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Beyond Right and Left

I came across David McKnight’s reflection on his own book of the same name, Beyond Right and Left, which tackles political ideas and the fight over “human nature.”  We’ve dealt with some similar ideas in the critical discussion we had over Steven Pinker and his essay on a moral instinct.  McKnight’s take seems to be more thoughtful. 

McKnight’s argument boils down to this: “Any plans for social reform must take account of the limitations presented by human nature. As remarkable as human diversity and capacity is, it is not unlimited. Any new political vision which assumes we can create societies without conflict or without self interest, is doomed to fail. Attempts at perfection, in politics or religion, have proven disastrous.” 
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The Rat Park

Here’s a great article on some of my favorite research, how creating a Rat Park (i.e., paradise for rats), leads to remarkably low rates of spontaneous drug use rates among animal models.  As the article goes, this research by Bruce Alexander “led him to conclude that drugs — even such hard drugs as heroin and cocaine — do not cause addiction; the user’s environment does.”  The Rat Trap piece over at The Walrus Magazine goes on to examine the Rat Park research, and then Alexander’s subsequent work on environmental causes for addiction.

One good quote: “Alexander’s research reveals that addiction rates are low when societies are stable, and they rise at times of social disruption. ‘The extreme case is the aboriginal people,’ he says. ‘You don’t have anything identifiable as addiction until you screw up their culture, and then alcoholism becomes a major problem. In extreme cases, addiction rates can go from zero to close to 100 percent.’  Such spikes suggest that environment is a stronger determinant of addiction than chemistry. As Alexander puts it, if you put a carton of eggs under a hydraulic press, it’s true some of the eggs will crack before others, but the problem isn’t the eggs. It’s the press.”

Still, understanding which eggs will crack, and why; and how and why specific cracks happen, and not other cracks, all provide an important role for more proximate research.  It is that mix, of environment through individuals down to mechanisms and then back out, which is particularly challenging but interesting in addiction.  And, in the end, that type of research might lead us to develop theoretical models that will go beyond treating either environments or genetics as hydraulic press models, imprinting us with their forms.  In any case, for getting started, it is crucial to recognize the context, the overall lay of the land, and Alexander’s work provides us one good (though not complete, for me at least) perspective on that.

Where to study neuroanthropology?

One of our readers, David Navega from Portugal, asked a great question about a very practical matter: where are the centres of neuroanthropological research? A great question which caused me to just about choke on my coffee. I had to break it to David that, well, I’m not really that sure. There are pockets of people around doing work that I would consider to be part of ‘neuroanthropology,’ broadly defined, though they might run screaming from the designation. But his question is an excellent one, and I would like to put that out to the readers, with an opportunity for them to write in with universities, centres, departments, or programs that would support this sort of research.

Aside from the two obvious candidates from the blog — the University of Notre Dame (where Daniel, Agustín, and a host of other good people work and teach) and Macquarie University (where I work, alongside great colleagues in my department and others) — there are a few programs that stand out. I’m going to list some, but I hope very much NOT to exclude anyone. If I don’t include your program, please drop us a line (without too much abuse of this author) to let us know you’re out there. We want to know where you are.

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Brain-culture, memes, and choosing examples

Earlier today, I wrote a post on Bruce Wexler’s book where I suggested that ideology and ‘culture shock’ were not necessarily the best case studies to work with when discussing the integration of social theory with neurosciences. My reasons for this are many, but they boil down to a fear that, if we choose our case studies poorly, we will not offer compelling integrated accounts that bring together biological studies of the brain and humanistic studies of society and culture. It may have seemed that I was not overly generous to Wexler, however, even though I quite like his work, so I thought I’d balance this out by giving some examples of ways that anthropologists have similarly chosen examples that make it especially difficult to present coherent accounts across different scales and perspectives on a subject.

One of the best/worst examples of attempting to prematurely bridge the gap between culture and brain science is the concept of ‘memes.’ First proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (in The Selfish Gene), a ‘meme’ is defined by Dawkins as the smallest unit of cultural information, which spreads from one person to the next through diffusion, sort of like an infection. Dawkins and other ‘memeticists’ (is that a word… or a meme?) are at pains to argue that culture propogates itself, like a catchy tune you can’t get out of your head or a fashion you must have that you then make your friends crazy to imitate, because of the effectiveness of the meme, not because it is useful to the bearers. Proponents also argue that, although there are significant differences with genes, evolutionary theory can also be applied to memes to understand how cultural ideas spread, develop, change, or become extinct.

So what’s the problem with memes?
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Tools, mirrors and the expandable body

Michael Balter writes in Science NOW Daily News, Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind, about recent research led by Italian neuroscientist, Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma, head of the team responsible for discovering ‘mirror neurons’ (which I’ve been banging on about for a while, here and here). Rizzolatti’s team was looking at how primate brains managed to do the same tasks with hands and with tools. As Balter describes the research: ‘So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain’s trick is to treat tools as just another body part.’

Two monkeys were trained from six to eight months to grasp food with pliers. Then the team documented the activity of 113 neurons in areas F5 and F1, a region linked to manipulating objects. How did the monkeys’ motor areas act when using the tools?

The researchers first established the brain’s firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Balter summarize their conclusions: ‘Rizzolatti and his co-workers conclude that when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.”‘

Continue reading “Tools, mirrors and the expandable body”