Category: Relationships

Headline: Maternal Instinct Is Wired Into The Brain

Sometimes it’s great to see other people make all those arguments that come to mind when brain imaging research gets turned into instincts and hard wiring.  Tara Parker-Pope runs a blog On Health through The New York Times, and while I have liked some of her previous posts (that’s where I found the autism YouTube video), today she really misses the mark.  And the people commenting really let her know it!

 So here’s the quick summary.  TPP reports on imaging research with 13 mothers and their 16-month-old infants (well, toddlers, wouldn’t they be by then?).  They were then shown videos of their own babies and other babies while images were taken of their brains.  “When a woman saw images of her own child smiling or upset, her brain patterns were markedly different than when she watched the other children. There was a particularly pronounced change in brain activity when a mother was shown images of her child in distress.”

TPP then provides a winner quote from the editor of Biological Psychiatry, which published the piece last month: “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior”

First comment, from PlainJane: “This does seem to be proving the bleeding obvious… [But] what happens then to mothers who are shown NOT to have these “natural” responses in their brains to their infants? Will they be locked up as freaks or have their kids taken from them? I can just imagine.  Or will neglectful mothers be able to say “oh its biological, I can’t help not bonding with my child”?  I applaud further research into all aspects of the human brain but you and other non-scientist commentators are vital in directing HOW this is viewed. It would be nice for your blog to put it in some more context.’

Katie: “By 16 months mothers and children must be bonded, and of course the mothers would react to seeing their child in distress – for more than a year they have been reacting to their child to meet its needs… And what about moms who adopt? or use surragates?”

Mark: “I would never have suspected that mothers have a special attachment to their own children. What will they find out next?”

Marcus: “The phrasing is misleading and suggests a common but fundamental misrepresentation of what this type of fMRI research shows — or maybe a misunderstanding that confuses a general audience. “Wired,” “hard-wired,” and “instinct” suggests genetically programmed in, like a reflex. A brain pattern that shows up on fMRI studies, however, can reflect brain “programming” that has been acquired through experience, to use the computer metaphor.”

LJB: “I can’t help but feel like this research is going to be used as the crux of some defense lawyer’s argument as to why his client abandoned her child. While I’m sympathetic to post-partum issues (it took me longer than expected to bond with my son after birth) I was still fiercely protective of him and responded to him, although I was terrified of not doing it right when I went to him. I think the mother-infant bond is more complex and this is just one of the many layers of the proverbial onion.”

JiminBoulder: “Will you please stop turning us into machines?”

Jeanne, mother of five: “The absolute hilarity of the line “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior,” made my day!”

Taking Play Seriously

When I lived in Nigeria, I used to cross the city of Calabar to visit the defunct zoo, taking food for the animals—a constrictor snake, some crocodiles, a male drill monkey—still trapped in cages.  Jacob, a large juvenile chimpanzee, lived in that zoo in a cage roughly ten feet by ten feet.  As I walked onto the zoo grounds, Jacob would greet me with an exuberant pant-hoot and I would respond back (my Intro to Anthro students are endlessly amused when I demonstrate my pant-hooting skills).  Though I carried food for him, what Jacob most wanted to do was play with me. 

Jacob loved to play tag first, swinging back and forth across the front of his thickly barred cage, sticking a hand out to see if I could catch it.  We would rush back and forth together, Jacob generally favoring the role of being chased.  Then we’d settle down for some tickling.  Believe me, being tickled by a chimpanzee is, I am sure, rather what my boys feel when I get overly excited about tickling them. 

Jacob’s fingers were powerful, and his arms more so, but I made myself laugh in the chortling sound of chimpanzees.  If he got too strong, I could simply let out a sound of pain and he’d stop.  Then we’d get started again, because of course I loved to tickle him back.  I remember times, our heads together, pressed against the bars, his hand at the back of my neck, my fingers digging into his ribs.  It was such fun, yet I never could quite shake the thought in that moment that he could crush my head so easily against the bars. 
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Mimicry and Persuasion

Greg, I had to put this up for you–mirroring others, salesmen, and the brain?  Couldn’t be a better combination, unless we also stick some no-holds-barred fighting or choke techniques in there when mimicked persuasion fails…

The NY Times has an article today, “You Remind Me of Me,” whose basic point comes to this: “subtle mimicry comes across as a form of flattery, the physical dance of charm itself.”  Subtle mimicry is not immediate and seemingly deliberate, but is a shadowing that happens a couple seconds later.  In one study, supposedly on a new sports drink “Vigor,” some study participants were subtly mimicked in the lab, legs crossed a couple seconds later, body position copied, and so forth.  The result: “None of the copied participants picked up on the mimicry. But by the end of the short interview, they were significantly more likely than the others to consume the new drink, to say they would buy it and to predict its success in the market. In a similar experiment, the psychologists found that this was especially true if the participants knew that the interviewer, the mimic, had a stake in the product’s success.”
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The Family Dinner Deconstructed

National Public Radio had a radio broadcast yesterday morning on “The Family Dinner Deconstructed.”  Here’s the blurb: “The ritual of a family dinner has been praised as an antidote to bad grades and bad habits in kids. But as researchers look closer at the family dinner, they raise the question: Is it the mere act of eating together that counts, or is it that strong families are already more likely to have a family dinner?” 

The reporter does a wonderful job talking with a variety of researcher to focus in on the proximate features of the family dinner—conversations, relationships, rituals, emotions—and how they can impact physical and mental health.  For example, the quality of conversations at mealtime was a better predictor of reading development than parents actually reading to their children.  But what mattered was the content on dinner conservation, that it was complex and “rich with explanation, story telling, and more.”  Similarly, for physical and mental development (for example, eating disorders), specific behaviors at dinner proved important: roles assigned (setting the table, beginning and end to dinner); a genuine concern about daily activities; and a sense of empathy and concern for each other. 

While the radio cast pushes a double-blind study to “determine” the specific effects of a good-quality family dinner versus dinner-as-usual, the announcer rightly acknowledges that doing such research is a daunting prospect.  I would add that an ethnographic approach that builds on this educational and psychological research and that teases out the relationships between dinner, family interaction, and development as a joint physical-mental phenomenon could also add some great insights.

Mice brains on stress

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchIn February 2006, a research team at University of Texas and Tufts University published a piece in Science on how experience could modify the structures in the brain that affect the production of dopamine through brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) (abstract here). The research team used ‘social defeat’ to explore ‘the neurobiological mechanisms through which psychosocial experience alters the activity of the mesolimbic dopamine pathway’; in other words, the malleable system that can induce structural changes in the brains of mice in response to persistent patterns of social interaction.The abstract, while a little thick, suggests all sorts of intriguing possibilities:

Mice experiencing repeated aggression develop a long-lasting aversion to social contact, which can be normalized by chronic, but not acute, administration of antidepressant. Using viral-mediated, mesolimbic dopamine pathway–specific knockdown of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), we showed that BDNF is required for the development of this experience-dependent social aversion. Gene profiling in the nucleus accumbens indicates that local knockdown of BDNF obliterates most of the effects of repeated aggression on gene expression within this circuit, with similar effects being produced by chronic treatment with antidepressant. These results establish an essential role for BDNF in mediating long-term neural and behavioral plasticity in response to aversive social experiences.  

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Why We Love, The Time Magazine Version

Too bad Jeffrey Kluger didn’t pay closer attention to Hannibal Lecter.  He might have written a better article on “Why We Love,” out this week in Time Magazine, instead of giving us a flawed view of evolution and brain research.  Still, in furtive glimpses of data, rather than quick quotes and pop theories, another way to think about love glides onto stage. 

As I told my anthropology students yesterday, the initial assumptions we make so often dictate our ideas and our results.  But those assumptions are generally presented as “facts” or assertions of truth, part of an unassailable background.  So here are the ones packed into Kluger’s piece, right there at the beginning: (1) that humans rely on our wits, so “losing our faculties over a matter like sex” needs explaining (in other words, humans are rational, why have primitive passions); (2) that we evolved in a “savanna full of predators,” so getting distracted by love could be potentially dangerous, (3) that our genes have “concerns,” primary among them to make us reproduce as much as possible (“breed now and breed plenty gets that job done”), and (4) that we can extend these sorts of explanations to all “the rituals surrounding” sex, love and relationships (like a bunch of scientists drunk on their own ideas—explanatory expansion gone wild!). 
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