Category: Psychological anthropology

David Brooks, Part One: The Cognitive Age

For those of you who believe the mind the center of all things, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, has two editorials this week that point to wider transformations that are shaping the world in which we live. And thus our very minds.

In this post I’ll cover yesterday’s editorial The Cognitive Age, which starts with taking the over-hyping of globalization to task. “Globalization is real and important. It’s just not the central force driving economic change.” After all, globalization is an old process, kicked into high gear by the European nations in the 1500s, as Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz have convincingly shown with their books, Europe and the People Without History and Sweetness and Power.

Brooks wants to make a different point about today’s global economy: “Global competition has accounted for a small share of job creation and destruction over the past few decades. Capital does indeed flow around the world. But as Pankaj Ghemawat of the Harvard Business School has observed, 90 percent of fixed investment around the world is domestic. Companies open plants overseas, but that’s mainly so their production facilities can be close to local markets.”

In other words, Brooks wants to side-step the pro vs. con debate about globalization and free markets, with Thomas Friedman and his The World Is Flat on the more-or-less optimist side and Joseph Stiglitz and his Globalizations and Its Discontents on the more-or-less pessimist side. (And for a critical take on all the pundits, see the collection edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back.)

Brooks points to local change as a critical feature in our changing world, something that anthropologists have often discussed but in a much different fashion. For example, Carla Freeman in High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean shows how the arrival of global jobs in Barbados, in this case high-tech informatics jobs, reworked local gender relations and feminine identities. In a more drastic sense, Beatriz Manz shows with her book Paradise in Ashes how global politics and local elites mixed in terrible fashion to drive the harrowing destruction of the highland Maya in Guatemala. Global processes always work through local structures, whether we’re taking about globalization or about the brain.

Brooks’ piece comes down to two forces, technological change and skills, with an obvious auxiliary: the need for education. “The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change (hastened by competition with other companies in Canada, Germany or down the street). Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does the America… The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution.”

Continue reading “David Brooks, Part One: The Cognitive Age”

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City

Grand Theft Auto IV comes out tomorrow. Looks like it might be the best in the series, certainly one of the best games of the year. The early reviews gathered at Metacritic have an average score of 99 out of 100 as I write this. Rockstar Games, the gaming company that has made Grand Theft Auto, estimates a pre-order demand around $400 million. So it’s big. Huge.

But why?

I will make a simple argument. It is the combination of creative anthropology, sophisticated game design and game play, and the right brain hooks that makes video games like Grand Theft Auto work so well.

And the reviews show it. In the rest of the piece, I will draw excerpts from three places, the IGN review, the New York Times review, and the highlight quotes from Metacritic.

Creative Anthropology

Take creative fiction, and add world-building and a do-it-yourself story, and then you have what I mean by creative anthropology. Some Geek Love through role playing and fantasy, mixed with narrative to get the cultural buy-in.

So here’s GameSpy: “The very nature of the American Dream is the central theme in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV, a gaming masterpiece that is a picture-perfect snapshot of the underworld of today’s big cities.”

The New York Times gushes, “The real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York.”

Continue reading “Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City”

Real Beauty and Why Women Want

In my medical anthropology class last Thursday, three students led our discussion of Caroline Knapp’s Appetites: Why Women Want, a memoir of anorexia, desire, femininity and feminism, and women and their bodies. To break the ice, they broke the class up into small groups and had the other students work on imaginary magazine covers for Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health (see also my previous post, Ethnography and the Everyday).

The startling thing, in retrospect, was not that it was a fun exercise, but that it was so easy to do. The students knew what each magazine aimed for, they got the stereotypical headlines down right, they mixed images and bodies and sex and fashion and pleasure into catchy titles. All those titles implied a need, and also a solution, an improvement. Even I got into the mix, adding some choice vernacular to the Men’s Health cover. The question lingers, why so easy…

Let me tell you first about the video that the student trio also showed, “Onslaught,” part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It’s media. It gets its point across, and much more. Watch it. It’s short. It helps sets up my Randy Pausch head fake.

Knapp’s book Appetites dwells on the media, on men and women and sex, and on mother-daughter relations.

Continue reading “Real Beauty and Why Women Want”

Moerman’s Placebo

I have been wanting to write a post about the placebo effect for some time, after finding a wonderful YouTube video about getting drunk without being drunk. And then today I saw a very different “placebo effect” that also drives home Dan Moerman’s point when he says that the placebo effect is better thought of as “the meaning response.” (Moerman is an anthropologist, of course.)

The video, How to Get Drunk Without Drinking, shows Derren Brown demonstrating “a method I used at university which allows people to recreate any drug state, adrenaline, alcohol, you name it, without actually taking the drug.” (If it doesn’t play, you can go directly to the YouTube version.) What is so striking about the video is Brown’s use of imagination, embodiment, practice, suggestion, and memory to accomplish the effect, and the ability of the brain to then switch between such different states so quickly. It’s also quite funny!

The other piece, The Cure by Sarah Manguso, is adapted from her forthcoming memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. Manguso writes of being twenty-one, her life in danger from an auto-immune disease, and her desire to make love to someone. Her own antibodies were attacking her body, as she wryly notes, “trying to destroy my nervous system — a misperception that caused me a lot of trouble.” She returned to college with a huge tube sticking out of her chest, a necessary part of the regular blood treatments she needed.

“My blood was removed and cleaned and put back more than 50 times. After that, my hematologist tried another treatment: massive gamma-globulin infusions. The second infusion kept me going for three months, and it was decided I wouldn’t have to have my plasma replaced again. My neurologist said I’d turned a corner, so after 11 1/2 months, my central line was pulled.”

“I believed, though, that I would stop secreting antibodies only after I had sexual intercourse. And though I looked worse than I ever had in my life, thanks to the steroids — I was fat and swollen, covered in acne, and had a gruesomely round face — I thought my legendarily promiscuous musician friend might still be interested.”

Continue reading “Moerman’s Placebo”

Tightening your belt on your mind

The New York Times has an opinion piece by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind, on the implications of new research on ‘willpower.’ Daniel already noted this research in his post, Glucose, Self Control and Evolution, and linked to the original research paper, Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than a Metaphor.

The New York Times‘ piece discusses the possibility that spending discipline necessitated by economic hard times might lead to less ‘willpower’ when confronting weight control issues. The authors write:

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

Specifically, the research team ‘found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.’ In one study, subjects were either given radishes or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before doing a puzzle (how did they get human ethics clearance for the cookies?!). The folks who ate the radishes lasted longer and were more persistent in experimental tasks than the cookie eaters, or those who were allowed to pass on the radish appetizer.

Continue reading “Tightening your belt on your mind”

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).

Continue reading “Two languages, one brain and theory of mind”