Savage Minds & Department of Defense’s Plan for Academia

Savage Minds, the blog of “notes and queries in anthropology,” has an important post on “Camelot Revisited: The Department of Defense’s New Plan for Academia.” Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense and former university professor, wants to buy our research and shape it to military uses.

As the post says, “His goal is not to further the overall body of knowledge within academic disciplines, but to increase the military’s stock of knowledge about ‘the countries or cultures we [are] dealing with.’ And by ‘dealing with’, he doesn’t mean tourism.”

Why object? Besides the pernicious skewing of free inquiry (funding matters to researchers and university administrators alike), there is a more important argument: “it treats humans—their lives, their culture, their behavior—as means to an end. This is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, not by a long stretch. It’s not knowledge for the betterment of humanity. It’s not even knowledge for the satisfaction of human curiosity. It’s knowledge for the achievement of strategic goals—goals that are set and grow out of particular political interests, not the priorities of anthropology and the other social sciences. Goals that take a particular status quo—US imperialism, to put a blunt point on it—as desirable, necessary, and even natural.”

Don’t think the military will do such a thing? They certainly are learning how to work the media, as the New York Times reports in Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand. Now they have a plan for academia too.

A Times Trifecta

Well, actually a double trifecta. The Science and the Health sections online (Tuesday publication) are all neuroanthropolicious.

John Schwartz’s article The Body in Depth covers the work of David Bassett, professor of anatomy and dissection. Even better, we get an online sampling of his dissections on human cadavers, Body Works but without the hype. eHuman will have the entire Bassett collection online (pay to download), with a sample and some accompanying audio here.

Christine Kenneally writes When Language Can Hold the Answer, describing a new way to the old Sapir-Whorf debate: “In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?” Kenneally points to the role of objects, to brain function and color perception, and spatial processing as new ways to attack the old debate. One nice quote: “By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”

John Tierney’s piece This Time He’ll Be Breathless covers the magician David Blaine’s physical and mental training in his soon-to-be-successful attempt to break the world record for holding one’s breath. Even without moving and having breathed pure oxygen, 16 minutes sounds like a lot to me! Tierney describes well the mental approach and the embodied expertise, familiar themes for this blog, in accomplishing such a feat.

At 60, He Learned to Sing So He Could Talk is a great story by Karen Barrow on Harvey Atler’s recovery from a stroke. Using “melodic intonation therapy,” Atler learned to draw on the language/musical parts of his right brain after damage to the Broca area in his left hemisphere. In other words, singing helps the brain adapt after a stroke, recapturing language skills.

Continue reading “A Times Trifecta”

Craving money, chocolate and… justice

Image by Lou Beach of The New York Times.A while back, I got really hacked off about a piece of really pathetic science reporting about some brain-related research in the post, Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis. And now, as if sent from heaven (or the Benevolent Goddess That Pokes Holes in Bad Evolutionary Psychology), this news release from UCLA, Brain reacts to fairness as it does to money and chocolate, study shows, by Stuart Wolpert. All caveats in place — including that I haven’t seen the reviewed piece that backs this up — we have some nifty data with which I can continue to pile scorn on those who think images of women’s cleavage dancing before them is what made the ‘financial titans’ leverage the US economy into subprime disaster.

The human brain responds to being treated fairly the same way it responds to winning money and eating chocolate, UCLA scientists report. Being treated fairly turns on the brain’s reward circuitry.

“We may be hard-wired to treat fairness as a reward,” said study co-author Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology and a founder of social cognitive neuroscience.

That’s right — if you recall the sex-money-chocolate ‘hub’ in the brain that we discussed (well, snickered at) in the ‘Bad Brain Science’ post, now it also looks like this part of the brain is also involved in being treated fairly. So now it’s the ‘sex-money-chocolate-justice hub’ (they’re sure beer and pizza isn’t in there, too?).
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The Sugar Made Me Do It

Neuroscientifically Challenged had a great post awhile back, Every Sweet Hath Its Sour, reporting on research that basically equates modern, processed food with drugs.

Why? As the Duke Health news release tells us, “Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have discovered that the brain can respond to the calorie content of food, even in the absence of taste.” An even better title summarizing this research is “Tasteless Food Reward.”

This March 2008 Neuron paper “Food Reward in the Absence of Taste Receptor Signaling” by Ivan de Araujo, Albino Oliveira-Maia and colleagues shows that high-calorie food can directly reinforce the mesolimbic dopamine system. This result overturns that common assumption that what we eat relies on conditioned preference, pairing taste with the ingestion of a particular substance, say, cops and their donuts. This assumption has been used to great effect in evolutionary medicine research—we evolved in a fat-, sugar- and salt-limited environment, and today our evolved tastes drive our excessive consumptions of fast food in the modern world.

Now the modern situation appears even more dire, for calories alone can also reinforce food consumption, at least in mice “which lack the cellular machinery required for sweet taste transduction.” The Tasteless Food Reward editorial by Zane Andrews and Tamas Horvath tells us that “de Araujo et al. show that mice lacking functional ‘sweet’ taste receptors (trpm5−/−) develop a preference for sucrose by activating the mesolimbic dopamine-accumbal pathway, solely based on calorie load.”

Continue reading “The Sugar Made Me Do It”

Anthropology and Neuroscience Podcasts

Similar to the earlier post on video resources online, I have compiled here a list of podcasts for your perusal. I have split them into neuroscience and anthropology categories. And please, if you have some worthy additions to make, please comment below!

One general place to look is PodFeed, where you can do searches for your favorite topics. Here’s one I found from Disarmament Insight on What Do We Know About Levels of Human Violence?

You can also try sites like Open Culture’s Podcast Library, Podcasting News, Blinkx (primarily video) and Radio OpenSource.

You can also check out two great audio resources online, National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Company. Here’s a piece from NPR, Lack of Sleep Linked to Later Health Problems. And one from BBC, What Factors Determine What We Eat? I found these through word searches such as anthropology, brain and culture from the main page.

Anthropology Podcasts

Society for Applied Anthropology Podcasts
Recent podcast: The Art and Science of Applied Anthropology

Anthropology.Net Podcasts
Recent podcast: Ancient DNA from the Neanderthal Genome

American Anthropological Association Podcast Series
Recent podcast: Recent developments at the Association

Neuroscience Podcasts

Dr. Ginger Campbell’s Brain Science Podcasts is a great place to start and to finish too!
Recent podcast: Interview with Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire

Continue reading “Anthropology and Neuroscience Podcasts”

Some Blogs: Anthropology, Design, Business

These blogs are similar in spirit to neuroanthropology: interdisciplinary, mixing experience into the mix, with good writing, ideas and links. They just focus on other pragmatics. Enjoy.

CultureBy: This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Economics and Anthropology
Recent Post: Cloudiness: Of Selves, Groups, Networks and Ideas

Purposive Drift
Recent Post: A Map Is Not the Territory (Revisited)

Open Range Anthropologist
Recent Post: Purists vs. Pragmatists in Driving Social Change: Which Is Better?

The Restless Mind
Recent Post: Postcards from the Edge

Experientia: Putting People First
Recent Post: ZIBA Design Founder: “It’s All About Experience”