Neuroanthropology

Starting tomorrow I will put up the posts that my students have been working on all semester for my class Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse. They started with a group presentation to the class, then worked through several drafts as I gave them feedback. Now each group gets their chance to share something with the world, rather than simply turn in a final paper (but they get to do that too–I’ve got my bases covered).

The topics include stress, brain imaging, and denial, among others, and I will post one a day over the coming days (I’ll probably skip Sunday, though). While I do not necessarily agree with everything that they say, these are the arguments that they developed–their takes on the material. And they’ve got some good takes.

So look for their posts over the coming days!

I’ve been waiting to hear how David Blaine went in his attempt to break the world record. John Tierney reports in David Blaine Sets Breath-Holding Record on The New York Times website that, in fact, Blaine was successful. On Oprah Winfrey’s show, he held his breath for 17 minutes 4 seconds, a world record for the activity with the use of pure oxygen before making an attempt.

As Tierney reports, Blaine was successful in spite of the fact that he couldn’t control his heart beat like he had on previous breath holding:

After he filled his lungs with pure oxygen, his heart rate remained at 130 during the second minute of the breath-hold and then stayed above 100 for much of the time. It was 124 in the 15th minute. The higher the heart rate, the more quickly oxygen is consumed, and the more painful the carbon dioxide buildup. But apparently his CO2 tolerance training (repeated breath holds every morning) was just enough to compensate. In the last minute his heart rate became erratic and he got concerned enough to start rising from the bottom of the water-filled sphere, but he kept his head underwater more than a half minute longer than the old record of 16:32.

Tierney reports that during training, Blaine was able to keep his heart rate down into the range of 40 to 60 beats-per-minute, but being on television apparently made it difficult to keep his pulse down.

Continue reading “Blaine breaks world record for breath-holding”

I went to see a student sing with Notre Dame’s jazz band on Tuesday. She did a great job! I was also reminded of this great tune by Charlie Parker, the jazz saxophonist and composer: “Anthropology.” I found this good clip by Czech saxophonist František Kop. Of course the anthropologist has to have Anthropology in a globalized setting… in this case, the jazz club U malého Glena (Little Glen) in Prague.

You can hear Parker himself on this online recording available at Imeem.

Charlie Parker would be a great person to dwell on for some neuroanthropology. Just not today. But Robert Philen, an anthropologist at West Florida, has a good riff on Parker and how biography informs our appreciation of artistry. And for a long bio, see Parker on Wikipedia. Cultural icon, brilliant musician, heroin addict, the Bird knew how to play.

Dave Munger has just put of a great post over at Cognitive Daily, one of the sites I read pretty religiously: With a little training, we can recognize other races as well as our own. Dave discusses a recent article in Perception by a team led by Elinor McKone in which subjects were trained to recognize faces from ethnic groups other than their own and then subjected to very difficult recognition tasks. Turns out that people can get pretty good at this task, which many of us don’t do very well if we’re not ‘trained.’

I’m not going to go over the same turf that Munger does (not least of all because I won’t do it as well as he does), but I will copy his conclusion:

In other words, memory for different-race faces can be trained to work in the same way it does for same-race faces, even in a difficult peripheral-vision test, in a relatively short period of time. It doesn’t take years of immersion in a foreign culture, just an hour or so studying pictures (albeit hundreds and hundreds of them!).

This suggests that humans have a general pattern for recognizing faces that is adaptable even to unfamiliar faces. McKone et al. argue that we recognize same-race faces holistically, instead of feature by feature. Initially when we see a different-race face, we attempt to remember it using individual features, much the same we remember a animal or other object. But after some training, we learn to recognize even different-race faces holistically, which can be more accurate, but which doesn’t work as well when faces are upside-down.

Briefly, the research runs against the tendency to see the psychological or neural effects of social conditioning (like living in socially segregated environments) as the cause of social conditions. That is, there’s a tendency to want to argue that humans are innately racist, sexist, biased, hostile to those different, hierarchical, or whatever…. This kind of research tends to be essentialist and usually appeals to some sort of ‘genetic programming,’ but typically with no genetic evidence or even a plausible account of this social attitude might emerge from the genes, neural chemistry or any other biological mechanism.

Continue reading “Face recognition training and stereotyping”