Empathy and Neuropolitics


Interesting new piece by Gary Olson, professor of political science at Moravian College. It’s called Empathy and Neuropolitics, with the tagline, “This is your brain on neoliberal culture. Any questions?”

Here’s the abstract:

Mirror neurons, the brain cells believed to be the basis for empathy, have recently been identified in the human brain. And yet we’re left to explain the disjuncture between this deep-seated, pre-reflective, moral intuition and the paucity of actual empathic behavior, especially in certain cultures. I suggest that answers may be found in the bidirectional connection between culture and brain development.

The political theorist William Connally has defined neuropolitics as “. . . the politics through which cultural life mixes into the composition of the body/brain process. And vice versa.” In this context, I hypothesize that the neo-liberal ideology justifying free market capitalism is one of the most potent empathy “bracketing off” elements of that culture and hybrid cultural/neurobiological imprinting can override the neurobiological traits that should bring people together. The dominant culture’s social engineering undermines and attenuates both the acceptance and institutionalization of empathy on a grand scale, while channeling its expression toward system maintenance behaviors.

There are outstanding exceptions, but too many cultural psychologists and other subspecialists have followed too many anthropologists in failing to unpack the meaning of culture itself. Following Gramsci, I argue that power and class realities have not received sufficient attention in explaining what I’ve described as a societal-wide cultural deficit disorder. This pathological condition has structural roots in the socio-economic system which influence the brain’s mirror neuron network. Cross-cultural studies offer a promising avenue for aiding our understanding of this process.

Gramsci and the encultured brain, that’s quite a mix!

Gary Olson’s website

Online paper Empathy and Neuropolitics

Brown Food Revolution

Shannon Horst, the CEO of The Savory Institute, has a good editorial, Africa Needs a Brown (Not Green) Food Revolution, over at the Christian Science Monitor. Rather than more artificial fertilizer and genetically enhanced seeds, of exporting our industrial model to them, she argues for a more local model that improves soil and yields, and works with local environments and knowledge.

She’s definitely on the William Easterly side of things, and against a Jeffrey Sachs type approach – White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good over The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.

Here’s the main part of Horst’s Green Revolution critique:

First, scientists are focusing on how to grow bigger, more, and disease- and pest-resistant plants. Their approach views the soil surrounding plants as a “problem” to overcome, rather than the very habitat in which they can thrive. The entire focus is on how to manipulate the plants rather than how to produce both healthy plants and healthy soil… Some 70 percent of Africa’s landscape is grassland – arid, semiarid, temperate, and some tropical. Kenya, for example, is 80 percent grassland. The practices and inputs required to use revolutionary seeds in these lands are destructive… Turning those lands into crop fields will have the same effect it produced on the Great Plains of the United States – the collapse of the grasslands and the soil, river systems, and the groundwater supplies that lie beneath them.

Horst also points out that human resources, embedded in cultures and specific histories, matter:

Most of Africa’s rural populations are pastoralists or agropastoralists who do not farm. Turning them into “productive farmers,” dependent on foreign seeds and other inputs, is not only destructive to their land, it is destructive to their culture. Millions have already been spent by US and European aid organizations throughout Africa on unsuccessful farming programs. Pastoralists in the Horn of Africa consistently say that these programs have also been culturally destructive.

In contrast, Horst and The Savory Institute push for a brown revolution, one that starts with increasing soil quality, and works with environmental and human resources on hand.

What Africa needs is a revolution that mobilizes people to focus on local inputs and practices that produce food that grows in healthy soil (maybe a “brown revolution”) and that enhances the social and economic fabric of the community and nation. Guess what? That brown revolution is possible and sustainable right now…

They have also achieved successful results over the past five years without spending one dime on expensive research into seeds, genetically modified organisms, root manipulation, climate change adaptation, herbicides, fertilizers, or pesticides, and without special planting or harvesting equipment.

Instead, they focus funds on educating local people in practices that blend some older pastoral knowledge and techniques of animal herding with new understanding of how grazing animals, soils, plants, and organisms coevolved and function in a healthy state. Savory’s approach also means building soils, using the seeds and simple tools already available to them, and enhancing the community’s social fabric.

A brown revolution resonates well with what I know of Lesotho, where development has had negative consequences (see James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine) and where a lack of local employment and farming opportunities, coupled with poor soil and arid conditions, means most Basotho men go to South Africa to work in mines. For more (including photos), see our post on food coping in Lesotho.

So, overall, a very good editorial. There will be roles for fertilizer to improve yields and for plant engineering for greater drought and insect resistance, but imposing such outside solutions simply on the idea that this is what we believe will work, is simply not good enough.

Link to lots of articles that detail the William Easterly vs. Jeffrey Sachs debates.

Link to The Savory Institute – “Leading the Brown Revolution”

Link to the editorial “Africa needs a brown (not green) food revolution”.

Squirrels as Models for Human Behavior? Indeed!

A delightful article on squirrel behavior, biology, and sociality today highlights just how great a model squirrels can be for some true comparative research. Here’s another species with phenomenal elasticity, good learning and sociality, and even specialized brain and body parts!

Behind the squirrel’s success lies a phenomenal elasticity of body, brain and behavior. Squirrels can leap a span 10 times the length of their body, roughly double what the best human long jumper can manage. They can rotate their ankles 180 degrees, and so keep a grip while climbing no matter which way they’re facing. Squirrels can learn by watching others — cross-phyletically, if need be.

In the acuity of their visual system, the sensitivity and deftness with which they can manipulate objects, their sociability, chattiness and willingness to deceive, squirrels turn out to be surprisingly similar to primates. They nest communally as multigenerational, matrilineal clans, and at the end of a hard day’s forage, they greet each other with a mutual nuzzling of cheek and lip glands that looks decidedly like a kiss.

The gray squirrel is diurnal and has the keen eyesight to match. “Its primary visual cortex is huge,” said Jon H. Kaas, a comparative neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, A squirrel’s peripheral vision is as sharp as its focal eyesight, which means it can see what’s above and beside it without moving its head.

“We’ve seen seeds that were recached as many as five times,” said Dr. Steele. The squirrels recache to deter theft, lest another squirrel spied the burial the first X times. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, the Steele team showed that when squirrels are certain that they are being watched, they will actively seek to deceive the would-be thieves. They’ll dig a hole, pretend to push an acorn in, and then cover it over, all the while keeping the prized seed hidden in their mouth. “Deceptive caching involves some pretty serious decision making,” Dr. Steele said. “It meets the criteria of tactical deception, which previously was thought to only occur in primates.”

Link to Natalie Angier’s Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive article

Royal Society Neuroscience and Cognition Articles Free

For the month of July 2010, Royal Society Publishing is providing free access to all their neuroscience and cognition articles.

To give you just one example, here is Joan Chiao & Katherine Blizinsky’s 2010 article (pdf) (sometimes problematic link…). The abstract reads:

Culture–gene coevolutionary theory posits that cultural values have evolved, are adaptive and influence the social and physical environments under which genetic selection operates. Here, we examined the association between cultural values of individualism–collectivism and allelic frequency of the serotonin transporter functional polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) as well as the role this culture–gene association may play in explaining global variability in prevalence of pathogens and affective disorders. We found evidence that collectivistic cultures were significantly more likely to comprise individuals carrying the short (S) allele of the 5-HTTLPR across 29 nations. Results further show that historical pathogen prevalence predicts cultural variability in individualism–collectivism owing to genetic selection of the S allele. Additionally, cultural values and frequency of S allele carriers negatively predict global prevalence of anxiety and mood disorder. Finally, mediation analyses further indicate that increased frequency of S allele carriers predicted decreased anxiety and mood disorder prevalence owing to increased collectivistic cultural values. Taken together, our findings suggest culture–gene coevolution between allelic frequency of 5-HTTLPR and cultural values of individualism–collectivism and support the notion that cultural values buffer genetically susceptible populations from increased prevalence of affective disorders. Implications of the current findings for understanding culture–gene coevolution of human brain and behaviour as well as how this coevolutionary process may contribute to global variation in pathogen prevalence and epidemiology of affective disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are discussed.

Here’s a whole list copied of what is freely available in just one journal:

Autism and talent(freely available)
Predictions in the brain: using our past to prepare for our future(freely available)
Mechanisms and functions of brain and behavioural lateralization(freely available)
Sensory learning(freely available)
Neuroeconomics(freely available)
The neurobiology of violence(freely available)
The neurobiology of addiction(freely available)
Japan: its tradition and hot topics in biological sciences(freely available)
The sapient mind: archeology meets neuroscience(freely available)
Perception of Speech (freely available)
Stem cells and brain repair (freely available)
Models of natural action selection (freely available)
Mental processes in the human brain (freely available)
Social intelligence: from brain to culture(freely available)
The use of artificial neural networks to study perception in animals(freely available)
The neurobiology of social recognition, attraction and bonding (freely available)

Link to Royal Society Publishing Neuroscience and Cognition articles.

Chains of Difference

Chains of Difference: A Community Clinical Anthropology Project is an effort to use anthropology to bridge our differences. Two of its key efforts are combining education and anthropology to help us deal better with the problems that can arise from our very diversity, and the idea that amateur anthropology – learning about and practicing anthropology outside formal settings – can be crucial to this process of negotiating our differences.

Here are three aims from their Welcome post:

-The discussion of contemporary dilemmas that stop us from learning more about each other across difference (religious, class difference, cultural, generational, etc): what can we actually ask each other about diversity and how to do it?

-The ideia that making anthropology a practise accessible to all can enhance inter-cultural relations and promote cooperation across difference

-The aim of passing direct knowledge of the practise of amateur anthropology across generations rather than relying on indirect educational means (e.g. internet). Adults trained in amateur anthropology can ideally pass the knowledge onto children and encourage them to pursue knowledge on questions of difference across diversity from a very early stage.

Chains of Differences is a project initiated by Pedro Oliveira, a Portuguese clinical psychologist
with a PhD in social anthropology recently completed at Brunel University.

Alongside Chains of Difference, Oliveira is starting a post-doctoral project focused on bring together clinical psychology and anthropology through “running multi-family groups and researching them simultaneously through an action-research ethnographic methodology.” He would love to get feedback on this project, so you can find the complete description of his proposed work here.

Link to Chains of Difference Facebook Group.

Link to Chains of Difference blog.

Four Stone Hearth #95

Afarensis has put together an outstanding addition of anthropology’s blog carnival Four Stone Hearth. The Four Stones refer to anthropology’s four fields – archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology – and the hearth to how they come together to create a holistic approach to understanding humans in varying times and spaces.

Michael Tomasello and cultural diversity, chimpanzee culture, neuroarchaeology!, and much more. Plenty for the readers of Neuroanthropology to enjoy.

Link to Four Stone Hearth #95.