Michael Pollan, Energy, and Change

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (one of the best recent anthropology books in my mind, even if it’s not by an anthropologist), has an essay out today, Why Bother? It is part of the New York Times Magazine themed issue, The Green Issue: Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller.

In his essay Pollan sums up how we, as normal people with normal powers, might change our approach to energy dependence. In particular, he focuses on overcoming the sense of helplessness we often feel, arguing cogently that this sort of “dependence” has been instilled through increasing social and economic specialization and a universalist approach in economics and politics.

Pollan points to the importance of local doing, to How and not just Why, as a central way to break the specialization and universalist trap. By focusing on mindsets, behaviors, experiences, and life roles (sound familiar?), Pollan gets at the everyday dimensions of life that can work as much change as technology or global accords. We just have to do it ourselves, even as we cultivate new ways to encourage and support these everyday processes.

(Still, for those of you who prefer a more political economy take on the problems we face, see Pollan’s highly recommended pieces You Are What You Grow and Weed It and Reap, taking on the US food bill, agribusiness, and energy-dependent processed food.)

Here’s an annotated version of Why Bother?

Early in the essay Pollan writes, “For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.”

Continue reading “Michael Pollan, Energy, and Change”

Video Resources

I have collected different video resources together under one heading and added them to the Web Resources page. I have only included specialized sites, not YouTube or Google Video or the like.

Besides TED, Dana, Grey Matters, and other resources Greg and I have mentioned previously, I have included the Stony Brook Mind/Brain Lecture Series. A yearly series, the most recent lecturer was Patricia Churchland, who spoke on “Decisions, Responsibilities, and the Brain.”

Please, if you know of other good video resources, leave a comment! I’ll keep adding them to the list.

Of course video of Patricia Churchland is also available on YouTube. Below I’ve included Part One from a three-part series. As she discusses research on brain science, belief and morality, she has a great set-up slide entitled “Brain Based Values” which announces “Evolution sets the brain’s style of drives and emotions” AND “Experience in a culture shapes the style into specific habits and preferences using the reward system.”

As regular readers will know, those are two great statements, BUT the proof is in the pudding, the devil in the details: good use of evolutionary theory, sophisticated understanding of subjective experience, effective use of the culture concept, an embodied approach to habits, and a more open and distributed view of the “reward system” than is normal in neuroscience. Does Churchland accomplish these things? I’ll let you decide.

But I will say that it is a perilous leap from “is” to “ought”…

Invisible Wounds of War

The RAND Corporation has just published a new study on the psychological and physical traumas of serving in Iraq and of veterans returning home. It’s entitled Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. Here’s the link to the press release, the summary statement, and the research highlights. You can also check out a round up on Iraq and trauma in my latest Wednesday collection.

The news release carries the title “One In Five Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Suffer from PTSD or Major Depression.” RAND estimates that these returning veterans will have direct and indirect costs of 6.2 billion dollars in the first two years after returning from deployment, to speak nothing of the distress and disruption felt by the servicemen and women and their families and friends. “If PTSD and depression go untreated or are under treated, there is a cascading set of consequences,” [study leader] Lisa Jaycox said. “Drug use, suicide, marital problems and unemployment are some of the consequences. There will be a bigger societal impact if these service members go untreated. The consequences are not good for the individuals or society in general.”

“We need to remove the institutional cultural barriers that discourage soldiers from seeking care,” Terri Tanielian said. “Just because someone is getting mental health care does not mean that they are not able to do their job. Seeking mental health treatment should be seen as a sign of strength and interest in getting better, not a weakness. People need to get help as early as possible, not only once their symptoms become severe and disabling.”

One of their major conclusions: “Improving access to high-quality care can be cost-effective and improve recovery rates.” The emphasis is on high-quality, something that reaches out to veterans and their families, and that is supported by evidence and not simply a feel-good budget moment.

Rats’ visual systems made plastic by anti-depressants

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchMy mind raced for potential titles to a post when I read the recent report from Science, ‘The Antidepressant Fluoxetine Restores Plasticity in the Adult Visual Cortex,’ by a team headed by José Fernando Maya Vetencourt (abstract), but I’ve opted to be demure, rather than go with some of my other options (like ‘Anti-depressants the “Cocoon” pool for brain?’ or something similarly outrageous).

The research team investigated wither fluoxetine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), could restore plasticity in the visual system of adult rats. They chose fluoxetine because long-term regimens of the drug promote neurogenesis and synaptogenesis in the hippocampus and increased activity of neurotrophin brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and its primary receptor, TrkB (close paraphrase to the original article). These effects have been shown essential to the drug’s effect; block one of these processes, and the anti-depressant doesn’t work nearly as well. In order to test plasticity, the team studied how rats responded to monocular deprivation — covering one eye — both the initial shift in ocular dominance and then the recovery of visual function after long-term monocular deprivation. In general, the fluoxetine-treated rats responded in exaggerated fashion to both conditions, suggesting that plasticity was greater with long-term administration of the drug. From the abstract:

We found that chronic administration of fluoxetine reinstates ocular dominance plasticity in adulthood and promotes the recovery of visual functions in adult amblyopic animals, as tested electrophysiologically and behaviorally. These effects were accompanied by reduced intracortical inhibition and increased expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the visual cortex. Cortical administration of diazepam prevented the effects induced by fluoxetine, indicating that the reduction of intracortical inhibition promotes visual cortical plasticity in the adult. Our results suggest a potential clinical application for fluoxetine in amblyopia as well as new mechanisms for the therapeutic effects of antidepressants and for the pathophysiology of mood disorders.

Continue reading “Rats’ visual systems made plastic by anti-depressants”

Perception and Politics

Do we really know what’s going on? Or do we just see what we want to see?

The Data

Larry Bartels, director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton, has an op-ed Who’s Bitter Now? which shows us a stereotype of rural voters in action. His argument? “Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.”

Bartels sets out to actually define the “small-town working class,” making less than $60,000, living in small towns or rural areas, never graduated from college. He compares them to cosmopolitan voters, college graduates who live in the suburbs or cities making $60,000 or more. The first group makes up about 16 percent of voters, the second 13 percent.

Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.

Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.

Bartels finishes by telling us the larger pattern behind it all. “It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.”

The Interpretation

So why the problem in perception? Is it because he clings to a stereotype, as Bartels seems to suggest?

Nicholas Kristof’s column today, Divided They Fall, offers us better than a yes/no. He wants to take on “how our biases shape our understanding of reality.” Of course the candidate you favor won the debate last time… Or did he or she?

Continue reading “Perception and Politics”