‘Innate’ fear of snakes?

Live Science has a recent piece, Why We Fear Snakes, written by Clara Moskowitz. I have to admit that, well, I hate this sort of thing for so many reasons that I hesitate to write. My problem with these accounts is with ‘innate’; I think the term is, generally, poorly defined, unprovable and unproven, sloppy, theoretically suspect, and freighted with so many dangerous implications that it gives me, for want of a better word, the heebie-jeebies.

Before I get too critical, however, it’s necessary to acknowledge that some of the assumptions I’ll critique may have, likely have, arisen in the translation of a complex research project into a few hundred words for a popular press account. God knows my own work has suffered when it’s been translated into popular formats (don’t even get started about a CNN special on race that I was interviewed for…). We’re encouraged to do outreach to the community, to put our specialties up on ‘expert’ databases and basically pimp ourselves for any positive reference, so we wind up bending over backwards to make our ideas accessible. This can lead us to stumble, especially in the view of a discipline that doesn’t share our concerns. For example, if I were to try to give an accessible account of my work, a neuroscientists would likely gag on some of the explanatory shortcuts. So some of the criticisms that I will level might be better applied to the science writer rather than the researchers; we’ll know when the research findings are eventually published. Caveats in place, on with it…

Apparently, the Psychology Department at the University of Virginia has a couple of scholars studying the ‘universal’ fear of snakes. The piece says what one might expect: ‘The researchers were inspired to investigate the fear of snakes when they thought about how universally people dislike the slithering legless lizards. “This feeling is really common,” [Vanessa] LoBue told LiveScience. “We don’t see snakes all the time. There’s really no reason for this overwhelming disgust or hatred of snakes.”‘ The researchers demonstrated this universal fear by showing that both adults and children ‘could detect images of snakes among a variety of non-threatening objects more quickly than they could pinpoint frogs, flowers or caterpillars.’ And the explanation is that an innate fear of snakes would have made humans more likely to survive in the wild.

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(insert clever French grammar title here)

Every once in a while, I drop some comment about language being ‘un-language-like’ when I’m talking about culture. It’s a tick, aggravated by my envy of linguistic anthropology, my wish that bodily practice was studied in anthropology as much (or had produced as much cool theory), and by my secret insecurity that I never took a course from Michael Silverstein when I was at the University of Chicago (what can I say? I was busy…). Most readers probably overlook my comments about language, chalking them up to PGSSD (post grad-school stress disorder) or some moral failing that they don’t want to know any more about. But I feel compelled to explain, especially since I found this great article on French speakers disagreeing on the gender of nouns (thanks to Dr. X’s Free Associations and grant-writing avoidance behaviour on my part).

Too often I think anthropologists use language ‘to think with’ when they are talking about ‘culture.’ Language is a kind of subliminal or suppressed metaphor guiding how they talk about this thing, culture. It leads to various problems, such as ‘code’ metaphors, reification of ‘the language/culture’ in things like meme theory, and the like. That is, people say some pretty daft things about ‘culture’ guided by the analogy with language.

The problem is, they’re not just committing sloppy thinking about human variation, they also don’t generally have a very grounded, empirically based view of language. That is, they assume things about language that linguistic anthropologists would dispute, especially those coming from a pragmatic approach (like Silverstein, from whom i took no courses and thus feel inadequate to be writing this).

Well, every once in a while, web surfing drops the perfect example right in your lap.

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Mind, body and Wiimote

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchI’m not usually the one blogging on video games; this tends to be Daniel’s department. After all, he’s got three boys at home, and I live with two horse-obsessed women, so it’s a bit out of my habitual orbit. I get more interaction with tractors than video game consoles. But Daniel tossed this reference my direction, and I decided to write on it for a number of reasons (thanks to Daniel).

According to a recent post on Psyorg.com, ‘The Wiimote as an interface bridging mind and body,’ a research team led by Rick Dale at the University of Memphis has been using the Wiimote from Nintendo to study how people reach as they learn new tasks. As the Psyorg story discusses, the Memphis team taught people a symbol matching task and used the Wiimote to judge the quality of their movements when doing the task.

As people learned, their bodies reflected the confidence of that learning. Participants moved the Wiimote more quickly, more steadily, and also pressed on it more firmly as they became familiar with the symbols. While everyone knows that you get better at moving in tasks that require intricate movement (such as learning to use chopsticks), these results suggest that your body movements are related to learning other information as well.

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Links to Society for Psychological Anthropology

Although their focus is not specifically on the brain sciences, both Daniel and I are members of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, one of the sections of the American Anthropological Association. In order to become a member, individuals have to join the AAA, which can get to be a substantial investment. But, for no cost, you can check out the website of the Soc for Psych Anth. There’s a number of resources worth checking out, including syllabi generously contributed by members for their courses on psychological anthropology and a list of graduate programs that are particularly strong in psychological anthropology.

The Society for Psychological Anthropology also has a list-serv that doesn’t put too much spam in my inbox (I may regret posting this for that reason). To join the list-serv, go to the sign-up page.

A Round Up

Addiction

Benedict Carey, When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
Addresses the links between heavy drinking and social context, quite a nice piece summarizing some key anthropological and social psychological research  

Jeneen Interlandi, What Addicts Need
The polar opposite of the Carey piece, arguing for a psychobiological approach to understanding addiction.

First Peek into Deepest Recesses of Human Brain
Advances in neuroimaging of the ventral tegmental area. 

Drinking Makes Heart Grow More Sorrowful, Study Finds
Drinking helps lock memories in place, at least in this rat research 

Radley Balko, Better Dead Than High
Death as a social deterrent, based on restricting access of naloxene for overdoses 

Jennifer Vineyard, ‘Harry Potter’ Is Addictive, Study Concludes
Withdrawal and craving after the series ends… 

Mental Health

Paige Parvin, Why Is This Man Smiling
The Dalai Lama and Emory scientists team up to examine happiness 

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was right… about adults

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchNature recently carried a short piece, Perception coloured by language (written by Kerri Smith), on several research papers, including one by Paul Kay at the University of California, Berkeley (well, actually, Kay is also the co-author on another of the three papers, too). The original article, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), is not openly accessible, but the abstract is here (Franklin et al. abstract). We’ve had a number of related posts on Neuroanthropology, including Daniel’s Language and Color, and my piece that the title of this one references, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?

The subject of language learning’s effect on the brain is an especially important one for a number of reasons to us at Neuroanthropology (other than our tendency to flog the occasional dead horse); not only is language a frequent surrogate for more amorphous concepts like ‘culture,’ but it is also one of the capacities that, due to the work of Chomsky, is frequently believed to have innate foundations in the brain. Chomsky’s discussion of a language function innate in all human brains provides one of the foundational texts for much broader, sweeping assertions about ‘massive modularity’ in the brain covering a wide variety of functions.

Work by Kay’s team focused on the brain hemisphere used to classify colours. They tested subjects by showing them coloured targets randomly in their visual fields, and then seeing how long subjects could shift attention to the targets. As Smith writes:

It is well known that in adults, perception of colour is processed predominantly by the left hemisphere, which is also where most people process language. Studies have shown that the language one speaks can have an impact on the colour one sees.

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