated mind versus an epigenetic brain, an accurate description?  Recent research suggests no. 

Continue reading “Autism, Depression and The Body”