Welcome to new readers: Why brain science needs anthropology

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchAfter a couple of really welcome links at places like Mind Hacks (from Vaughn) and at Dr. X’s Free Associations, as well as references from our friend Prof. Sue Sheridan at Life of Wiley (Home of the Daily Skeleton Action Figure), we at Neuroanthropology find ourselves with a lot more visitors over the past few days. Thanks to all of you who are checking us out for the first time and please consider yourself welcome at any time! As a way of welcoming our new readers, I want to reflect on what anthropology is, in my opinion, and why brain science needs it (a later post will discuss why anthropology needs the brain sciences, especially right now in the field’s development).

I was working on this piece before I saw Daniel’s most recent post, but I think it’s a good idea, especially considering the attention we’re getting from the neurosciences blogosphere.  Ironically, we’re probably getting more attention from brain scientists than from anthropologists.  The reasons for this seem to me to be complex, both a sense in the brain sciences of curiosity for things like ‘neuroanthropology,’ or ways of dealing with developmental, social, cultural, ecological, and evolutionary factors in the emergence of the human brain, but also an avoidance trend in cultural anthropology of dealing with psychology, neurology, and biology.  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, fears of ‘reductionism’ in biology in brain sciences and human biology among anthropologists seem to me to be exaggerated, mostly based upon the popularizers of brain sciences (like Pinker, who we’ve taken to task, but others as well) rather than on the more careful and interesting scientists working on the brain (we’ve discussed many examples in previous posts).

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Neuroscience On Out: The Forest and the Trees

Often on this blog we have argued about the relevance of neuroscience to our work as anthropologists.  Today, however, I want to turn the tables.  Neuroscience needs anthropology.  Given the emerging models of neural function, with their emphasis on embodied learning and active interaction with the environment, some of neuroscience’s best ideas can only be tested in the field. 

This thought came to me through my colleague Cameron Hay, an anthropologist at Miami University in Ohio.  I was reading over a near-complete draft of her paper on memory, anxiety and healing among the Sasak in Indonesia.  Cameron wrote: 

“Neuroscientists are well aware that the isolated models of mind and its cognitive processes that they tend to study are invalid and that the person’s social, cultural, and physical environment has ‘an active role in driving cognitive processes’ (Henningsen and Kirmayer 2000: 472-3). Neuroscientific methods do not allow for the kind of holistic exploration that anthropology encourages, therefore, the link between anxiety and memory retrieval is somewhat under explored; however, there are some tantalizing associations.”

 While laboratory research and even ecologically-valid experimentation certainly have a vital role in expanding our current understanding of our brains, the extension from brain research to the workings of the mind and behavior is not a simple step.  Extrapolation is, in effect, bad science, because it is not based on scholarly research. 
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Tools, mirrors and the expandable body

Michael Balter writes in Science NOW Daily News, Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind, about recent research led by Italian neuroscientist, Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma, head of the team responsible for discovering ‘mirror neurons’ (which I’ve been banging on about for a while, here and here). Rizzolatti’s team was looking at how primate brains managed to do the same tasks with hands and with tools. As Balter describes the research: ‘So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain’s trick is to treat tools as just another body part.’

Two monkeys were trained from six to eight months to grasp food with pliers. Then the team documented the activity of 113 neurons in areas F5 and F1, a region linked to manipulating objects. How did the monkeys’ motor areas act when using the tools?

The researchers first established the brain’s firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Balter summarize their conclusions: ‘Rizzolatti and his co-workers conclude that when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.”‘

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Dopamine and Addiction – Part One

By Daniel Lende 

The Pathway 

In your brain you have a system that comes up from some of the oldest evolved parts of your brain to some of the most recently evolved parts.  Reptile parts to ape parts.  In brain research on addiction, it’s generally called the mesolimbic dopamine pathway or system.  All the main addictive drugs affect this system, making the mesolimbic pathway a core component in addictive behavior.  Addictive experiences—gambling, shopping, eating and sex—also impact the mesolimbic dopamine system. 

In both scientific research and the popular press, the dopamine system is often cast in the role of “bad boy,” a hard-wired brain circuit that has gotten out of control, self-indulging in an orgy of pleasure.  That neat story tells us a lot about how we cast our own morals onto the brain, selectively picking out research to provide a nice scientific sheen.  Hard-wired for hedonism, we have to work even harder at self-control.   

It strikes me as the same sort of story that addicts know how to spin so well.  So let’s be blunt.  Denial! 
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The Stress Eraser. Only $299

Sometimes an example comes along that just captures everything you want to say, yet makes it all so horribly funny, sad and real at the same time.  Do culture, biology, the body, and technology all combine?  Look no further than the Stress Eraser, a gizmo with the slogan, “Finally, Stress Relief that Actually Works.”

Do we really need this?  The answer appears yes, at least according to Men’s Vogue.  Here’s the lead-in: “Last fall, the American Psychological Association released a major study that told us what we already knew—21st-century America is the most stressed-out place on Earth. A third of American adults are living with ‘extreme stress,’ and nearly half believe that their stress levels have increased in the past five years.” 
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Auditory neurons learning to hear

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s recent business report (January 2008) had an interesting research report on auditory neurons and the perception of complex sounds. (Science Daily has a short report on the longer piece available here). (The BBSRC is the UK’s principal funder of basic biological research.)

As the BBSRC piece discusses, sound perception is extremely difficult because similar objects often make quite different sounds, and the medium (typically air) through which we hear does not allow for the spatialization or easy decomposition that, say, light allows in vision. The Oxford-based research team is using neural imaging to try to figure out how the brain makes sense of sound, and one thing that they’re finding is that background noise appears to be extremely important to sound processing. The auditory cortex does not simply respond to isolated qualities of specific sounds but to variations in the statistical properties of the entire sound scape. As the article reports: ‘Cortical neurons appear to anticipate this particular level of statistical regularity, and respond best to sounds that vary in pitch and intensity according to this natural rate of ebb and flow, which is found in many natural scenes and most musical compositions.’

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