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.

Doidge on The Brain That Changes Itself

Dr. Norman Doidge has a short column on his own book, The Brain That Changes Itself, over at Science Blog. His book is extremely good, but it’s funny, when you read the column, it sounds like a science ‘travel log,’ as if he went on a long brain science roadtrip. It seems to be a leitmotif in a lot of recent popular science book; traveling around, meeting scientists, having a bit of a chat, getting a bit of personal back story as well as a chance to talk about their research. Or am I the only one who feels this way?

One of the commenters on the Science Blog says something about a book of ‘anecdotal evidence,’ which I think is pretty ignorant. Anyone who regularly reads neuropathology knows that ‘anecdotal evidence’ of human brain injury is not just typical, it’s essential. Singular cases can have an enormous impact on our knowledge of how the brain works by causing such distinctive disruptions of function. Where would we be in brain sciences with Phineas Gage, the folks Oliver Sachs writes about, and this unlucky brotherhood?

Check out Doidge’s column — and his book gets a strong recommendation as well.

Brain doping poll results in

According to Nature, 20% of scientists in an informal survey admitted to using ‘cognitive enhancing’ drugs: Poll results: look who’s doping. Ironically, the original survey was triggered by an April Fool’s prank played on the scientific community. My initial thought was, Do they count caffeine? Of course, they didn’t. If they did, numbers would obviously be different.

We asked specifically about three drugs: methylphenidate (Ritalin), a stimulant normally used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder but well-known on college campuses as a ‘study aid’; modafinil (Provigil), prescribed to treat sleep disorders but also used off-label to combat general fatigue or overcome jet lag; and beta blockers, drugs prescribed for cardiac arrhythmia that also have an anti-anxiety effect.

Check out the Nature site for a more complete discussion, but the conclusion is worth repeating:

The most popular of the drugs used by respondents to Nature’s poll seem to have fairly mild neuroenhancing effects, says Chatterjee, who calls the massive media interest in these drugs “neurogossip”. Nevertheless, the numbers suggest a significant amount of drug-taking among academics. As Eisen’s April Fool’s prank spread from blog to blog, it was hard to tell who was in on the joke and who was taking the announcement at face value. Although tricking people was a goal, Eisen had been aiming for something so ridiculous that most would chuckle. Instead, he worries that he might have hit a nerve: “I think it did make it less funny because it is actually too real.”

The initial discussion that led to the poll was referenced by Daniel a while back in a great piece, Brain Enhancement: Beyond Either/Or, that explored this topic in greater detail. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. Daniel talks about the ‘unintended consequences’ that almost always accompany drug use. I don’t have too much to add to that except that, with what we know about neuroplasticity, this should not surprise us at all. The brain and nervous system tend to adapt to any changes in the overall environment they inhabit: the tasks they do, the condition of the environment (which is both inside and outside of the body), any other chemicals introduced into the equation.
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Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis

I’m too busy to be blogging right now; I’m putting in an application for academic promotion, and like much else in academe, that means reams of paper must be offered up to the cruel, fickle gods of bureaucracy. But this example of the reporting on brain imaging research, drawn to my attention by Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon’s, Using 15 college age boys and some reactionary reporting, we are able to blame the coming depression on boobage, couldn’t pass by without comment. Thank YOU Amanda for getting me worked up enough that I won’t need a morning cup of coffee to get through several hours working on my promotion application, if I can just get back to that. (Thanks also to Echidne of the Snakes.)

The article which inspired this train of commentary is ‘Sex and financial risk linked in brain,’ by Seth Borenstein, who probably needs some sort of award for this piece. I’ll let you decide:

A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported. The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

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Discovery Channel on pushing the body’s limits

I’ve been enjoying the Discovery Channel’s series, The Human Body: Pushing The Limits, in dribs and drabs, watching the bits that are posted on You Tube. (Here’s the first part of the episode on Sensation, which is pretty good.) When I first read the description of the four-part series, I worried someone had already done a video version of the book I’m working on:

Human Body: Pushing the Limits takes you across continents and introduces you to people who have pushed their bodies to the max. Using CGI technology and hi-tech camera work, see their physical ordeals in vivid detail both externally and internally.

In fact, the series is not very deep, but the CGI graphics of throbbing nerves, eyes swiveling, sweat glands, and other anatomical marvels are pretty groovy. It’s well worth checking it out — there’s a whole lot of segments on You Tube. The four episodes were on Sight, Strength, Sensation, and Brain Power. I’ll probably try to get my hands on a DVD copy when it comes out and use it in my teaching.

Emotional intelligence in training

Although I’m not a real big fan of some of the work on ’emotional intelligence,’ here’s an interesting short video of Daniel Goleman on Karma Tube (a positive, social change video site). As the page explains:

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Sharing the results of psychological experiments (and the story of the Santa Cruz Strangler), he explains how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it.

I’m really not sure what we gain by putting ’emotional’ with ‘intelligence’ except that it does seem to increase the importance of empathy and perceptivity for those who undersell these human capacities. That is, I think the furor of ‘EI’ is in part simply that people who normally don’t get just how crucial interpersonal savvy is suddenly notice it.

Nevertheless, Goleman is a good big picture thinker, and in this piece he points out the malleability of human empathy, a crucial consideration for neuroanthropologists. It’s important to point out training effects on these abilities so that we’re not too prone to considering them permanent ‘personality’ traits.

Identical twins not… err… identical?

Although we’ve been accused of hatin’ on twin studies, I admit that I find twins pretty fascinating, mostly because they attract all kinds of magical thinking, not just within traditional Yoruba cosmology, but also in the West. My favorite pair of twins has to be the ‘Jim twins,’ a pair of identical twins discussed in an article in Time Magazine.

Like many identical twins reared apart, Jim Lewis and Jim Springer found they had been leading eerily similar lives. Separated four weeks after birth in 1940, the Jim twins grew up 45 miles apart in Ohio and were reunited in 1979. Eventually they discovered that both drove the same model blue Chevrolet, chain-smoked Salems, chewed their fingernails and owned dogs named Toy. Each had spent a good deal of time vacationing at the same three-block strip of beach in Florida. More important, when tested for such personality traits as flexibility, self-control and sociability, the twins responded almost exactly alike.

The Jim twins are great; they have given me hours of fun just going over the possible genetic roots for their similarity: ‘Oh my god, we’ve got a shared gene for naming our dogs “Toy” and another one for marrying women named “Linda” and, when that didn’t work out, marrying a second wife called “Betty.”‘ (A similarity that the Time Magazine article doesn’t explore.) I mean, I just can’t stop laughing when I think about how lovers of this sort of data actually think that some sort of gene directs people to go vacation in a particular spot or naming a son either James Alan or James Allan (Ooooh, so close… it must be shared genes!). But I digress… I just love the Jim twins’ story so much (see also Jonathan Marks’ book, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee, where he writes that, ‘In the world of twin studies the unscrupulous and the credulous symbiotically plumb the depths of contemporary pseudoscience.’ He’s way funnier than I am writing about this stuff in pieces like ‘Folk Heredity,’ especially the section on ‘hereditarianism’.)

But now we’ve got an interesting piece from Scientific American, Identical Twins’ Genes Are Not Identical, which explores the possibility that identical twins aren’t perfect genetic copies of each other. As the article reports:

Geneticist Carl Bruder of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his colleagues closely compared the genomes of 19 sets of adult identical twins. In some cases, one twin’s DNA differed from the other’s at various points on their genomes. At these sites of genetic divergence, one bore a different number of copies of the same gene, a genetic state called copy number variants.

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