In this post, I’ll highlight research presented at the meeting from several of the most compelling current research areas in cultural neuroscience, particularly work that underscores emerging themes in cultural neuroscience. Here I’ll cover presentations on culture and emotion, intergroup processes, and gene-culture interaction.

The meeting took place over three days. Presentations included 1) Poster sessions featuring the work of a number of graduate students, 2) Symposia about current research, as well as conceptual and methodological issues in cultural neuroscience, 3) Workshops on areas of the field’s growth, such as defining culture in cultural neuroscience research, 4) A keynote lecture by an anthropologist and one of the early pioneers in neuroimaging, Robert Turner, and finally, 5) Talks by several members of the NIH on the ever-important topic of funding.

Current Themes in Cultural Neuroscience:

 Culture and Emotion

I thought one of the most interesting research topics at the meeting focused on the ways that culture shapes people’s emotional experiences – and the physiology that accompanies such experiences. This theme was epitomized by the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her graduate student Xiao-Fei Yang based at University of Southern California. Dr. Immordino-Yang studies the relationship between emotions and bodily states.

It’s well established that one bodily component of emotion, its outward expression in terms of gestures and facial expression, is shaped by cultural norms. For example, East Asians tend to value less emotional expressivity than European Americans. What has been unclear is whether these cultural display rules also influence people’s internal experiences of emotion.

Dr. Immordino-Yang described a study aimed at answering this question. She used anthropology-style open-ended interviews about emotional stories to induce emotion and measure its expression in her study participants. She paired these interviews with brain imaging and heart rate measurements to measure the bodily states accompanying the emotions the induced.

Interestingly she found that it was not people’s assessments of emotion that differed based on cultural background, but the relationship between these feelings and the bodily states (both heart rate and brain activity) that accompanied them, suggesting that cultural experience may be shaping the way people translate bodily reactions into emotional feelings, rather than the intensity of those emotions themselves.

Although there were many other excellent presentations on culture and emotion, Dr. Immordino-Yang’s work stood out because her she measured both the cultural and biological sides of her question in great depth, inducing a full-blown emotional experience in the lab and measuring multiple biological correlates of emotion. I believe such approaches, which combine anthropological and neuroscience methods, are what will be necessary to allow cultural neuroscience research to reach its full potential. Research like Dr. Immordino-Yang’s, focusing on how cultural norms shape emotion will likely be critical for increasing the customization and efficacy of mental health treatment.

Intergroup Processes

Another theme at the meeting, one that’s especially near and dear to my heart, was that of intergroup processes, i.e. the interactions between people from different cultural/ethnic/racial groups. Although this topic has previously been subsumed under the umbrella of social neuroscience, and is undeniably social in nature, I believe cultural neuroscience has much to contribute to this research.

I especially enjoyed the presentation of Dr. Bobby Cheon, a postdoctoral researcher at the Nanyang Business School in Singapore. Dr. Cheon studies how cultural and social context influences between- and within-group social processes, such as prejudice and empathy. It is all too well known that discrimination and prejudice exist, but we still don’t have a complete understanding of the factors that drive these intergroup processes.

Dr. Cheon presented a series of studies aimed at elucidating both the social-environmental and biological factors that make people perceive groups other than their own (i.e., “outgroups”) as threatening. He found that those with a genetic variant that has been associated with greater sensitivity to environmental threats (a variant of of the serotonin transporter gene) were more likely to be influenced by prior negative experiences with outgroup members – and even general perceptions that the environment was threatening – and then discriminate against outgroup members. Dr. Cheon’s findings suggest that biological and environmental factors interact to shape prejudicial behavior.

One thing that was particularly convincing about these results is that he found the same genetic effect on prejudicial behavior against both real-world stigmatized ethnic and social groups and artificially created social groups in the lab, giving us increased confidence in the generality of these findings. Having a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying negative intergroup behavior like discrimination and prejudice is important in an increasingly globalized world, and may inform interventions aimed at lessening the incidence of such behavior.

Gene-Culture Interactions

A final theme that stood out to me at the meeting was the interaction between specific genetic variants and the cultural environment, such that the same genetic variant can produce dramatically different influences on behavior depending on the cultural environment of the person who carries it. In fact Dr. Chuangsheng Chen, a geneticist based at UC Irvine, said in his presentation that many geneticists now believe that one of the primary drivers of modern day evolution is human culture.

One of the highlights in this research domain for me was the work of Dr. Heejung Kim based at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Kim studies the interplay between human culture and human psychology and biology. As highlighted in the previous work by Dr. Cheon, there are now a number of well-established relationships between genetic polymorphisms and behavioral tendencies. What is less well understood is whether these gene-behavior relationships manifest themselves the same way in every cultural environment.

Dr. Kim asked this question in terms of the oxytocin receptor polymorphism (OXTR rs53576), which is related to socio-emotional sensitivity. She compared the effects of different gene variants between Americans and East Asians, two cultural groups in which the norms about social behavior are known to differ.

She found that among those with the more socially sensitive variant of the polymorphism (those with at least one “G” allele), Americans reported seeking social support to deal with stress, whereas East Asians – living in a culture where emotional support seeking is often considered inappropriately burdensome to others – did not report such behavior. Similarly, she found that Americans with the socially sensitive variant reported greater emotional well-being than those without it (presumably due in part to their emotional support seeking behavior), whereas East Asians did not show a relationship between this genetic variant’s presence and emotional well-being.

I found Dr. Kim’s work especially strong because she made a direct connection between a gene-environment interaction and a clinically relevant measure, emotional well-being. This work suggests that we need to understand the ways that genes and the environment interact if we want to treating medical conditions effectively across cultures.

As you can see this was an amazing meeting that highlighted both the breadth and depth of the emerging field of cultural neuroscience. Stay tuned for a follow-up post with some observations about the future directions of cultural neuroscience!

Neuroanthropology: What Is It and Why Should You Care?

The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology [2012] edited by Daniel H. Lende and Greg Downey makes an impassioned argument for why neuroscience and anthropology should be working together to unravel the ongoing mystery of how our brains make us who we are. The latest Brain Science Podcast (BSP 97) is a thought-provoking conversation with Downey and Lende. After explaining that anthropology can offer neuroscience field data about “brains in the wild,” we explore two case studies that demonstrate the promise of this new partnership.

Thanks so much, Ginger, for having us on our show. We really enjoyed it.

Infant Mental Health presents human development as relational and contextual, even as its research shows how brain development and our developmental trajectories both instantiate and shape how each of us develop as a person. It’s more the theoretical flavorings and basic orientations that keep the research apart, not some fundamental difference in what the results are showing. An encompassing paradigm – of encultured brains
- can help bring these approaches into more fruitful conversations.

So first Adrian Raine’s book is reviewed in The Guardian with the deadly wrong title, How to Spot a Murderer’s Brain. Skip over the first half and its biology vs culture framing. When it gets to Raine seeing that his own brain scan looks like a pscyhopath’s, like the same people he was studying as criminals, things suddenly get much more interesting.

Raine’s biography, then, was a good corrective to the seductive idea that our biology is our fate and that a brain scan can tell us who we are. Even as he piles up evidence to show that people are not the free-thinking, rational agents they like to imagine themselves to be – entirely liberated from the limitations set by our inherited genes and our particular neuroanatomy – he never forgets that lesson. The question remains, however, that if these “biomarkers” do exist and exert an influence – and you begin to see the evidence as incontrovertible – then what should we do about them? …

Reading Raine’s account of the most recent research into these reactions, it still seems to me quite new and surprising that environmental factors change the physical structure of the brain. We tend to talk about a child’s development in terms of more esoteric ideas of mind rather than material brain structures, but the more you look at the data the clearer the evidence that abuse or neglect or poor nutrition or prenatal smoking and drinking have a real effect on whether or not those healthy neural connections – which lead to behaviour associated with maturity, self-control and empathy – are made.

And now onto the second article, DSM, NIMH on mental illness: both miss relational, historical context of being human written by Infant Mental Health specialist Claudia Gold. Dr. Gold comes at behavior and mental health problems from a different perspective…

The growing discipline of Infant Mental Health offers just such a paradigm. This discipline is characterized by four key components. First and foremost, it is relational, recognizing that humans (and that includes their genes and brains) develop in the context of caregiving relationships. Second, it is multidisciplinary. Experts in infant mental health offer different perspectives. They come from many fields, including, among many others, developmental psychology, pediatrics, nursing, and occupational therapy. Third, it encompasses research, clinical work and public policy. The field looks at mental health within the context of culture and society. And last, it is reflective, looking at the meaning of behavior, not simply the behavior itself. The ability to attribute motivations and intentions to behavior is uniquely human, and research has shown that this capacity is closely linked with mental health.

These two approaches often think they are on separate sides of the fence. But what has happened is something a bit different. Each field placed a fence, saying “We don’t go there…” But the research has increasingly nudged the fence of each approach a bit further afield, eventually crossing into the realm of the other. The disciplinary fences are still there, but they’ve pushed so far into the other’s territory that suddenly there is a whole field in between. On that fertile land new paradigms will be grown. Greg and I outlined such an approach in our 2012 paper Neuroanthropology and Its Applications: An Introduction.

Gold mentions work on Adverse Childhood Experiences, and how the ACE people have become increasingly applied in their work. I wrote about the ACE approach and applied neuroanthropology last year in the post Neuroanthropology, Applied Research, and Developing Interventions.

This approach to intervention and policy is one that recognizes context, behavior, and meaning as equally important components alongside more targeted techniques that fields like psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience have developed. We know from previous work with mental illness that in general, a pharmacological treatment and a psychotherapy treatment work better together than either one on its own.

This approach pushes that formula one step further, recognizing the anthropological dynamics of applied work and the ways we can achieve targeted effects both matter.

-How to document the conversations we carry on with ourselves most everyday (in the West at least)
-The importance of inner voices for rebuilding our notion of mental illness
-The role hearing voices (and working with those voices) can play in therapy for schizophrenia
-What it’s like to be without such an inner voice
-The inner voices in addiction.

The post points to how we might rethink clinical practice and laboratory tests in ways that reflect better the natural history of our own voices, and the power of language in our lives. That, in turn, would lead to both conceptual reworkings and applied impact.

I find myself increasingly concerned that people continue to take interdisciplinary efforts like neuroanthropology to mean that everything must be reduced to the biology, as if that’s somehow an explanation. Well, it’s certainly a socially important one right now, but I have my doubts about its scientific validity for humans.

So this post is a reduction to language, it could be said. The overall theme is the conversation we carry on with ourselves, the voices we contain within our minds, and how that is central to how we are – and needs much more research.

I’ll start with the work of inner dialogues by anthropologist Andrew Irving, bring in a post about hearing voices and hallucinations from Ruminations on Madness, address Tanya Luhrmann’s work on schizophrenia and working with inner voices, bring back some great work by Greg on language and neuroanthropology, and then speak about how language, particularly our inner voices, matters deeply in addiction.

Andrew Irving and Documenting People’s Voices

In New York Stories, anthropologist Andrew Irving captures the inner dialogues people carry on with themselves as they walk the streets of the city. He combines visual, linguistic, and psychological anthropology together, using cameras and tape recorders to record people speaking out loud the same interior monologues we carry on with ourselves.

Irving has just been featured in a great write-up by Ferris Jabr over at Scientific American, Mrs. Dalloway in New York City: Documenting How People Talk to Themselves in Their Heads.

[Irving] approached strangers at different points in the city. “Excuse me,” he would say, “this might sound like a strange question, but can I ask you what you were thinking before I stopped you?” If the stranger did not run away, he would ask them to wear a microphone headset attached to a digital recorder and speak aloud their thoughts as he followed closely behind with a camera. He would not be able to hear what they were saying, Irving explained, and they would be free to walk wherever they liked and continue their business as usual…

Irving’s videos are permanent records of fleeting thoughts, of dynamic mental processes unfurling in real time. They give us nearly direct access to a kind of internal communication we usually do not share with one another.

Here’s one of the raw videos (you can find more here (YouTube) and here (vimeo), and the Jabr article contains some amalgamations):

Irving describes this monologue, along with two prior others, in his blogpost New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens.

[A]s the person walked through the city narrating their thoughts it soon becomes apparent that there are as many ways of thinking as there are of speaking. Meredith’s thoughts stretch from the trivial to the tragic over a few short steps as she begins by looking for a Staples stationary store to buy CD covers, then shortly after is dwelling on a friend’s cancer diagnosis she learnt about the previous night. Meanwhile, she looks over the road and notices a cafe she likes to watch people in. Thomas is concerned with people’s prospects in the current social and economic climate and his thoughts are organised as a sustained social analysis and argument about the position of working people and the historical migration of black workers from the agricultural south to the industrial north. Tony, a writer and video artist, walking from his boyfriend’s house, his thoughts emerging in staccato bursts: as he walks quicker and his blood circulates faster he begins to get more argumentative with himself as he negotiates a significant life event and keeps returning to the same words suck it up or let it go.

Irving has published on this research, including this 2010 article Dangerous substances and visible evidence: tears, blood, alcohol, pills. Irving also extends this approach to his work with HIV/AIDS in Africa, in his 2011 article Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue.

The capacity for a complex inner life—encompassing inner speech, imaginative reverie, and unarticulated moods—is an essential feature of living with illness and a principal means through which people interpret, understand, and manage their condition. Nevertheless, anthropology lacks a generally accepted theory or methodological framework for understanding how interiority relates to people’s public actions and expressions. Moreover, as conventional social–scientific methods are often too static to understand the fluidity of perception among people living with illness or bodily instability, I argue we need to develop new, practical approaches to knowing. By placing the problem of interiority directly into the field and turning it into an ethnographic, practice-based question to be addressed through fieldwork in collaboration with informants, this article works alongside women living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda with the aim of capturing the unvoiced but sometimes radical changes in being, belief, and perception that accompany terminal illness.

Irving’s emphasis that interiority can become a research question, addressed through methods and collaboration, is an important one. It turns us away from inner voices as a philosophical problem, one of trying to discern one’s “true voice”, as well as away from inner voices as a psychological problem, of an isolated mind that we access through some theoretical angle, fixing it with ideas rather than actually doing the reseaarch.

Ruminations on Madness and Inner Voices

Ruminations on Madness is a powerful blog that aims to bring together research, the actual experiences of people, and activism. Nev’s most recent post Limitatations of the Current Phenomenology of Psychosis, a reflection built on her attendance at the week-long International Congress on Schizophrenia Research.

Nev addresses how auditory verbal hallucinations have become naturalized, a nosological category that seems apparent to researchers and clinicians yet misses the actual complexity of the phenomena. People who experience these inner voices report a wider range of experiences than the token “AVH” considered in the literature, and the linking of biological, subjective, and social points to the need for new theory to better understand the role and meaning of these voices both clinically and in people’s everyday lives.

Here is what people actually report:

I regularly listen to descriptions, for example, of “voices” that are in no sense ‘literally’ auditory; that are also “felt” as presences (sometimes in a more tactile way, sometime more ‘affectively’); that are locatable and even agentically moveable or malleable (e.g. can be ‘pushed to one side’); that can occupy very specific parts of the head, brain and/or body; that can be felt passing through membranes, tissue and bones; that may be visual or visualizable; that may alternate or ‘flit’ between modalities; that may derive only from existing sounds, spoken or written words.

Their so-called “verbal” messages may likewise be directly ‘felt’—never taking the form of a spoken or written sentence or word; interpreted verbally or more straightforwardly ‘heard’ or ‘seen’ as words. The ‘hearing’ of messages may be a dream-like experience, phantastic or phantasied, brutal, possessing, but virtually always characterized by a strength and strangeness that defies metaphor and language in the most intractable ways…

[T]he lion’s share of “bizarre” beliefs I hear are instead often verbal descriptions (and precisely not ‘explanations’ although we might quibble over the distinction) of experiences that themselves seemingly resist any attempts at reduction to particular (more basic, primitive, ‘animal’) sensory, perceptual, vestibular, proprioceptive or affective domains.

Over time, layer adds to layer; there is labeling, description, explanation, interpretation; solo ‘acts’ repeatedly intermixed and intermarried with ‘raw’ experience, with clinical and social interactions, with dialogue, with the cultural imaginary.

And finally, so often, all these experiences are doubled in the most frustratingly inarticulable ways: “real worlds” encased in solipsistic realities; simultaneities of familiarity and radical unfamiliarity; perfectly intact logic ‘here’ and its wild negation, suspension or potentiation ‘there’. Fear, isolation, terror. Possibility. All of it.

This naturalistic approach is at odds with a clinical approach that needs definite categories for disease/illness, treatment options, and payment. This approach is also at odds with a biological reductionism, where these voices would become mere epiphenomena, expressions of an underlying and faulty biology. Nev pushes us to take this reality of inner voices as constitutive in itself of the problem we seek to understand. Not something to place to one side, to figure out later, but rather front-and-center in how we will move forward in understanding mental illness.

Undeniably, distinctions, categories, taxonomies, and so forth are needed and necessary. The first question is (yes, rhetorical): have we truly selected the most veridical, the most careful, the most phenomenologically coherent distinctions; those most likely to reveal crucial differences, correlates or indications– biologically, etiologically, epidemiologically, clinically or culturally?

If we have not (and this, clearly, is my contention), then we are faced with a series of (non-rhetorical) questions. Which distinctions, assemblages, gestalts or taxonomic clusters are in fact most relevant, most important?

Further, which distinctions at which temporal or developmental moments? (How, e.g., can we deconstruct ‘background’ and foreground, generative and consequential, primary, secondary and tertiary.) And at which levels of explanation?

How can we move forward (particularly with measurement) given the very serious limitations of extant vocabulary and the possibility that psychotic experience may, in fact, constitutively trouble even those mental distinctions that have held up in other areas of neurology, psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience?

Is there, here, a potentially critical role for ‘experiencers’ who may not be able to provide precise positive accounts of psychosis, but nevertheless effectively play the ‘negative theologian,’ apophatically indicating what madness is not?

To do this sort of work requires a methodological approach along the lines of Andrew Irving, something that can capture these voices and experiences outside both the clinical categories and clinical settings that so infect our thinking about and research on such phenomena.

Tanya Luhrmann and Hearing Voices

Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann is one person who has set out to do that sort of work. In the video below she speaks about her cross-cultural work on hearing voices, with research in the United States, India, and Ghana. The video was presented at the Culture, Mind and Brain conference last October. Greg wrote a long description and reflection on Luhrmann’s work, and describes the methods used by her research team:

Luhrmann and her research assistants asked patients about their voices: how many, what sorts of voices, their relationships to the voices, could they identify any of the voices, what sort of control they had. The interviews paid close attention to the experiential quality of the voices: were they stressful and why; were any experiences of hallucination positive; whether the patients thought that the voices were ‘real’; and what they felt the causes of the voices was.

For more on Luhrmann’s methods, jump to around 6:45 in the video.

Luhrmann is also interested in the applied implications of this work, and has worked with the Hearing Voices Movement to better understand how some people might cope with the distress they can experience with inner voices. She describes this work in a 2012 American Scholar essay, Living with Voices. Here’s the movement’s genesis in The Netherlands, birthed through postcards and then a meeting that brought people coping with voices in everyday life together in one spot.

Romme and Escher decided to hold a conference for everyone who had sent in cards. All sorts of people turned up, including people who had struggled with voices and hadn’t been able to do anything about them despite the efforts of psychiatrists and medication.

The people who were comfortable with hearing voices told the same story; their experience had a trajectory. Some voices had started out mean and difficult, and the hearers had first responded with startled fear, but once they had chosen to interact with them, the voices settled down and became more manageable, sometimes even useful.

“They show me the things I do wrong,” one voice-hearer said, “and teach me how to do them otherwise. But they leave the choice to me if I really want to change it or rather leave it as it was.” That was the kernel Romme and Escher took away from the event: if people could accept their voices and create a relationship with them, they could get their voices to change.

The implications of this movement for psychiatric thought and practice around schizophrenia are profound. Rather than auditory hallucinations as the reflection of an underlying pathology, of a brain gone wrong that needs to be treated with pharmacotherapy, the hearing of voices comes front-and-center in clinical practice. Or, to put it in a different way, the clinical practice socially constructs the voices in new ways, changing their meaning and expression.

Its method, to treat voices like people, is almost the inverse of the biomedical understanding of psychotic voices and a completely different perspective on how to handle them. The organization insists that hearing voices is a normal human experience, which indeed it is, although what is common (and thus “normal”) is hearing a voice as you slip into sleep, perhaps calling your name, perhaps your mother’s voice…

The paradoxical assumption here is that if the voice-hearer treats the voices as if they are real, as if they are like the independent, external people in the world they are perceptually experienced as being, the voices will become less real…

The Hearing Voices method not only puts people in groups to encourage them to talk about and then engage their voices, it also asks other people to treat the voices as real. Staff members conduct “voice dialogues,” often working one on one with a client. The staff member asks to speak with the voice. The client will listen for what the voice says and then report it back, in a strangely ventriloquized process. Some staff members invite the voices to attend the group meeting.

Luhrmann goes on to describe an alternative psychiatric reading of the Hearing Voices movement, that these internalized voices are related to trauma and dissociation, rather than a biologically-produced epiphenomenon.

If it is true that distressing auditory hallucinations are the dissociative consequences of trauma, the implications are enormous. Dissociative disorder has a positive prognosis, one of the most positive in the realm of psychiatric disease, whereas schizophrenia is often thought to have the worst. Dissociative disorder is understood to be a reaction to events in the world; schizophrenia is usually imagined as a largely inherited vulnerability. Dissociation is best treated with therapy and interaction; schizophrenia is assumed to require medication, often heavy.

The new way of thinking opens the possibility that people do not hear voices because they are crazy, but that their apparent craziness may be the result of the brain-numbing chaos that can result from hearing voices. It suggests that we can help by teaching people to cope with their voices, rather than viewing the voices as evidence of organic damnation.

Luhrmann’s long essay Living with Voices is filled with more case studies, more intellectual history, more discussion of implication, so I recommend you go read it. But to wrap up this part, what I want to stress is how inner voices are open to cultural influence, both in a broad sense (Chennai, Accra, US) and in a focused sense (the Hearing Voices movement). By doing cross-cultural research, and working with experts who cultivate particular lines of human variation, we can position ourselves to interrogate current ethnographic and neurobiological theory and to aim to build a better synthesis.

Life without Language Interlude

I want to take a quick meander back to a post Greg wrote in 2010, Life without language. He described there the work of Susan Schaller with people who have grown up without exposure to language, in particular her work with her informant Ildefonso. This research offers us another point of comparison, another dimension that helps set the overall layout of the puzzle we are facing. Howe we fit the pieces of the puzzle together will be quite determined by the borders we draw around the problem as well as the picture we think is painted there.

Greg summarizes his thoughts near the end:

In contrast to the absolute inability Idefenso had getting the idea of ‘idea,’ or his struggles with points in time, he clearly was capable of all sorts of tasks that suggest he was not mentally inert or completely vacant. He had survived into adulthood, crossed into the US, kept himself from being mowed down in traffic or starving to death. Moreover, he and other languageless individuals had apparently figured out ways to communicate without a shared language, which I find both phenomenally intriguing and difficult to even imagine…

I suspect that Ildefonso might be suggesting a way in which certain cognitive skills and communicative channels had actually atrophied with the incursion of language into his life, or even become impossible once language had intruded upon them. Language was not simply an addition to his cognitive repertoire; it may have displaced or disrupted other forms of thought and interaction.

From the perspective of a language-saturated world this seems improbable; we tend to think of ourselves as cognitively complete, profoundly abled, without limit. But clearly Ildefonso and other languageless individuals had to find some way to compensate for their deficits, whether it was through mimetic thinking (which is one possibility) or through some other constellation of adaptations. This languageless cognition would not be simply prelinguistic, childlike thought because adult languageless individuals function much more adeptly than four-year-olds. But how this non-linguistic, adult cognition might operate, what it might include, is a bit of a mystery and seems fragile in the face of language learning…

So can people have thought without words? Well, the evidence-based answer would seem to be, yes, but it’s not the same sort of thought. Some things appear to be easier to ‘get’ without language (such as imitation of action), other things appear to be a kind of ‘all-at-once’ intuition (such as suddenly realizing all things have names), and other ideas are difficult without language being deeply enmeshed with cognitive development over long periods of time (like an English-based understanding of time as quantitative and spatialized). In other words, language is not simply an either/or proposition, but part of a cognitive developmental niche that shapes both our abilities and (unperceived) disabilities relative to the fully cognitively matured language-less individual.

The case of Ildefonso suggests that not all ‘thought’ is either neurologically or practically similar. Ildefonso had managed to survive, and clearly had thoughts, but he was also obviously confused by some basic qualities of the language-saturated world in which he had to live, not least of which was social interaction. Even without very basic capacities – like, apparently, naming itself, the seemingly first act of applying a symbolic icon to a recurring element in perceptually reality – he managed in day-to-day life and was emphatically ‘human,’ although operating with unusual cognitive capacities.

The evidence that Schaller presents on the relationship of language to different cognitive skills correlates also with the evidence from child development, widely recognized as demonstrating a progression through skills of varying complexity. For example, Western children seem to understand the concept of ‘pretending’ or ‘imagining’ a couple of years before they understand the concept of ‘believing,’ although to an adult, the concepts might seem to be logically linked. These concepts are not pre-established in a ‘language of thought,’ nor are they just the result of language socialization shaping cognition as, in both cases, we would not expect them to emerge at staggered time intervals. Not all words are equally easy to learn, nor is every cognitive ability equally dependent upon language (although some functions might be accomplished both pre-linguistically and post-linguistically using different mechanisms, so that continuity of function masks discontinuity of means).

To be honest, I wish I could write something deeper and more interesting about the case. I find myself pondering without much success what life would be like without language, how I might learn to compensate or develop other ways of accomplishing the same tasks, but I’m stopped short by the realization that language has been knit into my neurological functioning to such a significant degree that words are my constant inner companion. Even when I find that I have not been engaged in an inner dialogue, it is like waking from a sleep, unable to recall a dream that fast slips away. Perhaps like Ildefonso, I cannot talk about a languageless ‘dark’ once in the linguistic ‘light,’ even though there is a rich potential for action and perception in the dark.

How does language knit into neurological function? What are its differential relations with our cognitive skills and developmental trajectories? These are complex questions. Greg has a series of older posts that get at this domain in a broad fashion: (1) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?, (2) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was right… about adults, and (3) The new linguistic relativism: Guy Deutscher in the NYTimes.

Lera Boroditsky is a leader in this area, and has a nice Scientific American article, How Language Shapes Thought. This 2012 paper Linguistically Modulated Perception and Cognition: The Label-Feedback Hypothesis looks similar to some of what Greg is proposing about how language might interact with thought, perception, and action. Nick Chater and Morten Christiansen are leaders in developing an alternative approach to Chomsky’s univeral grammar, and have a recent chapter entitled Language as an Adaptation to the Human Brain. And Stephen Levinson and Nicholas Evans offer up a co-evolutionary model in Time for a Sea-change in Linguistics: Response to comments on ‘The Myth of Language Universals’. For those looking for a good overview, this 2010 review article Linguistic Relativity (pdf) by Phillip Wolff and Kevin Holmes is quite good.

Addiction: Talking Yourself into It and Out of It

To many, addiction seems like the prototypical biologically-based mental illness. Drugs change the brain, leading to compulsive craving and lots of problems. Certainly this view is promoted that way by the US government, for example, NIDA calling addiction a “brain-based disease.” So, what role for language here?

My ideas about addiction changed one day in Bogotá, Colombia as I watched the head therapist in action at the counseling program where I also worked. This moment was before I ever returned to grad school to studying action. I was simply trying to do my best at therapy for young addicts.

Gloria was overseeing the Monday morning session with the boys who had returned from a weekend at home. I worked at a therapeutic community, where the adolescent boys stayed for months of treatment. Near the end they started returning to spend their weekends at home, to see how they adjusted and to give them time to adapt back to their family setting while also dealing with the inevitable problems that cropped up.

It seemed a routine session, the counselor in charge admonishing some and praising others, boys confessing various transgressions and difficulties. But Gloria stepped in when one boy tried to skate through the moment too easily.

She set to down to grill him in the most kindly yet forceful of therapeutic ways. This was a woman who brooked little foolishness, most of all from young men who thought they could get away with it. Getting away with it, in her mind, was the slippery slope towards addiction in the first place – boys and families alike were too “permisivos,” too permissive, letting things slide that should otherwise be confronted.

More often that not, that simple confrontation was the main point of Gloria’s intervention in moments like that, to show both boy and therapist alike that small “broken window” moments need to be confronted. But today she put on a virtuoso display.

[And there ends my dramatization – I’d really like to, but this post is already way too long. So I am going to cut to the chase.]

The boy had hemmed and hawed about how things went at home. But under Gloria’s careful question, it became apparent that he was “bored” at home, that things weren’t easy. His family wasn’t like treatment; his friends were waiting outside. He made his bed and did his chores and then had little to do. He was bored.

And then Gloria led him through how he was trying to talk himself into going using, into why he really should. His mother was on his case. He was fed up with being bored. Who would know if he just slipped out for a bit? His friends were there, waiting; they wouldn’t say anything.

“So you were trying to talk yourself into it?” Gloria asked.

“Sí,” the boy answered. Yes.

That moment has stuck with me through the years. Talking yourself into it?!! That went against so many things I had read and heard about addiction. But it took on an important clinical relevance there. Gloria knew enough about these boys, and about their problems, to recognize the conversation going on inside their heads. And that’s where she chose to focus her energies that day, on bringing that conversation into public light and confronting that level of permisividad, of permissiveness.

For me, the lesson has been larger, though to be honest I haven’t quite known what to do with it. My work has focused on compulsive desire and habitual use, on the linking of the neurobiological with the subjective and the contextual. But language too is there. Likely in ways more profound than I can imagine.

Drinking: A Love Story

Journalist Caroline Knapp’s memoir Drinking: A Love Story illustrates this articulated element of addiction, of words and feelings and desires and conflicts playing out inside our heads and how that plays into drinking or not.

First, early in the development of her drinking, Knapp describes her rising urge to go for a drink right after work.

At some point I began to notice how edgy I’d start to get every afternoon… I’d get up from my desk and wander around the office until I found someone who looked ready to wrap up for the day. I forced a tone of nonchalance. “Any interest in a quick drink at Aku?” “How ‘bout a quick drink?” It was always a “quick drink,” as if I had things to do, places to rush off to afterward.

I was conscious of this, conscious of the feeling of need behind the words, but I managed to ignore this for a long time. I suppose a part of me meant it – just a quick drink: no big deal. The need, and its intensity, was a secret I kept from everybody, myself included (27).

Later, she describes how language – how an inner voice – mediates between urges and anguish and identity.

When I sat there at the table with my aunts and uncles and parents, when I lifted the glass to my lips and watched the people around me swirl the liquid in their glasses, it felt right. I felt as though I’d made the right transition and that gave me a feeling of relief…

Drinking always worked that way, at least it did until the end. There was a logic to it, an easy liquid logic that resolved some deep puzzle of need and wanting. Ah! That’s how it feels. Ah! Here it is; I’ve found the way.

Tennessee Williams describes this feeling in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when Big Daddy asks Brick why he drinks. His answer: “I do it for the click.” Click: it’s right, it’s me (70).

But it’s not just in the self-affirmations, in the mediation on how functional drinking might be, on how it seems – told in a certain way – like the right kind of answer. Other parts of how language works for people come to the fore as well.

No is an extraordinarily complicated word when you’re drunk. This isn’t just because drinking impairs your judgment in specific situations, like parties or dates (which it certainly may); it’s because drinking interferes with the murkier, larger business of identity, of forming a sense of the self as strong and capable and aware. This is a difficult task for all human beings, but it’s particularly difficult for women and it’s close to impossible for women who drink…

There was something about drinking, something about getting drunk and sleeping with men [Meg] didn’t know, that gave free rein to a host of buried feelings, to an undercurrent of neediness and longing she’d kept compressed in the darkest corner of her soul for years.

The drink released this current, let it stream up and out. There was a fuck-you element to it: a feeling of fuck you, I am going to get what I want, even if I don’t believe I deserve it. Frustration and shame and fear and self-loathing and release, all wrapped into one, all liquefied and drained away by drink. She drank and she did just that, just said fuck you to her own complicated mix of feelings and did it (80-81).

Knapp repeats this same theme later in the book.

Abby drank a lot before [the rape] happened, and she smoked pot daily, but afterward, something within her shifted. The impulse to control, and to worry, abated. Fuck it. It’s like the deepest part of your soul just says that – fuck it – and you plunge, justification in hand like a passport to self-destruction…

Janet took the leap after her marriage ended. Something clicked the same way, something very deep said, Nope. Just can’t tolerate any more pain, and her alcohol intake went off the charts. She moved from Vermont to Boston and after a very short time found herself looking up at the clock every night at ten-fifty or ten fifty-five and thinking: Oh, shit. Then, no matter what she was doing, she’s race out to the liquor store before it closed to pick up one more bottle, one more bottle to get her through the night, to get her to sleep (213-214).

Even in recovery the inner voices continue to do their work.

A few nights before the two-year anniversary of my mother’s death, I found myself at home, alone, with an unplanned evening ahead. I stood there in my living room at one point and I could sense it, an edge of emptiness and grief tugging at me, and I wanted to run, eradicate it. This is why I drank. This is why I drank. The feeling is immediate and laced with panic, and so is the response: Anesthetize me. Fuck it.

In the end I lit a cigarette, another great antidote for strong emotion, and I made myself a cup of tea. The feeling abated, as it always does despite your unshakeable conviction that it won’t, and then the feeling passed. Another moment, gotten through without a drink (266).

Knapp brings these words inside ourselves to light, tying them to our experiences and our emotions and the everyday occurrences around us. In her writing I’ve found that she provides a great deal of raw material – of description – that is good to think with, even if one might not always agree with her final assessment. That gives the potential to rework what she describes in new ways.

Inner voices are there in the mediation of drinking, in the why’s we drink and the why’s we don’t. These are a different type of inner voice, one already a part of oneself, yet triggered in specific moments, an articulation of need, a permission to do, a sense of why concretized in an inchoate voice, often confused yet powerful. Deeply powerful.

Later that night, back at Michael’s and sitting around his living room chatting with his parents, I found an excuse to go out to my car. I think I told Michael’s mom I had a book out there I wanted to lend her. In fact, I had a bottle of Scotch stashed under the front seat, and when I got to the car, I grabbed it and I sat there in the dark and drank a good two or three inches of it straight out of the bottle. I just remember the hunger, the need. I need this. I might have actually said it aloud; I can’t remember, but it wouldn’t surprise me, it felt as strong as words (59).

Rethinking Motivational Interviewing as a Linguistic Practice

Motivational Interviewing is one of the few proven clinical interventions for addiction. In the official documents, including the recently released 3rd edition of Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change (Applications of Motivational Interviewing), and in their extensive training sessions, Motivational Interviewing is presented as a clinical technique that promotes people’s internal motivations in positive ways. Therapists should listen empathically and roll with client resistance, all the while engaging clients in “engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning” on those positive statements that clients make about changes they’d like to make in their lives.

The basic point of Motivational Interviewing is to not get into debates with addicts about the negative side of things; start scolding them, and inevitably they’ll start defending themselves. Rather, therapists should focus on reinforcing the reasons addicts have to make changes in their lives. They inevitably have them. Addiction is no walk in the park, and people are not stupid – heavy alcohol and/or drug use comes with costs, and often wishes on the part of users that things could be different. But they say those things tentatively. Motivational Interviewing works by re-phrasing statements in a more active and positive fashion, a powerful system of feedback from the therapist.

Motivational Interviewing involves attention to natural language about change, with implications for how to have more effective conversations about it, particularly in contexts where one person is acting as a helping professional for another (4).

Motivational Interviewing is presented at a therapeutic approach, a type of talk-based therapy, and is increasingly framed in psychological terms. Clients experience ambivalence, they having varying motivations, they can assess costs and benefits. For counselors, the job is to, first, engage them in a conversation that isn’t oppositional, but after that, largely cognitive – all that “engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning.”

From one perspective MI is complete when there is a change plan in place to which the client is committed. Viewed in this way, MI is something that might be done at the beginning of a treatment process to prime the pump for change… [However] change is often not a linear process. Motivation to initiate and persist in change fluctuates over time regardless of the person’s stage of readiness.

But in writing this post, I’ve come to develop another perspective on what Motivational Interviewing might do. It works because it helps develop certain inner voices over others, giving voice to desired selves and conflicted feelings and hoped-for outcomes. Motivational Interviewing works because it changes the conversations a person has with himself or herself.

In part, those conversations change by being articulated in new ways, in ways that don’t reinforce common stereotypes and negative feelings in the person and that change the very language used. Hearing that affirmation from another – you really do want to cut back on your drinking – changes how the internal conversation happens outside the therapeutic setting. Rather than saying “fuck it” or talking themselves into going out to use, people learn to listen less to their most negative voices and to give space to others inside themselves.

While Motivational Interviewing is largely ramed as changing internal motivations, it really is a linguistic performance. It concretizes things in language – changes the “voice” of it – and helps change the inner voices that the person carries around as they move through their world. That’s the basic point I want to make. It’s not really more complicated than that.

In Conclusion(or Lieu of?!)

Oh, lots more I could say. Here are just two topics I left out:

-Cultural neuroscience and its curious results about bilingual individuals and the differing patterns of brain activation based on which language gets used (for example, this paper on dynamic bicultural brains). Use Chinese, and the interdependent self becomes the better framework to interpret brain imaging results, since both “mother” and “self” are activating similar areas. Switch to English, and the independent self comes to the fore, complete with differing patterns of neural activation.

-How isolated most psychological approaches to “language” are within the framework of linguistic relativity, often taking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as meaning just the language one speaks and little more. But languages come attached to cultures. When I speak Spanish here in Tampa, it’s just not quite the same as when I speak Spanish in Colombia. Language without social context and history is, in the end, easily painted into a universal grammar corner. The things that make it actually matter to people are washed away. For better reflections on this than I am capable, see Duranti’s Language as a non-neutral medium and Michael Silverstein on the Language-Culture Nexus.

So that’s not much of a conclusion. But this is very much a first draft of thoughts.

Photo Credit: Donna Mulholland, Our Inner Voices, appearing in The Aquinian post Expressing your inner voice through creativity and yoga

Update: I just want to add in this 2007 piece I came across, Exploring how deaf people ‘hear’ voice-hallucinations, describing the work of Joanna Atkinson with hearing and non-hearing individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. It points to the sensory modality (and mediation) side of things, and highlights also how “inner voices” can vary.

Participants born profoundly deaf reported non-auditory, clear and easy to understand voices. They were all confident that they did not hear any sounds, but knew the gender and identity of the voice. They reported seeing an image of the voice signing or lips moving in their mind.

By contrast, only participants who had early experience of hearing speech described their experiences in auditory terms. Others with partial awareness of sound were uncertain whether they were really hearing sound when the voices were present. Individuals with severe language deprivation and incomplete acquisition of either speech or sign, were remarkable in that they did not experience either auditory characteristics or perception of subvisual imagery of voice articulation, suggesting that language acquisition within a critical period may be necessary for voice-hallucinations that are organised in terms of how spoken or signed utterances are articulated.

I don’t think that the two events — registration and resignation — are directly related.  Well, unless Bowen was thinking that he should register for an online course because he might have more time on his hands…

But the two are definitely metaphorically related, because the discussion of MOOCs has become a forum for debating the future of tertiary education, including a host of political, economic and technological changes: public funding for universities, digitization strategy for education, economies of scale in educational cooperation, the role of entrepreneurs and for-profit institutions, student debt burden, reduced employment in academia, the un-bundling of university degrees (or here), the concentration on student outcomes, growth of university administration, the cost of a university education…

Trying to keep up with even a fraction of what is being written about MOOCs is impossible — counting snowflakes in a blizzard — but there does seem to be a pattern: virtually any and every current fear about change in tertiary education is being projected onto MOOCs. You can find a column promising that MOOCs will fix almost every problem facing academe — or make it unfathomably worse — even suggesting that MOOCs are ‘digital sharecropping’ or calling for universities to declare a hiring freeze while we re-examine our long-term strategies in light of ‘MOOC mania’.

Fortunately, because they’re so scalable, everyone with an opinion could fit into a single MOOC.

With the politics and pedagogical debates in mind, I just want to offer some initial thoughts on my own MOOC-related experience and design goals. We can’t really evaluate the outcome yet, as the MOOC still hasn’t started its inaugural run, but we can at least talk about the design and orienting principles, however nascent they may be. This reflection is liable to run into several posts as it’s already a sprawling set of documents on my hard drive.

The MOOC is one reason that I haven’t been blogging as much of late. I was planning on having January away from serious academic writing (that is, non-blog writing), especially after the stress involved in applying for promotion to Associate Professor (I got it). Instead, I wound up carefully scripting 40 or so video segments for this subject, working on graphics, quizzes and other elements, and helping to build an online simulation of hominid evolution. (…and this is my first bit of advice about MOOCs: don’t underestimate how much work is involved in prepping all these materials.)

Open2Study

All jokes aside, here in Australia the ministry shake-up and failed leadership challenge in the federal Labor Party, as well as a more recent bum fight about funding reform for primary and secondary education, pushed to the back pages the announcement that Open Universities Australia (OUA) is launching ten new MOOCs. These are the first of what are intended to be 50 offerings through it’s new project Open2Study. OUA is the online provider owned by seven Australian universities, including my employer — Macquarie University — as well as Curtin, Griffith, Monash, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Swinburne, and the University of South Australia.

Open2Study intro video

Perhaps we’re developing MOOC-related fatigue, after all, last year was officially the ‘year of the MOOC’ according to the New York Times, but it’s especially surprising to me that we’re not getting more coverage here because Australians love when someone does an ‘Australian’ version of just about anything. The one exception is a piece at The Conversation: The Aussie Coursera? A new homegrown MOOC platform arrives.

The lack of coverage, however, may have to do with the fact that the tertiary education sector in Australia is not gripped by the same level of fear or millenarian imagining (‘we’re about to enter a new Golden Age…’) as the industry in some other places.

With some noteworthy exceptions — usually due to epic mismanagement or ideologically-driven ‘pre-emptive austerity’ — Australian universities haven’t undergone the kinds of financial shakeups that some other national systems have suffered. (For an anthropological discussion of this process, see the special issue of Anthropologies, ‘The Neoliberalized, Debt-plagued, Low Wage, Corporatized University’ and my piece on the Australian situation)

Any discussion of MOOCs here in Australia then seems at once lower stakes and less urgent, less likely to propose that MOOCs are the ‘final nail in the coffin’ or the potential financial ‘savior’ of universities. This may be about to change as Bowen’s replacement, Dr. Craig Emerson, just announced that the new federal budget is slated to cut $2.3 billion from tertiary education to pay for reforms to primary and secondary education in Australia. (Response here by Genevieve Kelly.)

My project was chosen to be the first cab off the rank at Macquarie after I pointed out at a panel discussion last semester during ‘Learning and Teaching Week’ that the technology made opening classrooms electronically inevitable. At the time, I argued that if the University didn’t promote open classroom efforts, the academic staff were going to start opening up our classrooms on our own. Either do it with us, or stand by as it happens without you. Anthropology (as well as a lot of other disciplines) wants to be free, or at the very least we are inexorably leaking onto the internet.

The leaking lecture hall

Web 2.0 opportunities are simply making it too easy and cheap to put teaching materials online. Our universities are often forcing us to tape lectures, generate electronic syllabi and provide access to our students already, so many of us are asking ourselves, why, after we put so much energy into lectures, slides, student readings, and the like for our classes, should we not share these much more widely. We have watched as lecture-like presentations – most notably, TED conference videos, but also iTunes U, Slideshare, and the like – have grown as a genre through podcasting and other avenues. There are copyright issues, and many of us are nervous about what will happen when as these materials become public, but enough of us are ready to dive into the deep end that the process is only likely to accelerate.

Why lock up all our work in presentations with limited audiences if it’s simple to break down the walls around the lecture hall? Why not transform our lectures and syllabi into vodcasts and websites and create new forms of popular, multi-media publishing (or teaching… whatever you want to call it)?

The example of MIT’s Open Courseware is just one of many; their anthropology offerings are fantastic, but whet the apetite for much more. A number of anthropologists have been posting material through iTunes U, including lectures by the staff at Oxford University, Arizona State University, and  Cambridge University. John Hawks has been putting a whole range of his teaching materials online, including even synopses of his lectures and lab activities from Anth 105. And there’s the AAA’s syllabi exchange site and Jason Antrosio’s links to introductory syllabi at Anthropology Report.

I’ve already been putting my syllabi online in different places and working more and more with technologies like screencasting. For example, I shared around my Prezi for my introduction to evolutionary theory (I’ll put up the new version of the syllabus for that class and link to that later), wrote a long blog post and shared the beta Prezi for my lecture on steroids and performance enhancing drugs, and have been publicly posting Prezis for my psychological anthropology lectures (like this one on the ‘self’ or this one on childhood.).

A project I was involved in, ‘Bringing the Learning Home,’ created a complete curriculum for teaching intercultural skills to students doing study abroad and international exchange. All of that material, including slides, lecture materials, Prezis, worksheets and the like are all shared and Creative Commons licensed to encourage international studies offices to incorporate more anthropological thinking in their programming. (More on this project at a later date, especially because I’m working on an ebook version of the whole thing.)

Exchange of teaching materials is one of the really important ways that we share ideas and keep our discipline healthy. I’ve been so grateful to my colleagues everywhere who have shared syllabi for their course when asked to design new offerings (twenty-three different subjects last time I counted). Pedagogic sharing acts as a subtle, subterranean way that we influence each other in the academic community, one that likely has more effect on future generations than our peers, as we influence how our colleagues elsewhere teach students who may eventually specialize in our core areas of expertise.

Especially when we are pushing for subtle changes, like a more integrative approach to biological and cultural anthropology (obviously a core theme here at PLOS Neuroanthropology), it’s helpful to share the teaching materials we produce. To get beyond the older, obsolete perspectives that make it unnecessarily difficult to understand processes like neural enculturation or biocultural emergence of variation in ‘human nature,’ we’re going to have to overcome previous forms of understanding. These paradigms are deeply ingrained in so many of the classic textbooks and other teaching materials that we habitually use.

If we share our teaching materials — lecture notes, slides, assignments, accessible readings, graphics, diagrams — we can work together to stymie the compulsion to refight anachronistic intellectual battles. Without new pedagogy and teaching materials, we risk unintentionally transmitting to future generations of scholars tired debates simply because they’re so embedded into our curriculum.

It’s not our peers’ views then that we seek to change through these efforts. Although we share the teaching materials with our peers, it’s their students’ views through fellow teachers that pedagogical sharing most affects.

A MOOC is a whole new level of open pedagogy. We educators are making a mistake if we only focus on the problems with MOOCs, and not the potential, or if we are so afraid of the economic consequences that we shy away from educational experimentation. I would love to see professors, educational programmers, and even web designers leading a charge into experimentation – economics and business plans be damned!

It’s a kind of intellectual Stockholm syndrome if we feel like we can’t experiment with exciting teaching opportunities or intellectual practice that might potentially threaten these institutions — those that employ some of us — even though we’re all well aware of many of their structural problems, their elitism, and their limits.

Then again, it’s also above my pay grade to have to worry about the consequences… I don’t want to be flippant, but lawyers and MBAs and administrators shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of pedagogical innovation. We’re right to be suspicious of many ‘start-ups’ and for-profit providers who are getting into this area, but there’s still likely to be a lot of really interesting and powerful new techniques that will emerge. (That said, I’ve got part of a post on how I think a greater move to open education is actually good for the ‘business plan’ of universities today, and hope to finish and post that one soon.)

This whole section, however, comes with a major caveat: I have not won the argument about making the materials in ‘Becoming human’ completely open. I believe that they will only be open to students who register, at least in the first iterations, which I’m not entirely happy about. But I don’t get the final say in this — yes, it’s because of MBAs and administrators. If I ever get all my notes together for the ‘business model of MOOCs’ post, I’ll share my thinking on this problem, but I don’t like strings on a gift economy… I’m already thinking of ways to overcome this problem without getting my partners in the project too irritated. 

The freedom of lowered expectations

Our project is what The Australian is calling a ‘mini-MOOC’, ‘a taste of higher education, not the real thing’ (again, that’s The Australian). My offering, ‘Becoming Human: Anthropology,’ is like full-sized MOOCs: registration is free to anyone anywhere. The MOOC is a reinterpretation of some of the foundational material that I use in my course, ‘Anth 151: Human evolution and diversity,’ but the MOOC version is only four ‘modules’ or week-sized chunks long.

As I write this, enrollment is over 700, so it’s more like a Fairly Large Online Open Classroom or ‘FLOOC’ than a MOOC at the moment, but, well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

OUA has put some serious thought into the production quality issues. But this quality comes at a price: a grueling film schedule, and a content-driven design, where I’ll have less chance to change things as we go (well,… no chance, really).

The shortened four-module format is good, even though I initially asked for six. In retrospect, for this subject, five would have been ideal — four is a bit cramped, but better to err on the side of brevity. The shorter format makes it clear that we’re not actually going head-to-head with more substantial university courses.

Our MOOC, then, is really more of a ‘MOOSC’ (Massive Online Open Short Course), which cannot be so easily mistaken for a university course. And that’s a good thing. A really good thing.

The short course design shifts expectations. ‘Becoming human’ is clearly not a fully-fledged university class, but university course-ish.

The short form is education-y without the higher invest of time and energy (and money) needed for a university degree, either from instructor or student.

This kind of short course format could free us up to think about topics that wouldn’t support a full twelve-week course, to pull together a concentrated focus on a single topic, regardless of whether or not that topic has the natural flow on potential required of a course. In other words, a MOOSC format allows us to do things we can’t do in our regular university teaching: a reading group on a single book, or a tight set of ideas, or a limited skill like a research method.

Moreover, the shortened format may surmount one of the other chief problems with MOOCs: the very high drop-out rates. A semester-long course is bedeviled by the issue of fatigue, even for on-campus students (and for their instructors).

In fact, thinking in the MOOSC or short course format — or maybe not even a ‘course’ at all — opens the frame for considering what we are creating online: resources for learning, rather than complete, free-standing ‘courses’ with a central vision. As Nick Shackleton-Jones argues in his post ‘E-learning is dead. Long live online learning,’ the model of an ‘e-learning’ course is a top-down, centralized view of how education works. The problem is, that’s not how people are actually learning online:

Meanwhile the way in which actual people learn online took a different direction: people Googled stuff as they needed to know it, generated low-grade short form video of everything from dance-moves to cake-baking, from computer skills to people skills. Created Wikipedia. Once again the people who contribute are the ones who really care, with content typically consumed at point of need. Ever wonder why nobody is spontaneously creating elearning courses? (the closest is probably Slideshare). A familiar theme I grant you, but designing in this space is very different. Last year we created infographics, short video stories, animations, portals for content sharing, decision-support tools, scenarios and simulations. Each asset needs to be a good fit for the audience and the need. They may need them on laptops, phones or paper. Sometimes production values are critical, sometimes they are not.

Shackleton-Jones advocates for the creation of online educational resources that might be used for a wide range of different purposes, including in conventional university courses, but also by the online explorers and auto-didacts.

In other words, MOOSCs or education-y, course-ish offerings might be a way to create novel elements that correspond more closely to the way people learn online, rather than how we traditionally teach. In the process, we might get much better results, although the shift necessarily means we will disappoint those who hope that universities can just be replaced by online providers (a group I’m happy to disappoint).

The problem: the ‘C’ in ‘MOOC’

The idea that MOOCs will compete with university classes, especially classes at highly-regarded, elite universities and liberal arts colleges, is simply a mistake as far as I’m concerned. Conceptualizing MOOCs as ‘classes’ — or only as ‘classes’ — is a paradigm problem that is helping to clog up commentary on the issue, if not actually stopping innovation and practice (although I’m hardly the first to point this out).

It’s virtually impossible for an online environment to compete with an idealized university experience: small, intensive seminars full of bright people and facilitated by brilliant, passionate scholars. The idea that they might compete has been fostered by some MOOC advocates, especially proponents like Thomas Friedman, who has written that the ‘budding revolution’ in online education leaves him ‘incredibly hopeful about the future.’

I don’t fully understand what Friedman or others think will happen, but I suspect he envisions a kind of academic ‘dream team’ of charismatic intellectuals, all delivering polished, engaging lectures through short, slickly produced video clips, posting great assignments that are somehow marked with instant, accurate feedback, and offering buzzing online discussion threads spawning intense local study groups.

Might happen, I suppose. Probably does in some of the best situations. But might not happen. Probably doesn’t in most cases…

I share Friedman’s optimism, not because I think MOOCs will bring down the cost of a university degree, replacing four-year residential institutions with a smorgasbord of free online courses. Nor do I think that MOOCs will be a kind of virtual ‘Dead Poets’ Society,’ eclipsing bricks and mortar university experiences with a kind of immersive virtual, educational world (although some of these online classes are liable to be damn good).

It’s going to take some serious design thinking, including imaging beyond the ‘class’ as a structure for a MOOC, before we can produce the very best online educational resources and opportunities. To me, the battle over whether online university education should exist or not is over — it’s already happening. The question is, do we do online education well, or is it going to be really disappointing. Do we learn from how students (and non-students) are learning online or do we just try to package up and sell what we do on campus in some kind of online format. My own experiences, both in delivering and in taking courses online, suggest that we have a very long way to go in figuring out what is possible and what works.

MOOCs provide the ideal environment to learn how to do online education better, with large numbers of students who are willing subjects and plenty of opportunity to generate data about teaching methods, presentation techniques, and student problems. Anybody who does research on educational technology would be salivating at the kinds of subject pools and beta testing teams generated by the largest MOOCs. What we will learn in online education can improve what we provide our campus-based, face-to-face students. In the process, the initial providers may go belly-up, but that’s their problem, and their investors’ problem, not an educator’s problem.

One of the reasons that I agreed to do the project with OUA is that I wanted to see what we could do with the technology, especially in partnership with an experienced provider (Open Universities Australia). I have one course already online (Anth 151 ‘Human evolution and diversity’), and another one is liable to go online soon (Anth 207 ‘Psychological anthropology: body, brain, and culture’). I’d like those offerings to be really good, rather than just watered down, pre-recorded versions of what I do on campus. MOOCs are already leading to alternative platforms, as educators ask whether the video-lecture + multiple-choice-quiz format is really the best fit for all content (yeah, probably not).

Assuming that MOOCs will either bring down the cost of tertiary education or provide identical learning experience — or must accomplish these ends or inevitably wind up over-hyped failures — too narrowly interprets what is possible, and what MOOCs are up against (spoiler: I don’t think they’re competing with universities… only… and I think one of their chief rivals are other forms of online reading and informal education). Moreover, I think it misses the point that a lot of education is already online.

The exaggerated hype is inevitable, however, as MOOCs rub up against the fever dreams of venture capital, the spintastic confabulations of public relations, and the still-reverberating hopes of the dot.com internet bubble. We’ll need to get past this hype to truly find what is possible because, I suspect, MOOCs will need to escape the model of university classes as they find their own centre of gravity, appropriate format, and distinctive opportunities, especially to do things that cannot be done in a university class.

Assuming that MOOCs can (or must) replace university degrees may slow their development into something distinctive, flexible, and intellectually interesting. We can be education-y without being a course. After all, universities do a lot more than just provide courses; some of our institutions offer public lectures, museum exhibitions, short courses in between terms, alumni tours, conferences, outreach to high schools, and a wide range of other events that are not courses.

Our MOOC — or more accurately ‘MOOSC’ — is not competing with our own core ‘product’ — university classes — but a much larger, diverse set of events, objects, texts, or experiences. Through MOOCs, universities and academics are potentially moving into spaces currently occupied by book clubs and Wikipedia and documentaries and after-school ‘gifted and talented’ programs and a whole host of resources, some of them already online. If MOOCs are truly to be disruptive technology, they will not just move our current students from on-campus classrooms to virtual relations; they will become a channel through which the university reaches publics that we don’t currently engage enough, in ways we haven’t done before.

For me, it’s a no brainer. University education is already going online. MOOCs are here and they’re a great way to figure out how to do that online education better, but the quicker we stop thinking of them only as courses, the quicker we’ll be able to turn them into a whole range of other exciting opportunities. We’ve got lots of tricks up our sleeve already as educators, but MOOCs or MOOSCs or other technological innovations are liable to give us a lot more.

Additional links

There’s no way I can post a comprehensive list of all the stuff I’ve been reading on MOOCs, but a few pieces stand out, in addition to those that I’ve linked to throughout this post. I’ve tried to put some of those below, but there will, without doubt, be even more in subsequent posts.

• Aaron Bady, ‘Questioning Clay Shirky’ at Inside Higher Ed.
• Susan D. Blum, ‘Learners Are People, Not Isolated Test-Taking Brains: Why MOOCs Both Work and Fail’ at Huffington Post.
• Andrew Delblanco, ‘MOOCs of Hazard’ at New Republic.
• Andrew Gillen, ‘The Four Lessons I Learned by Taking a MOOC’ at Minding the Campus.
• Kris Olds, ‘Globalizing MOOCs’ at Inside Higher Ed.
• Jonathan Rees, ‘Half the professoriate will kill the other half for free.’ at More or Less Bunk.
• Justin Reich, ‘MOOCs and Higher Education’s Non-Consumers’ at Impact of Social Sciences.
• Jane Robbins, ‘The Ethics of MOOCs’ at Sounding Board.
• Geoff Shullenbereger, ‘The MOOC Revolution: A Sketchy Deal for Higher Education’ at Dissent magazine.
• Nigel Thrift, ‘To MOOC or not to MOOC’ at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Cultural Neuroscience special issue in Psychological Inquiry, with a target article by Joan Chiao and colleagues and commentaries by leaders in the field.

The inaugural issue of the new journal Culture and Brain, with Shihui Han serving as editor-in-chief

A 2013 Annual Review of Psychology article, A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to the Biosocial Nature of the Human Brain, also by Shihui Han and a long-list of leaders in cultural neuroscience

Cultural Neuroscience: Progress and Promise

First off, the new issue of Psychological Inquiry has a target review article “Cultural Neuroscience: Progress and Promise” by Joan Chiao, Bobby Cheon, Narun Pornpattananangkul, Alissa Mrazek & Katherine Blizinsky. Like a BBS article, it comes with a series of commentaries by leaders in the field, followed by a response from the authors. As I write this, the target article is open-access, but the commentaries are not. Here’s the link to the entire special issue.

The abstract for the Chaio et al. review:

Contemporary advances in cultural and biological sciences provide unique opportunities for the emerging field of cultural neuroscience. Research in cultural neuroscience examines how cultural and genetic diversity shape the human mind, brain, and behavior across multiple time scales: situation, ontogeny, and phylogeny.

Recent progress in cultural neuroscience provides novel theoretical frameworks for understanding the complex interaction of environmental, cultural, and genetic factors in the production of adaptive human behavior. Here, we provide a brief history of cultural neuroscience, theoretical, and methodological advances, as well as empirical evidence of the promise of and progress in the field. Implications of this research for population health disparities and public policy are discussed.

Chiao et al. review a wide range of studies, which heartily demonstrates how this field is growing rapidly. Everything from “Individualism–Collectivism and the Serotonin Transporter Gene (5-HTTLPR)” to “SES and Neural Bases of Social Cognition”.

This section comes closest to representing the core summary of cultural neuroscience provided by Chiao et al.:

Our understanding of culture–biology interactions not only across the lifespan but also across evolutionary timescales has advanced with the discovery of culture–gene coevolutionary models of human behavior, including the cultural and genetic selection of specific traits in the production of adaptive behavior (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010; Nikolaidis & Gray, 2010; Way & Lieberman, 2010).

A neuro-culture interaction model was then developed to suggest a causal trajectory such that cultural practices reinforce values and tasks that become “culturally patterned neural activities” due to neuroplasticity or neuronal change, which then facilitates social survival via biological adaptation and reproductive success (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011).

Culture–gene coevolutionary processes may also produce cultural variation in core cognitive and neural architecture (e.g., structure and function) across phylogeny and generations, due to geographical variation in environmental pressures (Chiao & Immordino-Yang, in press). For instance, environmental factors, such as pathogen prevalence, are known to lead to cultural selection of individualism-collectivism, due at least in part to genetic selection of the short (S) allele of the serotonin transporter gene (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2010).

In other words, it’s an ambitious field. The approach aims to understand human variation across time and space, with a focus on the brain as the key site for research and for understanding difference. Genes and evolution as well as culture and environment shape the linked variation of brain and behavior. Individual/collectivism, for example, is not simply a cultural trait in this model; it has identifiable neural correlates, in part formed by past evolutionary history and in other part by the intersection of culture, development, and neuroplasticity.

The commentaries on the article are really informative. I particularly recommend the one by Denise Park, Kudos and Cautions for Advances in Cultural Neuroscience. A pioneer in cross-cultural neuroimaging, Park brings a broad sense of the strengths and potential problems her field faces moving forward in both its research and its public impact.

Park highlights important concerns and potentials: (1) that cultural neuroscience “does not inadvertently become enmeshed in variations of arguments that genetic endowment is primarily causal of neural activity, endowment, and behavior; (2) the need to distinguish clearly between a hard-wired approach and a processing approach in cultural neuroscience, such that task demands can drive differences in processing rather than being something placed immutably there by culture; (3) the importance of thinking about cultural saturation, where sustained experiences actually can generate structural changes in the brain, both within and across societies; and (4) caution about over-generalizing, particularly in such a young field that works with small sample sizes but which examines such broad questions that matter to so many people.

Among the commentaries is one from neuroanthropologist Andreas Roepstorff, Why Am I Not Just Lovin’ Cultural Neuroscience? Toward a Slow Science of Cultural Difference. He applauds the comprehensive review by Chiao et al., but also highlights some of this discomfort he feels in reading the research as an anthropologist engaged in similar work, one who brings a more reflexive approach and who has a broader approach to culture than simply treating it as a broad trait that identifies difference.

Here’s the finish to his commentary:

In the nutritional realm, the slow food movement has been restating a simple fact: Food is not just something we consume, it is also something we produce. Of importance, they say, the way we grow it, cook it, and eat it is part of making us who we are. It is not so much a matter of “you are what you eat” but equally a matter of “you become how you cook.”

Like food, culture is not just something that constitutes humans. Cultural differences are not just passive categories to be picked up, they are also distinctions that are made and used, and as such they are important vectors actively shaping our understanding of the world.

This looping effect of human knowledge (Hacking, 1995) may be a critical part of that which makes humans cultural, and this seems to be a mechanism, which cultural neuroscience cannot escape.

This is not a bad thing. In the years to come, cultural neuroscience may become one of the very important venues for identifying and reflecting on differences and identities within and between groups of people.

Realizing this may call for a slow science of cultural difference. This is very different from a happy meal of fast facts that are more concerned with generalizing by the millions or billions than understanding individual differences, strategies, and identities.

A slow science approach would care about how we grow, cook, exchange, and share knowledge about ourselves and others, and it would be interested in mapping out how that affects the world we jointly live in.

New journal Culture and Brain

The inaugural issue has four articles.

Medial prefrontal cortex differentiates self from mother in Chinese: evidence from self-motivated immigrants

In the present study, we examined the contribution of the MPFC to self and close other-referential processing of psychological traits in Chinese participants, newly arrived to the United States, in both their native language and in English. We predicted that, contrary to prior findings, the MPFC would differentially represent psychological traits for self and mother.

Neural computing: the metaphorical, cultural roots of brain models

While brain operations can be viewed as computational in nature, both the design and the properties of the brain deviate radically from those of man-made computers. This might be why brains, unlike computers, are capable of moral and esthetic judgment and of experiencing joy and sorrow, friendship and love and other human values.

Cultural experiences reduce racial bias in neural responses to others’ suffering

Manipulations of cognitive strategies and intergroup relationships in laboratory can significantly reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses by increasing the neural activity to perceived pain in other-race individuals. The current study further investigated whether real-life cultural experiences with other-race individuals can reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses to others’ suffering.

Genotypes over-represented among college students are linked to better cognitive abilities and socioemotional adjustment

Results showed that 24 loci showed Hardy–Weinberg disequilibrium among college students, but only two of these were in disequilibrium in the 1000 Genomes sample. These loci were found to be associated with mathematical abilities, executive functions, motivation, and adjustment-related behaviors such as alcohol use and emotion recognition. Generally, genotypes overrepresented in the college sample showed better performance and adjustment than under-represented or non-biased genotypes.

Some fascinating research! I’m hopeful this journal will become a meeting place for this type of synthetic research, and encourage neuroanthropologists to consider it for publication.

Cultural Neuroscience in Annual Review of Psychology

A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to the Biosocial Nature of the Human Brain is a 2013 Annual Review article authored by Shihui Han, Georg Northoff, Kai Vogeley, Bruce Wexler, Shinobu Kitayama, and Michael Varnum.

Cultural neuroscience (CN) is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the relationship between culture (e.g., value and belief systems and practices shared by groups) and human brain functions. In this review we describe the origin, aims, and methods of CN as well as its conceptual framework and major findings. We also clarify several misunderstandings of CN research. Finally, we discuss the implications of CN findings for understanding human brain function in sociocultural contexts and novel questions that future CN research should address.

Han et al. recognize that most cultural neuroscience research so far melds cultural psychology with neuroimaging. Cultural psychology demonstrated differences in psychological process across societies; neuroscience steps in to document those differences at the neural level. Cross-cultural cognition meets cross-cultural neuroimaging.

But their ambitions for the field are much larger. Here are how they describe the aims of cultural neuroscience.

The goal of CN studies is to investigate human brain function and structure in diverse sociocultural contexts. Like cultural psychologists (Markus & Hamedani 2007), CN researchers have little interest in using brain activity as a way to classify people into groups. Instead, CN research investigates whether and how the functional organization of the human brain is shaped by culture and by the interaction between culture and genes on different time scales (Chiao & Ambady 2007, Han & Northoff 2008).

In addition, CN research aims to investigate how neurobiological processes in the human brain contribute to the rise of divergent cultures in the world. Theories built on CN findings will eventually help to explain how cultural differences in human brain function mediate divergent social behaviors across cultures while at the same time pointing out the neural predispositions of psychosocial commonalities across different cultures.

CN considers culture as a highly dynamic system of continuous interaction and exchange among individuals. This system of social interaction feeds back into social practices, values, and belief systems, thereby establishing circular, recursive, and reciprocal influences between interacting individuals and culture (Hacking 1999, Vogeley & Roepstorff 2009).

The implications section of this review article are among the most interesting parts. Here they write a more existential piece that also points to substantive issues long engaged by anthropology.

The human brain develops in a specific sociocultural context during interactions with others. Because there are large variations across cultures, how to fit into one’s specific society and how to cooperate with others efficiently is a challenge for each person. CN studies indicate that the human brain has the capacity to develop culture-specific neurocognitive processes that help an individual to function in a specific sociocultural environment.

And they discuss two potential models for CN, something that I will also discuss in my commentary just below.

The context-dependent nature of the human brain can be understood in two different senses. One possibility is that the culturally different stimuli merely modulate already preexisting neural activity that, as such, remains independent of any contextual effects.

This amounts to what has been called modulatory context dependence (Han & Northoff 2008, Northoff 2012). Alternatively, the constitution of any neural activity is dependent upon the context; this amounts to what can be described as constitutive context dependence (Han & Northoff 2008, Northoff 2012)…

In the case of modulatory context dependence, neuronal and social activities interact with each other while remaining independent from each other in their respective constitution. The brain is then purely neuronal and thus biological, whereas culture is social.

This differs from the model of constitutive context dependence, which posits that, if the constitution of the brain’s neuronal activity depends on the respective social context, a clear-cut distinction between the biological domain of the brain and the social domain of culture is impossible. Rather than being exclusively and completely biological, the brain and its neuronal activity must then be considered to be a hybrid of both biological and social influences. In other words, our brains are biosocial.

Cultural Neuroscience and Neuroanthropology: Two Models?

The two fields have different historical origins – cultural psychology meets neuroimaging, and field research meets neuroscience. Such differences might push these approaches apart for institutional reasons. However, the similarities are more striking to me. Both fields are interested in questions of human variation and similarity across time and space, and both draw on evolution, culture theory, and neuroplasticity.

That said, the issues of problem scale and of theoretical models can separate the fields. A rough generalization for problem scale could be that cultural neuroscience is examining more population-level variation and neuroanthropology more local variation. Or, cross-cultural differences versus within-culture differences.

That said, neuroanthropology looks at field-based variations by drawing on anthropology, which has over a century of research on human variation extending back more than two million years. At times, that vast scope can only come into focus in one specific study – one time and place. Whereas cultural neuroscience’s more narrow scope comes through the laboratory methods, and using neuroimaging to try to understand patterns of neural structure and function.

As for theoretical models, cultural psychology has generally taken a trait-based approach to culture – individualism vs. collectivism, for example. This approach, and its increasing use of genetics, has led to a more factor-based approach to explaining variation. The culture measure contributes this much to the outcome variable, and the gene marker this much. This discrete approach to measuring variables is both powerful and reductive. It generates results quickly, leads to better comparability across studies, and can provide broad outlines of what variables are at play with what sorts of problems. That said, the anthropological concept of “culture” is hard to reduce to just one measure, for that misses the immersive, interactive, and shared dimensions of culture – the really operative parts of the concept.

This measurement approach is also hard to apply to the interactive, dynamic, and embodied approach to the “biosocial” brain that Northoff (with his colleagues) outlines in the Annual Review article. Neuroanthropology explicitly takes that approach, positing neurocultural processes as central to how brains operate, and that an embodied nervous system (and not just brain) is crucial to understanding how human variation gets produced. Some cultural neuroscientists surely agree with this approach. But given the history of their field, and the use of both neuroimaging and cross-cultural measures, they often haven’t taken this approach in the actual research. Thus, questions of theoretical models and of evidence can separate the fields.

That said, the more determinist/computational model versus the more embodied/dynamic model splits cognitive science and neuroscience more generally. Both approaches have their uses. I think it’s useful to recognize how the scale of problems addressed, the theoretical models used to understand the patterning of human neural function and structure, and the measurement models and what counts as evidence are the pragmatic concerns that make cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropology different fields at present. They both broadly examine similar issues, and I believe greater collaboration will lend strength to both sides. But right now? The two fields started from different points, and have to figure out how best to find a common meeting ground even amidst those different historical dimensions of research.

Update: John Hawks was kind enough to feature this post on his blog with Cultural neuroscience and pedigree-based neuroimaging.

John focuses on my comments near on the end, on the difference between a trait-based approach and a more dynamic one to culture, and then generalizes that more broadly to analyzing complex traits more generally, and drawing parallels to his work with genetics and the linkage to complex behaviors and traits.

Besides the emphasis on statistical design and better sampling, John also raises another important point, of using an historical and phylogenetic approach (or pedigree-based approach), one that would be broadly analogous to the emphasis on history and tradition within cultural anthropology. The historical approach to culture is often contrasted to older views, that took snap shots of culture (a frozen in place view) and assumed a certain degree of timelessness in its analytic approach. So not a theory of culture change…

Here’s the relevant excerpt from Hawks’ post:

The problems here are very much like those facing complex trait genetics more generally. We won’t get answers to many questions until we are able to look at much larger samples of people. And because the motivating factors for behavior are often very personal and local, we need to compare close relatives and members of individual communities on a massive scale.

I am thinking explicitly about the “missing heritability” problem in human genetics. One solution to this problem is that the causal genes are rare, meaning that they can be most productively identified by comparing relatives to each other. Those relatives need to be embedded in large pedigrees for the comparisons to have any statistical power to test associations.

Why should we expect studies of brain imaging to be any different? These studies are famously subject to the “dead fish” problem; small random differences between cases and controls show up as statistically important. Moreover, in small samples the appearance of correlations among uncorrelated variables creates a severe problem. The power to examine small differences between individuals randomly drawn from a population will be swamped out by variations throughout the brain. By comparing large sets of relatives, it may become possible to get some traction on the relationship of small brain differences and behavior. By looking within local communities in a stratified design, it should be possible for neuroscientists to pick apart the cultural influences on brain development from the genetic and individual influences. But there has been relatively little pedigree-based or community-based neuroimaging (much of it done on captive primates, not people).

I raise this issue to reinforce what Lende has written about anthropology: These kinds of community-based and family-based approaches are naturals for anthropologists. And they provide a way for cultural neuroscientists to move beyond the “East versus West” comparisons of America and China, and move toward a much finer-grained understanding of how genetic and cultural levels of causation may interact within individuals.

Here, in my first post, I’ll tell you how I came to study cultural neuroscience and give you an insider’s perspective on how the field has grown. I’ll also tell you a bit about my specific research interests and give you an idea of what I’ll be blogging about.

I started on the path towards a career in science in the 4th grade when I read Koko’s Kitten, the children’s book about Koko, the gorilla whom Dr. Penny Patterson taught to use American Sign Language. I, too, wanted to communicate with apes and find out how they thought! I had set my sights on studying primate cognition.

In middle school and high school, my journey towards a career in primatology was facilitated by information, advice and encouragement from a number of generous scientists, which I was able to parlay into my web page for other young people interested in primatology: Primatology Future Tense. I am especially grateful that these scientists were willing to engage in science outreach at a point when this had to be done by answering my emails through Gopher and sending me books in the mail rather than simply directing me to a pertinent blog. I realized my childhood dream in college when I completed an honors thesis on chimpanzee communication with Bill Hopkins at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

Although I was passionate about this work, I realized that part of what led me to study apes was a curiosity about the origins of human cognition. It seemed that some of the questions that fascinated me the most, such as the mechanisms underlying complex human cultural capacities, could not be answered from studying nonhuman primates alone.

This interest in studying human culture and cognition solidified when, in a single semester, I took Joe Henrich’s Psychological Anthropology class and Jim Rilling’s Social Neuroscience class at Emory University. Psychological Anthropology opened my eyes to cultural diversity in cognition and behavior, but I was left wondering how this diversity was instantiated in the brain. In contrast, Social Neuroscience provided insights about the neural correlates of human social behavior using functional neuroimaging. I was surprised, however, that none of the studies we discussed in class, not even studies of racial perception, considered subjects’ own cultural backgrounds.

I realized that neither discipline was providing a complete picture of human behavior and its underlying mechanisms, and this realization led me to my next goal, the one I am still pursuing: to use my training in anthropology and neuroscience to study the bidirectional interactions between culture and the brain.

When discussing this career goal in my graduate school interviews 7 years ago, studying culture and the brain was practically unheard of. The reactions I got from many of the faculty in the neuroscience programs to which I applied gave me a clue as to why. They ranged from questioning the feasibility of studying such high-level questions with neuroscience methods to telling me, in as many words, that I was committing career suicide.

It was clear that in 2006, the disciplinary boundaries between the social and natural sciences were a formidable barrier to studying culture and the brain at many of the universities where I interviewed. Although many of these boundaries still exist today, the field has come a long way. We now have a journal, Culture and Brain, a conference, the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium conference, and a summer school, The University of Michigan Center for Culture, Mind, and the Brain Summer Institute in Cultural Neuroscience (which will be in it’s 4th year this summer). In addition to a host of empirical papers, there have been a number of review articles, special issues and conference symposia devoted to cultural neuroscience. The field has a Wikipedia page, and searching for “Cultural Neuroscience” on Google yields over 21,000 hits.

As for my own growth as a cultural neuroscientist, although I did not accomplish the goal I expressed to my graduate school advisor of being the first researcher to use the term cultural neuroscience- I believe that honor goes to  Joan Chiao at the Northwestern University- I was able to find an academic home in the FPR-UCLA’s Culture, Brain and Development program and participate in the growth of this promising new field.

My dissertation research (supervised by Mirella Dapretto and Marco Iacoboni) focused on examining the neural mechanisms underlying cultural learning.

I began by considering anthropological theories about imitative biases, theories to which I was introduced to in that Psychological Anthropology class as an undergraduate. According to those theories, people’s tendencies to imitate certain kinds of individuals over others (e.g. to prefer others like them, or those high in status) would likely increase the efficiency of cultural learning. I used functional MRI to investigate a) what neural systems support these imitative biases and b) how they may differ depending on one’s own cultural background.

This work was supported, both intellectually and financially, by the FPR-UCLA Culture, Brain and Development Program (CBD). CBD is an interdisciplinary, cross-departmental program that provides students training, mentorship and funding to facilitate research that combines theory and methods from these three disciplines. I believe that such programs will be critical in advancing fields that bridge the social and biological sciences, such as cultural neuroscience, because they help students overcome what might otherwise be insurmountable disciplinary boundaries, and provide financial support for work that might be considered too risky for some traditional funding agencies.

In my postdoctoral research, I’m taking my cultural neuroscience research in two new directions that I hope will further increase the potential impacts of its findings. First, I am investigating socio-cultural influences on human health. Specifically, I am investigating how socio-cultural norms and sociocultural similarity between doctors and their patients influence pain perception and other aspects of the medical care experience. I believe that asking cultural neuroscience questions in the context of research on human health is one of the best ways to allow this work to have a direct impact on the lives of others. I also believe that this work represents an important, but mostly overlooked, aspect of human health and disease.

Second, I’m applying new multivariate statistical analysis methods, such as machine learning, to cultural neuroscience questions. Such techniques are better than traditional neuroimaging analysis methods for establishing close connections between brain and behavior. For this reason, I think these new methods will be especially useful in tackling the often thorny questions posed by cultural neuroscience.

In broader strokes, my research interests encompass the use of neuroscience methods to investigate the reciprocal interactions between social and cultural processes in the brain. I’m equally passionate about science outreach. I hope to integrate these interests and my own research experience into my blog posts here on Neuroanthropology.

Some of the areas I plan to cover are: 1) recent advances in cultural neuroscience and related fields, 2) the interaction between this work and society, including its potential applications and impacts on human health, and 3) how cultural neuroscience can inform, and learn from, research on non-human animals. I’m looking forward to being part of the Neuroanthropology community, and I encourage you to add your own thoughts to the conversation in the comments section below! Thanks!

Photo Credits:
Portrait: Neil Losin
Race Research Image: Race modulates neural activity during imitation (abstract)
Liz Demo: Cynthia Lee

Liz first came to my attention through her work on science outreach, in particular the video she made on Neuroplasticity for the Society for Neuroscience 2011 Brain Awareness Video Contest.

One of Liz’s early papers, written with her Ph.D. advisors Mirella Dapretto and Marco Iacoboni, remains one of the most explicitly neuroanthropological pieces written by a neuroscientist – Culture in the mind’s mirror: how anthropology and neuroscience can inform a model of the neural substrate for cultural imitative learning (pdf). Liz is someone who takes anthropology very seriously, even as she continues to develop outstanding expertise and breadth of knowledge within neuroscience.

Look for plenty of good stuff coming from Liz. She has an introductory post which should be up soon, and then plans to blog on cultural neuroscience, the impact of neuroscience on society and health (and vice versa), monkeys and apes and humans (a long-standing interest of hers, dating back to her undergraduate work on ape learning and communication), and more.

MINDLab is based on fruitful collaborations among leading research groups across Faculties and Institutes at Aarhus University… addressing central scientific problems within culture, music, language and memory. Combining this knowledge with research on novel technologies to examine the living brain, and on the most devastating neurological and psychiatric disorders, we hope to create new means to preserve and recover function and quality-of-life in relation to diseases accounting for 35% of the disease burden in Denmark. MINDLab will also develop new forms of teaching and sharing of knowledge, exploiting crucial synergies across traditional disciplines.

LEVYNA – the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion – has posted an interview with Roepstorff where he discusses his synthetic work in neuroanthropology.

It’s a real pleasure to hear Roepstorff, as I’ve never met him in person. Big hat-tip to Micah Allen for bringing the video to my attention.

If you want more from Roepstorff, you can access a list of all his publications here. One of the best overviews of his approach to neuroanthropology is the paper co-authored with Jörg Niewöhnerc and Stefan Beck, Enculturing brains through patterned practices (pdf available here).

LEVYNA also features a series of interviews with other great scholars, including Harvey Whitehouse and Paulo Sousa.

Take stage production, add in social media skills, and apply that to science. That’s what the X-Labs delivered at the USF’s 41st Engineering EXPO last weekend. I went to the Expo with my ten-year old son, and we had a blast seeing all the great projects geared towards kids and adults alike. The X-Labs show was our grand finale.

Smoke rings and candy liberally doused the audience even before the event began, all part of getting the audience geared up. Then the show started, with a robot playing drums, music and fire mixed together to show sound waves, and spinning chicken wire to create a flaming spiral. That one was entrancing! The photo above doesn’t do it justice. It was like the best souped-up campfire ever.

Then came the video of the thermite explosion – yes, just a video, not a live demonstration.

And finally the music-playing Tesla coils. Followed afterwards by a Q & A about each of the demonstrations, which really got into the science and engineering behind each project. It was definitely one of the most innovative science communication projects I’ve seen. Makes a blog seem all fuddy-duddy. Obviously my ten-year-old loved it!

The Mario video doesn’t quite do justice to the final live demonstration, where they had two coils in action!

But you can see the two of them in action, and get a sense of the show itself, in this video of the 2012 X-Labs Engineering Expo production.

Link to USF Engineering Expo, and a story on the 20,000 parents and children who attended it

Link to USF X-Labs webpage

X-Labs on Facebook

X-Labs on YouTube