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.

Neurosexism, size dimorphism and not-so-‘hard-wiring’

Cordelia Fine has a great short piece, Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism, on the recent spate of work about the ‘female brain.’ In the article (which is short but worth reading, including for the other material she links to), she explores ‘several recent popular and influential books arguing for fundamental and “hard-wired” differences in male and female psychology.’ In her discussion, she doesn’t so much focus on the research itself but on the question, ‘What accounts for the success and appeal of the new field of neurosexism?’ I’m going to take this posting as a license to range all over the place on the ‘biology’ of sex differences, not just in the brain, as a way of thinking more about how culture and biology become inextricably entangled even in basic sexual differences, like say body size.

One explanation for neurosexim, according to Fine, is that ‘Most lay readers, of course, have neither the background nor the resources to question the many inaccurate and misleading claims made about gender differences in the brain,’ a discussion that we’ve already had on Neuroanthropology (both here and here). I especially like a quote that Fine borrows from Mark Liberman: ‘misleading appeals to the authority of “brain research” have become the modern equivalent of out-of-context scriptural fragments’ (originally on Language Log).

Fine presents the example: ‘The back cover of The Female Brain offers to explain why “a man can’t seem to spot an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm”. Were we to pick up a different sort of book that made an equally unusual sort of claim (a guide to pets, say, which promised to explain why cats can’t climb trees), we would immediately put it down and go in search of a more reliable text.’ It’s a great point; so much of our experience points to myriad exceptions to these neurosexist rules, and yet many of us don’t throw the books out immediately. Odd…

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Snakes and spiders on the brain

A little while ago, I wrote a piece, ‘Innate’ fear of snakes?, in which I took issue with a University of Virginia study that was described by a science writer (and perhaps by the researchers) as showing that humans have an ‘innate’ fear of snakes. At the time, I argued that what their research had shown was a propensity to pay attention to snake shapes, and not that this was an ‘innate’ fear, for reasons that I banged on about for a fair few words (go to the original if you’re a glutton for snake-related musings).

And now, vindication. Well, as much vindication as you can get considering that psychological research is liable to be undermined by another study in the next few months. According to a posting today on Science Daily, ‘Unlocking The Psychology Of Snake And Spider Phobias,’ researchers at the University of Queensland have tested both snake experts and those who are naive about the creatures to see if there is an innate fear.

In the study, researchers compared the responses to stimuli of participants with no particular experience with snakes and spiders, to that of snake and spider experts.
“Previous research has argued that snakes and spiders attract preferential attention (they capture attention very quickly) and that during this early processing a negative (fear) response is generated… as an implicit and indexed subconscious [action],” Dr [Helena] Purkis said.
“We showed that although everyone preferentially attends to snakes or spiders in the environment as they are potentially dangerous, only inexperienced participants display a negative response.”

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Contagious stress and children redux

Sandy G at The Mouse Trap reviews my earlier post on how parents’ stress can affect their children in a posting entitled Stress contagion: from parents to the child? It’s a thoughtful response — thanks, Sandy G. And there’s lots more interesting stuff at The Mouse Trap to check out for our readers. I especially enjoyed a rambling, but incredibly engaging piece, Catch 22: Psychosis, Culture and the Mind Wars; it’s a great read with so many fruitful tangential thoughts that I may have to come back and post on it again.

Sandy G. does a nice job of summarizing the four channels I suggest might be operative in transmitting stress effects to children from their parents. I think he unfairly dismisses the ‘other communication channels’ (#3); there’s some evidence, including even cross-species effects, that there are ways we affect each other’s emotional states that are not imitation and ‘chameleon’ effects. I give the example of pheromones, but that’s not the only way that this could happen. But, fair enough, Sandy doesn’t think it’s plausible, I do. The evidence is hardly conclusive so this kind of disagreement is exactly the sort of thing we need to inspire new research (‘SandyG laughed at my theories… wahahahaha, this will show him!’).

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Two languages, one brain and theory of mind

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchAt first, when I read this journal article in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, I thought, ‘Stop the presses; this one’s a barn burner.’ Since then, I’ve backed off my enthusiasm a bit, but I still think it’s fascinating. Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, and Elise Tem have a really intriguing piece on brain-imaging studies done on bilingual Japanese-English speakers, when the subjects worked on false belief questions that tested their ability to solve ‘theory of mind’ problems. The piece, entitled ‘Switching language switches mind: linguistic effects on developmental neural bases of “Theory of Mind”‘ (abstract available here), comes to a number of conclusions, some of them needing to be confirmed by other research, but they’re worth mulling over at Neuroanthropology.

I discussed “false belief” (FB) tests and how they indicate developmental changes in children’s ability to perceive the thoughts of others in my post, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of? Kobayashi and colleagues asked bilingual subjects to solve FB problems in either Japanese or English, and they compared both younger and older subjects, who had learned their second language later in life than the younger subjects.

Different theorists disagree about how important language is to the development of ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) ability, affecting how children solve (or fail to solve) FB problems. For this reason, different experiments have sought to distinguish whether language ability supports the development of ToM or vice versa, but, as Kobayashi and colleagues summarize, ‘the evidence is mixed on this issue’ (62). Children improve on FB tests when given language training and yet pre-verbal children seem to be able to solve some ToM problems that are not based on language. I feel that the authors’ conclusion is warranted, that the evidence seems ‘to support a conjecture that some aspects of language affect ToM throughout development and adults may process ToM more verbally than children’ (63).

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Blatant plug: new book, Brain Rules, by John Medina

book_dvd.jpgThe publisher of John Medina’s new book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, sent me an email saying that the book might be appropriate for Neuroanthropology. Normally, I wouldn’t plug something I haven’t yet read (and you can be confident that the publisher didn’t bribe me with a review copy, as I don’t have a copy… yet…), but I thought that the website in support of the book itself was worth a look.

The website contains a wealth of Flash-based audio-visual elements from the book, bibliography, graphics, and a host of other resources. I’m struck by several things about it; first, Medina is very savvy — he’s pitched this book brilliantly for a general audience. I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment; in fact, it’s something that I aspire to in my own writing, and it’s educational to see such a good practitioner. Second, he’s done a great job of distilling some complicated ideas into bullet-point amenable, succinct statements. This sort of nested complexity (because there is more when one scratches the surface) is going to be a hallmark of neuroanthropological work, as we’re going to have to be able to write on several levels at once if we’re to persuade both specialists in the areas we’re writing about and other, non-specialists. For example, if I’m going to discuss brain modularity and it’s relationship to cultural theory, I’m going to have to be able to come up with compelling glosses for very complex research (to appeal to those more interested in cultural theory than modularity, but also vice versa), and deeper explanation so that I don’t get off-sides with the specialists.

Finally, I’m just amazed at the media support for the book — it’s excellent. As a former design ‘consultant,’ I just dig deeply the richness of the website and accompanying material. For example, there’s clever little bits of Medina giving audio versions of some of the book’s main points, but they’re much slicker and better produced than the usual head-on or 45-degree-to-the-side, video-camera-on-tripod, wide-angle-to-catch-powerpoints-and-speaker footage. He comes across as profoundly and engaging and funny. Frankly, he’s providing a really accessible counter-point to some of the simplistic ‘public intellectual’ versions of the brain sciences that we rail against frequently. For those of you with better access to well-stocked bookstores, you might want to check it out.

Autoimmune epidemic

I’m afraid I don’t have much interesting to say about this link, but I just can’t scrape my jaw off the floor. There’s a story on Alternet about the incidence of autoimmune disorders, The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World out of Balance. I’m simply floored by some of the accounts, the numbers, and the whole phenomenon. I wish I had something to add, but I thought the least I could do was point out the story to some of our readers.

The autoimmune system is of special interest to those of us concerned about how environmental factors affect the development of organisms, including humans, because it is one of the clear cases of a system that gets substantial input from the environment to accomplish basic functions. We also find that it offers all sorts of interesting examples of non-genetic forms of heredity, including influences in utero and the widely-recognized importance of breast feeding for shaping the immune system. Less widely understood are the effects of changing environment on immune system functions in things like allergies.

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