Category: general

The Cultural Brain in Five Flavors

By Daniel Lende

Next week is the Critical Neurosciences workshop, where I will help lead a discussion of the cultural brain. So I better figure out what I want to say!

Thinking about it yesterday, I came up with this. Rather than one “cultural brain” and lots of arguing about what that means, I will argue that we have five distinct varieties of the cultural brain to consider.

Each flavor deals with a different sort of problem at the intersection of human culture and neuroscience. I will outline these different intersections below, and provide links to our posts to give further depth.

Here are our five flavors:

-The Symbolic Brain: Culture, meaning and the brain combined
-The Inequality Brain: Bad outcomes through society, power, and the brain
-The Theory Brain: Neuroscience impacts social science theory
-The Brain Transformed: Social science impacts brain theory
-The Critical Brain: Taking down bad brain justifications and examining the cultural uses of the brain

The Symbolic Brain

The symbolic brain represents the increasing convergence of work in anthropology and in neuroscience on questions of meaning, symbolism, subjective experience, and behavior. To take an example from my own work, understanding compulsive drug use has required that I examine how processes of attention and behavioral involvement are altered by consistent drug use and how people interpret their own use, from the reasons they had to use to what the experience of use represents to them.

In many ways, this work focuses on a central problem raised but not resolved by Clifford Geertz when he wrote that we should treat human behavior as “symbolic action—action, which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies (1973: 9).” Today, rather than reducing that significance to either a cultural pattern or a brain function (both determinist approaches), people interested in the cultural brain are looking for synergies between different domains of research.

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Sex differences in the brain

Graphic from Slate
Graphic from Slate
I fear that I don’t link enough to Mind Hacks because I kind of assume that anyone who regularly reads us also checks out Vaughn’s excellent work over there. But he’s clued me into a series of articles on Slate that are excellent in his piece, Selling the ‘battle of the sexes.’ I won’t write something derivative here: you should really go read the piece by Vaughn and then link through to the series on Slate, starting with The Sex Difference Evangelists on several recent books that push the ‘sex differences are in the brain’ argument despite conflicting data. Vaughn nicely sums up the series by Amanda Schaffer:

Of course, there are cognitive differences between men and women, but the punchline of almost all sex difference research is that the extent of the difference between any two individuals, be they male or female, tends to vastly outweigh the average difference between the sexes.

Furthermore, while some of these books suggest the differences are innate many studies have found the differences change markedly over time and are influenced by cultural or social factors.

The series is well-researched, easy to digest and looks at the areas of communication, empathy, maths ability and development during childhood. It’s also accompanied by a three-part video discussion, which tackles similar issues.

And, as a bonus, when you link through to the material on Slate, there’s heaps of other links, including related book reviews, video segments, and other items (although some of it is not as solid as Schaffer’s work).
Graphic from Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2194486/entry/2194488/.

Four Stone Hearth #44: Everything fine on the 4th

Greg Laden has up the latest Four Stone Hearth. In the spirit of the holiday, it’s ‘Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival: The Fourth Of July Everything is Just Fine We’ve Got It Under Control In America Edition.‘ Lots of good anthropology.

I’ll be quoting from Laden’s own ‘Morning Sickness is an Adaptation, not a … Sickness‘ in my upcoming lecture on evolutionary perspectives on sex and sexuality. I also particularly liked The Myth of Cultural Miscommunication at Savage Minds. The post, by Kerim, uses a good video to point out why the problem with ‘miscommunication’ in the Iraq war isn’t always lack of knowledge; sometimes it’s simply lack of concern for the Iraqis and the relatively simple things that they are trying to communicate. Finally, Afarensis has a nice discussion of technological development of projectile points, and the issue of ‘optimizing’ design, at ‘Return of the Projectile Points.’ But please check out the original as there’s a lot of good material in this one, and happy 4th of July to all the Yanks!

Graphic from Greg Laden.

Erkan Saka and Media Anthropology

Erkan Saka has a great round up entitled, “Media Anthropology, Fifteen Years On.” His blog, Erkan Saka’s Field Diary, covers Turkey, the European Union, and cultural anthropology, as well as providing consistently good round ups of the anthro blogosphere (here’s one, another, and a third).

Open Anthropology has provided a good summary of what Erkan does, if you want another perspective on his work. Also check out Erkan’s online paper on Blogging as a Research Tool. Finally, this post gives me the chance to wish Erkan good luck with his dissertation defense—only 157 days to go!

Cabbies’ brains

The BBC has a nice piece covering the continuing research of Prof. Eleanor Maguire (Wellcome Institute of Neurology, University College London) on the distinctive development of the hippocampus in the brains of London taxi drivers: Taxi drivers’ brains ‘grow’ on the job. Prof. Maguire’s research in this area is pretty extensive (see publication list). She’s found a great naturally occurring experiment in the brains of cabbies who have to navigate London’s notoriously byzantine downtown streets.

As the BBC report describes, driving a cab in London is difficult and demands a well-developed knowledge of urban geography:

In order to drive a traditional black cab in London drivers have to gain “the knowledge” – an intimate acquaintance with the myriad of streets in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.

It can take around three years of hard training, and three-quarters of those who embark on the course drop out, according to Malcolm Linskey, manager of London taxi school Knowledge Point. “There are 400 prescribed runs which you can be examined on but in reality, you can be asked to join any two points,” he told BBC News Online.

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