Category: Psychological anthropology

Time Globalized

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchStefan Klein has an editorial, Time Out of Mind, in today’s New York Times, where he writes “the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions.”

 He elaborates on this argument as follows:

Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time… To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. Neuroscientists have observed this phenomenon using computer-assisted functional magnetic resonance imaging tomography. When subjects are asked to indicate the time it takes to view a series of pictures, heightened activity is measured in the centers that control muscular movement, primarily the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and the supplementary motor area. That explains why inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any Tai Chi master knows.Time seems to expand when our senses are aroused. Peter Tse, a neuropsychologist at Dartmouth, demonstrated this in an experiment in which subjects were shown a sequence of flashing dots on a computer screen. The dots were timed to occur once a second, with five black dots in a row followed by one moving, colored one. Because the colored dot appeared so infrequently, it grabbed subjects’ attention and they perceived it as lasting twice as long as the others did. 

Klein then links this argument to stress: “Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash… Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.”

 His conclusion? “The remedy is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. Time is not money but ‘the element in which we exist,’ as Joyce Carol Oates put it more than two decades ago (in a relatively leisurely era). ‘We are either borne along by it or drowned in it’.”

 By coincidence, Kevin Birth, professor of anthropology at Queens College-CUNY, wrote us about our blog recently, highlighting his own work on time, anthropology and biology.  Birth has a recent article, “Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization (full pdf).”  Given that we live on a “rotating globe where each locale has its own cycles of day and night,” our present globalized economic system produces some severe contradictions that people struggle with in everyday life: “temporal conflicts between locations on the globe, desynchronization of biological cycles, and lack of correspondence between those cycles and social life.”

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Links to Society for Psychological Anthropology

Although their focus is not specifically on the brain sciences, both Daniel and I are members of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, one of the sections of the American Anthropological Association. In order to become a member, individuals have to join the AAA, which can get to be a substantial investment. But, for no cost, you can check out the website of the Soc for Psych Anth. There’s a number of resources worth checking out, including syllabi generously contributed by members for their courses on psychological anthropology and a list of graduate programs that are particularly strong in psychological anthropology.

The Society for Psychological Anthropology also has a list-serv that doesn’t put too much spam in my inbox (I may regret posting this for that reason). To join the list-serv, go to the sign-up page.

Autism and Understanding Others

Amanda Baggs presents her own life and thoughts in her YouTube video, In My Language, her translation of how she is in a constant conversation with the world around her.  She is autistic and does not speak.  But she can type, and after three minutes showing her interacting with her environment, she uses computer technology to explain herself to us.


I came across this video through Tara Parker-Pope’s post, The Language of Autism.  As Parker-Pope relates, “Ms. Baggs does far more than give us a vivid glimpse into her mind. Her video is a clarion call on behalf of people with cognitive disabilities whose way of communicating isn’t understood by the rest of the world.”

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Play and Embodiment

In yesterday’s post, Play and Culture, I discussed how the neurobiological and behavioral aspects of play feed into the production of culture.  Play helps integrate the processing and coordination of different brain systems and to produce skilled social and physical engagement with other individuals in the environment.  By being able to draw on these evolutionary and embodied precursors, play also helps with the formation of cultural patterns, particularly among children.  These cultural patterns—say, a game of Cowboys and Indians—then feedback to shape the coordinated behavior of the individuals involved, from everything to guns vs. arrows and good vs. bad to cultural valuations of indigenous people and gender roles. 

In many ways, it sounds like a fairly neat story, at least to me (well, I wrote it, didn’t I?).  But the process of cultural production and the ability of cultural forms to then re-engage with people still seems a bit of a black box to me.  Biology and behavior don’t quite get us to culture, even if I invoke emotional and motor processing in conjunction with social relationships.  It’s too far a jump, because it assumes that all these things just “naturally” come together and somehow produce culture.  It also relinquishes too much of “meaning” to culture.  Anthropologists have traditionally been quite happy to accept that deal in the mind-body split—we talk about meaning, you guys about neurotransmitters. 

Greg and I have both pushed embodiment and practices as a central way to mediate between meaning and neural function.  Bringing body, behavior, and organism-environment interactions into the picture certainly is a big help.  But in writing the posts on play, I realized that all the talk of “embodied cognition” suffers from the same problem that I talked about in the first post on play.  Researchers often assume that the integration of different brain systems happens naturally, without help, without any “outside” process to help it along.  I see the same thing happening with embodied cognition. 
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Play and Culture

Two earlier posts on The Neurobiology of Play and Taking Play Seriously examined play as the neurobiological and behavioral levels.  Together, they present an argument for play as one primary way that animals with large brains achieve neurological integration through play’s role in skilled behavioral engagement and the building of social relationships. The last post ended by discussing the role of play in joint coordination and reciprocal fair play, and the first post by saying that play helps combine sensory information, emotional states, cognitive framing, bodily movement, and decision making. 

Today I want to argue that together, these processes help promote the production of culture.  Without the integration of basic neurological processing and social relationships into culture, culture is, in effect, an empty shell of forms and roles and symbols.  Play connects us into cultural forms, helps recreate them anew for developing individuals and even create new forms.  In other words, I see play as part of how we get cultural creole, which I discussed in an early post, Avatars and Cultural Creole, on the challenge persistent on-line communities present to anthropology’s theory of culture. 

But first a mini-ethnographic moment.  I went sledding with my kids the other day.  My eldest son’s best friend joined us, along with his older sister.  At first I was sledding with my little daughter as the boys zipped and at times tumbled down the hill on their own.  They started to create a game out of it, imagining they were space ships in battle.  Arguments began to break out over who beat whom and what type of ship each one could be.  A new game quickly evolved as I started to race down on my sled after them—suddenly I became the enemy, trying to torpedo them, hands outstretched as they tried to squirm away.  (To note, the combined rough-and-tumble/Space Wars held no interest for the older sister and was a bit too dangerous for my daughter, so they started hanging out and doing things together.  Play and gender…)  Then the game evolved more, as I went up the other side of the run-off pond where we sled.  First I was a dangerous battleship attacking them.  Tiring more quickly than they did, I finally simply lay there on the flat bottom of the pond and became a battlestar which they could ram with fierce joy. 
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Cracks in Our Rose-Tinted Glasses?

In the last week, several media outlets have addressed research that presents an alternative view on the happy emphasis on positive psychology and self-help that has swept through America in the past few years.  I’ll just excerpt some pieces from each, not a lot of commentary this time. 

First, three pieces from Sharon Begley’s article “Happiness: Enough Already” in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569 

Excerpt #1: While careful not to extol depression—which is marked not only by chronic sadness but also by apathy, lethargy and an increased risk of suicide—[Diener] praises melancholia for generating “a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.” This is not romantic claptrap. Studies show that when you are in a negative mood, says Diener, “you become more analytical, more critical and more innovative. You need negative emotions, including sadness, to direct your thinking” 
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