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.

Kids falling down

The Appeal of DirtIf, like me, you find the sense of balance and its development fascinating, or if you just want to learn more about toddlers falling over, check out Cognitive Daily’s wonderful piece discussing research on toddlers’ balance. A research team put weighted vests on toddlers to see how they would compensate when they tried to walk, and the poor little folks leaned the wrong way. That is, put a bit of weight on a toddler’s back, and he or she tends to lean backward to try to compensate. Man, little kids are ka-razy!

The piece by Dave Munger is, What backpack-wearing toddlers can tell us about how kids learn to walk. As always, Munger’s discussion is very thorough and gives a great sense for the original research. The work is reminiscent of the research of the late Esther Thelen, one of the psychologists who really opened my eyes to dynamic systems theory and a rethinking of developmental theory.

What makes humans unique?

Photo by JoProf. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, whose work on chimpanzees and human children, on the biological capacity for culture, and a range of other subjects, must place him among the most important contemporary thinkers using comparative primate data, asks ‘How Are Humans Unique?’ in a recent piece for The New York Times‘ Idea Lab.

As Tomasello suggests, many things that we thought once definitively marked the difference between humans and other species, have gradually been found in evidence in other species — tools, deductive learning, language, even certain patterns of anti-social behaviour suggesting war and the like. The result is, for some, an uneasy sense that we might not be so different from other animals, and for others, a satisfaction that humans might be thought about using analytical frames developed with other species.

One thing that Tomasello points out very well is that many of humans’ cognitive advantages over other intelligent animals are ‘products of collective cognition,’ that is, not so much just an individual’s ability as the ability of an individual invested with the collective creativity and mental tricks invented by previous generations of humans.

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Back from absence with links on human evolution

I’ve been noticeably silent on Neuroanthropology of late — I didn’t think I could get any busier after January was bad, but it’s been awful around here. I’ve been involved in local politics, if you can believe that, and set up another website (www.berrybypass.com) to try to expose a bit of local corruption and misinformation that was trying to reroute a highway bypass. So I’ve been blogging, just not on Neuroanthropology, putting my knowledge of WordPress to alternative uses.

With the absence, I’ve got a backlog of interesting stuff that I will not be able to write substantial comments on, so I thought I could at least put some links to a couple of pieces:

ABC News has an intriguing short piece on vestigial organs, Five Things Humans No Longer Need, by Laura Spinney. Some of the usual subjects are there (like wisdom teeth and the coccyx), but there’s also some less well-known examples. If I were writing a long piece on this, though, I’m still not persuaded by the notion of ‘vestigial’ organs because it seems to imply that other organs ARE doing what they were selected for, and I doubt that’s the case; too many organs have likely been co-opted into other things over evolutionary time. I worry that the notion of ‘vestigial’ organs singles these out, when in fact the issue is broader, BUT I also love using vesigial organs when I teach.

The other piece I’m not going to get to is Tracing Humanity’s Path, by Michael Balter on ScienceNOW Daily News. The piece is a news story on a longer article available on PLoS Genetics, Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model, by Garrett Hellenthal, Adam Auton, and Daniel Falush, that uses genome-wide statistical modeling to reconstruct human dispersal patterns that, although not earth-shattering, does produce some interesting wrinkles in the usual account of how humans got all over the globe. And it has cool animated maps linked to it that show the patterns.

Wired on imaging ‘neurohype’

Wired magazine has a good piece on recent attempts to market neuroimaging services to individual consumers, Brain Scans as Mind Readers? Don’t Believe the Hype, by psychiatrist Daniel Carlat. Vaughan at Mind Hacks has a good discussion of the piece, Don’t believe the neurohype (thanks to Vaughan, also, for alerting me to the original piece). The Wired article, in addition to sharing Carlat’s adventures with the pay-per-scan industry, has a nice table of ‘neurologisms’ as well to help out the less-neurohip among us (myself included).

(I was a bit chastened by the line: ‘Add the prefix neuro to a discipline and you get a new field with instant cred. But the science can be less than compelling.’ uhhh… we at Neuroanthropology hope that our readers will judge us by our results; we plan to earn our ‘cred.’)

As Vaughan discusses, some people have a financial interest in over-interpreting brain scans and exaggerating what they can do:

Scientists and responsible clinicians will know about these shortcomings and make sure they don’t oversell their findings, but commercial companies are not selling you the data, they’re selling you a way of make you feel better about your insecurities, whether they be commercial concerns or health worries.

All I would add to this is ‘most‘ scientists know about these shortcoming and don’t paper over them when describing their research (and we’re happy to heap scorn on those who don’t have the proper humility).

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The human ‘super-organism’

The New York Times has just run a story by Nicholas Wade, 6 Tribes of Bacteria Found to Be at Home in Inner Elbow. The piece discusses new views on commensal bacteria, types of bacteria that live benignly on the body of a host. As the article points out, DNA culturing has really expanded our ability to study these bacteria because they are so difficult to sample and culture normally (in part because they need their host to live very long). The research is part of the federally funded human microbiome project, an attempt to catalogue all of the bacterial DNA that makes up the human ‘microbiome’ or what some call the human ‘super-organism’ (not because it can leap tall buildings but because a human ‘being’ turns out to be a walking system with staggering numbers of bacterial ‘beings’ as part of it).

Usually, articles like this make the point that, ‘no matter how hard you wash, every square inch of you is still covered in millions of bacteria…’ This article is no exception. But the article is also working with a lot more interesting data. For example: ‘The project is in its early stages but has already established that the bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.’ Bacteria cells outnumber the cells of the body itself as they are often quite a bit smaller than human cells.

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‘Psychological kevlar’ and the burden of remembering war

I just read a fascinating piece by Clayton Dach, America’s Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers, on Alternet. Although there’s a sense in which Mr. Dach jumps to some of the worst possible outcomes when he looks at technology in the pipeline, on the whole, it’s a pretty well thought and concerned-but-not-hysterical account of some of the technology being brought to bear on soldiers, including the possibility of removing humans further from the ‘loop’ in combat decisions. I’m less interested with the latter — the robot warriors angle — not only because I think it’s been done better in science fiction movies, but also because I think it’s simply a more remote technology than some of the pharmaceutical work he discusses.

In particular, I found the discussion of ‘psychological kevlar’ to be interesting for neuroanthropology:

In the U.S., where roughly two-fifths of troops returning from combat deployments are presenting serious mental health problems, PTSD has gone political in form of the Psychological Kevlar Act, which would direct the Secretary of Defense to implement “preventive and early-intervention measures” to protect troops against “stress-related psychopathologies.”

Proponents of the “Psychological Kevlar” approach to PTSD may have found a silver bullet in the form of propranolol, a 50-year-old beta-blocker used on-label to treat high blood pressure, and off-label as a stress-buster for performers and exam-takers. Ongoing psychiatric research has intriguingly suggested that a dose of propranolol, taken soon after a harrowing event, can suppress the victim’s stress response and effectively block the physiological process that makes certain memories intense and intrusive. That the drug is cheap and well tolerated is icing on the cake.

With PTSD so prevalent among soldiers, can it be better treated, even if that means blocking the formation of traumatic memories? Daniel did a piece on PTSD rates in soldiers in April, Invisible Wounds of War, and he discussed a RAND Corporation estimate that treatment of soldiers with PTSD would cost ‘6.2 billion dollars in the first two years after returning from deployment.’ (Daniel also provided links to a number of articles on Iraq and its psychological effects in Wednesday Round Up #7.) The potential to use drugs to stop the development of PTSD, even if it also blocks normal memory formation, raises a number of ethical and moral questions as well as some interesting neuroanthropological ones.

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