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.

Thinking about how others think: two ways?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchJason Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji, of Harvard University, and C. Neil Macrae, at the University of Aberdeen, published a fascinating piece in Neuron in May 2006, ‘Dissociable Medial Prefrontal Contributions to Judgments of Similar and Dissimilar Others’ (abstract on PubMed or pdf download here). I came across the article through the Mind Matters blog in a piece by Stephen Macknik (director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix), entitled How Harvard students perceive rednecks: The neural basis for prejudice. Both the original article and the blog post by Macknik are worth checking out.

In the experiment, the team headed by Mitchell showed the subjects photographs and asked the subjects questions about the beliefs, feelings, or attitudes of the people in the pictures. Subjects were told the pictures were of either ‘liberal northeastern’ or ‘conservative Midwest fundamentalist Christian students’ after doing a survey which determined which group the subjects were most like. The categories for the photographs were false, the pictures being taken from dating websites and randomly assigned to either of the groups. The photos were reassigned for each subject, and gender, age and other distinguishing marks controlled for (or likely just avoided by the original choice of photos). In other words, college students were being told that other ‘college students’ were either ‘like them’ or ‘different from them,’ with (apparently) no visual cues for either identity. The research team was interested in what parts of the brain were being used in attempts to ‘mentalize,’ that is, to perceive the thoughts, motives or perceptions of others.

In particular, the researchers discussed that slightly different parts of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are used when trying to mentalize, depending upon whether the target of observation is believed to be similar or dissimilar (should I write ‘the Other’ to prove I’m a cultural anthropologist?) to the self. Specifically, a more ventral (front) part of mPFC is used when ‘mentalizing’ about others perceived as similar, as opposed to a higher (dorsal) part of the mPFC used to deduce the thinking or feelings of others when confronted with photos of people thought to be ‘unlike’ themselves. The difference is significant because the different regions suggest that these perceptions are being accomplished in distinct fashion.

… simulation theories of social cognition suggest that this [ventral] region should be specifically engaged for mental state inferences about others perceived to be similar to oneself, since mentalizing on the basis of self knowledge can only take place if another person’s internal experience is assumed to be comparable to one’s own. As such, this hypothesis suggests an important ‘‘division of labor’’ in the contributions made by different subregions of mPFC to mentalizing. Whereas ventral mPFC may be expected to contribute to mental state inferences about similar others, the dorsal [upper or top] aspects of mPFC—more traditionally associated with mentalizing tasks—should be specifically engaged by mentalizing about dissimilar others, that is, individuals for whom overlap between self and other cannot be assumed.

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Where to study neuroanthropology?

One of our readers, David Navega from Portugal, asked a great question about a very practical matter: where are the centres of neuroanthropological research? A great question which caused me to just about choke on my coffee. I had to break it to David that, well, I’m not really that sure. There are pockets of people around doing work that I would consider to be part of ‘neuroanthropology,’ broadly defined, though they might run screaming from the designation. But his question is an excellent one, and I would like to put that out to the readers, with an opportunity for them to write in with universities, centres, departments, or programs that would support this sort of research.

Aside from the two obvious candidates from the blog — the University of Notre Dame (where Daniel, Agustín, and a host of other good people work and teach) and Macquarie University (where I work, alongside great colleagues in my department and others) — there are a few programs that stand out. I’m going to list some, but I hope very much NOT to exclude anyone. If I don’t include your program, please drop us a line (without too much abuse of this author) to let us know you’re out there. We want to know where you are.

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Brain-culture, memes, and choosing examples

Earlier today, I wrote a post on Bruce Wexler’s book where I suggested that ideology and ‘culture shock’ were not necessarily the best case studies to work with when discussing the integration of social theory with neurosciences. My reasons for this are many, but they boil down to a fear that, if we choose our case studies poorly, we will not offer compelling integrated accounts that bring together biological studies of the brain and humanistic studies of society and culture. It may have seemed that I was not overly generous to Wexler, however, even though I quite like his work, so I thought I’d balance this out by giving some examples of ways that anthropologists have similarly chosen examples that make it especially difficult to present coherent accounts across different scales and perspectives on a subject.

One of the best/worst examples of attempting to prematurely bridge the gap between culture and brain science is the concept of ‘memes.’ First proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (in The Selfish Gene), a ‘meme’ is defined by Dawkins as the smallest unit of cultural information, which spreads from one person to the next through diffusion, sort of like an infection. Dawkins and other ‘memeticists’ (is that a word… or a meme?) are at pains to argue that culture propogates itself, like a catchy tune you can’t get out of your head or a fashion you must have that you then make your friends crazy to imitate, because of the effectiveness of the meme, not because it is useful to the bearers. Proponents also argue that, although there are significant differences with genes, evolutionary theory can also be applied to memes to understand how cultural ideas spread, develop, change, or become extinct.

So what’s the problem with memes?
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Cellular effects of exercise

I just came across a news report on the Times Online website by Nigel Hawkes, entitled, Exercise really can make you younger, study shows. A team from King’s College London looked at telomeres, a section of repeating DNA at the end of chromosomes, in twins to judge how exercise affected them. Telomeres protect the end of chromosomes, and they shorten over our lives (however, long telomeres may increase the likelihood of cancer, so there’s a trade-off between cancer susceptibility and aging). A study in 2002 even showed that telomere length could be used in forensic anthropology to tell the age of remains. The researchers used questionnaires, but they also looked at data from twin studies, to try to isolate the effects of exercise, controlling for BMI, smoking, diet, and even genetic inheritance (hence, the twins).

The difference could be pretty significant. Dr Lynn Cherkas from King’s College explained: ‘Overall, the difference in telomere length between the most active subjects and the inactive subjects corresponds to around nine years of ageing.’ According to the researchers, their results ‘show that adults who partake in regular physical activity are biologically younger than sedentary individuals.

‘The only reason I point out the research on the Neuroanthropology blog is that here we have another cellular-level mechanism that profoundly affects very basic body functioning that can be manipulated by individuals, behaviour, cultural ideals, social fads, and even moral panics. The amount of exercise we get affects the speed at which our cells age; but the amount of exercise we get is, in turn, affected by a whole range of things, from changing policy and budget concerns at schools, to safety concerns about transportation, housing patterns, leisure activities, public health campaigns… In other words, we have a wonderful example in the current discussion of exercise, and the effects of exercise on our telomeres, of a way that sociological-scale phenomena might affect very microscopic-scale qualities of the human body. The shape of our DNA is not just a cause of our physiology, but also an effect of our physical activity.

Welcome to new readers: Why brain science needs anthropology

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchAfter a couple of really welcome links at places like Mind Hacks (from Vaughn) and at Dr. X’s Free Associations, as well as references from our friend Prof. Sue Sheridan at Life of Wiley (Home of the Daily Skeleton Action Figure), we at Neuroanthropology find ourselves with a lot more visitors over the past few days. Thanks to all of you who are checking us out for the first time and please consider yourself welcome at any time! As a way of welcoming our new readers, I want to reflect on what anthropology is, in my opinion, and why brain science needs it (a later post will discuss why anthropology needs the brain sciences, especially right now in the field’s development).

I was working on this piece before I saw Daniel’s most recent post, but I think it’s a good idea, especially considering the attention we’re getting from the neurosciences blogosphere.  Ironically, we’re probably getting more attention from brain scientists than from anthropologists.  The reasons for this seem to me to be complex, both a sense in the brain sciences of curiosity for things like ‘neuroanthropology,’ or ways of dealing with developmental, social, cultural, ecological, and evolutionary factors in the emergence of the human brain, but also an avoidance trend in cultural anthropology of dealing with psychology, neurology, and biology.  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, fears of ‘reductionism’ in biology in brain sciences and human biology among anthropologists seem to me to be exaggerated, mostly based upon the popularizers of brain sciences (like Pinker, who we’ve taken to task, but others as well) rather than on the more careful and interesting scientists working on the brain (we’ve discussed many examples in previous posts).

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Tools, mirrors and the expandable body

Michael Balter writes in Science NOW Daily News, Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind, about recent research led by Italian neuroscientist, Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma, head of the team responsible for discovering ‘mirror neurons’ (which I’ve been banging on about for a while, here and here). Rizzolatti’s team was looking at how primate brains managed to do the same tasks with hands and with tools. As Balter describes the research: ‘So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain’s trick is to treat tools as just another body part.’

Two monkeys were trained from six to eight months to grasp food with pliers. Then the team documented the activity of 113 neurons in areas F5 and F1, a region linked to manipulating objects. How did the monkeys’ motor areas act when using the tools?

The researchers first established the brain’s firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Balter summarize their conclusions: ‘Rizzolatti and his co-workers conclude that when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.”‘

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