Author: gregdowney

Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, I have gone on to do fieldwork in Brazil and the United States. I have written one book, Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art (Oxford, 2005). I have also co-authored and co-edited several, including, with Dr. Daniel Lende, The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (MIT, 2012), and with Dr. Melissa Fisher, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke, 2006). My research interests include neuroanthropology, psychological anthropology, sport, dance, human rights, neuroscience, phenomenology, economic anthropology, and just about anything else that catches my attention.

British educational leader advocates The Matrix

The Telegraph yesterday ran with an article, Brain downloads ‘will make lessons pointless,’ about some comments made by Chris Parry, former Rear Admiral and the CEO of the Independent Schools Council. Parry believe that ‘”Matrix-style” technology would render traditional lessons obsolete,’ because we’ll soon be beaming knowledge into kids brains. Parry told the Times Educational Supplement: “It’s a very short route from wireless technology to actually getting the electrical connections in your brain to absorb that knowledge.”

Okay, you all need to help me: do I feel this under ‘hokum,’ ‘malarky,’ or ‘balderdash’? Rear Admiral Parry, sir, will the wireless technology use the brain’s Bluetooth or WiFi receptors? Which part of the brain’s RAM will you use when you install the new ‘human operating system’?

Okay, Admiral Parry, repeat after me: The brain is not a computer.

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On ‘uncontacted Indians’

I normally don’t mix my audiences much, writing straight-up applied anthropology over at Culture Matters and saving this blog exclusively for neuroanthropology, but there’s a fascinating story circulating based on some photographs taken from the air of ‘uncontacted’ Native Americans in Brazil. I did a couple of radio interviews yesterday on the story, so I decided to blog on it over at Culture Matters.

If you’re interested in the love of the myth that there are groups that have ‘never seen a white person’ (of course, we’re not as interested that they haven’t seen an African or a Swiss Army knife or a Rottweiler or a blender…), check it out: ‘Uncontacted Indians?!’ — contact an anthropologist!

Gotta shuffle before you walk

So, when is it really efficient to get up and move around on two feet? I know that’s what you’re thinking this morning — and your answer is probably, if someone would bring me a cup of coffee in bed, well, that might shift the whole equation. But a recent piece by Sylvester and Kramer asks this question of a model for the shift to bipedal locomotion in primates.

As most folks who do research on or teach about human evolution will tell you, we spend a lot of time and energy thinking about bipedalism. Because it emerges earlier in the fossil record than the really large brains of later hominids, bipedalism seems to be a key adaptation, a kind of evolutionary watershed that opened up environmental niches that weren’t available to other primates.

But it’s really hard to figure out when exactly it started or why; theories about the reasons for bipedalism include a wide range of explanations, from avoiding too much contact with the sun in open savanna to walking on branches while supporting the body overhead on other branches, from predator spotting to low-fruit foraging from the ground. While it’s clear bipedalism has created all sorts of opportunities, it’s not clear which one of them was necessarily the decisive one that sealed the deal and made bipedalism work for ancestors to modern humans.

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Monkeys and robots teaming up — worried?

As Daniel discussed in January in Monkey Makes Robot Walk!, a number of researchers are working on brain-machine interfaces by attaching prostheses to monkeys. Science Daily carries a new story, Mind Over Matter: Monkey Feeds Itself Using Its Brain, about a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine experiment in which a monkey successfully used a human-like prosthetic limb to feed itself. As the Science Daily story reports:

Using this technology, monkeys in the Schwartz lab are able to move a robotic arm to feed themselves marshmallows and chunks of fruit while their own arms are restrained. Computer software interprets signals picked up by probes the width of a human hair. The probes are inserted into neuronal pathways in the monkey’s motor cortex, a brain region where voluntary movement originates as electrical impulses. The neurons’ collective activity is then evaluated using software programmed with a mathematic algorithm and then sent to the arm, which carries out the actions the monkey intended to perform with its own limb. Movements are fluid and natural, and evidence shows that the monkeys come to regard the robotic device as part of their own bodies.

According to the team, this is the ‘first’ example of the ‘use of cortical signals to control a multi-jointed prosthetic device for direct real-time interaction with the physical environment (’embodiment’)’ (from the abstract to the Nature article) (I’m always dubious about such ‘firsts,’ especially as this team has been announcing work on this project since at least 2004; but the research is still fascinating even if not a ‘first’).

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No wonder the altar boys look spaced out…

(And before I go any further, yes, I know that girls outnumber boys as servers in most American Catholic Churches — I just couldn’t get a title with the same ring…)

I just came across a recent story on PsyOrg.com, Incense is psychoactive: Scientists identify the biology behind the ceremony, that confirms something I have long suspected. As a veteran Catholic altar boy who has spent more than my fair share of hours inhaling incense, I knew the stuff made me loopy. I even once watched a friend of mine take a slow, sideways dive with a half twist off a kneeler into the front row of church after he got a little over-enthusiastic swinging the incense boat around and checked out of conscious-ville for a few minutes. Turns out that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent that can be isolated from frankincense, lowers anxiety and acts as an anti-depressant in mice (unless those mice are forced to kneel for long periods of time in heavy cassock and surplus, or chant in Latin).

The danger of this sort of data is that someone will say that they can use it to ‘explain’ religion, as if everytime someone got mildly baked off of psychoactive chemicals in bark or tree resin, they came up with two-millenia-lasting notions of a triune God, the Resurrection of Man, and other assorted ideas. That is, psychoactive chemicals can explain certain phenomena within religion, but they certainly could not explain any religion as a whole. Otherwise, there’d be a lot more theological creative stoners shambling around.

And so we’re left with the advice in Exodus (30:34-37):

And the Lord said to Moses: Take unto thee spices, stacte, and onycha, galbanum of sweet savour, and the clearest frankincense, all shall be of equal weight. And thou shalt make incense compounded by the work of the perfumer, well tempered together, and pure, and most worthy of sanctification. And when thou hast beaten all into very small powder, thou shalt set of it before the tabernacle of the testimony, in the place where I will appear to thee. Most holy shall this incense be unto you. You shall not make such a composition for your own uses, because it is holy to the Lord.

Children integrating their senses

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchTwo of the pieces that I have wanted to discuss appear together in Current Biology, both on evidence of sensory integration in adults compared to their integration in children. Nature News carried a story about both articles, One sense at a time, by Matt Kaplan. As Kaplan explains, the research generally supports the idea that: ‘Adults readily integrate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in their everyday lives without a second thought. But research is revealing that this is not the case with children. Two new studies hint that children under the age of eight only use one sense at a time to judge the world around them.‘

As I started to discuss in an earlier piece on human equilibrium (long ago — still working on parts two and three), adults learn how to weight different sensory information depending on context and the task at hand, evaluating one stream against another if they conflict. When confronted with two contradictory impressions from different senses — such as video of a person saying one thing and audio of a slightly different word — adult sensory systems figure out a way to integrate the sense world, sometimes creating ‘sensory’ compromises or syntheses. The ability to integrate sensory information is fundamental to normal human functioning, but it tends to undermine certain conceptions of brain ‘modularity,’ as I argued in the earlier post.

But with these two articles, I want to explore something a bit different, so I’m going to tackle each one individually, and then reflect on one issue that I think is important: the tendency to see child development in a teleological framework, that is, as an incomplete version of an adult system rather than as a deployment of the child’s distinctive neural resources. Before you click on ‘read more’ below though, be warned; this piece is a bit long…

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