Prison Nation

It’s hard to find a better example of what today’s anthropology is about than the US prison system.  The conjunction of cultural logics (the importance of punishing crime), racism and inequality (the impact on minority populations), social institutions (politics and media), and neoliberal capitalism (prisons as big business) come together to drive a nation-wide pattern: the systematic incarceration of our population.  The United States now has more that 1 in 100 adults in prison, the New York Times recently reported.  We incarnerate more people, in both absolute numbers and percentages, than any other country in the world.  Those people happen to be more male than female, more poor than rich, more black and Hispanic than white.

The New York Times published an editorial on this fact today entitled Prison Nation.  The editorial goes after the cultural logic: “Many Americans have come to believe, wrongly, that keeping an outsized chunk of the population locked up is essential for sustaining a historic crime drop since the 1990’s.  In fact, the relationship between imprisonment and crime control is murky.”

It takes on the industry: “Persuading public officials to adopt a more rational, cost-effective approach to prison policy is a daunting prospect, however, not least because building and running jailhouses has become a major industry.”
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Geek Love for Gary Gygax

As a former D&D player myself, and still hooked on fantasy novels and the occasional RPG on the computer, I just had to put up this editorial Geek Love by Adam Rogers, honoring Gary Gygax, who passed away this past week.

Here’s the beginning to pique interest:

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Brain Enhancement: Beyond Either/Or

Benedict Carey writes, “Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?” covering the emerging debate on performance-enhancing drugs in academia and other intellectual pursuits.  This debate began in the journal Nature, and exploded since then.  (I’ve covered some similar issues in a previous post, Drugs and Biosociality.) 

Carey poses us this question, “Is prescription tweaking to perform on exams, or prepare presentations and grants, really the same as injecting hormones to chase down a home run record, or win the Tour de France?” 

Whatever our answer to that question is, and it is surely to be a complex answer (more on that in a second), it is clear to me that this is already happening.  In a recent paper, I showed how heavy users already engage in “functional use”—using methamphetamine, a stimulant, to work and play more, to deal with cognitive deficits, and to change their subjective state while continuing to interact in a normal social manner.  While I am almost hesitant to say it, in this matter, drug users are already on the avant-garde. 

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More on sleep and time: the Letterman effect

Steve Higgins of Of Two Minds has a short post discussing recent research on, as the title says, Is TV changing our circadian rhythms? I think it’s another interesting factor to go into our subject-level dynamic systems model of time and sleep, after discussions by Daniel on Time Globalized and my earlier post on ‘Giant Sleep Machines’ and the Brain (which, now that I read it, sounds like a bit like a cheesy horror movie title).

Higgins discusses the article, ‘Cues for Timing and Coordination: Latitude, Letterman, and Longitude,’ by Daniel S. Hamermesh, Caitlin Knowles Myers, and Mark L. Pocock from the Journal of Labor Economics. I’ve searched for the original paper, and I can’t find it, even through the website of JLE; I’m not going to post this with the little ‘blogging about peer-reviewed research’ logo because I can’t really find the original. I suspect that it might be forthcoming; however, what I think is a working version of the JLE paper can be found through ANU here, and another working paper on a related topic by members of the team can be found here).

To get information about circadian rhythms, the research team used the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey (ATUS), focusing on how Americans divided time among their three most time-consuming activities: work, sleep, and television watching. Comparing the times people spent on these activities and their schedule with the time of sunrise and sunset, Hamermesh and his colleagues were ‘amazed how little daylight matters nowadays, and how much artificial time zones matter.’ (This quote and several others from a short article on the research at PsyOrg.)

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Headline: Maternal Instinct Is Wired Into The Brain

Sometimes it’s great to see other people make all those arguments that come to mind when brain imaging research gets turned into instincts and hard wiring.  Tara Parker-Pope runs a blog On Health through The New York Times, and while I have liked some of her previous posts (that’s where I found the autism YouTube video), today she really misses the mark.  And the people commenting really let her know it!

 So here’s the quick summary.  TPP reports on imaging research with 13 mothers and their 16-month-old infants (well, toddlers, wouldn’t they be by then?).  They were then shown videos of their own babies and other babies while images were taken of their brains.  “When a woman saw images of her own child smiling or upset, her brain patterns were markedly different than when she watched the other children. There was a particularly pronounced change in brain activity when a mother was shown images of her child in distress.”

TPP then provides a winner quote from the editor of Biological Psychiatry, which published the piece last month: “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior”

First comment, from PlainJane: “This does seem to be proving the bleeding obvious… [But] what happens then to mothers who are shown NOT to have these “natural” responses in their brains to their infants? Will they be locked up as freaks or have their kids taken from them? I can just imagine.  Or will neglectful mothers be able to say “oh its biological, I can’t help not bonding with my child”?  I applaud further research into all aspects of the human brain but you and other non-scientist commentators are vital in directing HOW this is viewed. It would be nice for your blog to put it in some more context.’

Katie: “By 16 months mothers and children must be bonded, and of course the mothers would react to seeing their child in distress – for more than a year they have been reacting to their child to meet its needs… And what about moms who adopt? or use surragates?”

Mark: “I would never have suspected that mothers have a special attachment to their own children. What will they find out next?”

Marcus: “The phrasing is misleading and suggests a common but fundamental misrepresentation of what this type of fMRI research shows — or maybe a misunderstanding that confuses a general audience. “Wired,” “hard-wired,” and “instinct” suggests genetically programmed in, like a reflex. A brain pattern that shows up on fMRI studies, however, can reflect brain “programming” that has been acquired through experience, to use the computer metaphor.”

LJB: “I can’t help but feel like this research is going to be used as the crux of some defense lawyer’s argument as to why his client abandoned her child. While I’m sympathetic to post-partum issues (it took me longer than expected to bond with my son after birth) I was still fiercely protective of him and responded to him, although I was terrified of not doing it right when I went to him. I think the mother-infant bond is more complex and this is just one of the many layers of the proverbial onion.”

JiminBoulder: “Will you please stop turning us into machines?”

Jeanne, mother of five: “The absolute hilarity of the line “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior,” made my day!”

Time Globalized

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchStefan Klein has an editorial, Time Out of Mind, in today’s New York Times, where he writes “the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions.”

 He elaborates on this argument as follows:

Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time… To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement. Neuroscientists have observed this phenomenon using computer-assisted functional magnetic resonance imaging tomography. When subjects are asked to indicate the time it takes to view a series of pictures, heightened activity is measured in the centers that control muscular movement, primarily the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and the supplementary motor area. That explains why inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies — as any Tai Chi master knows.Time seems to expand when our senses are aroused. Peter Tse, a neuropsychologist at Dartmouth, demonstrated this in an experiment in which subjects were shown a sequence of flashing dots on a computer screen. The dots were timed to occur once a second, with five black dots in a row followed by one moving, colored one. Because the colored dot appeared so infrequently, it grabbed subjects’ attention and they perceived it as lasting twice as long as the others did. 

Klein then links this argument to stress: “Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash… Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.”

 His conclusion? “The remedy is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. Time is not money but ‘the element in which we exist,’ as Joyce Carol Oates put it more than two decades ago (in a relatively leisurely era). ‘We are either borne along by it or drowned in it’.”

 By coincidence, Kevin Birth, professor of anthropology at Queens College-CUNY, wrote us about our blog recently, highlighting his own work on time, anthropology and biology.  Birth has a recent article, “Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization (full pdf).”  Given that we live on a “rotating globe where each locale has its own cycles of day and night,” our present globalized economic system produces some severe contradictions that people struggle with in everyday life: “temporal conflicts between locations on the globe, desynchronization of biological cycles, and lack of correspondence between those cycles and social life.”

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