The Family Dinner Deconstructed

National Public Radio had a radio broadcast yesterday morning on “The Family Dinner Deconstructed.”  Here’s the blurb: “The ritual of a family dinner has been praised as an antidote to bad grades and bad habits in kids. But as researchers look closer at the family dinner, they raise the question: Is it the mere act of eating together that counts, or is it that strong families are already more likely to have a family dinner?” 

The reporter does a wonderful job talking with a variety of researcher to focus in on the proximate features of the family dinner—conversations, relationships, rituals, emotions—and how they can impact physical and mental health.  For example, the quality of conversations at mealtime was a better predictor of reading development than parents actually reading to their children.  But what mattered was the content on dinner conservation, that it was complex and “rich with explanation, story telling, and more.”  Similarly, for physical and mental development (for example, eating disorders), specific behaviors at dinner proved important: roles assigned (setting the table, beginning and end to dinner); a genuine concern about daily activities; and a sense of empathy and concern for each other. 

While the radio cast pushes a double-blind study to “determine” the specific effects of a good-quality family dinner versus dinner-as-usual, the announcer rightly acknowledges that doing such research is a daunting prospect.  I would add that an ethnographic approach that builds on this educational and psychological research and that teases out the relationships between dinner, family interaction, and development as a joint physical-mental phenomenon could also add some great insights.

Sleep, Eat, Sex – Orexin Has Something to Say

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchOrexin is a neuropeptide which is released by the posterior lateral hypothalamus, and is linked to wakefulness and sleep, appetite regulation, and the motivation of sexual and addictive behaviors.  One apt way to think about it is as a hormone in the brain, combining some of the popularly conceived effects of adrenaline and testosterone into one. 

(Don’t get too excited now!  I am just trying to give you a way to think about it, that orexin works to promote arousal and response…)

I am writing a post on the links of orexin to appetitive behavior, particularly addiction, but I’ve generated a lot of material.  So I am going to give you this one first, which summarizes aspects of orexin (also known as hypocretin) and neurological function with respect to sleep, appetite and sex. 
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Where to study neuroanthropology?

One of our readers, David Navega from Portugal, asked a great question about a very practical matter: where are the centres of neuroanthropological research? A great question which caused me to just about choke on my coffee. I had to break it to David that, well, I’m not really that sure. There are pockets of people around doing work that I would consider to be part of ‘neuroanthropology,’ broadly defined, though they might run screaming from the designation. But his question is an excellent one, and I would like to put that out to the readers, with an opportunity for them to write in with universities, centres, departments, or programs that would support this sort of research.

Aside from the two obvious candidates from the blog — the University of Notre Dame (where Daniel, Agustín, and a host of other good people work and teach) and Macquarie University (where I work, alongside great colleagues in my department and others) — there are a few programs that stand out. I’m going to list some, but I hope very much NOT to exclude anyone. If I don’t include your program, please drop us a line (without too much abuse of this author) to let us know you’re out there. We want to know where you are.

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Denial

Today I will lecture to my students in my Alcohol and Drugs class on denial.  We had a provocative discussion of the topic last Thursday, building off our reading of the wonderful and powerful memoir Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. 

A group of students opened last Thursday’s class with a presentation that framed denial in the two ways it is generally discussed in addiction (in the US).  As I wrote to this group to help in preparing their presentation, “There is a basic debate in the addictions field (particularly alcoholism) on the role and importance of denial in addiction and recovery.  On the one side, denial is seen as a defining feature of addiction and breaking through denial as a core component of successful recovery.  On the other side, denial is seen as a marginal feature of addiction, likely the result of some other internal problem or even of social relations.  In this approach, attacking denial can backfire, causing anger in the substance abuser while not addressing either addiction itself or the promotion of therapeutic change.” 

After the students gave their presentation, I wanted to encourage class discussion, and used a technique I often employ, getting them to reflect on their own everyday lives and what that can tell us about ourselves.  I asked the class to write down an example of someone they knew “in denial,” and then give their gut reaction about why they think that person reacted that way.  In other words, I wanted some ethnographic data and some culturally-framed “explanations” to generate discussion.  It worked. 
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Brain-culture, memes, and choosing examples

Earlier today, I wrote a post on Bruce Wexler’s book where I suggested that ideology and ‘culture shock’ were not necessarily the best case studies to work with when discussing the integration of social theory with neurosciences. My reasons for this are many, but they boil down to a fear that, if we choose our case studies poorly, we will not offer compelling integrated accounts that bring together biological studies of the brain and humanistic studies of society and culture. It may have seemed that I was not overly generous to Wexler, however, even though I quite like his work, so I thought I’d balance this out by giving some examples of ways that anthropologists have similarly chosen examples that make it especially difficult to present coherent accounts across different scales and perspectives on a subject.

One of the best/worst examples of attempting to prematurely bridge the gap between culture and brain science is the concept of ‘memes.’ First proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (in The Selfish Gene), a ‘meme’ is defined by Dawkins as the smallest unit of cultural information, which spreads from one person to the next through diffusion, sort of like an infection. Dawkins and other ‘memeticists’ (is that a word… or a meme?) are at pains to argue that culture propogates itself, like a catchy tune you can’t get out of your head or a fashion you must have that you then make your friends crazy to imitate, because of the effectiveness of the meme, not because it is useful to the bearers. Proponents also argue that, although there are significant differences with genes, evolutionary theory can also be applied to memes to understand how cultural ideas spread, develop, change, or become extinct.

So what’s the problem with memes?
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Cellular effects of exercise

I just came across a news report on the Times Online website by Nigel Hawkes, entitled, Exercise really can make you younger, study shows. A team from King’s College London looked at telomeres, a section of repeating DNA at the end of chromosomes, in twins to judge how exercise affected them. Telomeres protect the end of chromosomes, and they shorten over our lives (however, long telomeres may increase the likelihood of cancer, so there’s a trade-off between cancer susceptibility and aging). A study in 2002 even showed that telomere length could be used in forensic anthropology to tell the age of remains. The researchers used questionnaires, but they also looked at data from twin studies, to try to isolate the effects of exercise, controlling for BMI, smoking, diet, and even genetic inheritance (hence, the twins).

The difference could be pretty significant. Dr Lynn Cherkas from King’s College explained: ‘Overall, the difference in telomere length between the most active subjects and the inactive subjects corresponds to around nine years of ageing.’ According to the researchers, their results ‘show that adults who partake in regular physical activity are biologically younger than sedentary individuals.

‘The only reason I point out the research on the Neuroanthropology blog is that here we have another cellular-level mechanism that profoundly affects very basic body functioning that can be manipulated by individuals, behaviour, cultural ideals, social fads, and even moral panics. The amount of exercise we get affects the speed at which our cells age; but the amount of exercise we get is, in turn, affected by a whole range of things, from changing policy and budget concerns at schools, to safety concerns about transportation, housing patterns, leisure activities, public health campaigns… In other words, we have a wonderful example in the current discussion of exercise, and the effects of exercise on our telomeres, of a way that sociological-scale phenomena might affect very microscopic-scale qualities of the human body. The shape of our DNA is not just a cause of our physiology, but also an effect of our physical activity.