Cognitive Science and the Advance of Ideas

Here’s a link to the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Minnesota top 100 cognitive science papers of the last century.  Definitely a useful reference.  Debates about modularity, connectionism, the mind as computational, limits on human rationality, and so forth all emerged from these papers.  Not a lot of culture, inequality or anthropology in the bunch, and a definite bias towards psychology as universal rather than also being variable and contextual–but, hey, this site has to work on something…

And if you haven’t seen it, Edge asked top scholars in 2008, What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?

In looking at the first page of answers, I am struck by how much scientists are now reworking the views developed in those top 100 cognitive science papers.

So, Joseph LeDoux: “Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.”

Continue reading “Cognitive Science and the Advance of Ideas”

Kwame Appiah

Kwame Appiah is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, and has a new book Experiments in Ethics.  The book is interesting to me both because of his use of data, rather than just analysis, to think about ethics, and his emphasis on the contextual nature of morality.  NPR has an entertaining radio interview with Appiah, where he discusses his approach to “empirical philosophy.” 

There’s also a discussion of Appiah’s book in the NY Times, which presents a different take on trolleyology (discussed in our critical take on Pinker’s essay on morality).  Here’s what Paul Bloom writes in “Morality Studies“: 

[T]his book has teeth, particularly when Appiah looks hard at the emphasis on moral dilemmas like the trolley problems. These were originally developed to tap our intuitions about agency and responsibility, and are thought to bear on real-world issues like abortion and just war. But the dense trolley literature “makes the Talmud look like Cliffs Notes” even as its complexity fails, he argues, to capture the richness of morality in our everyday lives. Real moral problems don’t come in the form of SAT questions, and being a good person often requires figuring out for yourself just what the options are: “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.”

 Here’s a review blurb by Cass Susstein: “This dazzlingly written book argues for reconnecting moral philosophy with the sciences, both natural and social–and demonstrates that the reconnection, while in a sense overdue, reconnects philosophy with its ancient interest in empirical issues. Appiah’s important argument promises to transform more than one field. It is not only wise and subtle; it is also inspiring.”

 And a summary from an Amazon reviewer raising a few critical points: 

1. In his chapter on “the varieties of moral experience,” the author discusses a number of “modules” that he feels characterize the human psyche: compassion, reciprocity, hierarchy, and so forth. He draws on other scholars who have posited such proclivities, and he also mentions Chomsky who, he says, has proposed a similar, presumably innate, human capacity for language. I do not find these “modules” persuasive as being human universals. There is very little in this discussion that would connect it to empirical science, for example to anthropology, not to speak of the findings of modern neuroscience. Indeed, the descriptions of modules are reminiscent of pre-scientific speculations concerning “four humors.”

2. The second chapter, “the case against character,” gives us a stimulating and challenging rundown of experiments that suggest that ethical choice is very much influenced by the immediate situation. So we learn, for example, that if you have just smelled the delicious odor of fresh-baked bread, you are more likely to be generous than you would be without such olfactory stimulus. The author seems to conclude (he does hedge this a bit) that there is no such thing as character, that everything depends on the situation.

The problem here is that in any of these situations there are minorities of subjects who don’t act as expected. Even with all that good smelling bread, some remain stingy; even without great smells, some are generous. So it would appear that these experimental situations explain some of the variance but not all.

Brainy muscles

A recent story in The New York Times by Gina Kolata, one of my favorite science writers, highlights one reason why I think neuroanthropology has to be broader than ‘cognitive anthropology’ was in the 1980s and 1990s (and why ‘cognitive science’ itself has really expanded with the more recent wave of thinking about embodied cognition). In an article on whether or not weight training is really good for athletes, titled Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?, I think Kolata does a much better job presenting the case for the efficacy of weight training than the arguments against it. Even several of the physiologists and trainers who Kolata suggests are less than rapt with weight training make comments that are more specifically about weight training done badly than against the practice as a whole; they criticize poor form, badly designed programs, and even not working hard enough, hardly criticisms of the overall efficacy of weight training.

Most of the athletes and other experts seem to me to be pretty strongly in favor of weight training, and I have no doubt that there’s good reason. Most athletic training has been radically transformed with the advent of weight training, and approaches that have come out of weight training (such as targeting specific muscle groups and working different parts of the body to failure) are also applied even in non-weight training exercises, such as selective sprinting, whole body exercises, and the like. Some of my research on capoeira, no-holds-barred fighting (or MMA), and other forms of wresting training suggest that actually training with ‘weights’ — barbells, dumbbells, and the like — can be less than ideal, but most of the modifications that this research suggests are consistent with the theory and practice of weight training, even if they expand the activities involved (body weight exercises, whole body dynamic lifting, jumping, etc.).

But one of the few critics says something that I found extremely interesting, and it resonated with some of the stuff I’ve been writing in my sports-related manuscript (hopefully a book soon) about how neural plasticity affects athletic performance. Specifically, Dr. Patrick O’Connor, a University of Georgia exercise scientist, says that ‘a sport like rowing, swimming or running requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns that may best be developed by actually doing the sport.’ A sport like ‘rowing, swimming or running’ that ‘requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns…’ hmmmm? So that would be like, what, every sport?

Continue reading “Brainy muscles”

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

Vania Smith-Oka, my colleague at Notre Dame, pointed out this NY Times article “Curiouser and Curiouser” by Siri Hustvedt.  The piece starts by exploring changes in body image, “The afflicted person perceives herself, or parts of herself, ballooning or diminishing in size. The neurological terms for the peculiar sensations of growing and shrinking are macroscopy and microscopy.”  Equally interested is how the article examines “medical materialism,” a tendency to view the varieties in our lived experience in both a pathological and materialist light, the result of nerve cells and associated molecules run amock.  

The essay argues eloquently for the need to see complexity as the way to understand ourselves, overcoming dichotomies such as nature/nurture or materialist/subjective:

The human infant is born immature, and in the first six years of its life, the front part of its brain (the prefrontal cortex) develops enormously. It develops through experience and continues to do so, although not as dramatically… A child who has good parental care — is stimulated, talked to, held, whose needs are answered — is materially affected by that contact, as is, conversely, the child who suffers shocks and deprivations. What happens to you is decisive in determining which neural networks are activated and kept. Since we are born with far too many neurons, the ones that aren’t used are “pruned”; they wither away. This explains why so-called “wild children” are unable to acquire anything but the most primitive form of language. It’s too late. It also demonstrates how nurture becomes nature and to make simple distinctions between them is absurd. A baby with a hypersensitive genetic makeup that predisposes him to anxiety can end up as a reasonably calm adult if he grows up in a soothing environment.

Hustvedt also speaks to the importance of an interpretative approach to understanding human phenomena, something that many anthropologists would echo: “Crick’s reductionism does not provide an adequate answer to Alice’s question. It’s rather like saying that Vermeer’s “Girl (or Woman or Maidservant) Pouring Milk” is a canvas with paint on it or that Alice herself is words on a page. These are facts, but they don’t explain my subjective experience of either of them or what the two girls mean to me.”

Another quote, one that resonates with much of what we’ve written on this site:

It is human to clutch at simple answers and shunt aside ambiguous, shifting realities. The fact that genes are expressed through environment, that however vital they may be in determining vulnerability to an illness, they cannot predict it, except in rare cases, such as Huntington’s disease; that the brain is not a static but a plastic organ, which forms itself long after birth through our interactions with others; that any passionate feeling, whether it’s about politics or tuna fish, will appear on scans as activated emotional circuits in the brain; that scientific studies on weight and longevity tell us mostly about correlations, not causes; that the feelings evoked by the so-called “God spot” may be interpreted by the person having them as religious or as something entirely different — all this is forgotten or misunderstood.

Hustvedt ends with a similar call to our own: “We are all prisoners of our mortal minds and bodies, vulnerable to various kinds of perceptual transfigurations. At the same time, as embodied beings we live in a world that we explore, absorb, and remember — partially, of course. We can only find the out there through the in here… Our thinking, feeling minds are made not only by our genes, but through our language and culture.”

Glutamate and Schizophrenia

The NY Times has an article, Daring to Think Differently about Schizophrenia, about research on glutamate, schizophrenia, and drug development.  In addiction research, there is also increasing consideration of the role of glutamate, moving beyond the dopamine-centered models.  Glutamate-targeted drugs “might help to treat the cognitive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Drugs currently on the market do little to treat those symptoms.”  Here are some early quotes from the article:

“Dr. Schoepp and other scientists had focused their attention on the way that glutamate, a powerful neurotransmitter, tied together the brain’s most complex circuits. Every other schizophrenia drug now on the market aims at a different neurotransmitter, dopamine.”

“Glutamate is a pivotal transmitter in the brain, the crucial link in circuits involved in memory, learning and perception. Too much glutamate leads to seizures and the death of brain cells. Excessive glutamate release is also one of the main reasons that people have brain damage after strokes. Too little glutamate can cause psychosis, coma and death.  ‘The main thoroughfare of communication in the brain is glutamate,’ says Dr. John Krystal, a psychiatry professor at Yale and a research scientist with the VA Connecticut Health Care System.”

Looking for more blogs to pass the time?

I’ve added some new blogs to our blogroll, including ones that I have enjoyed recently.  

I am particularly impressed by Laura Kilarski’s Psique, which contains insightful commentary as well as summaries and links to recently published literature by topic.  Most useful! 

Jonah Lehrer’s The Frontal Cortex is another great addition.  Jonah is the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist, a former Rhodes Scholar, and interested in how neuroscience and everyday intersect, as well as the fostering of a Fourth Culture, a genuine dialogue between arts and sciences. 

Finally, Deric Bownds’ MindBlog which “reports new ideas and work on mind, brain, and behavior.”  Deric covers many of the same topics that we do here, with more emphasis on the biology (but less on the anthropology).  He also provides good excerpts from current neuroscience research, and is author of The Biology of Mind.