Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam and Dreams

My niece sent me the first link, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam, which is as relevant today as it was then.

And for the second, I Have A Dream, came, of course, at “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation” against the “flames of withering injustice” and “the long night of [our] captivity”

The third is Miri Ben-Ari’s Symphony of Brotherhood, an uplifting and haunting piece of music that resonates deeply with me.  I’m not a big fan of music videos, and this one is not particularly well done, so I listen to it with the video in the background.  It’s the music that speaks.

Errol Morris and The Thin Blue Line

Sometimes art is way out ahead of science.  Errol Morris has an essay, “Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One),” which speaks to the complexity of human life, the mixture of moral judgments, memory, and evidence.  It is well worth a read.

He discusses the making of his documentary The Thin Blue Line, which helped to overturn a murder conviction in Dallas.  His essay, in one sense, is a long meditation on who we are, who we think we are, and how to show both.  His creative use of interviews, re-enactments, police evidence, audience perspective, and storytelling show how he already knew, intuitively, much of what we try to discuss here.

 I’ll copy his ending here:

Perception is endlessly colored by fantasy and belief – perception of the present as well as the past. If there is a story that we wish to believe, our perceptual apparatus will usually modify or reinterpret what we see rather than the other way around. We see things that do not exist and fail to see things that are right in front of our eyes. We often remember things incorrectly and our memories change over time.

The brain is not a Reality-Recorder. There is no perfect replica of reality inside our brains. The brain elides, confabulates, conflates, denies, suppresses, evades, confuses and distorts. It has its own agenda and can even work at cross-purposes with our conscious selves. Consciously, we may think that we see all and know all, but our brains may be “blind” to much of what is going on around us.

Many people believe they have found a way around the eccentricities of the brain by substituting a camera, but this only defers the problem. It does not solve it. Even photographs have to be perceived. They have to be seen. There is no shortcut around the Cartesian riddle of separating reality from the appearance of reality. There is no shortcut to reality. The brain is all we have.

Culture and Inequality in the Obesity Debate

So far in the posts I’ve done on obesity, I have been focused on the biology behind obesity.  Part of that is due to my class and what this particular section of the course covered—showing them a biological approach to a health problem.  But as I have been going over research on obesity, I’ve collected a number of links and articles on culture, social class, and obesity.  So I am going to share those here. 

Culture 

Let me say one thing.  In biomedicine and particularly in epidemiology, there is an overarching orientation towards the individual.  It is how treatment is planned, how data is collected and analysis proceeds.  This approach misses out on the central insight of culture theory—that aspects of our environment get bundled together due to accumulating human action and our cultural systems of meaning making.  Epidemiology, by separating out factors, has little recourse to understand the dynamics of these larger patterns.  At least in epidemiology, one alternative might be Nancy Krieger’s ecosocial framework (pdf), complemented by James Trostle’s Epidemiology and Culture and Carol Worthman and Brandon Kohrt’s Biocultural Approaches to Public Health Paradoxes. 

In any case, some cultural anthropology and obesity.  First, check out Gina Kolata’s article Chubby Gets a Second Look, including quotes from Emory anthropologists Peter Brown and George Armelagos, teachers of mine when I was in graduate school.  “Being thin really isn’t about health, anyway, but about social class and control.  When food was scarce and expensive, they say, only the rich could afford to be fat…  Those notions of fashion gradually gave way to a more streamlined physique… The body mass indexes of Miss America winners, according to a 2000 study, have been steadily decreasing since 1922, so much so that for most winners in the last three decades their indexes would cause them to be considered underweight.” 

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Utilitarianism and the Brain

Guy Kahane has a discussion of Utilitarianism and the Brain over at Ethics Etc.  In particular, he is discussing Joshua Green’s fMRI studies of moral judgments that have claimed to distinguish between utilitarian and non-utilitarian thinking (and the latter claimed as more rational, the former more emotional and hence not quite as good).  Kahane in particular pays attention to the methods used to generate the evidence and claims, and finds it wanting—the experimental scenarios themselves don’t clearly distinguish between the two types.

The debate has taken place in Nature, and here is a link to the actual text of the Nature critique by Guy Kahane and Nicholas Schackel as well as the response by Michael Koenig and colleagues.

Hat Tip: Natural Rationality

Identical twins not… err… identical?

Although we’ve been accused of hatin’ on twin studies, I admit that I find twins pretty fascinating, mostly because they attract all kinds of magical thinking, not just within traditional Yoruba cosmology, but also in the West. My favorite pair of twins has to be the ‘Jim twins,’ a pair of identical twins discussed in an article in Time Magazine.

Like many identical twins reared apart, Jim Lewis and Jim Springer found they had been leading eerily similar lives. Separated four weeks after birth in 1940, the Jim twins grew up 45 miles apart in Ohio and were reunited in 1979. Eventually they discovered that both drove the same model blue Chevrolet, chain-smoked Salems, chewed their fingernails and owned dogs named Toy. Each had spent a good deal of time vacationing at the same three-block strip of beach in Florida. More important, when tested for such personality traits as flexibility, self-control and sociability, the twins responded almost exactly alike.

The Jim twins are great; they have given me hours of fun just going over the possible genetic roots for their similarity: ‘Oh my god, we’ve got a shared gene for naming our dogs “Toy” and another one for marrying women named “Linda” and, when that didn’t work out, marrying a second wife called “Betty.”‘ (A similarity that the Time Magazine article doesn’t explore.) I mean, I just can’t stop laughing when I think about how lovers of this sort of data actually think that some sort of gene directs people to go vacation in a particular spot or naming a son either James Alan or James Allan (Ooooh, so close… it must be shared genes!). But I digress… I just love the Jim twins’ story so much (see also Jonathan Marks’ book, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee, where he writes that, ‘In the world of twin studies the unscrupulous and the credulous symbiotically plumb the depths of contemporary pseudoscience.’ He’s way funnier than I am writing about this stuff in pieces like ‘Folk Heredity,’ especially the section on ‘hereditarianism’.)

But now we’ve got an interesting piece from Scientific American, Identical Twins’ Genes Are Not Identical, which explores the possibility that identical twins aren’t perfect genetic copies of each other. As the article reports:

Geneticist Carl Bruder of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his colleagues closely compared the genomes of 19 sets of adult identical twins. In some cases, one twin’s DNA differed from the other’s at various points on their genomes. At these sites of genetic divergence, one bore a different number of copies of the same gene, a genetic state called copy number variants.

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Tightening your belt on your mind

The New York Times has an opinion piece by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind, on the implications of new research on ‘willpower.’ Daniel already noted this research in his post, Glucose, Self Control and Evolution, and linked to the original research paper, Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than a Metaphor.

The New York Times‘ piece discusses the possibility that spending discipline necessitated by economic hard times might lead to less ‘willpower’ when confronting weight control issues. The authors write:

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

Specifically, the research team ‘found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.’ In one study, subjects were either given radishes or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before doing a puzzle (how did they get human ethics clearance for the cookies?!). The folks who ate the radishes lasted longer and were more persistent in experimental tasks than the cookie eaters, or those who were allowed to pass on the radish appetizer.

Continue reading “Tightening your belt on your mind”