Category: Learning

What makes humans unique?

Photo by JoProf. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, whose work on chimpanzees and human children, on the biological capacity for culture, and a range of other subjects, must place him among the most important contemporary thinkers using comparative primate data, asks ‘How Are Humans Unique?’ in a recent piece for The New York Times‘ Idea Lab.

As Tomasello suggests, many things that we thought once definitively marked the difference between humans and other species, have gradually been found in evidence in other species — tools, deductive learning, language, even certain patterns of anti-social behaviour suggesting war and the like. The result is, for some, an uneasy sense that we might not be so different from other animals, and for others, a satisfaction that humans might be thought about using analytical frames developed with other species.

One thing that Tomasello points out very well is that many of humans’ cognitive advantages over other intelligent animals are ‘products of collective cognition,’ that is, not so much just an individual’s ability as the ability of an individual invested with the collective creativity and mental tricks invented by previous generations of humans.

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You can lead a horse to water

I’m not sure what to file this thought under, but I figure I may as well share it. I was holding a couple of my wife’s horses today while our farrier, Chris, shoed them, and we got to talking about horses instincts. I think I was asking about horses hooves in the wild, how they responded to injury or heavy use. He joked that the only reason we really needed to clip their hooves was that we kept them in overly-soft paddocks, fed them high energy feed, and thus they didn’t cover the miles and miles that wild horses would have to in order to get enough to eat. In other words, the ecological niche we created for our horses was so unusual that the whole horse physiology was different.

He also pointed out that most domestic horses, unless they are trained to, will not drink from natural water sources. If they’re accustomed to drinking from troughs or buckets, some will die of thirst before drinking out of a creek or lake. They may recognize that it’s water on some level, but they don’t trust the source unless they’re used to encountering water in this way. Obviously, they might be socialized early in order to become acquainted with water in a wider variety of forms.

I don’t have any information on whether or not a horse has ever died from thirst in the presence of lakes or streams, so I can’t confirm this. (I’ll look it up and report back.) If it is true — and I have no reason to doubt Chris as he’s a deeply knowledgeable guy on the subject of horses — it would be a fascinating case of a very useful ‘instinct’ not being inevitable. It also explains the ‘You can lead a horse to water…’ proverb, which I didn’t really understand until today, in retrospect.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

I finally watched it–the Carnegie Mellon professor, dying of pancreatic cancer, and his words and wisdom to his friends, students, colleagues and most importantly, his young daughters. There is a reason the lecture is so popular. It made me proud to be a professor, made me consider how to teach interdisciplinary and engaged courses, made me stand up for a student who is struggling, and more. Trust the head fake.

Digital Ethnography

Michael Wesch has an on-going project Digital Ethnography with his students at Kansas State University. Looking at what they have done impressed me, and gave me ideas for things that I might do with my own classes and research. I like the engaged, participatory style and with issues like substance use or health care seeking, it proves so useful to show people what it is like. Students doing the work and then sharing that with a broader world, that is a good model.

Wesch has one popular video The Machine Is Us/ing Us, covering Internet 2.0 and the revolution in interconnected digitial communication. In many ways, I found his message about the Internet as quite similar to the message we are promoting here at neuroanthropology, that connections matter, that we drive change in our brains, that we need to rethink traditional concepts. So enjoy that.

His students came up with a great video A Vision of Students Today, which helps justify spending time on a blog rather than traditional papers (hey, students are more likely to actually read this) and also the need to teach in non-traditional but equally effective ways. And it’s just well done.

I’m Not Really Running: Flow, Dissociation, and Expertise

The British long-distance runner Paula Radcliffe won last year’s New York City Marathon.  In a later interview, discussing the struggles and pains of running a marathon, Radcliffe said, “When I count to 100 three times, it’s a mile.  It helps me focus on the moment and not think about how many miles I have to go. I concentrate on breathing and striding, and I go within myself.” 

Gina Kolata used that quote in her article, I’m Not Really Running, I’m Not Really Running, which talked about dissociation strategies and peak performances: “The moral of the story? No matter how high you jump, how fast you run or swim, how powerfully you row, you can do better. But sometimes your mind gets in the way.  ‘All maximum performances are actually pseudo-maximum performances,’ Dr. [Bill] Morgan said. ‘You are always capable of doing more than you are doing’.”

Kolata recounts how this applies even to the everyday struggles of training: “Without realizing what I was doing, I dissociated a few months ago, in the middle of a long, fast bike ride. I’d become so tired that I could not hold the pace going up hills. Then I hit upon a method — I focused only on the seat of the rider in front of me and did not look at the hill or what was to come. And I concentrated on my cadence, counting pedal strokes, thinking of nothing else. It worked. Now I know why.  Dr. Morgan, who has worked with hundreds of subelite marathon runners, said every one had a dissociation strategy.”

Besides covering her own experience and having a brief mention of Tibetan monks, Kolata writes about how the brain can affect training and performance: “ ‘Imagine you are out running on a wet, windy, cold Sunday morning,’ said Dr. Timothy Noakes, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town. ‘The conscious brain says, “You know that coffee shop on the corner. That’s where you really should be”.’ And suddenly, you feel tired, it’s time to stop.  ‘There is some fatigue in muscle, I’m not suggesting muscles don’t get fatigued,’ Dr. Noakes said. ‘I’m suggesting that the brain can make the muscles work harder if it wanted to’.” 

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(insert clever French grammar title here)

Every once in a while, I drop some comment about language being ‘un-language-like’ when I’m talking about culture. It’s a tick, aggravated by my envy of linguistic anthropology, my wish that bodily practice was studied in anthropology as much (or had produced as much cool theory), and by my secret insecurity that I never took a course from Michael Silverstein when I was at the University of Chicago (what can I say? I was busy…). Most readers probably overlook my comments about language, chalking them up to PGSSD (post grad-school stress disorder) or some moral failing that they don’t want to know any more about. But I feel compelled to explain, especially since I found this great article on French speakers disagreeing on the gender of nouns (thanks to Dr. X’s Free Associations and grant-writing avoidance behaviour on my part).

Too often I think anthropologists use language ‘to think with’ when they are talking about ‘culture.’ Language is a kind of subliminal or suppressed metaphor guiding how they talk about this thing, culture. It leads to various problems, such as ‘code’ metaphors, reification of ‘the language/culture’ in things like meme theory, and the like. That is, people say some pretty daft things about ‘culture’ guided by the analogy with language.

The problem is, they’re not just committing sloppy thinking about human variation, they also don’t generally have a very grounded, empirically based view of language. That is, they assume things about language that linguistic anthropologists would dispute, especially those coming from a pragmatic approach (like Silverstein, from whom i took no courses and thus feel inadequate to be writing this).

Well, every once in a while, web surfing drops the perfect example right in your lap.

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