Being Human

antropologi.info

Currents online, University of California

In an invited lead article in the current issue of the influential journal Human Development, UCSC psychology professor Per Gjerde challenges his colleagues to reconsider popular ideas about the role of culture in human development.

Much of the trouble stems from the use of nations as proxies for cultural units, said Gjerde. Notions of culture are linked to national boundaries and geographical areas, like “East” and “West,” fueling generalizations about “American individualism” and “Asian collectivism,” said Gjerde.

Gjerde is critical of the fieldwork that forms the basis for most notions of culture, saying it has been conducted in “limited and bounded social contexts” and that the fixation on groups has obscured the exploration of variation and complexity within and between human beings.

Gjerde’s model would take a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture, incorporating the writings of anthropology and other fields, and it would consider the influence of power, coercion, and class differences on individual psychological development.

Here's the link to Frontline that we discussed in class.

University of Colorado at Boulder

A region of the human brain that scientists believe is critical to human intellectual abilities surprisingly functions much like a digital computer, according to psychology Professor Randall O'Reilly of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The finding could help researchers better understand the functioning of human intelligence.

In a review of biological computer models of the brain appearing in the Oct. 6 edition of the journal Science, O'Reilly contends that the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia operate much like a digital computer system.

"Many researchers who create these models shun the computer metaphor," O'Reilly said. "My work comes out of a tradition that says people's brains are nothing like computers, and now all of a sudden as we look at them, in fact, in a certain respect they are like computers."

Digital computers operate by turning electrical signals into binary "on and off states" and flexibly manipulating these states by using switches. O'Reilly found the same operating principles in the brain.

"The neurons in the prefrontal cortex are binary -- they have two states, either active or inactive -- and the basal ganglia is essentially a big switch that allows you to dynamically turn on and off different parts of the prefrontal cortex," O'Reilly said.

I've added a couple of new features that will help you to find things on the site:

1. A search box (upper right-hand corner). Now you can search by keywords to find posts and comments on the site.
2. Categories. Each post can now be assigned to a specific category. Please use the menu at the top of your post to choose a category. (If you don't see an appropriate one, then send me a message and I'll add it.)

Eat or just wish for food?

Eating nourishes and sustains us,

life begins with food.

Hankering accelerates into a hunger inside.

Being an autistic man I try

every day to actualize,

have more of what I desire.

I am simply too famined and

at mealtime I’m weary from starvation.

Eat nothing,

fattened at most by the smell of supper.

Pause, to eat in the company of love.

[The following post was so relevant to our discussions, I stole the whole thing from Boing Boing]

Are people with autism disfunctional? Are psychopaths genetically adapted to survive by exploiting the rest of us?

CBC's Quirks and Quarks, my favorite science radio program, has run a couple of pieces recently about the idea that some of what we think of as "disorders" in human behavior can be more usefully treated as speciation -- a different kind of human.

Psychopaths: Quirks talks to research psychologists about the biological basis for psychopathy -- and the fact that psychopaths are sexually profligate and have lots of kids. Psychopathic rapists target fertile women -- not children or old women.

Dr. Marnie Rice is a psychologist with the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She studies criminal psychopaths who are incarcerated there. She views psychopathic behaviour as an evolved survival strategy. She says that there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that psychopaths are mentally ill but there’s good reason to believe that their disturbing behaviour is an evolved trait. She says psychopaths have evolved to capitalize in a particular environmental niche -- namely preying on the rest of society.

Autism: A noted cognitive nueroscientist and one of his patients (who has autism) team up to advance the hypothesis that autism isn't a disorder, but simply a different kind of person. They say that arguing that autism makes you "good at numbers" but "bad at socializing" is like taking a dog and saying that it's a special kind of cat that's "bad at climbing" but "good at fetching slippers." Autism makes you a different kind of person, most usefully compared to other people with autism.

In a small but highly provocative study, a UW-Madison research team has found, for the first time, that a short program in "mindfulness meditation" produced lasting positive changes in both the brain and the function of the immune system. - source

This is a couple of years old, but still worth looking at. It is one study from the HealthEmotions Research Institute located at the University of Wisconsin. Their goal is to scientifically determine how emotions influence health. They have quite a few studies going on at the moment, and I look forward to seeing the results of all of them.

I think that this sort of study speaks to a side of human development that we haven't discussed a lot in class. The conscious development of the self, through discipline and choice.

I like to dwell on this aspect of development, as it is the part we have a lot of control over. I can't change my parents or my heredity. I can have a direct impact on the way my brain functions and how I navigate what I've been given though.

You can read more about how science is approaching meditation here and here.

Since we are reading a lot in Bloom's book about emotions and why they may exist, you might also find how people are manipulating their emotions for their own gain interesting. There is a "new" practice called Laughter Therapy that has become quite popular with some folks. Here is a Laughter Yoga page that has several short movies about the practice. They even go into "laughter clubs" as they exist in India.

This article caught my eye. It discusses the importance of spontaneous play and the development of children.

Many parents load their children's schedules with get-smart videos, enrichment activities and lots of classes in a drive to help them excel. The efforts often begin as early as infancy...

It is available here.

I read the two reading preping for the world cafe. I must say from this perspective of my life as a want to be downsizer and not collector, I value a good slow-cooked meal shared with friends across the table from me. I like to see their expressions and share the humanity. I have takes several courses here that look at what world globalization is doing to us and now the rest of the world. I find that at work when I go on my computer it creates more work, not less. It moves information faster but that means someone half a country away gets to create more work for me! I have less time to spend on the floor with my people interacting. Computers are designed to be addictive. They get you hooked and suck the time right out of you. I like not killing trees but reading the articles was hard on my eyes on line, and what fossil fuel was used to generate the energy to run my computer.

What happens when the fuel runs out and unless you have solar computers does learning stop?

As far as "relationships" on line, I think it is a bad idea. I have read enough Carol Gilligan to be recruited to her way of thinking that this is another way to supress women. It dehumanizes and degrades people. When people can create false fronts it is called deception. We had a friend that was going to date an on line person that represented herself as a tea totaler and some other things she was not, we clued him in and he was able to avoid a real bad situation. Human networking one, on line dating zero!

Computers have thier place as proper tools. It is convenient to go to the library from my home computer. A virtual walk through fall leaves is just not the same as a walk through Mc clain nature trail or around Capital Lake. Anyway I want to return to relationships and friends as "old school" as possible. See you at the long house and we can chat eye to eye.

(The interesting part starts at 30 min. in, so jump ahead to that point.)

Be sure to watch the comments. Here are a couple of tests that will tell you if you are an empathizer or systematizer.

Sense of justice discovered in the brain - health - 05 October 2006 - New Scientist Tech

Sense of justice discovered in the brain

A brain region that curbs our natural self interest has been identified. The studies could explain how we control fairness in our society, researchers say.

Humans are the only animals to act spitefully or to mete out "justice", dishing out punishment to people seen to be behaving unfairly – even if it is not in the punisher's own best interests. This tendency has been hard to explain in evolutionary terms, because it has no obvious reproductive advantage and punishing unfairness can actually lead to the punisher being harmed.

Now, using a tool called the “ultimatum game”, researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for punishing unfairness. Subjects were put into anonymous pairs, and one person in each pair was given $20 and asked to share it with the other. They could choose to offer any amount – if the second partner accepted it, they both got to keep their share.

Philosophy of Genetics: Development genes and stem cells

Development genes and stem cells

Human development is breathtaking in its complexity. After an egg is fertilized by a sperm, the cell starts to divide. Some of the earliest cells in the clump are known as embryonic stem cells because they can duplicate themselves endlessly, and change themselves (or differentiate) into any cell in the body by selectively switching off some of their genes.

Later, the cells become more specialized. The neural stem cells can only differentiate into neural cells of various kinds, and skin stem cells can only differentiate into skin cells (but not neural cells), even though the underlying genes in each cell are still the same (but selectively de-activated).

I want the note again how impressed I am with the way in which everyone has made use of the blog. I've witnessed topics from class being discussed on the blog, and topics from the blog crossing over into class. This is exactly what I'd hoped for -- that the conversation would become bigger than what we can do just in the classroom. So, good job!

I have a few thoughts that I hope will make the blog even more relevant to what we're doing:

• We've had lots of posts on a range of issues, many of which may not seem to be concerned with human development at first. I think this is fine (we're still breaking in the blog, and getting used to online conversation). And there isn't much that can't be connected to human development at some level. But, I'd like to suggest that everyone begin to focus in a little when considering what to choose as a topic. When you post something, be sure to comment about how it relates to the themes in the class.
• When you read other's posts, try to make a comment. Ask a question, make an observation, or connect the topic to something we've discussed in class. This might help our conversations go a little deeper, instead of being spread out over such a wide range of topics. If you are thinking about contributing on an specific issue, do a quick check to make sure that it isn't already being discussed on an existing thread.
• Support each other in thinking about things. If someone has posted something without making a connection to our work, engage that person by helping to make that connection. One of the great things about blogging is that it allows us to think as one mind. We are smarter together than we are individually, so use each other's minds to take these ideas further than we would be able to solo.

Remember, this is an experiment. I don't know of another class that has attempted to establish a true community blog as a learning tool. That means that y'all are blazing the trail. It also means that we're making this up as we go along, so be sure to pipe up if you're having any problems.

So i guess that it is normal for kids to turn out some what like their parents and all because they are the biggest influence to the kid from the start. I have this friend who has a child and this man is abusive to the mother and the child sees that on a regular basis and is now 2 1/2 and is showing signs of defiant 'bully' behavior. the kid is a male so that dominate bully gene probably is already there, but will it seem more normal as he grows up to treat woman like his dad? is he doomed to begin with? i know eventually we all develop a sense of right from wrong and a conscience like when the parents aren't the only influence...i mean the kid already says swear words! is that just bad parenting? he doesn't have the best role models...his dad is an alcoholic who is consistently in and out of jail and his mom works and constently taking back and forgiving his dad for beating her..so will the kid adopt the idea that that is the way it works? I mean i know that not all kids end up like their parents...i came from living in the ghetto with a drug addictive mother and siblings and i grew up knowing that, but i saw what the drugs made them and decided that that life style wasnt for me..but this kid has some serious violent issues....is it just a stage that all little boys go through and will grow out of? or is it programed in his little mind that its ok to act the way he does and how his parents do? its like 330 in the AM and i was just kind of thinking and rambling. it was all triggered because i'm with his dad and he was telling me all the things that his kid does. and i have always wondered what his son will turn out to be like since i have known him since birth and am very aware of the at home situation. i dunno i guess if i just think about it hard enough i would find this silly and could come up with some rational explanation, but, i'm tired......

In my seminar group the topic of feral children was briefly brought up. I found this documentary on YouTube that is pretty interesting.

You can also go here to watch it.

Just heard this fascinating installment of Open Source Radio about the ways in which marketing has dialed in to the mechanisms of the mind in order to manipulate our choices, especially about food, with such efficiency that we are unable to resist eating stuff that we don't want. This program is very relevant to the discussion that we've been having about the structure (and vulnerabilities) of the human mind.

Link.

There seems to be some great information available regarding Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development.

Here is a useful link on the subject matter.

Although there is no general theory of cognitive development, the most historically influential theory was developed by Jean Piaget, a Swiss Psychologist (1896-1980). His theory provided many central concepts in the field of developmental psychology. His theory concerned the growth of intelligence, which for Piaget meant the ability to more accurately represent the world, and perform logical operations on representations of concepts grounded in the world. His theory concerns the emergence and acquisition of schemata—schemes of how one perceives the world—in "developmental stages," times when children are acquiring new ways of mentally representing information.

Link

From Mind Hacks:

ABC Radio's The Philosopher's Zone has just had two special editions on Freud and his relevance to modern day thinking.

The programmes look at two contrasting areas of his wide-ranging theories.

The first is on Freud's contribution to philosophy and the second contrasts Freud's theories of dreaming with modern dream science derived from neuroscience.

The discussion picks out theories which were seminal in igniting research, and those which have not stood the test of time.

For those wanting an almost entirely critical take on Freud, the Times Literary Supplement has a review of a Frederick Crews' new book entitled Follies of the Wise (ISBN 1593761015), which attempts to show that even many of Freud's more popular ideas are fundamentally flawed.

Taking pot shots at Freud is quite fashionable in this day and age. However, as Freud wrote so much and about so many different topics, it is easy to find something to criticise but difficult to dismiss all his ideas at once.

Link to Philosopher's Zone on Freud the Philosopher.

Link to Philosopher's Zone on The Dream Debate.

Link to TLS book review.

I listened to the first radio program about Freud as philosophy. It is rather sympathetic to Freud's ideas, but does bring out some good points. I think of Freud as primarily a philosopher, even with regard to psychology. It is hard to think of it as science, as it seems to really consist of a reformulation of Greek myths and intuition. It is pre-scientific (as all good philosophy is, really), because it provides a starting point, but is a metaphor just like the notion that the mind is a computer. That is a useful concept, and may generate some specific theories, but no one regards it as any more than a metaphor.

I'm not sure if I am understanding Steven Pinker (from the video in class) correctly when he said that sex reversed cultures were a myth. I'm interpreting 'sex reversed' as gender traits that vary from our culture's 'typical' understanding of male and female. In a previous class I took, we studied other cultures where each sex took on the opposite gender traits. Females took on the stereotypical male side while males fulfilled the stereotypical female role. The culture I'm going to use as an example is a primitive society known as the Tchambuli. Margaret Mead wrote "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies" where she discusses how when she and her colleagues studied the Tchambuli society, they "found a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner, and the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependant person." Mead attributes all sex characteristics to being socially conditioned. Also, looking at animals, Bonobos, a primate closely related to humans and chimpanzees, also have a very different approach to gender. With females being in charge and sexually aggressive. Many matriarchial societies seem to exist so I don't know how Pinker can say the idea is a myth. There are also Native American cultures such as the Pokot, Navajo, and Mohave tribes that have very different sexes. How did everybody else interpret what he was saying?

After I read Patty's posting about the taste buds. I found this article in The News Tribune about the display of "Bodies..The Expedition" that is in Seattle through December. It was in the Soundlife Section of the Sunday October 1, 2006 Paper, I have not heard about it before. It is a exhibit of many preserved corpses that show the human muscular, skeletal, respiratory and nervous systems in great detail. At first sight of the photos I was taken aback but then as I read about it more I discovered it is actually something that can be very educational. What I am more surprised about is that this is a huge contraversial world wide exhibit. My thought is, isn't this what scientist have done for years as a way of learning about the human body. What a spectacular way for us to learn about the human body and its functions. What is so contraversial is "Is it Science or show biz"? Personally I think it would be a little wierd to see a skinless body that you are aware was a real person but I can not help but think of how much knowledge we can gain from this opportunity. I would encourage anyone who was interested in this to see News Tribune Website and check it out.

Here is the address for the website to the full story.