Category: Human variation

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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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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Genetics and Obesity

In my medical anthropology class, we’ve been reading Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss and the Myths and Realities of Dieting.  Kolata argues for a biological approach to obesity, that weight is largely under genetic control and that there is no ideal diet which is going to help all people lose weight.  In other words, Kolata is taking up the “nature” side of the nature/nurture debate, with a direct critique of the idea that if overweight people could simply use their willpower and follow the age-old recommendation of eat less and exercise more, they would be ideally thin like the beautiful people we see on television—the Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies of the world. 

Kolata sums up these points in a very amusing interview on The Colbert Report.  As Fat Fu summarizes about Kolata, “you can actually learn something about the state of the science. And which don’t conclude with exhortations to diet or insinuations that fat people are lazy and ignorant. In fact she doesn’t think diets work.” 

I like Kolata’s book, which is why I assigned it in my class.  And I certainly see the weight of the evidence as supporting many of her main points: heritability and biological regulation of body weight, as well as the absurdity of an “ideal diet” that will simply work for everyone (that’s called ideology, folks).  But Kolata gives us an approach that recreates the mind/body and culture/biology dichotomies, and resorts to a genetic determinism that both obscures the genetics and doesn’t leave much room for anthropology.  For example, she uses one study, a classic one by Stunkard et al. in 1990, to tell us that “70 percent of the variation in people’s weight’s may be accounted for by inheritance,” which is greater heritability than with “mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.” 

I’ll admit, I am not the biggest fan of twin studies.  They are generally done in western populations without much variance in environment or development and with relatively homogenous populations.  In public, these researchers generally claim the higher range of heritability estimates.  And perhaps most bothersome, these studies seem to provide us with a “why” that is not really there—“genetic” becomes tantamount to cause. 

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Obama and Race

The importance of history, the role of our own personal lives, a recognition of the power of our ideas and the stains of our faults, the emphasis on the strength of both inequality and hope.  Barack Obama’s speech on race in the United States, on the terrible patterns of the past and the foundational hopes and ideas of this nation, embodies much that I have found in trying to understand people’s lives on their own terms, those lives as both driving the same repeating patterns and offering the possibility of change. 

It was luck that I had decided to post a series on race today, and Obama’s speech, and the array of reactions today, were more than worthy inclusions—they were necessary.  Obama captures the movement towards a new way of managing our problems, of integration and reconciliation, of the best ideas presented clearly rather than as decisions hidden behind the doors of power.  Oh, he is a hard-core democrat, and I have as much cynicism about the possibility of our government working towards change.  History provides both lessons, of tragedy and triumph, and always at a cost.  And yet… 

Obama is reflexive, he sees the limits of knowledge, he sees the value of emotion as well as reason, he can judge vociferous ideas and statements but still cherish a person, he draws on his own experience to think about the larger lessons.  He is, as he says, against our continued tendency to “simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”  We simplify politics, we simplify brain biology, we simplify anthropology—and thus distort our engagement with our own larger reality.

Race is about that distortion, and using that distortion to justify the discrimination Obama so eloquently argues against.  It is an old theme in anthropology, the theme that really founded the field in the United States.  There is no manifest destiny in our biology; we forge it, for ourselves and too often against others.  It is time to turn the page, both back to our foundational moments and forward to what we can now do. 

Brain Enhancement: Beyond Either/Or

Benedict Carey writes, “Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?” covering the emerging debate on performance-enhancing drugs in academia and other intellectual pursuits.  This debate began in the journal Nature, and exploded since then.  (I’ve covered some similar issues in a previous post, Drugs and Biosociality.) 

Carey poses us this question, “Is prescription tweaking to perform on exams, or prepare presentations and grants, really the same as injecting hormones to chase down a home run record, or win the Tour de France?” 

Whatever our answer to that question is, and it is surely to be a complex answer (more on that in a second), it is clear to me that this is already happening.  In a recent paper, I showed how heavy users already engage in “functional use”—using methamphetamine, a stimulant, to work and play more, to deal with cognitive deficits, and to change their subjective state while continuing to interact in a normal social manner.  While I am almost hesitant to say it, in this matter, drug users are already on the avant-garde. 

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What’s the ‘culture’ in neuroanthropology?

Some cultural anthropologists are afraid of the brain sciences; they fear that neuroscientists want to dissolve culture into the study of the brain, discounting the necessity of studying culture, social interaction, systems of meaning, symbolism, everyday life, and all the things that cultural anthropologists have argued are important for shaping human life. Emily Martin, for example, one of the most interesting anthropologists working on the way that cultural assumptions shape medicine, medical education, and the like, writes in an article on the ‘mind-body’ problem of the dangers of ‘neuro-reductionist’ thought.

Martin’s fear is that, ultimately, although some in the brain sciences explicitly claim to have an interest in cultural differences, they do not grant the social the same degree of ‘reality’ as the cellular and organic. As Martin writes, although they sometimes discuss social and cultural differences; ‘… the levels in neuron man, a figure frequently reproduced in neuroscience texts, begin with molecules, but go no farther than the central nervous system’ (2000:574). I’m sure that Martin is right for a lot of neuroscience texts; but I would argue that cultural anthropology texts, in the main, probably demonstrate the same degree of partiality.

She sees ‘the neuroreductive cognitive sciences as the most dangerous kind of vortex—one close by and one whose power has the potential to suck in disciplines like anthropology, severely weakening them in the process’ (ibid.). Martin encourages anthropologists to unite ‘in opposition to a position in which the dyke between nature and culture has been breached, and all of what anthropologists call culture has drained through the hole and dissolved in the realm of neural networks’ (ibid.: 576).

Normally, I would argue that Martin is over-reacting, worried about a possibility that is too remote. But then, every once in a while, I read something that helps me to realize that Martin’s fear, however exaggerated, are grounded in concrete experiences. Rather than a ‘dyke between nature and culture,’ I find that the real issue is the slipperiness of the notion of culture that some in the brain sciences use. That is, if we look carefully at what they are using as the ‘cultural’ in their own attempts to grapple with cross-cultural differences in the brain, cognition, and development, we find that however well meaning, given the wrong tool, one is likely to wind up with a bit of a mess. Unfortunately, although I like the majority of what they write, I fear that this is the situation with a recent piece I stumbled across by reading Encephalon’s recent posting, Briefing the Next US President on 24 Neuroscience and Psychology Issues.
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