Neuroanthropology

Laziness Does Not Exist

I’ve been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I’ve seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I’ve watched PhD candidates take months or years revising a single dissertation draft; I once had a student who enrolled in the same class of mine two semesters in a row, and never turned in anything either time.

I don’t think laziness was ever at fault.

Ever.

In fact, I don’t believe that laziness exists.

The Eleventh Word
This is a lovely essay.

It was, perhaps, his eleventh word. He had dog and ball and duck and bubble and mama and (mysteriously in our lesbian household) dada and nana (for banana) and vroom vroom (for cars) and hah-hah (for hot) and (the root of so many of our evils) what’s dat? What’s dat? What’s dat?

And then, there it was: fish.

It should have been a tragic moment for me. I, of all people, should have sensed the danger in it. I had just spent the last ten years of my life working on a book called Why Fish Don’t Exist, arguing that the word “fish” is symptomatic of our human inability to see the world as expansively as it is. In short, scientists recently discovered that many of the creatures we typically think of as “fish” are in fact more closely related to us than to each other. And when you accept this fact you will see that the category of “fish” is a bum category—an act of gerrymandering we perform over nature to make it line up with our intuition. But it’s a lie, this category of “fish,” a mistake, a meaningless group that hides incredible nuance and complexity.

And “fish” is just one glaring example of this thing we do all the time—group things together that do not belong under one label in the name of maintaining our convenience, comfort, power. My book, in large part, is a plea to approach the world with more doubt—more doubt in our categories, more doubt in our words, more curiosity about the organisms pinned beneath our language. The reward, as I promise in the book, is a more expansive world, “a wilder place,” where nothing is what it seems, where “each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.”

And so, as the word “fish” rolled off my son’s tongue for the very first time, I should have felt that hot burst of fricative air as a puncturing of his innocence—sheeesh.

Behave

In 2014, Milkman published a study of a self-control strategy she calls “temptation bundling.” The idea is to link a want (in the study, listening to audio versions of page-turners such as the Hunger Games books) with a popular should (working out at the campus fitness center). If getting on a treadmill were the only way to hear the next chapter in the novel, would you be more likely to get off the couch and go to the gym?

The results were promising: Participants who had access to the audiobooks only at the gym made 51 percent more gym visits than those in the control group. (Another cohort that was encouraged, but not required, to restrict their listening to workout times had 29 percent more visits than the control group) …

When Milkman explained the temptation-bundling study and other research on the Freakonomics Radio podcast last year (listen to the show here), it struck a chord with listeners: Hundreds sent emails, sharing examples of their own “bundles.” While most involved household chores or exercise, some included more serious problems such as bouts with depression.

For more from Katherine Milkman, see her TedX talk Why we fail and how we stand up afterwards

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #20”

The Consciousness and Metacognition YouTube Channel

Here’s one, a general overview of why understanding the brain can be useful to different people, from researchers to social workers.
Introduction to Brain and Consciousness 0.1 – Understanding Mental Health at Different Levels:

How to Write an Essay: A Guide for Anthropologists

There are two things you must know intimately before you start: your audience and your core point. Know these things and the rest will be far easier. Once you have locked down those two core elements, there’s a basic formula that you can master for almost any essay.

What Strength Really Means When You’re Sick

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #19”

How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past

They came up with equations to describe how the brain might in theory encode time indirectly. In their scheme, as sensory neurons fire in response to an unfolding event, the brain maps the temporal component of that activity to some intermediate representation of the experience — a Laplace transform, in mathematical terms. That representation allows the brain to preserve information about the event as a function of some variable it can encode rather than as a function of time (which it can’t). The brain can then map the intermediate representation back into other activity for a temporal experience — an inverse Laplace transform — to reconstruct a compressed record of what happened when.

Just a few months after Howard and Shankar started to flesh out their theory, other scientists independently uncovered neurons, dubbed “time cells,” that were “as close as we can possibly get to having that explicit record of the past,” Howard said. These cells were each tuned to certain points in a span of time, with some firing, say, one second after a stimulus and others after five seconds, essentially bridging time gaps between experiences.

The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges

The cost, ecologists think, is that ants trapped in bridges aren’t available for other tasks, like foraging. At any time on a march, a colony might be maintaining 40 to 50 bridges, with as few as one and as many as 50 ants per bridge. In a 2015 paper, Garnier and his colleagues calculated that as much as 20 percent of the colony can be locked into bridges at a time. At this point, a shorter route just isn’t worth the extra ants it would take to create a longer bridge.

Except, of course, individual ants have no idea how many of their colony-mates are holding fast over a gap. And this is where the second rule kicks in. As individual ants run the “bridging” algorithm, they have a sensitivity to being stampeded. When traffic over their backs is above a certain level, they hold in place, but when it dips below some threshold — perhaps because too many other ants are now occupied in bridge-building themselves — the ant unfreezes and rejoins the march.

The Dying Russians

In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.

In 2006 and 2007, Michelle Parsons, an anthropologist who teaches at Emory University and had lived in Russia during the height of the population decline in the early 1990s, set out to explore what she calls “the cultural context of the Russian mortality crisis.” Her method was a series of long unstructured interviews with average Muscovites—what amounted to immersing herself in a months-long conversation about what made life, for so many, no longer worth living. The explanation that Parsons believes she has found is in the title of her 2014 book, Dying Unneeded.

Is Freedom White?

In a political season of dog whistles, we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence fired through the frigid air on the coldest day anyone in the state could remember. His 1963 inaugural address—written by a Klansman, no less—served as the war cry for the massive, violent response to the nonviolent civil rights movements of the 1960s. Wallace’s brand of right-wing populism would reconfigure U.S. party politics, making him, as his biographer put it, the “invisible founding father” of modern conservatism. As so many pundits have pointed out, when Donald Trump talks about “domination” today, he is talking the language and politics of Wallace.

Yet Wallace’s famous speech was less about segregation than it was about freedom—white freedom. Other than its infamous applause line, the inaugural mentions “segregation” only one other time. In contrast, it invokes “freedom” twenty-four times—more times than Martin Luther King, Jr., used the word during his “I Have a Dream” address the following summer at the 1963 March on Washington. Freedom is this nation’s ill-defined but reflexive ideological commitment. Winding through the heart of that complex political idea, however, is a dark and visceral current of freedom as the unrestrained capacity to dominate.

The Tyranny of Fragility: How Alexis De Tocqueville Foretold the Rise of Victimhood Culture

Tocqueville’s writings illuminate a deep paradox arising from modern forms of democracy—as is evident in common misconceptions of his critique of the tyranny of the majority. For Tocqueville, the real tyrant in democracy is not so much the group as the individual; or rather individualism as we know it—entitled, selfish, envious, consumerist, insatiable—which arises when certain conditions of collectivist populism are in place. The erosion of extended kinship structures, religion and broader systems of ritual and meaning—which afford both a source of support and a sense of duty to others and to a project greater than oneself—are certainly partly to blame.

But Tocqueville also directs our attention to the most perverse level at which modern individuation operates: that of what becomes imaginable, desirable but ultimately unattainable in the democracy of the masses. You might call this the cognitive-affective dimension of democracy. Once a certain ideal of equality—however ill-defined as a normative goal—is in place, envy and upward social comparison become the norm. Since anyone can become more of anything or anyone at any time, something akin to entropy increases. In affective terms, social and psychological entropy become something we now call anxiety.

Talking Is Throwing Fictional Worlds at One Another

There’s an interesting paradox in Language Unlimited. You write that language is endlessly creative but also our cognition is constrained by the structure of language. What does that paradox say about human beings?

You’re right. There is a wee paradox in there. That’s a nice thing to pick up on. I think about it like even numbers. There’s an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren’t in there. Language is like that. There’s an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure.

So you’re absolutely right. Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way.

What does that say about us as human beings? That’s a gigantic and fascinating question. It probably means our cognition is limited. There may be things that we can never solve because we don’t have the cognitive structures that will help to solve them.

LOL Something Matters

These lamentations continued unabated throughout 2017. Just two weeks ago, Facebook said it would no longer flag phony links with red-box warnings, since pointing to a lie only makes it stronger. The truth, this move implied, does more harm than good.

But there’s a problem with these stories about the end of facts. In the past few years, social scientists armed with better research methods have been revisiting some classic work on the science of post-truth. Based on their results, the most surprising and important revelations from this research—the real lol-nothing-matters stuff—now seem overstated. It may be that the internet does not divide us, that facts don’t make us dumber than we were before, and that debunking doesn’t really lead to further bunk.

In fact, it may be time that we gave up on the truth-y notion that we’re living in a post-truth age. In fact, it may be time that we debunked the whole idea.

The Final Five Percent

If traumatic brain injuries can impact the parts of the brain responsible for personality, judgment, and impulse control, maybe injury should be a mitigating factor in criminal trials — but one neuroscientist discovers that assigning crime a biological basis creates more issues than it solves.

7 Modern Life Habits That Can Be Incredibly Bad For Your Brain Health

“In our study, socializing was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance,” said Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and a lead author of the study with ISR psychologist Eugene Burnstein and psychologist Piotr Winkielman from the University of California, San Diego.

The lack of true personal interaction limits the brain’s opportunities to make better connections. It can also lead to loneliness and depression — mental conditions that contribute significantly to reduced brain health.

My Octopus Teacher

Gordon W. Hewes — a four-field anthropologist with an encyclopedic, visual sensibility. He was interdisciplinary before it was cool.

There’s No Homunculus In Our Brain Who Guides Us

The cognitive-map theory has inspired decades of experiments and become a ubiquitous and widely used concept. Edward Tolman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, introduced the concept in a famous 1948 paper “Cognitive Maps of Rats and Men.” Three decades later, the neuroscientist John O’Keefe tried to put an electrode in the amygdala of a rat but inserted it instead into the hippocampus, the bilateral brain region deep in the temporal lobe, critical to memory formation. O’Keefe’s instrument began recording the firing pattern of a single cell that strangely seemed to correspond to the rat’s physical location in space. For O’Keefe, these “place” cells were evidence that the hippocampus was the site of Tolman’s cognitive map.

But the cognitive map has also been called the theory that refuses to die. The idea that there is an innate geometric representation of the environment in our brains has dissenters in brain science, anthropology, and psychology. As the neuroscientist Richard Morris points out in The Hippocampus Book, maps are things that people look at to extract information. “Adopting this term for the neural activity of a region of the brain seems to carry with it the mental baggage that there must be some cryptic homunculus that is ‘looking at’ the map to do likewise,” he wrote.2 There is no mechanistic explanation of how humans extract information from this map but because the map is such an easily understood concept, it lives on as a “beguiling metaphor.”

The Fog of the Pandemic Is Returning

The first major change to beset the testing system is entirely because of Trump. Two weeks ago, the CDC changed its official guidance about when Americans should get a coronavirus test. The agency had once maintained that everyone who was exposed to the virus should get tested for it. Now it altered this advice: If someone was exposed to the virus but did not yet have symptoms of COVID-19, they did not necessarily need a test, the guidance said.

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States

Taken together, some parts of the U.S. will see a number of issues stack on top of one another — heat and humidity may make it harder to work outside, while the ocean continues to claim more coastal land. The table below ranks the most at-risk counties in the U.S. if all of the perils were combined. You can also sort by individual climate risk to see how each one stacks up, with higher numbers being worse in all categories. The projections are for 2040-2060 under RCP 8.5.

A Biden victory cannot bring normal back

The liberal centre raises hell about the falsehoods of Trump and Johnson, which are undeniably flagrant. However, the brazen fabrications of yesterday – most obviously, those that led to the catastrophe in Iraq, for which there has never been a proper reckoning – did much to pave the way for those of today. And yet only last month, Colin Powell, who personally presented the fallacious case for the invasion of Iraq to the United Nations, was paraded as a star turn at the Democratic National Convention.

Likewise, when Tony Blair recently popped up to warn Johnson against flouting international law by breaching certain aspects of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, the lack of self-awareness on display was breathtaking. It’s not that Blair’s point was wrong, but the fact that he was the one making it allowed the Tories to issue the obvious riposte that their transgression of international law would pale in comparison to his.

Even if the liberal centre were in a stronger position to highlight the cynicism and dishonesty of Trump and Johnson, that wouldn’t be enough without changing the political conditions that gave rise to them. After all, neither Trump nor Johnson came out of nowhere. Trump inherited an apparatus of invasive state surveillance and militarised borders from a predecessor who himself presided over mass deportations, while in Britain, it was New Labour that first indulged bogus moral panics about asylum seekers and laid the foundations for today’s hostile environment.

Both Biden and Starmer might win elections simply by appearing to offer their respective electorates a steady hand. But mounting, interrelated crises stare us in the face: environmental, economic, social and political. Addressing any of them would require, for starters, radically curbing the prerogatives of capitalist vested interests wedded to a destructive status quo. It’s not enough just to install more competent and polite managers, and otherwise leave the same arrangements in place.

Evolutionary Anthropology in the Time of COVID-19

It is imperative that we see this pandemic as a biosocial event. Though SARS-COV2 is a biological entity that has specific biological, deleterious, pathological impacts on the human respiratory system (among others), the biological information is meaningless without the social, historical, political, and economic context. Fuentes gives the example of hand washing. If you understand the structure of the coronavirus, you would see how just some soap and water lifts the outer layers and can save billions of people. But that knowledge of biology is completely useless when there is no access to running water like in a refugee camp or a homeless encampment, or even in some of the Indigenous reservations here in the United States.

A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”