Category: general

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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Wednesday Round Up #6

Gaming

Sqrl, Link Between Online Gaming and Violence Killed Off
“People who play violent games online actually feel more relaxed and less angry after they have played”

GameSpot News, Study: Gamers Show Autistic Traits
“the closer gamers were to being addicted to their hobby, the more likely they were to display “negative personality traits.”

Jackie Burrell, Game on Too Long: A Fine Line Separates Addiction, Fun
Relaxed or autistic?! A more balanced consideration of how much is too much

GameSpot News, Video Game Addiction a Mental Disorder?
The comments by gamers—the debate among themselves—provide plenty of insight into the cultural and health issues at stake

Vaughan Bell, Internet Addiction Nonsense Hits the AJP
A critical take on attempts to define internet addiction as a mental illness

Science Daily, Occupational Therapists Use Wii for Parkinson’s Study
The interactive Wii makes for functional fun

Health

Rense Nieuwenhuis, Disentangling the SES-Health Correlation
Poor health and lower class. Going beyond the chicken-or-the-egg to consider pathways

Eric Brunner, Biology and Health Inequality
Online PLOS Biology article: The translation of social differences into biological differences

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Anthropology, Tribal Politics, and Iraq

It’s rare to see anthropology used in debates about Iraq and the Middle East. Too often we’re reduced to the same marginalized position—for example, is participation by anthropologists in human terrain systems ethical or not? (For more on that, see Greg’s Culture Matters post here, Savage Mind’s summary, and Rick Shweder’s essay.) But today David Brooks has an essay in the New York Times entitled A Network of Truces. He builds off of Stanley Kurtz’s review essay, I and My Brother Against My Cousin, which analyzes Philip Salzman’s new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East.

Salzman basically calls attention to the vastly different sociopolitical organization that happens in Iraq, where tribal affiliation and segmentary politics make for a very different playing field than the liberal democracy, nation building Western stance.

David Brooks uses this approach to justify the surge and argue for a slow withdrawal (which many would take as meaning no withdrawal), not exactly the use of anthropology that many anthropologists would advocate. And Kutz is after even bigger fish, writing at the end, “We’ve taught ourselves a good deal about Islam over the past seven years. Yet tribalism is at least half the cultural battle in the Middle East, and the West knows little about it. Learning how to understand and critique the Islamic Near East through a tribal lens will open up a new and smarter strategy for change.” This stance recreates the good vs. evil, civilization vs. barbarians (tribes in this case) dichotomy that helped get us into the problem in the first place.

But for anthropologists who whine about not getting our ideas included in the public debate, here are two big publications bringing anthropology to the fore. I especially recommend the Kurtz review, since it provides a good overview of anthropological thinking about tribes, political organization, and the such before turning to its own political points.

So get in touch with the New York Times and the Weekly Standard to express yourself, and please feel free to debate this issue below.

A Crooked Science

Stanley Fish has an editorial today, Think Again-French Theory in America, which is a great reflection and historical contextualization of deconstructionism.  He builds much of the essay off the forthcoming book by Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.

 

The reason I like this piece by Fish is his ability to at one hand show the strengths and limits of a deconstructionist stance and on the other to show the polarization into the relativist versus absolutist “Culture Wars” in the US.

 

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Errol Morris and The Thin Blue Line

Sometimes art is way out ahead of science.  Errol Morris has an essay, “Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One),” which speaks to the complexity of human life, the mixture of moral judgments, memory, and evidence.  It is well worth a read.

He discusses the making of his documentary The Thin Blue Line, which helped to overturn a murder conviction in Dallas.  His essay, in one sense, is a long meditation on who we are, who we think we are, and how to show both.  His creative use of interviews, re-enactments, police evidence, audience perspective, and storytelling show how he already knew, intuitively, much of what we try to discuss here.

 I’ll copy his ending here:

Perception is endlessly colored by fantasy and belief – perception of the present as well as the past. If there is a story that we wish to believe, our perceptual apparatus will usually modify or reinterpret what we see rather than the other way around. We see things that do not exist and fail to see things that are right in front of our eyes. We often remember things incorrectly and our memories change over time.

The brain is not a Reality-Recorder. There is no perfect replica of reality inside our brains. The brain elides, confabulates, conflates, denies, suppresses, evades, confuses and distorts. It has its own agenda and can even work at cross-purposes with our conscious selves. Consciously, we may think that we see all and know all, but our brains may be “blind” to much of what is going on around us.

Many people believe they have found a way around the eccentricities of the brain by substituting a camera, but this only defers the problem. It does not solve it. Even photographs have to be perceived. They have to be seen. There is no shortcut around the Cartesian riddle of separating reality from the appearance of reality. There is no shortcut to reality. The brain is all we have.

Good Sexual Intercourse Lasts Minutes, Not Hours, Therapists Say

That’s the title of a report over at Science Daily.  A survey of 34 sex therapists found: “The average therapists’ responses defined the ranges of intercourse activity times: ‘adequate,’ from 3-7 minutes; ‘desirable,’ from 7-13 minutes; ‘too short’ from 1-2 minutes; and ‘too long’ from 10-30 minutes.”  The researchers Eric Corty and Jenay Guardiani conclude, “Unfortunately, today’s popular culture has reinforced stereotypes about sexual activity. Many men and women seem to believe the fantasy model of large penises, rock-hard erections and all-night-long intercourse.”

For a much funnier take on the same phenomenon, here’s a YouTube music video, “Ooh Girl” – An Honest R & B Song. You can also check out our comprehensive sex round up, including the very funny Business Time video, and Greg’s in-depth post, What do those enigmatic women want?