The Oyster’s Garter is hosting the 10th edition of the Carnival of Evolution. The activation and deactivation of genes, bonobos and bad taste, 300 million year old fish, why evolution is true, and plenty more – so enjoy the best damn adaptive carnival out there!
Thinking to change your brain: Sharon Begley in the WSJ
In January, The Wall Street Journal carried a short excerpt from science writer
Sharon Begley’s excellent, but unfortunately titled book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. The article, How Thinking Can Change the Brain, is excellent, as is the book, which I’d highly recommend, but both engage in a couple of pervasive rhetorics for talking about brain function that I believe make it harder to really theorize about issues like neuroplasticity.
That is, although I like Begley’s work, some of the ways that she writes about the brain puts her readers, if they’re not already neuroscience savvy, two steps backwards before moving toward greater understanding. It’s sad because I think her book is one of the best works for a general readership on recent research, and the brain imaging projects with Tibetan monks which forms the central narrative of the book are fascinating on so many levels. Begley has a brilliant eye for turning research into story-telling and with the meditation research, she’s picked an ideal subject on which to exercise her skills.
If only she would stop carrying on about ‘Mind’ and ‘Brain’ like they were the two primary characters…
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What Is The Value of Neuroscience?
Jonah Lehrer has a great post, The Value of Neuroscience, over at The Frontal Cortex. He writes about struggling with a common question he got during his recent tour for his new book, How We Decide.
The question is, “What practical knowledge have we gained by looking at decision-making in the brain that we didn’t already have, either through introspection or behavioral studies?”
His answer is, “The best answer, I think, is that learning about the brain can help constrain our theories. We haven’t decoded the cortex or solved human nature – we’re not even close – but we can begin to narrow the space of possible theories.”
That is both an elegant and a practical answer – it claims neither too much nor too little for neuroscience, and provides a way to think about neuroscience. Ways of thinking are often much harder to grasp than what to think, where neuroscience churns out an enormous quantity of information but not necessarily an enormous range of hypotheses about people as people.
Lehrer’s answer echoes my own view of evolutionary theory, that its greatest utility is in limiting the range of possibilities when confronting the diversity and commonality of people’s behavior lives today and in the recent past. People are often aghast when I say this – but what about all the predictions, the selective forces, Darwin’s genius? But there is evolution’s strength – certain possibilities are more likely, and others are often not on the table. Combine that with the mechanistic understandings from neurobiology–the outcomes of evolutionary adaptations and present function–and suddenly the range of possibilities is constrained further.
Is Facebook rotting our children’s brains?
The Guardian (UK) brings us a recent example of technophobia based on comments by neuroscientist Lady Susan Adele Greenfield, this time about the latest prime suspects for ‘rotting the brains of our youth’: Facebook and social networking sites. Patrick Wintour offers us Facebook and Bebo risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind, suggesting that social networking websites might be responsible for ‘short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.’
The Baroness Greenfield has written a stack of books, including a best-seller on the brain, earned a peerage for her outstanding career, and has so many titles and honours that I’m not even sure what to call her (Prof? Lady?). Browsing her homepage and publications list, there’s a range of interesting stuff on consciousness, analgesia, dopamine, and a fair number of subjects upon which I don’t have even the expertise to comment. The only problem is that her fears, closely examined, reveal that she doesn’t know what to be afraid of, adopting a ‘one-paranoia-fits-all’ approach to technological change.
The Guardian article seems a bit over-wrought, and I don’t have the transcript of Greenfield’s presentation to the House of Lords, so I’m hesitant to attribute too much of the phobia to the original speech (for a critique of Greenfield’s habit of alarmism, however, see Ben Goldacre’s weblog). As we’ve seen repeatedly, the transition from scientist presenting to science writer submitting the story to editor reworking to press printing can be really rough, transforming subtle and measured analysis into formulaic, exaggerated soundbites. However, there are some extensive quotes, so in this piece, I’ll do my best to analyze what we have. In another post, I want to move beyond the fear of Facebook, using Lady Greenfield’s comments to think about how we might actually do research on the effects of technological change among developmental influences, but I won’t get to that in this post, as it’s already too long.
I’m not blasé about the developmental consequences of heavy exposure to screen technology, but I think that a legitimate interest in the possible effects of significant technological change in our daily lives can inadvertently dovetail seamlessly into a ‘kids these days’ curmudgeonly sense of generational degeneration, which is hardly new. That is, we have to be careful when we look at the research as it’s easy to annex our popular understandings of generational dynamics, even frustrations with our own children, students, and other young people, into a snowballing sense that everything’s going to hell.
Is new technology affecting our brain development and how? Is the recent change in the developmental environment much greater than previous changes in childhood ecology? And what specifically can we say about social networking sites as a factor in cognitive development? Obviously, these are huge questions, and it’s not my area of research specialty exactly, so I’m not going to bring fresh unpublished data to the table. But I do have some thoughts on the subject nonetheless, as our regular readers might imagine… but here’s the first part, where I deal with the concerns voiced by Greenfield and others.
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Grand Stone
Two great carnivals this week. The Blog That Ate Manhattan (love the name!) is hosting Grand Rounds, the weekly medical round-up. Fat Barbies, why a public health campaign to lower salt is wrong, and lots more over at a well-organized and delictable edition.
The Moore Groups Blog is hosting all things anthropological with Four Stone Hearth. First off, congratulations on parting ways with those cigarettes. The When on Google Earth? game looks fun, Neanderthal hybrids are always provocative, and the 2008 Flickr anthropology contest now has winners. That and Moore at the latest Four Stone.
The Sex Round Up
I just have to start off with this great video, Business Time, from the group Flight of the Conchords. It’s just as funny, maybe even more so, than my previous favorite, Ooh Girl – An Honest R&B Song.
So Greg had an enormously popular post discussing the latest sex research and media portrayals in What Do These Enigmatic Women Want? Here I do my thing, providing a round up of all things sex-related.
To put you in the mood, I’ll start with funny sex, then go through neuro, anthro and public health themes, and wrap up with some basic info sites and a couple places to explore more.
Funny Sex
Bonobos – Let’s Talk about Sex
Of course we have a bonobo sex video! But not just any video. It’s a music video.
Dr. Petrya Boyton, My Geeky Valentine (and not a PR sex survey in sight!)
Dr. Petra shares some of the geekier valentine links she has gotten. Some funny stuff.
Regina Lynn, NSF Management Had Time to Surf Porn?
A great take on the recent “scandal” of government employees doing NSFW activities
Natasha Mitchell, A Poet Responds (with Sexually Selected Verse)
Sexual selection and the mating mind. It starts: “So evolution has made the human brain a phallus. A frontal protuberance that is rather callous.”
Neuro Sex
Scicurious, Friday Weird Science: Sex in an MRI, Is That Romantic or What!
Kinda cramped – but, hey, there’s no standing in the way of science. You can also get the full paper, Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal
Neuroanthropology 