Addiction and Our Faultlines

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchDrugs are what cause drug addiction, or so is the story we often hear in the United States.  But what if social conditions mattered as much or more in who used and abused drugs?

 Many anthropologists and other social scientists have shown that social conditions matter, including Phillippe Bourgois, Merrill Singer, and Elliott Currie.  Bourgois’ book In Search of Respect, Singer’s article Why Does Juan Garcia Have A Drinking Problem, and Currie’s Reckoning are powerful testaments to a basic point: Addiction runs along the fault lines of society.

 However, it has been relatively easy for neuroscientists to isolate themselves from that view, and to argue that drugs run along the pharmacological fault lines of the brain, generating terrible problems on their own.  Social conditions are one thing, drugs and brains are another.

 The research by Michael Nader, Morgan Drake and colleagues shows convincingly that social conditions matter, and matter a great deal, at the basic level of the brain.  This same line of research also highlights that individual differences, whether genetic or social, make a difference in addiction.  The trick is that the research is done with monkeys.

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Beyond Right and Left

I came across David McKnight’s reflection on his own book of the same name, Beyond Right and Left, which tackles political ideas and the fight over “human nature.”  We’ve dealt with some similar ideas in the critical discussion we had over Steven Pinker and his essay on a moral instinct.  McKnight’s take seems to be more thoughtful. 

McKnight’s argument boils down to this: “Any plans for social reform must take account of the limitations presented by human nature. As remarkable as human diversity and capacity is, it is not unlimited. Any new political vision which assumes we can create societies without conflict or without self interest, is doomed to fail. Attempts at perfection, in politics or religion, have proven disastrous.” 
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Podcast on the evolution of language

Friend of Neuroanthropology, Dr. Ginger Campbell, has a new podcast up on the evolution of language. It’s free to download (audio mp3 or through iTunes).

Dr. Campbell’s stuff is great. I tend to load the podcasts onto my little iPod shuffle and listen to them while I’m riding around on the tractor (got a new 4-wheel-drive tractor this week!) and while running the ‘whipper snipper’ (what Yanks call a ‘weed whacker’ or, less prosaically, a ‘line trimmer’). We have a 4 cylinder whipper snipper, and it gets to be a rough ride, so I always enjoy listening to a good lecture while I’m I’m tearing through the unruly grass around the farm. Ira Bashkow, my former writing group mate from Chicago, now on the faculty at University of Virginia (and author of the 2007 Victor Turner Award winning, The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World), turned me on to the podcast-lecture-listening-while-doing-physical-work when he told me that he works out in the gym to them. I’ve put a bit of a farm-related wrinkle on the whole process. But I digress…

The bottom line is that the Brain Science Podcasts are a great resource for anyone interested in Neuroanthropology. In her interviews, Dr. Campbell reminds me a lot of Anne Fausto-Sterling, one of my intellectual heroes (just her enthusiasm, willingness to learn, and humility in spite of knowledge). As soon as I get the slasher (Yanks: mower) on the back of the new tractor and the pastures dry out a bit, I’ll no doubt have stack of the podcasts I haven’t yet had a chance to listen to loaded on the iPod.

Thinking about how others think: two ways?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchJason Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji, of Harvard University, and C. Neil Macrae, at the University of Aberdeen, published a fascinating piece in Neuron in May 2006, ‘Dissociable Medial Prefrontal Contributions to Judgments of Similar and Dissimilar Others’ (abstract on PubMed or pdf download here). I came across the article through the Mind Matters blog in a piece by Stephen Macknik (director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix), entitled How Harvard students perceive rednecks: The neural basis for prejudice. Both the original article and the blog post by Macknik are worth checking out.

In the experiment, the team headed by Mitchell showed the subjects photographs and asked the subjects questions about the beliefs, feelings, or attitudes of the people in the pictures. Subjects were told the pictures were of either ‘liberal northeastern’ or ‘conservative Midwest fundamentalist Christian students’ after doing a survey which determined which group the subjects were most like. The categories for the photographs were false, the pictures being taken from dating websites and randomly assigned to either of the groups. The photos were reassigned for each subject, and gender, age and other distinguishing marks controlled for (or likely just avoided by the original choice of photos). In other words, college students were being told that other ‘college students’ were either ‘like them’ or ‘different from them,’ with (apparently) no visual cues for either identity. The research team was interested in what parts of the brain were being used in attempts to ‘mentalize,’ that is, to perceive the thoughts, motives or perceptions of others.

In particular, the researchers discussed that slightly different parts of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are used when trying to mentalize, depending upon whether the target of observation is believed to be similar or dissimilar (should I write ‘the Other’ to prove I’m a cultural anthropologist?) to the self. Specifically, a more ventral (front) part of mPFC is used when ‘mentalizing’ about others perceived as similar, as opposed to a higher (dorsal) part of the mPFC used to deduce the thinking or feelings of others when confronted with photos of people thought to be ‘unlike’ themselves. The difference is significant because the different regions suggest that these perceptions are being accomplished in distinct fashion.

… simulation theories of social cognition suggest that this [ventral] region should be specifically engaged for mental state inferences about others perceived to be similar to oneself, since mentalizing on the basis of self knowledge can only take place if another person’s internal experience is assumed to be comparable to one’s own. As such, this hypothesis suggests an important ‘‘division of labor’’ in the contributions made by different subregions of mPFC to mentalizing. Whereas ventral mPFC may be expected to contribute to mental state inferences about similar others, the dorsal [upper or top] aspects of mPFC—more traditionally associated with mentalizing tasks—should be specifically engaged by mentalizing about dissimilar others, that is, individuals for whom overlap between self and other cannot be assumed.

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The Rat Park

Here’s a great article on some of my favorite research, how creating a Rat Park (i.e., paradise for rats), leads to remarkably low rates of spontaneous drug use rates among animal models.  As the article goes, this research by Bruce Alexander “led him to conclude that drugs — even such hard drugs as heroin and cocaine — do not cause addiction; the user’s environment does.”  The Rat Trap piece over at The Walrus Magazine goes on to examine the Rat Park research, and then Alexander’s subsequent work on environmental causes for addiction.

One good quote: “Alexander’s research reveals that addiction rates are low when societies are stable, and they rise at times of social disruption. ‘The extreme case is the aboriginal people,’ he says. ‘You don’t have anything identifiable as addiction until you screw up their culture, and then alcoholism becomes a major problem. In extreme cases, addiction rates can go from zero to close to 100 percent.’  Such spikes suggest that environment is a stronger determinant of addiction than chemistry. As Alexander puts it, if you put a carton of eggs under a hydraulic press, it’s true some of the eggs will crack before others, but the problem isn’t the eggs. It’s the press.”

Still, understanding which eggs will crack, and why; and how and why specific cracks happen, and not other cracks, all provide an important role for more proximate research.  It is that mix, of environment through individuals down to mechanisms and then back out, which is particularly challenging but interesting in addiction.  And, in the end, that type of research might lead us to develop theoretical models that will go beyond treating either environments or genetics as hydraulic press models, imprinting us with their forms.  In any case, for getting started, it is crucial to recognize the context, the overall lay of the land, and Alexander’s work provides us one good (though not complete, for me at least) perspective on that.