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Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences. We especially hope to explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behaviour.
gregdowney
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- June 14, 2011
- 09:03 AM
- 671 views
Getting around by sound: Human echolocation
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
By Greg Downey
As any fan of the adventures of Daredevil, being blind in comic books can give you superpowers. Matt Murdoch was blinded by a radioactive accident that he befell because he tried to save a blind pedestrian from the truck carrying the waste (ah, the irony…). Murdoch developed a kind of ‘radar’ sense that allowed him to prowl Hell’s Kitchen, rooting out the miscreants and lowlifes who, like the blind Man Without Fear, preferred to lurk in the dark.
Although his personal life proved that nice guys often finish, if not last, certainly with a heavy burden of angst and personal tragedy, Daredevil built upon the observation that deprivation of one sense can lead to heightened ability in others.
Although the Man without Fear may seem implausible, in fact, researchers have examined a number of deaf individuals who seem to develop extraordinarily acute echolocation, a kind of active sonar that they use by clicking to produce echoes from their surroundings. In a recent edition of PLoS ONE, Lore Thaler from the University of Western Ontario, with Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale, report on brain imaging research that tries to sort out how individuals who can echolocate – who have what one blind activist calls ‘flash sonar’ – accomplish this perception neurologically. Do they use an especially acute sense of hearing, or do they develop another kind of sense, able to transform echoes into spatial perception?
What the researchers found, in short, is that blind individuals who could echolocate did not really have better ‘hearing’; on normal tests of hearing acuity, they scored the same as two sighted subjects who could not echolocate. However, when a recording had echoes, parts of the brain associated with visual perception in sighted individuals became extremely active, as the echolocators were able to extract information from the echoes that was seemingly not accessible to the control subjects who were sighted.
Although I want to review the results from the recent article, I’m actually interested more generally in several things I think we can learn from human echolocation:
Sensing is broader than perception; that is, our nervous system may react to many things that we are not consciously aware it is noting in any meaningful way. Sensation is ‘bigger than’ consciousness (and I realize I’m using those terms loosely.).
Human echolocation highlights, again, that the anthropology of the senses needs to realize that the theory of ‘five senses,’ an idea that we really get from Aristotle it seems to me (although I have no interest in digging any deeper into the intellectual history of the concept), is a bit of cultural common sense and not at all a scientific approach or reflection of verifiable psychological or phenomenological reality.
Human echolocation is a capacity of any human being, but the extraordinary skill shown by exemplary practitioners like Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood requires much more than just a human nervous system and the right training: the skill requires a community that ‘gets it’ and supports the capacity.
For me, echolocation is not simply an oddity or a quirky case for the vast human carnival. Rather, human echolocators tell us something fundamental about the brain’s extraordinary flexibility and power to squeeze perception out of a range of information streams, some of which are normally non-conscious to us. But plasticity follows very specific patterns which helps to explain why the Canadian researchers report in PLoS ONE that they found activity in certain parts of the visual cortex.
The echolocators
If you’re not already fascinated by echolocation, the following clips, I hope, will ignite some spark of ‘gee whiz-ism’ in even the most blasé reader.
In this first video clip, CBS covers the story of Ben Underwood, a young man who could do remarkable things with echolocation. Ben passed away in 2009 at the age of 16, when the cancer that had led to his blindness returned. I remember the first time I saw this video clip and, even though I was already aware of human echolocation, some of what this young man could accomplish simply blew me away. It’s one thing to hear about subjects’ accuracy locating a 25 cm target at 4 meters distance, another to watch a young man bean a reporter with a throw pillow across a living room. At some points, it’s simply hard to believe how acute Ben’s echolocation was, easy to wonder if the video is some kind of hoax.
The second clip is of researcher, activist, and echolocation teacher, Daniel Kish, who, in addition to having an extraordinary capacity to maneuver by echolocation, is also one of the subjects studied in the research reported in PLoS ONE. Kish was partially blind at birth, fully blind after 13 months-of-age when his eyes were removed due to retinoblastoma in both.
Because Kish is so remarkable and such an interesting advocate for encouraging the blind to live as independently as possible that I’ve included a number of links to his websites and stories about him at the end of this piece (such as a link to World Access for the Blind).
As the authors of the PLoS ONE article write, their blind subjects used echolocation constantly in daily life, to get around familiar places, to explore cities, hike outdoors, mountain bike, and even play basketball.
Senior author Mel Goodale, Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience, and Director of the Centre for Brain and Mind, says, “It is clear echolocation enables blind people to do things otherwise thought to be impossible without vision and can provide blind and visually-impaired people with a high degree of independence.” (from Science Daily)
How do they do it?
One of the interesting wrinkles in the study of echolocation by the blind is that, until some path-breaking research in the 1940s, blind individuals and psychologists alike were not sure how the blind were able to get around as well as they did. Many blind people reported what psychologists came to call ‘facial vision,’ a sensation supposedly of pressure on the face that let them know that they were approaching an obstacle when waking.
Karl M. Dallenbach
Early experiments led by Karl Dallenbach (Cotzin and Dallenbach 1950; Supa et al. 1944; Worchel and Dallenbach 1947; click here for a black and white, silent video of their experiments) on ‘facial vision’ found that blind individuals could detect a board placed in their paths as they walked toward it, but that blindfolded individuals with normal sight quickly also started to detect the obstacle on repeated trials. By thirty trials, the blindfolded subjects were as accurate as the blind in walking up to an obstacle without touching it.
But the researchers also found that the channel for perception was not touch or a mysterious kind of facial ‘sight,’ but instead linked to the sound emanating from the subjects and reflecting off the target obstacles. When Dallenbach, Supa and colleagues put their subjects in socks on carpeted floors, or interfered with their hearing, ‘facial vision’ dropped off. The sound of hard-soled shoes on the floor was likely the source of their perception (see Stoffregen and Pittenger 1995 for an excellent review of early research on echolocation).
Stoffregen and Pittenger (1995: 209) point out that echolocation is a distinctive form of perception because the sense is a ‘closed-loop system,’ that is, ‘stimulus energy that is generated by the animal propagates into the environment, is structured by the environment, and returns to receptors.’ In other words, to echolocate people and other animals must produce as well as perceive sound. They are using active rather than passive sonar. By comparing the outgoing energy with the incoming reflection echolocators can perceive their environment (although there some echolocators evidently can also pull information from passively perceived echoes, that is, of sounds that they themselves do not create).
The active nature of this sense means that the perceiver can query the environment, as we see in the video clips, pushing out more sonic energy, clicking more frequently or l... Read more »
COTZIN M, & DALLENBACH KM. (1950) "Facial vision:" the role of pitch and loudness in the perception of obstacles by the blind. The American journal of psychology, 63(4), 485-515. PMID: 14790019
Kellogg, W. (1962) Sonar System of the Blind: New research measures their accuracy in detecting the texture, size, and distance of objects "by ear.". Science, 137(3528), 399-404. DOI: 10.1126/science.137.3528.399
Merabet, L., & Pascual-Leone, A. (2009) Neural reorganization following sensory loss: the opportunity of change. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(1), 44-52. DOI: 10.1038/nrn2758
Nagel, T. (1974) What Is It Like to Be a Bat?. The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435. DOI: 10.2307/2183914
Pascual-Leone, A., Amedi, A., Fregni, F., & Merabet, L. (2005) THE PLASTIC HUMAN BRAIN CORTEX. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 28(1), 377-401. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.27.070203.144216
Pascual-Leone A, & Hamilton R. (2001) The metamodal organization of the brain. Progress in brain research, 427-45. PMID: 11702559
Rosenblum, L., Gordon, M., & Jarquin, L. (2000) Echolocating Distance by Moving and Stationary Listeners. Ecological Psychology, 12(3), 181-206. DOI: 10.1207/S15326969ECO1203_1
Schenkman, B., & Nilsson, M. (2010) Human echolocation: Blind and sighted persons’ ability to detect sounds recorded in the presence of a reflecting object. Perception, 39(4), 483-501. DOI: 10.1068/p6473
Stroffregen, T., & Pittenger, J. (1995) Human Echolocation as a Basic Form of Perception and Action. Ecological Psychology, 7(3), 181-216. DOI: 10.1207/s15326969eco0703_2
Thaler, L., Arnott, S., & Goodale, M. (2011) Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts. PLoS ONE, 6(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020162
WORCHEL P, & DALLENBACH KM. (1947) Facial vision; perception of obstacles by the deaf-blind. The American journal of psychology, 60(4), 502-53. PMID: 20273385
- February 22, 2011
- 11:30 AM
- 1,042 views
John Shea, Human Evolution, and Behavioral Variability – Not Behavioral Modernity
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, gives us a double whammy of actual human evolution this month, rather than the typical victorious narrative. Using fossil and archaeological evidence, Shea takes down the idea that we became “modern” late in human evolution, with that sense of modernity (or progress) often tied to causes like “a cognitive revolution” or “an explosion of culture.”
In other words, he wants to contradict the popular image just below:
We have known for years that this image is entirely wrong. Chimpanzees, often cast at the base of the sequence, are – wow – just as evolved as we are. After all, they are an extant species, living today, and have also gone through millions of years of evolution since our common ancestor.
The sequence of being hunched over as a shuffling apeman in the middle to an erect man at the end is also wrong. Bipedality came early in hominin evolution, and is linked with an upright skeletal frame, not some missing link that mixes chimp and human into one. Finally, the linear sequence itself is wrong. There were numerous species of hominins in the past, a veritable branching tree just like Darwin used to diagram.
Shea adds one more important element that helps to completely dismantle this popular image. We often assume that our immediate ancestors were primitive, and that something special must set us apart.
Shea’s article, Refuting a Myth about Human Evolution, is this month’s feature article in American Scientist.
For decades, archeologists have believed that modern behaviors emerged among Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years after our species first evolved. Archaeologists disagreed over whether this process was gradual or swift, but they assumed that Homo sapiens once lived who were very different from us. These people were not “behaviorally modern,” meaning they did not routinely use art, symbols and rituals; they did not systematically collect small animals, fish, shellfish and other difficult-to-procure foods; they did not use complex technologies: Traps, nets, projectile weapons and watercraft were unknown to them.
Premodern humans—often described as “archaic Homo sapiens”—were thought to have lived in small, vulnerable groups of closely related individuals. They were believed to have been equipped only with simple tools and were likely heavily dependent on hunting large game. Individuals in such groups would have been much less insulated from environmental stresses than are modern humans. In Thomas Hobbes’s words, their lives were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.”
This view is wrong. Much of the evidence used to support this view has relied on stone tool technologies, which are one of the most accessible records we have of human activity in the past, and the presumed florescence of art and sophisticated tool making in Europe by cro-Magnons, contrasted with those nasty, primitive Neanderthals.
Shea uses new evidence on human fossils and tool making to refute this old and worn-out narrative. First, modern humans have a greater time depth and greater geographical distribution than often assumed:
In Europe, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils date to only 35,000 years ago. But studies of genetic variation among living humans suggest that our species emerged in Africa as long as 200,000 years ago. Scientists have recovered Homo sapiens fossils in contexts dating to 165,000 to 195,000 years ago in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley and Middle Awash Valley. Evidence is clear that early humans dispersed out of Africa to southern Asia before 40,000 years ago. Similar modern-looking human fossils found in the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel date to 80,000 to 120,000 years ago. Homo sapiens fossils dating to 100,000 years ago have been recovered from Zhiren Cave in China. In Australia, evidence for a human presence dates to at least 42,000 years ago.
Second, the stone tool evidence shows great variability and overlap in tool types over this time period, rather than some march to modernity.
When [Clark's model of five modes of technology] is applied to sites in eastern Africa dating 284,000 to 6,000 years ago, a more complex view of prehistoric life there emerges. One does not see a steady accumulation of novel core technologies since our species first appeared or anything like a “revolution.” Instead one sees a persistent pattern of wide technological variability.
But Shea’s real target is not simply the documentation of variation in fossils and tools in the past, it’s how we think about the past, and how we do research and test ideas about recent human evolution.
In the most recent Current Anthropology, Shea has a peer-reviewed article, Homo Sapiens Is as Homo Sapiens Was: Behavioral Variability versus “Behavioral Modernity” in Paleolithic Archaeology. Here is the abstract:
Paleolithic archaeologists conceptualize the uniqueness of Homo sapiens in terms of “behavioral modernity,” a quality often conflated with behavioral variability. The former is qualitative, essentialist, and a historical artifact of the European origins of Paleolithic research. The latter is a quantitative, statistically variable property of all human behavior, not just that of Ice Age Europeans. As an analytical construct, behavioral modernity is deeply flawed at all epistemological levels.
This paper outlines the shortcomings of behavioral modernity and instead proposes a research agenda focused on the strategic sources of human behavioral variability. Using data from later Middle Pleistocene archaeological sites in East Africa, this paper tests and falsifies the core assumption of the behavioral-modernity concept—the belief that there were significant differences in behavioral variability between the oldest H. sapiens and populations younger than 50 kya. It concludes that behavioral modernity and allied concepts have no further value to human origins research. Research focused on the strategic underpinnings of human behavioral variability will move Paleolithic archaeology closer to a more productive integration with other behavioral sciences.
As Shea writes, the “behavioral modernity” approach focuses too much on the search for “human uniqueness”, and is framed by a narrative of moving from a primordial past to our resounding success as a species. In a typical heroic narrative, obstacles must be overcome, failures fought through, until finally here is a transformation in the hero – ourselves. That transformation is when we became “behaviorally modern” and language and art and all those good things are the trappings of our success.
This narrative comes with significant limitations.
The strongest reason for discarding “behavioral modernity” and “modern human behavior” is that they lack analytical precision. As matters stand today, there are wide and irresoluble theoretical disagreements about the nature of behavioral modernity, how to define it, and how to recognize it. Eurasian prehistorians use the term “modern human behavior” for evidence that occurs consistently over tens of thousands of years at a regional scale (various parts of Europe and/or Southwest Asia). Africanists use the term for behavior that occurs intermittently over hundreds of thousands of years at a continental scale. Neither term clarifies the description of archaeological evidence, nor does either of them refine our understanding of the evolution and variability of a particular behavior. They have become postmodern concepts, words that mean whatever one wants them to.
The idea that behavioral modernity is a derived evolutionary state, one not shared by all morphologically modern-looking H. sapiens and one that can be reliably diagnosed from behavioral characteristics, is rich with potential for abuse. It fits well with racist arguments that there are meaningful grade-level evolutionary differences among living humans. Such views are rarely expressed in scientific circles (or polite company), but they nevertheless can find traction among nonscientific audiences because they incorporate the same unilinear model of human evolution that underlies the behavioral modernity concept. If paleoanthropologists judge humans’ evolutionary state based on their behavior, why shouldn’t others do so as well? Discarding the term “behavioral modernity” will not stop individuals from cherry-picking selected findings of paleoanthropology to support racist agendas, but it will deny them the illusion that they are emulating an accepted scientific method.
Shea proposes a focus on behavioral variability as the solution. He approaches it as a quantifiable problem, and one linked to similar types of research in behavioral ecology.
Variability is a measurable quality of all human behavior expressed in term of modality, variance, skew, and other quantitative/statistical properties. These qualities change through time and space, and they do not necessarily follow a preferred direction. Trends are recognizable only i... Read more »
Shea, J. (2011) Is as Was . Current Anthropology, 52(1), 1-35. DOI: 10.1086/658067
- February 3, 2011
- 05:42 AM
- 499 views
Human (amphibious model): living in and on the water
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
At the beginning of the film clip, Bajau fisherman Sulbin sits on the side of a boat on the coast of Borneo, gulping air, handling his speargun. And then, he drops into the water. The footage suddenly changes and becomes arresting: silent, dreamy, slow, and so blue. Sulbin strokes deliberately and descends until he strides along the bottom of the ocean, holding his breath, and hunts for fish through handmade goggles.
Finally, after a couple of minutes, he spears a fish and heads for the surface. The narrator tells us that Sulbin could stay down twice as long and dive deeper if necessary. Most viewers, unfamiliar with free diving, exceptional if they can hold their breath longer than thirty seconds, are quite likely to be shaking their heads by the end of the clip, wondering at the ability of the human body to adapt to life in water. Life as an amphibious human can appear so alien that it’s stranger than science fiction, but painfully beautiful to watch.
I stumbled across the video clip in part because of my academic interest in free diving. Earlier this month, I was supposed to attend a free diving workshop in New Zealand with one of the sport’s world record holder, Will Trubridge (or see the story on the Times Online). The workshop fell through at almost the same time I was diagnosed with multiple hernias, so my first free diving experience likely wouldn’t have worked out – I’m still hoping to do it as part of my ethnographic research on extraordinary human performance in the near future.
But the clip of Sulbin on the BBC series, Human Planet episode, Oceans, has inspired me to write a little bit about Homo aquaticus (kidding), adaptation, culture, and what this sort of remarkable human adaptation might imply for the idea of ‘human nature.’
Sulbin’s ability is remarkable, but like so many exceptional human skills, it relies not on innate difference from other individuals, but on the steady cultivation of peculiar changes in the body and in how it is experienced. What I hope to suggest is that amphibious humans point to the most basic fact of human nature: that we seem particularly adept at finding ways to adapt ourselves – biologically, psychologically, behaviourally, technologically – to a host of niches that then rebound back upon us and shape how we develop. We are a peculiar self-made species.
This piece is probably best seen as one in a series I’ve been crafting on how human adaptation to situations that we place ourselves in map out the envelope of our bodies’ malleability. Human skills and adaptation show us how our brains and nervous systems can be trained to do amazing things. Frequent readers will know that I think much of the discussion of ‘human nature,’ carried out by — to put it nicely — exceptionally sedentary theorists, severely underestimates what our bodies are capable of doing.
Too often, in discussions of human adaptation, we allow a flabby distinction between three basic types of adaptation: genetic, phenotypic (or physiological), and cultural (or technology). What I’ve been playing with, and will return to at the end of this piece, is the inseparability of these, especially the last two: physiology and culture. The Bajau fisherman Sulbin shows us how biology and culture are inseparable because what he does ends up shaping his body, but only because he grew up around people who knew how to manage becoming human in this distinctive amphibious way and because his adaptations play upon how his nervous system works, including some intriguing quirks.
If you’re mad keen to learn more about human adaptation and my ongoing obsession, you might check out samples of my work on human quadrupedalism (part two), barefoot running, barefoot climbing, and even overhand throwing (the piece is specifically on ‘throwing like a girl’). I’ll be posting more in the months to come, so if you’re interested in what the human body can be made to do, pay us a return visit periodically.
‘Sea gypsies’ in Southeast Asia
Sulbin is a member of a number of groups who live wholly or partially as oceanic nomads or sea foragers in South-East Asia. As the BBC website explains:
Few peoples have a deeper connection with the sea than the Bajau Laut of South-East Asia. Sometimes known as “sea gypsies”, they live in house boats or stilt houses built on top of coral reefs and when they do spend the occasional night on solid ground they often report feeling ‘landsick’.
Malaysia’s best Bajau free-divers can dive to depths of over 20 metres and stay there for several minutes on a single breath as they go in search of fish. And as if that weren’t enough, studies on some “sea gypsy” children from Thailand and Burma show that they have unusually good underwater-vision because their eyes have adapted to the liquid environment.
The Bajau Laut’s livelihood is traditionally totally dependent on the resources of the sea so spear-fishing is vitally important to them, but different cultures have very different ways of catching fish. (BBC website).
I won’t go into the ethnographic material on the Bajau and other groups called ‘sea gypsies’ (such as the Moken, who live along the coasts of Thailand, Burma and increasingly into Malaysia). If you’re interested, I’ve placed some links to more material on the Moken and other groups at the end of this article. Some of the groups experienced a recent spike in interest when they apparently avoided serious casualties in the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 because they ‘saw signs in the waves’ of the trouble to come.
This post is really about adapting to diving, and that happens a lot more broadly than just in ‘sea gypsy’ populations. Although SCUBA and other techniques are replacing breath-hold diving, traditional divers cultivated incredible abilities in the production of sponges in Greece, and pearls in places like Polynesia and the Persian Gulf. The practice is still widespread among recreational divers, competitive divers, and even in some industries, such as among seafood harvesters in Japan and Korea, where an estimated 20,000 professional divers still worked with minimal equipment as late as the 1990s (see Park et al. 1990, cited in Ferretti 2001).
Learning to ‘hold’ your breath
Freediving: Ewens Ponds
Human ‘adaptation’ to water is both conscious and unconscious, as so many things about human behaviour. Even the most basic adaptive reflexes have to be shaped and elaborated, although they can often be learned in implicit, indirect ways or found in basic form very early. For example, one of the most reliable reactions to a startling new sensation is to gasp, a potentially deadly maladaptive approach to dealing with being dunked in the water. Fortunately, when water hits the pharynx or larynx, glottal spasms clamp the throat shut with a glottal spasm in part of what is referred to as the ‘diving reflex’.
If we’re going to enjoy the whole underwater swimming experience, however, we’ve got to be taught to stop the airway voluntarily and close the glottis muscularly, or to exhale. It’s more pleasant than just plunging into the water and trusting that the ‘diving reflex’ will save you from winding up with a couple of lungs full of the stuff by triggering a glottal spasm. In other words, the reflex has to be cultivated into a skill.
The online web resource eHow suggests, in How to Teach a Baby to Hold Breath Underwater, that you first condition an infant by essentially an associative learning process where dipping a washcloth in water is followed shortly by dripping water over his or her face. The writer advocates following this up at a pool with a learned association between ‘1… 2… 3…’ and subsequently being splashed in the face, later substituted by short immersion. The diving reflex can cue the early learning, but the goal is to build a more robust v... Read more »
Bavis, R., Powell, F., Bradford, A., Hsia, C., Peltonen, J., Soliz, J., Zeis, B., Fergusson, E., Fu, Z., Gassmann, M.... (2007) Respiratory plasticity in response to changes in oxygen supply and demand. Integrative and Comparative Biology, 47(4), 532-551. DOI: 10.1093/icb/icm070
Ferretti, G. (2001) Extreme human breath-hold diving. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 84(4), 254-271. DOI: 10.1007/s004210000377
Fitz-Clarke JR. (2006) Adverse events in competitive breath-hold diving. Undersea , 33(1), 55-62. PMID: 16602257
Ferretti G, & Costa M. (2003) Diversity in and adaptation to breath-hold diving in humans. Comparative biochemistry and physiology. Part A, Molecular , 136(1), 205-13. PMID: 14527641
Gislén A, Dacke M, Kröger RH, Abrahamsson M, Nilsson DE, & Warrant EJ. (2003) Superior underwater vision in a human population of sea gypsies. Current biology : CB, 13(10), 833-6. PMID: 12747831
Gislén A, Warrant EJ, Dacke M, & Kröger RH. (2006) Visual training improves underwater vision in children. Vision research, 46(20), 3443-50. PMID: 16806388
Parkes, M. (2005) Breath-holding and its breakpoint. Experimental Physiology, 91(1), 1-15. DOI: 10.1113/expphysiol.2005.031625
Schagatay E, van Kampen M, Emanuelsson S, & Holm B. (2000) Effects of physical and apnea training on apneic time and the diving response in humans. European journal of applied physiology, 82(3), 161-9. PMID: 10929209
SCHOLANDER PF, HAMMEL HT, LEMESSURIER H, HEMMINGSEN E, & GAREY W. (1962) Circulatory adjustment in pearl divers. Journal of applied physiology, 184-90. PMID: 13909130
- January 28, 2011
- 12:48 AM
- 830 views
Brand Anthropology: New and Improved, with Extra Diversity!
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
Since graduating from high school, I’ve several times worked as a salesman, first flogging reference books door-to-door over summers while an undergraduate and later, while writing my dissertation, getting involved in the ‘design consulting’ business where I helped sell something a lot less tangible. Sales was a great training ground for an anthropologist: nothing prepares you for quickly manufacturing social relations like slogging around door-to-door with a sample case, and a large lecture room of first-year students is a lot easier to sell than a skeptical dairy farmer in Wisconsin.
Marquesan tattooing (rear), by Von de Steinen.
I’ve often given anthropological colleagues advice that could have been taken verbatim from my stints in sales school — they would probably be mortified if I knew about the dual purposing. At times, I worry about my colleagues because I think that a whole series of situations in academia actually resemble sales situations: job interviewing, ‘open day’ for prospective students, grant writing, and even the first few lectures in an introductory class, when you’d be well served if you could persuade the assembled students that you’ve got something to say worth hearing.
Anthropologists sometimes don’t seem terribly good at selling what they do. If you couldn’t convince a starving man to eat a sandwich, how can we persuade diverse audiences to pay attention to anthropology?
After my previous post on the ‘Vital topics forum,’ reader Jason Antrosio asked my opinion about Ulf Hannerz’s article from the same American Anthropologist: ‘Diversity is Our Business.’ Since I had been banging on about anthropology promoting itself as the study of human diversity, Jason probably assumed, quite reasonably, that I had already read Hannerz’s piece. Alas, I hadn’t. One of the many downsides of being laid up at home is that I only read the forum online and hadn’t really browsed the contents of the latest AA because my hard copy is likely still sitting in my office mailbox.
Hannerz’s piece, ‘Diversity is Our Business,’ is well worth the read not just because he explores how the field is misrepresented in the public eye; Hannerz asks what we might do as a field to counter-act anthro-bashing. He wades into water that I prefer to plunge into neck deep here: what kind of brand is ‘Anthropology,’ how do we tell people about what we do, and do we need to perform a bit of brand management?
Perhaps provocatively, in drawing on a characteristic current vocabulary, I would argue that anthropology needs to cultivate a strong brand. Those who feel ill at ease with that term, thinking that in its crassness it sullies their noble scholarly pursuits, can perhaps just as well continue to call it “public image” or even just “identity,” but in times of not just neoliberal thought but also of media saturation and short attention spans, it may be that “brand” is a useful root metaphor, a word to think with in the world we live in. (These days, too, not only corporations or consumer goods are linked to brands but also for example cities and countries.) Brands should attract outsiders: customers, visitors, members of the public. At the same time, they should preferably offer a fully acceptable identity for whoever may count as insiders to reflect on and be inspired by. (Hannerz 2010: 543)
Hell, yeah, we should think about Anthropology as a brand! With no trace of irony, I’d argue that we get serious about our collective self-promotion as a discipline. Hannerz gets off to a good start, but I think we could even step up the campaign a bit, making use of the traditional strengths of our discipline to promote our intellectual and research potential. And I’m going to take this opportunity, as well, to reply to some of the issues Daniel outlined in his piece, Anthropology and Publicity, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
Anthropology bashing
Hannerz begins his discussion with a reflection on Pres. Barack Obama’s use of ‘anthropological’ to describe when, during his campaign, Obama apologized for sounding out of touch. Obama said he was sorry that he sounded as if he was ‘talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters.’ As Hannerz explains, Obama’s assumptions embedded in this apology grate for anthropologists because he takes for granted a public stereotype so at odds with our self-conception (and so ironic given that Obama’s late mother was an anthropologist):
Here it seems to me, then, that the candidate Obama assigns a stereotypically distant view, lacking in empathy, to anthropology—and then proceeds to sketch, as its opposite, precisely the sort of close, contextualizing understanding that we as anthropologists are much more likely to claim for ourselves. And from this particular source, we may find the stereotype so much more surprising because we might have thought this candidate should have got his anthropology right—but more about that later. In any case, here is an instance of a recurrent phenomenon that we might call “anthropology bashing.” (Hannerz 2010: 541)
According to Hannerz, ‘anthropology bashing’ comes in four basic flavours:
Anthropologists are portrayed as cold and distant observers, ‘at worst, as someone who uses his skills to manipulate situations in ways which are detrimental to the human beings about which he has built up an expertise’ (Hannerz 2010: 541). This image is of the ‘handmaiden’ of colonialism, a superior-feeling expert at manipulating natives, depriving them of their patrimony, and speaking in place of the cultures that we study.
Anthropologists, in contradiction, are depicted as ‘bumbling, incompetent observer who does not get even obvious realities right,’ as Hannerz puts it, less capable of ‘getting it’ than locals or even amateur observers. This image is the anthropologist as dowdy professor-type who is ill-suited for life beyond the Ivory Tower but utterly oblivious to this fact.
As part of academia, Hannerz also worries that we are ‘easy target for a kind of populism that proclaims that research in and about far-away places is useless and that money devoted to it is therefore not well-spent.’ Here, Hannerz suggests that anthropologists are particularly prone to populist abuse, such as the ‘Golden Fleece Awards’ given by US Senator William Proxmire, often to projects that receive federal funding but have the bad luck to possess titles that Sen. Proxmire finds easy to mock.
Finally, Hannerz argues that anthropologists are bashed as being anachronistic and slightly out of date, pictured in pith helmets and safari suits with a mirthful chuckle that our field even still exists. Ironically, I believe that one of the senior administrators at my own university had a giggle at our expense for this very reason, as if it was comical to think that anthropologists still were out there, wandering around, doing this funny old anthropology thing we do.
I could fiddle with this classification, but I think the list is quite good on the whole and demonstrates the key problem: not a single critique, but a lack of control over how we are perceived. Anthropologists need to invest more in getting our version of what we do before the public eye rather than let ourselves be defined by others.
If we look closer, what we find in a lot of the critiques are caricatures of us put forward by other people: indigenous ‘advocates’ who attack anthropologists, cultural studies scholars who try to make game of us, and the out-of-touch who assume that, if they don’t know what’s happening, there must not be anything happening in our field. We often don’t take strong stands against these caricatures, or we take nuanced opposition to them that doesn’t do much to abate the more powerful rhetorical thrust of the criticism.
For example, when criticized for being complicit in colonialism, most cultural anthropologists will tend to roll over and go along with the criticism, conceding that, in fact, anthropologists have given indirect assistance and even philosophical justification for colonialism. I think that this is a losing strategy in the public sphere.
Cui Yin Mok at the Open Anthropology Cooperative similarly argues that anthropologists have sort of lost their mojo as they’re going too self-critical ‘baggage’ that stops them from better describing their field to the public.
Anthropology’s troubled past and its roots in colonialism might... Read more »
Hannerz, U. (2010) Diversity Is Our Business. American Anthropologist, 112(4), 539-551. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01274.x
- January 27, 2011
- 04:50 PM
- 501 views
Cortico-thalamic dissociation in Sleep Paralysis
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
By Paul Mason
Paul Mason is a PhD student at Macquarie University and frequent contributor to Neuroanthropology. He is well on his way to finishing his thesis, but occasionally shares his insightful columns on a wide range of topics here. Please note that the former ‘Fattest Man in the World’ is a different Paul Mason.
Have you ever woken up and not been able to move your body? For those people who have experienced this sensation, it is unnerving, surreal, and often quite stressful. Rest assured though, that this condition is benign, harmless, and your body will wake up after a minute or two. People also report that their body wakes up when someone touches them, or even at the sound of a surprising noise. Despite the temporary sensation of uncanny paralysis upon wakening, you can ride the episode out with the knowledge that it has not been associated with any medical disorders.
This condition, known as sleep paralysis, is rare but not uncommon. Funnily enough, in the last year, three of my friends have asked me about this condition—two of them medical doctors. Sleep paralysis is a parasomnia usually associated with REM sleep. Episodes typically last one to three minutes and disappear spontaneously by themselves or by someone else’s touch. Dreams can potentially superimpose onto reality during this period. However, the condition is usually experienced as a dream state without the dreams. In other words, your body has still turned off control of its muscles as though you are dreaming, but your brain is strangely awake. In medical terms, the condition is considered a dissociated REM state where the motor atonia of REM is present in isolation. That basically means that control of your muscles has been turned off but consciousness has been switched on.
When my friends asked me what I thought about the symptoms they described, I was reminded of my undergraduate study in neuropsychology where I learnt about lesion studies in cats that disrupted areas in the brain to do with sleep, dreaming, and muscle control. In this study, researchers performed lesions to areas of the brain in cats that normally inhibit motor control during sleep. The lesion was performed to the ventral locus coeruleus of the Pons (it’s weird what you remember sometimes). This lesion caused the cats to exhibit strange sleepwalking behaviour that allowed researchers an uncanny little window into Kitty dreams.
I’m not sure, but if you google ‘dream enactment’, then you should find plenty of information on the web. Anyway, my first thought about sleep paralysis was that there must be some kind of delay in switching off the area inhibiting motor control during a hypnopomic or postdormital sleep paralysis episode. I’m not suggesting that sleep paralysis is associated with anatomical problems, merely an occasional physiological hiccup—something as simple as say pins and needles in an otherwise healthy organ. Possibly the hiccup can occur in the Pons… Possibly, as recent research indicates, it could be somewhere else…
Of my friends who shared their symptoms with me and asked me for my thoughts, one was doing shift-work, the other was suffering from severe jet-lag, and the third slept odd hours due to an erratic rotation schedule at her job. I’m not a medical doctor, but the suggestion of sucking a melatonin tablet under the tongue before bed for only a couple of nights worked wonders for my friend with jet-lag. But, you also have to consider that episodes of sleep paralysis are rare, so they probably disappeared by themselves. For my other friends I suggested potassium rich foods such as bananas, which are always yummy to eat anyway, (those friends haven’t told me of any episodes since, but then again that is anecdotal as well).
From scant research reports on the subject, it appears that sleep paralysis occasionally occurs in a familial form, affects females more often than males, and has an X-linked dominant transmission. Talking with my Indonesian friends suggests to me that the condition is not as rare as Western medical practitioners think. But then again, I have lived with Indonesians who have some extremely erratic sleeping schedules.
I am fascinated in the phenomenology and neurophenomenology of sleep paralysis episodes. One of my friends reported a hypnagogic auditory hallucination accompanying an episode of sleep paralysis. Not surprisingly, she is not the only person in her family to occasionally suffer from the condition.
In my own experience, I have had a hypnogogic visual hallucination as a child of five or six years of age. Before my teenage years, I also had an episode of what I now understand to be sleep paralysis. I woke up in the morning and could not for the life of me open my eyes. My eyelids were as heavy as lead (Pb), and then it felt like bees were performing the waggle dance all over my closed eyes. It was an overwhelming experience at the time but I can’t recall if I woke up or went back to sleep afterwards. If I’m not making stories up, I was eventually able to open my eyes, but then I shut them again and went back to sleep.
As a sidenote, the word ‘hypnagogic’ says so much to me about medical practice. A ‘hypnagogic hallucination’ is literally just a hallucination that one experiences just before or just after falling asleep. We don’t actually have an explanation for ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’, but we do have a fancy label with two lovely multi-syllabic words. On numerous occasions, friends have shared private stories about hallucinations with me. If they have been stressed by the episode then calming them simply involved asking if they were in bed at the time, which they have thus far always confirmed, and then I merely say,
“Don’t worry, you just experienced a hypnogogic hallucination. It’s not unusual in the slightest.”
On every occasion, labeling the episode makes a friend happy. I have even seen colleagues in medicine calm other acquaintances using the very same words. It’s fantastic, but it really makes me wonder how much people seek a label and how much people seek an explanation.
In research published in PNAS only in February last year (Magnin et al. 2010), researchers have made headway in describing the physiology underlying hypnagogic hallucinations. Using electrodes implanted into the brains of epileptic patients (a common pre-surgical practice to localise the origins of epileptic seizures), researchers opportunistically—but ethically—used the data to reveal what happens in the deepest parts of the brain during sleep onset. The activity of deep structures in the brain is difficult to image because MRI is too slow and EEG is too superficial. This electrophysiology research revealed a surprising finding:
The thalamus (a small but dense deep brain structure highly interconnected to body and cortical regions and involved in receiving sensory information) goes to sleep some ten minutes before the cortex.
When falling asleep, the thalamus shuts us off from the outside world, but the cortex continues to function which could explain, as the researchers hypothesise, how hallucinations can arise when we fall asleep.
A hypothesis about Sleep paralysis:
The finding that extensive cortical regions remain activated for several minutes after thalamic deactivation at sleep onset might explain forms of insomnia associated with lesions to the thalamus, and it also might be the reason that hypnagogic experiences commonly occur during the wake–sleep transition.
In the thirteen people studied, they did not find desynchronisation of the thalamus and cortex during awakening. But that was only thirteen people. If someone who experienced an episode of sleep paralysis was under observation, would we find that awareness with paralysis upon waking was associated with a desynchronisation of the thalamus and cortex? If the cortex reactivated before the thalamus could sleep paralysis be the result?
An episode of sleep paralysis typically only lasts a few minutes. Knowing that desynchronisation of the thalamus and cortex during sleep onset lasts only several minutes, then it is not implausible to hypothesise that there could be a lapse between the reactivation of the cortex and the reactivation of the thalamus in sleep paralysis that lasts only a few minutes. If the cortex wakes up before the thalamus, people might be lucid but unable to move.
The cessation of sleep paralysis by physical touch might be explained by the idea that touch might be igniting sensory systems that activate the thalamus. As an ostensibly benign condition, and one that occurs rarely and unpredictably, sleep paralysis might not be the most accessible or indeed imperative area of medical research, but as a case of dissociative consciousness it is a deeply fascinating research venture into the awareness of who we are.
References:
... Read more »
Magnin, M., Rey, M., Bastuji, H., Guillemant, P., Mauguiere, F., & Garcia-Larrea, L. (2010) Thalamic deactivation at sleep onset precedes that of the cerebral cortex in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(8), 3829-3833. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0909710107
- January 17, 2011
- 07:19 AM
- 843 views
Vital topics forum in AA: ‘Nature and the human’
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
The question of ‘human nature’ is a fraught one for many anthropologists, especially those of us who pay special attention to human variation, Darwinian theory, and dynamic approaches to diversity in developmental questions.
The very concept ‘human nature’ can be the theoretical equivalent of the double-bind question, ‘So can you confirm that you no longer are a Creationist?’ Even conceding to respond to the question places us in a position where we wind up between the Scylla of the essentialist fallacy and the Charybdus of the ‘blank slate,’ the Devil of ethnocentric universalism and the deep blue sea of ascribing innate and irreducible differences to human groups.
Nevertheless, former colleague Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, has brought together a number of prominent anthropologists to ponder the question of ‘human nature’ in a ‘Vital Topics Forum’ in the American Anthropologist (AA): ‘On Nature and the Human’ (abstract here). As Fuentes lays out the challenge for anthropologists:
Of late, psychologists, historians, political scientists, economists, and even philosophers have been in the public eye speaking about these issues of the human; anthropological voices have been muted in comparison. I propose we take this topic by the horns and advance a new public debate about it. (Fuentes 2010: 512)
The Forum brings together Fuentes’s thoughts with short pieces by Jonathan Marks, Tim Ingold, Robert Sussman, Patrick V. Kirch, Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg, Laura Nader, and Conrad P. Kottak, some heavyweights from across our field.
Unfortunately, given the illiberal policies on publication access practiced by the American Anthropological Association, the forum is behind a subscription wall, so you cannot access it without going through an academic library (unless you’re an AAA member). I’m still grousing about the complete absence of open-access journals in our field, as I think any discussion of ‘public outreach’ given the way we’ve locked up our publications is a bit hypocritical. So, because you likely can’t get to it, I’m going to quote liberally from the original forum and reference each author’s contributions separately.
One of the first important points that gets made by biological anthropologists Prof. Jonathan Marks (UNC – Charlotte) is that, even though the comparative inter-species perspective on human evolution is important, too-simple equations between humans and other living great apes can be misleading. Marks argues that we have ‘evolved into biocultural ex-apes’ (2010: 513). His point is that, as Fuentes (2010: 519) clarifies, we are not simply ‘upgraded versions of out ancestors’ but something distinctive.
I don’t think, by any stretch, the Marks is advocating the polar opposite view, that humans are so exceptional that we can essentially disregard our relations to other animals. Rather, attempting to roll back our species’ recent biological, cultural, cognitive, and social innovations in an attempt to get to what is really ‘human nature’ is misguided. Or, as Marks puts it (and I’ve long admired his writing stylistically):
To imagine that we are nothing but apes, and to find human nature there (e.g., de Waal 2005; Wrangham and Peterson 1996), actually constitutes a denial of evolution. We evolved; get over it. In a classic midcentury synthesis, George Gaylord Simpson explained the problem with “nothing-butism”: “Such statements are not only untrue but also vicious for they deliberately lead astray enquiry as to what man really is and so distort our whole comprehension of ourselves” (1949:283). Evolution is the production of difference and novelty, and you are not your ancestors. (Marks 2010: 513)
I recently made a similar argument in filming a documentary on sexuality that will be broadcast here in Oz on SBS, supposedly in June: if you strip away everything that makes humans distinctive in reproduction, social relations, and expression as a species, you can’t then say you’ve discovered our ‘sexual nature.’ Likewise, you can’t try to imagine a human without language, culture, learning, sophisticated intelligence, tools and the like, and then say ‘that’s human nature. We’re nothing but bald apes!’
The thought exercise of stripping human characteristics to discover (or more likely, invent) ‘human nature’ is certain to produce some other imagined non-human species of hominids, likely a hybrid of contemporary biases, comparative guesswork, and plain stabs into the paleoanthropological dark. Interesting for science fiction, perhaps, but not as scientific theory. Or, as Marks himself puts it much more acerbically, ‘the quest to imagine a human condition without culture is simply the tortured dream of a hack philosophe’ (2010: 513).
This argument follows from Marks’ critique of some of the most prolific and widely cited contemporary theorists of ‘human nature,’ ones who commit what I referred to above as the ‘essentialist fallacy.’ Marks describes the contemporary trend as a paradox: individuals who believe that they are upholding the theoretical legacy of Darwin are, in fact, operating with a pre-Darwinian concept that a species has an essential and irreducible ‘nature’:
One of the most extraordinary paradoxes of modern science is the way in which a pre-Darwinian concept (deriving the essential properties of the human beast) has been transformed into a Darwinian litmus test: if you don’t believe sufficiently in the idea of human nature, then you must be a creationist (Konner 2002; Pinker 2003). But in an intellectual arena where facts are notoriously difficult to come by, one fact is certain: human nature is a politically contested turf. Anyone who pronounces on it, while simultaneously arguing that their pronouncements are disconnected from society and politics, is not to be taken seriously. (2010: 513)
Marks is collapsing together what I think are two separate and equally important critiques: the first is that arguing any species has a ‘nature’ or essential being is not consistent with the most basic of Darwinian understandings of natural selection, which assume that variation is inherent in reproduction. To argue that ‘human nature’ is any one thing — violent, cooperative, thoughtful, credulous or whatever — may be rhetorically important but it runs afoul of the most basic invariant of ‘descent with modification’: variation.
Marks’ second critique is that the invocation of ‘human nature’ is inevitably political, an argument that I don’t wholly agree with although I would concede that statements about human nature often have a political subtext, even if the person making them may not be aware of the subtext. Marks (2010: 513) argues that ‘the most consistent scientific invocation of human nature has been to explore, or, rather, to construct, limits to human social progress,’ that arguments asserting human nature are often conservative ‘biopolitics,’ rearguard actions to defend hereditary aristocracy, racial inequality, sexual hierarchy or other social problem as inherently, biologically irreducible.
Professor Tim Ingold, Chair in the Department of Anthropology of Aberdeen University, parses the question of ‘human nature’ into what he argues are fundamentally two different questions: ‘What is a human being? What does it mean to be human?’ The first we typically answer biologically with a discussion of our species, but the second of which we answer existentially because our self-awareness transcends our biological reality. In other words, Ingold is pointing out that the question of ‘human nature’ is both biological and philosophical, and one question can’t be reduced to the other.
Ingold, for reasons slightly different from Marks, suggests that some current explorations of ‘human nature’ are profoundly inconsistent with evolutionary theory although they loudly profess to be ‘evolutionary.’ As Ingold writes, the problem is as obvious as the nose on your face (although you’re likely not to notice your own nose if you’re not looking for it), but some scholars:
persist in the search for a universal architecture underwriting the capacities of the human mind while attributing the evolution of these capacities to a theory—of variation under natural selection—that only works because the individuals of a species are endlessly variable. This is not a mistake that anatomists would make. Every human being, for example, has a protuberance in the centre of the face with two holes that allow the inhalation and exhalation of air. We call it the nose. No two noses are alike: they vary among individuals and among populations. Yet no one conversant with modern biology would attribute these variations to developmentally induced inflections of a universal nasal architecture, identically keyed in to all humans. Did not Darwin finally refute the essentialist doctrine that for every species there exists a preestablished, formal template? Yet this is precisely the doctrine to which evolution... Read more »
Fuentes, A., Marks, J., Ingold, T., Sussman, R., Kirch, P., Brumfiel, E., Rapp, R., Ginsburg, F., Nader, L., & Kottak, C. (2010) On Nature and the Human. American Anthropologist, 112(4), 512-521. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01271.x
- January 10, 2011
- 08:15 AM
- 1,190 views
Delusions, odd and common: Living in the prodrome, part 2
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
Author Rachel Aviv talked at length with a number of young people who had been identified as being ‘prodromal’ for schizophrenia, experiencing periodic delusions and at risk of converting to full-blown schizophrenia, following some of the at-risk individuals for a year. In December’s Harper’s, Aviv offered a sensitive, insightful account of their day-to-day struggles to maintain insight, recognizing which of their experiences are not real: Which way madness lies: Can psychosis be prevented? (Freely accessible pdf available here.)
Psychiatric Research by Ted Watson
Aviv’s piece was really moving and inspired this post and an earlier one. The first part (Slipping into psychosis: living in the prodrome (part 1)) provides some sense of Aviv’s interviews, especially the story of ‘Anna,’ a woman who feared that she, like her mother before her, might be losing her grasp on reality. In addition, the earlier post covered the controversy surrounding the attempt to formalize a diagnosis in the DSM-V of ‘prodrome’ and the ethical problems created by trying to identify who is at risk of ‘going mad.’
This post is my more speculative offering, contemplating the relation of the content of delusions to the cultural context in which they occur. How do the specific details of delusions arise and how might the particularity of any one person’s delusions affect the way that a delusional individual is treated by others? Are you mad if everyone around you talks as if they, too, were experiencing the same delusions?
Aviv’s remarkable detailed account of prodrome, especially because it’s so strongly based in sensitive biographies of living on the boundary with schizophrenia, offers an opportunity to reflect on how the specific content of delusions — not simply the fact of having delusions — might provide the sufferer with different avenues to relate with others.
This piece, however, unlike the first, comes with a pretty serious caveat that this is not my area of expertise by any stretch. As I mentioned at the end of the other post, bloggers rush in where fools fear to tread. Moreover, as I try to finish off this piece, news from Tucscon about the shooting of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is provoking a much more heated discussion of the role of society in shaping the thoughts of delusional individuals. I won’t be talking about Jared Lee Loughner, the suspect apprehended at the scene where six people were killed and almost twenty others injured, in this post, but I may have to write a third piece separate from the discussion of Aviv and the people she presents.
Daniel has already begun the discussion of the recent shooting in Jared Lee Loughner – Is Mental Illness the Explanation for What He Did? Daniel’s piece comments on an article in Slate by Dr. Vaughan Bell, the writer behind the excellent blog Mind Hacks. Bell’s Slate piece on Loughner and the attribution of mental illness to him is entitled Crazy Talk.
But I can’t help but think about prodromal delusion as Aviv’s article is so reminiscent of anthropological accounts, with sensitivity to the worldview of the subjects, in this case, individuals who are at the fraying edge of a shared reality with society around them. As an anthropologist, I can’t help but wonder how the prodromal-schizophrenic-recovery trajectory might be influenced by different contexts, so I’ll offer some thoughts with the caution that my experience with schizophrenic individuals is severely limited.
The cross-cultural variation in schizophrenia
In 1977, anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (1977: 9) influentially called for an injection of cultural sophistication into medicine, a recognition that some cross-cultural psychiatrists took that they needed to better understand the complicated relationship between ‘disease,’ the psychological and biological problems leading to disturbance, and ‘illness,’ ‘the personal, interpersonal, and cultural reaction to disease.’
This awareness that social worlds entered into the experience of disease helped bring together cross-cultural psychology and psychological anthropology and cleared the ground for the cross-cultural analysis of schizophrenia.
In the case of schizophrenia research, López and Guarnaccia (2000) point out that cross-cultural research has tended to focus on two issues: prognosis and family emotional structure.
First, early findings from global mental health surveys like the World Health Organization’s (1979) International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (IPSS) seemed to indicate that ‘schizophrenia in developing countries has a more favorable course than in developed countries’ (López and Guarnaccia 2000: 582).
Lin and Kleinman (1988: 555), for example, reviewed discussions by mental health practitioners and suggested that,
Concurrently, a number of psychiatrists with extensive clinical experiences in various parts of Asia and Africa have reported that the majority of psychotic patients they treated in these “Third World” countries tended to suffer from a disease process that was characterized by acute onset, fulminant but typically short clinical course, and, more often than not, complete remission…
Those who believe schizophrenic individuals are more likely to fully remit in developing countries point to a number of possible reasons (see for example Lin and Kleinman 1988: 561-563):
1) without clinical definitions of disorders, both sufferers and those around them are more likely to believe the condition is temporary whereas the expectation in industrialized societies is often that mental illness will be either chronic or even identity-defining;
2) industrialized societies demand greater individual autonomy and expose individuals to greater isolation and changing circumstances;
3) social roles exist for impaired individuals in developing economies that are not heavily stigmatized, especially in the workplace where individuals who have been institutionalized in industrialized communities can find it very difficult to reestablish employment;
4) smaller families and higher expectations on individuals in industrialized societies subjects mentally ill individuals to greater criticism and negative emotion; and
5) families are more invested in recovery of individual members who suffer psychotic symptoms and work actively to integrate the individual into social interaction. (Paraphrasing and summary with some elaboration of Lin and Kleinman, not a direct quote.)
The idea that an individual was more likely to recover from schizophrenia if living in the developing world than in a wealthy, industrialized country is widespread in the area of public mental health, although some critics think that the prognosis is not so positive among the poor (see Cohen et al. 2007; see also Lin and Kleinman 1988 for a discussion of methodological complications).
In fact, even if the pattern found in the WHO study holds, the contrast between industrialized and developing economies is overly broad, as there are exceptions in both cases — for example, developing economies where mental illness is heavily stigmatized and industrialized countries with greater optimism about recovery (Cohen et al. 2007).
Cohen and colleagues’ (2007) review significantly complicates the picture for understanding global schizophrenia across cultures and economic status. If this post were really to consider the global epidemiology of schizophrenia, Cohen et al.’s review would be central to asking some penetrating questions about the forces that affect the emergence and prognosis for schizophrenic individuals around the world. But that’s a different post…
The second area of concentration in cross-cultural research is that a number of researchers have explored whether emotional expression and interaction patterns in the family increase the chances of a relapse when schizophrenic patients return home. This research explores whether inter-ethnic differences in households may affect patient susceptibility to relapse (see Weisman 1997).
I’ll come back to this point in a bit, but the basic discussion revolves around the observation that the small nuclear family residence structure in many industrialized countries can place extraordinary burdens on immediate family members to care for schizophrenic kin. The resulting friction, especially combined with an individualized, medicalized understanding of the origins of schizophrenia, can produce resentment, criticism, fa... Read more »
Bauer, S., Schanda, H., Karakula, H., Olajossy-Hilkesberger, L., Rudaleviciene, P., Okribelashvili, N., Chaudhry, H., Idemudia, S., Gscheider, S., & Ritter, K. (2010) Culture and the prevalence of hallucinations in schizophrenia. Comprehensive Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1016/j.comppsych.2010.06.008
Cohen, A., Patel, V., Thara, R., & Gureje, O. (2007) Questioning an Axiom: Better Prognosis for Schizophrenia in the Developing World?. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 34(2), 229-244. DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sbm105
Corcoran, C., Davidson, L., Sills-Shahar, R., Nickou, C., Malaspina, D., Miller, T., & McGlashan, T. (2003) A Qualitative Research Study of the Evolution of Symptoms in Individuals Identified as Prodromal to Psychosis. Psychiatric Quarterly, 74(4), 313-332. DOI: 10.1023/A:1026083309607
Gearing, R., Alonzo, D., Smolak, A., McHugh, K., Harmon, S., & Baldwin, S. (2010) Association of religion with delusions and hallucinations in the context of schizophrenia: Implications for engagement and adherence. Schizophrenia Research. DOI: 10.1016/j.schres.2010.11.005
Huang, C., Shang, C., Shieh, M., Lin, H., & Su, J. (2010) The interactions between religion, religiosity, religious delusion/hallucination, and treatment-seeking behavior among schizophrenic patients in Taiwan. Psychiatry Research. DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2010.07.014
Koenig HG. (2009) Research on religion, spirituality, and mental health: a review. Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, 54(5), 283-91. PMID: 19497160
Lin KM, & Kleinman AM. (1988) Psychopathology and clinical course of schizophrenia: a cross-cultural perspective. Schizophrenia bulletin, 14(4), 555-67. PMID: 3064282
López SR, & Guarnaccia PJ. (2000) Cultural psychopathology: uncovering the social world of mental illness. Annual review of psychology, 571-98. PMID: 10751981
Roth, T., Lubin, F., Sodhi, M., & Kleinman, J. (2009) Epigenetic mechanisms in schizophrenia. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - General Subjects, 1790(9), 869-877. DOI: 10.1016/j.bbagen.2009.06.009
Saha, S., Chant, D., Welham, J., & McGrath, J. (2005) A Systematic Review of the Prevalence of Schizophrenia. PLoS Medicine, 2(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020141
Saravanan, B., Jacob, K., Johnson, S., Prince, M., Bhugra, D., & David, A. (2010) Outcome of first-episode schizophrenia in India: longitudinal study of effect of insight and psychopathology. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 196(6), 454-459. DOI: 10.1192/bjp.bp.109.068577
Weisman, A. (1997) Understanding Cross-Cultural Prognostic Variability for Schizophrenia. Cultural Diversity , 3(1), 23-35. DOI: 10.1037//1099-9809.3.1.23
- January 5, 2011
- 06:37 PM
- 1,158 views
Slipping into psychosis: living in the prodrome (part 1)
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
How might it feel to sense your own sanity eroding? Would you realize it? How might you sift the phantoms from physical reality, daydream from delusion, the irrefutable from the implausible? Or, as author Rachel Aviv puts it,
When does a strong idea take on a pathological flavor? How does a metaphysical crisis morph into a medical one? At what point does our interpretation of the world become so fixed that it no longer matters “what almost everyone else believes” [part of the definition of ‘delusion’ in the DSM]? Even William James admitted that he struggled to distinguish a schizophrenic break from a mystical experience. (Aviv 2010: 37)
Aviv wrote in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine: Which way madness lies: Can psychosis be prevented? As Aviv told me in an email, the story arose, in part, out of following young patients at clinics who might be in the prodrome to psychosis, the early stages of experiencing intermittent breaks from shared reality that might lead up to schizophrenia. Based on interviews with patients and clinicians, Aviv explores how both seek to cope with the warning signs that someone may be sliding toward a definitive break, or ‘conversion’ as it is termed in psychiatry, bolstering the individual’s sense of self and reality against corrosion.
The piece is a powerful, troubling, and thought-provoking read. Aviv explains:
It is impossible to predict the precise moment when a person has embarked on a path toward madness, since there is no quantifiable point at which healthy thoughts become insane. It is only in retrospect that the prelude to psychosis can be diagnosed with certainty. (36)
What I particularly appreciate about Aviv’s account is that she writes extensively about the nature of the delusions themselves, about the flow of delusional ideas, their relation to the collapse of a clear sense of self, and the challenges facing an individual who begins to feel the implausible welling up in everyday reality. She writes that much of psychiatry has tried to get around the specificities of the delusions — Who’s putting thoughts in your head? How are you being watched? What sort of ghosts or angels or aliens are following you?
Patients and some clinicians alike have a vested interest in discrediting the content of delusions, dismissing the ideas as errant chemicals or glitches in brain function. But as Aviv so clearly demonstrates, the specificities of the delusions are both what the patients struggle with daily and the source of the leverage that some of them find to fight off further drift into idiosyncratic worlds. The delusions matter, both because patients search in them for signs of their truth or unreality, but also because the details of the delusion, not just the fact of having them, arise from our shared reality.
As Aaron (not his real name) told Aviv: ‘What happens if there’s some truth to your delusion? What if it is tied to reality?… They don’t want you to come up with mythical explanations. So they keep telling you over and over again that it’s just your brain’ (44). This will be part one of a two-part post, the first of which will explore Aviv’s writing and the controversy around prodrome; the second post will follow by tomorrow and talk about the anthropological study of schizophrenia and my own thoughts on the how the content of delusion might affect the experience of psychosis.
Rachel Aviv’s work on prodrome
Rachel Aviv has won a number of awards for writing about mental health, but in 2010 she secured a Writers’ Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Aviv used the support to follow young people who had been identified as in danger of schizophrenia at a Maine psychiatric clinic and at a specialized clinic in upper Manhattan. As she explained on the Rona Jaffe Foundation webpage, ‘I am drawn to [the Maine] clinic because it offers a rare glimpse into a community of adolescents self-consciously struggling to maintain their grasp on reality.’
Aviv, out of the blue, sent me her wonderful article in Harper’s Magazine: Which way madness lies: Can psychosis be prevented? (appeared in the December 2010 issue). Consider it my belated Christmas present to all of you to recommend that you should go read Rachel’s powerful piece, available through Harper’s online archive. The only reason I haven’t posted something on it sooner is that I wanted to do Ms. Aviv’s piece justice, and it’s taken me longer to do it than I like.
According to Aviv, sixty clinics around the US work on early psychosis, about a third of which focus exclusively on people in the prodrome of psychosis. The prodrome is:
the aura that precedes a psychotic break by up to two or three years. During this phase, people often have mild hallucinations—they might spot a nonexistent cat out of the corner of their eye or hear their name in the sound of the wind—yet they doubt that these sensations are real. They still have “insight”—a pivotal word in psychiatric literature, indicating that a patient can recognize an altered worldview as a sign of illness, not a revelation. (36)
In other words, mild (or not so mild) hallucinations alone are not the specific problem with psychosis, but the failure of what we might call the ability to recover the normal, the ‘insight’ to realize that something was a hallucination. Other symptoms seem to precede the onset of serious psychosis — conversion — and demonstrate a process of degeneration.
More recent studies have shown that in the years before people have a psychotic break, they struggle to identify tastes and smells—a banana no longer tastes like a banana, or fresh water begins to carry the odor of mold—and they lose gray-matter volume in certain parts of their brains, particularly the hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory. (38)
In another study, researchers found that subjects with a tendency toward psychosis could discern words in recordings of multiple voices intentionally overlaid so as to make it impossible under normal conditions to understand what was being said. Normal subjects could not perceive anything.
Part of the loss of reality then was an over-projection of meaning and exaggerated concentration on some aspect of reality that most of us, by consensus, choose to ignore (I’ll come back to this because of course, the consensus is not everywhere the same).
Rachel tells Anna’s story
One thing Aviv brings to the piece in Harper’s is a non-judgmental gentleness and generosity to people who are clearly experiencing the fragility of their own grasp of reality. Aviv tells the story of ‘Anna’ (not her real name), a young woman who had grown up with a schizophrenic mother and lived in fear of following her mother into madness.
Although Anna struggles to communicate her profoundly alien sensations — she described in her personal journal, written while first experiencing troubling thoughts, feeling ‘migrating electrical sensations’ and the sense that ‘words were alive’ (Aviv 2010: 37) — together, Anna and Rachel produce a moving description of the edge of our shared reality. I emphasize this because I don’t want to underestimate the skill of either Aviv or the people she interviewed in piecing together compelling accounts of unusual realities. As an anthropologist, I very much appreciate the skill of the translator, making another world comprehensible and yet preserving its distinctiveness.
I’m going to take the liberty of piecing together from a number of places in the article a version of the story of Anna because I think it captures with profound sensitivity the fragility of her reality. Aviv’s (2010) telling of the story is excellent, and I don’t think I can do it justice in paraphrase.
I met Anna last year at her Illinois home, a small, brightly painted town-house apartment, and she tried to pinpoint when she had stopped believing in the reality she’d contentedly inhabited all her life. A petite twenty-eight-year-old with cleanly parted blond hair, she spoke in a thin, strained voice and avoided looking at me. My lips, she said, appeared as if they were moving at a different pace than my voice, and she had to bat away the thought that she was watching a dubbed film.
Anna’s mother is schizophrenic, and Anna had always found her mother’s world-view—derived in part from messages she deciphered in processed-food packaging—distasteful and impossible to comprehend. She assumed that when her mother had a schizophrenic break, the delusions had taken her by force, engulfing her. But an alternate reality did not come to Anna fully formed….
One day, wandering the halls of an academic department, she became fascinated by the physical details of the building: tiny cracks in the wall, a light swit... Read more »
Addington, J., Cadenhead, K., Cannon, T., Cornblatt, B., McGlashan, T., Perkins, D., Seidman, L., Tsuang, M., Walker, E., Woods, S.... (2007) North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study: A Collaborative Multisite Approach to Prodromal Schizophrenia Research. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 33(3), 665-672. DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sbl075
Corcoran, C., Davidson, L., Sills-Shahar, R., Nickou, C., Malaspina, D., Miller, T., & McGlashan, T. (2003) A Qualitative Research Study of the Evolution of Symptoms in Individuals Identified as Prodromal to Psychosis. Psychiatric Quarterly, 74(4), 313-332. DOI: 10.1023/A:1026083309607
- November 7, 2010
- 07:49 AM
- 932 views
Life in the dark
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
My wife, along with her many other jobs – paid and unpaid – is the local director of a campus exchange program that brings US students to Wollongong, New South Wales. Because of her background in outdoor education and adventure therapy, she does a great job taking visiting Yanks on weekend activities that get the students to see a side of life in Australia that they might not otherwise see. From Mystery Bay on the South Coast, to Mount Guluga with an Aboriginal guide, to abseiling (rapeling) in the Blue Mountains, to surf lessons at Seven Mile Beach, I think she does a great job, and I frequently tag along to help and enjoy being reminded of the distinctiveness of my adopted home.
Abdulai Abubakari holds his infant child, Fakia. (Peter DiCampo/VII Agency)
Invariably, either at the beach or in the Blue Mountains, at night, students will confront a clear, dark Australian sky, staggered at just how many stars fill the darkness from horizon to horizon. I’ve seen the US students – well, not all of them get into it – just stand, necks craned backwards, and stare. What they thought was darkness was actually full of innumerable points of light.
I’m sympathetic because I had a similar experience one clear night in the Chapada Diamantina (the Diamond Plateau) in Brazil, when I couldn’t believe how, given real darkness, desert-like humidity, and clear, pollution-free air, the sky was crowded with sources of light, just smeared with stars. For the first time, I felt like I understood the name, the ‘Milky Way,’ because I could see the uninterrupted blur toward the centre of our galaxy.
I was reminded of my experience with seeing stars, as if for the first time, and the reactions of the American students when I stumbled across the photos of Peter DiCampo (click here for Peter’s website), an American freelance photographer and former members of the Peace Corps who volunteered in the village of Voggu in rural Ghana. His photo essay, Full Frame: Life without lights, is up at Global Post, an online American newspaper launched at the start of 2009. His beautiful photos of life by flashlight, candle and gaslight, capture the atmosphere in this part of Ghana without electricity, and got me to thinking about artificial light and the way the sensory environment affects human development (additional photos at Peter’s personal website, including photos from darkness in Kurdistan).
Dark photos as activism
Peter’s photos are a form of social activism as well as both photojournalism and art. As he describes, the images seek to convey concretely life in Voggu without focusing entirely on deprivation, drawing attention to the villagers’ condition without simply recapitulating familiar visual stereotypes in images (and I think he’s quite successful):
The villagers of Voggu are among the 1.6 billion people worldwide who live without electricity.
I had a simple plan: to photograph only with the light available, so that the reader can see only what the subjects are able to see….
I have no desire to contribute to a stereotypical view of Africa, presenting people as miserable and helpless — but I have every desire to use my photographs toward humanitarian means. How to reconcile the two?
The photographs – of night markets and kids reading the Qur’an and actors shooting a movie scene, as well as flashlight-lit portraits – don’t just bring us to a different geographical locale, but to a profoundly different sensory reality (as do the photos from Kurdistan that appear on his own website). For most Americans and Australians, I suspect, living truly in the dark, with only tiny patches of light, would be a rarity.
Studies of nightglow, the light reflected back by humid or polluted atmosphere from ground level electric lighting, suggest that large portions of Europe, North America, and most urban areas are constantly swathed in low levels of ambient glow. Nightglow effectively banishes night, shifting the daily cycle for every one, and every thing, living in these areas.
The effects of light at night
Navara and Nelson (2007), in the Journal of Pineal Research, review the diverse effects of artificial light on biological systems. They discuss the extensive research on the negative effects of ambient nighttime light on animals, including disruptions to reproduction, migration, foraging behaviour and predation. I won’t discuss these effects in any detail, but one of the sadder examples is that hatchling sea turtles often use the contrast between dark bush behind the beach and lighter horizon over the water to orient themselves when they are born. Too much light on the inland horizon can confuse them so that they cannot find their way to water before predators get them.
Humans are also affected in a host of ways by nighttime light. These light-derived condition are widespread, even pervasive; as Navara and Nelson (2007: 216) review: ‘In 2001, the percentage of the world’s population living under sky brightness higher than baseline levels was 62%, with the percentages of US and European populations exposed to brighter than normal skies lying at 99%’ (Navara and Nelson cite Cinzano and colleagues 2001 atlas of the night sky). For some of these populations, true night is never experienced, for artificial light is consistently brighter than a full moon.
The increasing prevalence of high intensity artificial light that tends to be blue (rather than incandescent yellow) is especially troubling because light near this wavelength affects the pineal gland, which regulates melatonin production; long-term light exposure correlates with shrinkage of the pineal gland. Just 39 minutes of incandescent light at night can cause melatonin synthesis to drop by 50% (Navara and Nelson 2007: 217). As Korkmaz and colleagues (2009: 267) cite, elevated melatonin levels correlate with darkness and have been referred to as ‘the chemical expression of darkness.’ Altered or disrupted production of melatonin has a range of neuroendocrine effects on a range of bodily systems, including the metabolism of prolactin, glucocorticoids, adrenocorticotropic hormone, corticotrophin releasing factor and serotonin. Long-term exposure to light at night can contribute to chronic sleep deficit, especially through the effects on melatonin, with ‘countless’ other effects, according to Navara and Nelson’s (2007: 217) review.
Over the long term, disruption of the light-dark cycle can affect body composition, contribute to obesity, negatively impact gut efficiency, and otherwise disrupt metabolism, especially the moderation of energy uptake. These changes have been linked to diabetes, heart disease, and other metabolic problems. Moreover, chronic exposure to low levels of light at night can lead to oxidative stress, which can damage immune cells and even contribute to higher incidence of cancer and rates of physiological aging (see Navara and Nelson 2007 for research review).
Because of the diverse endocrine disruptions caused by ambient night light, some health advocates argue for a decrease in the number of lights, for a modification of design, or for a shift to using lights which function less in the blue-violet part of the spectrum, which seem to cause the most biological disruption.
The dark in Ghana
But Peter’s photos also struck me because I was fascinated by the way that perception, too, might be altered. When I emailed Peter to ask his permission to use his photo in this post, I asked him how he felt his perceptions were affected by living in an area without streetlights and neon signs and all the other electricity-based technologies that transform our experiences of night. He wrote back:
As far as perception or vision – it was obvious to me that I was the clumsiest person in town. My Ghanaian friends, it seemed, could simply see in the dark. Maybe they couldn’t read a book, but they knew who was coming when he or she was still a great distance away, and they didn’t stumble as they walked around at night. I, however, wasn’t there long enough to adjust, apparently!
I also asked Peter how living with dark night affected him more generally, his state of mind and overall experience of the Ghanaian countryside. His answer highlights a range of issues:
... Read more »
Navara, K., & Nelson, R. (2007) The dark side of light at night: physiological, epidemiological, and ecological consequences. Journal of Pineal Research, 43(3), 215-224. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-079X.2007.00473.x
- October 27, 2010
- 11:38 PM
- 744 views
Food for thought: Cooking in human evolution
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
Did cooking make us human by providing the foundation for the rapid growth of the human brain during evolution? If so, what does this tell us about the diet that we should be eating, and can we turn back the culinary clock to an evolutionarily ideal diet? A number of provocations over the last couple of weeks have me thinking about evolution and diet, especially what our teeth and guts tell us about how our ancestors got their food.
I did a post on this a while back at Neuroanthropology.net, putting up my slides for the then-current version of my ‘brain and diet’ lecture from ‘Human evolution and diversity,’ but I’m also thinking about food and evolution because I just watched Nestlé food scientist, Heribert Watzke’s TED talk, The Brain in Your Gut. Watzke combines two intriguing subjects: the enteric nervous system, or your gut’s ‘second brain,’ and the evolution of diet. I’ll deal with the diet, gastro-intestinal system and teeth today, and the enteric nervous system another day because it’s a great subject itself (if you can’t wait, check out Scientific American).
This piece is going to ramble a bit, as it will also include some thoughts on the subject of diet and brain evolution sparked by multiple conversations: with Prof. Marlene Zuk (of the University of California Riverside), with Paul Mason (about Terrence Deacon’s article that he and Daniel wrote about), and following my annual lecture on human brain evolution as well as conversations today with a documentary crew from SBS. So let’s begin the meander with Dr. Watzke’s opening bit on why he thinks humans should be classified as ‘coctivors,’ that is, animals that eat cooked food, rather than ‘omnivores.’
Although I generally liked the talk, I was struck by some things that didn’t ring quite right, including Dr. Watzke’s opening bit about teeth (from the online transcript):
So everyone of you turns to their neighbor please. Turn and face your neighbors. Please, also on the balcony. Smile. Smile. Open the mouths. Smile, friendly. (Laughter) Do you — Do you see any Canine teeth? (Laughter) Count Dracula teeth in the mouths of your neighbors? Of course not. Because our dental anatomy is actually made, not for tearing down raw meat from bones or chewing fibrous leaves for hours. It is made for a diet which is soft, mushy, which is reduced in fibers, which is very easily chewable and digestible. Sounds like fast food, doesn’t it.
Okay, let’s not be pedantic about it, because we know that humans, in fact, do have canines. Watzke’s point is that we don’t have extended canines, long fangs that we find in most carnivorous mammals or in our primate relatives like chimps or gorillas.
The problem is that the absence of projecting canines in humans is a bit more interesting than just, ‘eat plants=less canine development.’ In fact, gorillas are completely vegetarian, and the males, especially, have massive canines; chimpanzees eat a very small amount of animal protein (something like 2% of their caloric intake), and they too have formidable canines. Our cousins don’t have extended canines because they need them for eating – rather, all evidence suggests that they need big fangs for fighting, especially intraspecies brawling among the males in order to reproduce.
Teeth of human (left), Ar. ramidus (middle), and chimpanzee (right), all males.
The case of chimpanzee canines is especially intriguing because, with the remains of Ardipithecus ramidus now more extensively discussed, a species potentially close to the last common ancestor of humans and chimps, we know very old hominids didn’t have pronounced canines. If the remains are indicative of our common ancestor with chimpanzees (and there’s no guarantee of that), then it’s not so much human canine shrinkage alone that’s the recent evolutionary development but also the re-development of chimpanzee canines, probably due to sexual competition.
Even with all the possible points of disagreement, the basic point is that human teeth are quite small, likely due both to shifts in our patterns of reproduction and sexual selection and to changes in our diet. Over the last few million years, our ancestors seemed to have gotten more and more of their calories out of meat, one argument goes, at the same time that our ancestors’ teeth were getting less and less capable of processing food of all sorts (or, for that matter, being effectively used as a weapon).
Hungrier and hungrier, with weaker jaws and smaller teeth
As I always remind my students in my lecture on human brain evolution, if big brains are so great, why doesn’t every animal have one? The answer is that big brains also pose certain challenges for an organism (or, if you prefer, ‘mo’ neurons, mo’ problums’).
The first and most obvious is that brains are hungry organs, devouring energy very fast and relentlessly, especially as they grow. The statistic that we frequently throw around is that the brain constitutes 2% of human body mass and consumes 25% of the energy used by the body; or, to put it another way, brain tissue consumes nine times as many calories as muscle at rest. So, if evolution is going to grow the brain, an organism is going to have to come up with a lot of energy – a smaller brain means that an animal both can eat less and be more likely to survive calorie drought.
But hominin brain growth also presents a few other problems, which sometimes get underestimated in accounts of our species’ distinctiveness. For example, natural selection had to solve a problem of excess heat, especially if big-brained hominids were going to do things that their big brains should tell them are ill advised, like run around in the hot sun. As your brain chews up energy, it generates heat, and the brain can overheat, a serious problem with sunstroke. The good news is that somewhere along the line our hominin ancestors picked up a number of adaptations that made them very good at shedding heat, from a low-fur epidermis and facility to produce copious sweat to a system of veins that run from the brain, shunting away heat (for a much more extensive discussion, see Sharma, ed. 2007, or the work of anthropologist Dean Falk, including her 1990 article in BBS laying out the ‘radiator theory’).
Not only is our brain hungry and hot; our enlarged cranium also poses some distinctive challenges for our mothers, especially as bipedalism has narrowed her birth canal by slowly making the pelvis more and more basket shape (bringing the hips under our centre of gravity). The ‘obstetrical dilemma,’ the narrowing of the birth canal at the same time that the human brain was enlarging, led to a bit of a brain-birth canal logjam, if you’ll pardon the groan-worthy pun (see Rosenberg and Trevathan 1995).
Although frequently presented as a significant constraint on brain growth (and I’m sure all mother... Read more »
Rosenberg, K., & Trevathan, W. (2005) Bipedalism and human birth: The obstetrical dilemma revisited. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 4(5), 161-168. DOI: 10.1002/evan.1360040506
Suwa, G., Kono, R., Simpson, S., Asfaw, B., Lovejoy, C., & White, T. (2009) Paleobiological Implications of the Ardipithecus ramidus Dentition. Science, 326(5949), 69-69. DOI: 10.1126/science.1175824
Wrangham, R. (2003) 'Cooking as a biological trait'. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology - Part A: Molecular , 136(1), 35-46. DOI: 10.1016/S1095-6433(03)00020-5
- October 16, 2010
- 05:21 AM
- 1,219 views
The @#$% 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize: Pain files 1
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
The 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded recently by the Annals of Improbable Science, and a paper I read a while ago and wanted to comment on won the Ig Nobel for Peace! (By the way, comment on, not because I thought it was Ig Nobel-esque, but because it was actually relevant to my work — what does that say about my research!?)! Congratulations to Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston for the prize, awarded for their paper, ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain,’ in Neuroreport. I’ll blog specifically about their article below the fold.
Apparently, recipients didn’t get to try on bra-gas masks this year like at last year’s Ig Nobels 2009, but I’m sure much fun was had. Paper plane throwing, operatic songs about tooth bacteria, bat porn (well, they didn’t actually get to show the bat porn…), a little girl telling award winners she was bored to stop them from giving overly-long acceptance speeches… sounds like something for the whole family.
There are a number of great-looking winners, including a brilliant engineering team who used remote-controlled toy helicopters to breathalyze whales to better sample their snot (yeah, ‘why didn’t *I* think of that?!,’ you’re saying…), a game-theory demonstration that hierarchical firms were better off simply promoting people randomly, a demonstration that oil and water in fact do mix together (the award was shared with BP for demonstrating the same effect on a much larger scale), and a too-long-ignored, forty-year-old contribution to epidemiology which pointed out the dangers of beards on microbiologists.
For more on all the papers that won, check out Christie Wilcox’s prize-by-prize rundown with links or a great discussion by Jeff Hecht at New Scientist. If you wanted to watch the ceremony, it was streamed, but I haven’t found it archived yet; I’m sure it will eventually be available at the Annals of Improbable Research YouTube channel.
Pain and swearing
In their paper in Neuroreport, Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston discuss research in which they tested whether swearing really helped pain resistance. They hypothesized, like good emotionally repressive scientists, that swearing was a maladaptive response to pain, exacerbating the pain by generating additional ‘negative thoughts.’ They first asked experimental subjects to list five words that people might say if they struck their thumb with a hammer (controls were asked for five descriptors for a table). Subjects then did a cold pressor test, in which they held an open hand in iced water; both groups were instructed to repeat a word from their list, seeing how long they could keep their hands immersed.
The test subjects who swore kept their hands in the water longer than the folks who muttered about tables, and reported less perceived pain from the cold pressor than did the control subjects, with some variation: ‘Although both sexes experienced a reduction in perceived pain in the swearing condition, females did so to a greater extent’ (1057). The table below shows some of the key results: not only did the swearing subjects hold their hands in longer, they experienced less pain according to their reports, and their heart rates spiked higher.
The data not only disproved the researchers’ hypothesis (that swearing was maladaptive), it also revealed interesting sex differences between men and women, and the link to increased heart rate, which I think is especially interesting. Stephens and co-authors suggest that the increased heart rate while swearing may indicate a heightened emotional response like fear or aggression that downward regulates experiences of pain through ‘classic fight or flight mechanisms’ (1060).
As the researchers conclude:
This study has shown that, under certain conditions, swearing produces a hypoalgesic effect. Swearing may have induced a fight or flight response and we speculate on a role for aggression in this. In addition swearing nullified the link between fear of pain and pain perception. (1060)
Minor issues
Of course, the research did confront the occasional outlier. After they asked all the experimental subjects to list the words a person would say when hit on the thumb with a hammer, ‘One participant was excluded because none of their suggested words were swear words’ (1057). Unfortunately, no footnote reveals what precisely this outlier thought a person would say if hit on the thumb with a hammer. (‘Rats’? ‘Fudge’? ‘Sugar’? ‘Fiddlesticks’?)
Trying to create a careful control for the swearing/non-swearing conditions also created some issues, forcing a control that meant that some of the cathartic value of swearing had to be sacrificed: ‘Participants were asked to maintain a similar pace and volume of word recital across conditions’ (1056). Subjects were also required to repeat the same word over and over again — anyone who swears like a stuck sailor knows that part of the relief comes from the stream of changing epithets shouted at the top of one’s lungs, the profane creativity of the novel compound vulgarity, ‘@#$%! *&^%-*&^%! $@*^^&^$#@! &^%$#@@!’ (although sometimes you just can’t manage anything more interesting than repeating the same choice epithet).
Vocal volume especially would seem to be an issue if the researchers are postulating that the analgesic mechanism was an effect of aggression downward mediating perceptions of pain. I’m not sure that swearing relatively quietly and at a measured pace would actually provoke a strong emotional dynamic, no matter what sort of dynamic you’re expecting.
Thinking through the dynamic of vulgar analgesia
The research is fun, of course, but I find it particularly intriguing because the experiment, in its own way, illuminates some of the neurological complexity underlying pain, including the possibility that top-down mechanisms— like coping techniques, conscious thought, or learned emotional responses—might modulate our experience. As a number of neuropsychologists have argued (and demonstrated empirically), pain involves a constellation of interacting neural mechanisms, some of them more conscious than others, rather than a single ‘pain centre’ (see Apkarian et al., 2005). Donald Price (2000), for example, reviews the relations among pain, feelings of ‘unpleasantness’, and ‘secondary pain affect,’ such as the emotional feelings of long-term worry or ‘suffering’ that may accompany the unpleasantness. As Price writes (2000: 1769):
Psychophysical studies demonstrate that pain sensation and pain unpleasantness represent two distinct dimensions of pain that demonstrate reliably different relations to nociceptive stimulus intensity and are separately influenced by various psychological factors.
One of the clearest examples of the way that pain stimulus can be, to a limited degree, decoupled from sensations of unpleasantness is that subjects reliably report diminished sensations of pain if told that a pain is transitory and will produce no lasting effect and enhance reports of suffering if they believe that a pain will be long-lasting.
In some cases, the decoupling can produce a quite profound gulf between pain sensation and pain unpleasantness; in a study at a Forward Hospital in World War II, military surgeon Dr. Henry Beecher found that three-quarters of severely wounded men did not experience such pain that they asked for pain relief, even when they were reminded that it was available (1946: 99). Beecher was surprised by the result, pointing out that even patients suffering severe wounds to the chest and head and broken bones, caused a minority of sufferers to report significant subjective pain.
In addition, the relation between unpleasantness and secondary pain affect – suffering or distress – also varies. A study of ethnic differences in pain perception, for example, conducted by Zborowski (1952), found that different ethnic groups felt varying levels of distress in relation to similar reports of pain, some groups worrying extensively about the future implications of pain and others curtailing expression of suffering. Pric... Read more »
APKARIAN, A., BUSHNELL, M., TREEDE, R., & ZUBIETA, J. (2005) Human brain mechanisms of pain perception and regulation in health and disease. European Journal of Pain, 9(4), 463-484. DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpain.2004.11.001
BEECHER, H. (1946) PAIN IN MEN WOUNDED IN BATTLE. Annals of Surgery, 123(1), 96-105. DOI: 10.1097/00000658-194601000-00008
Price, D. (2000) Psychological and Neural Mechanisms of the Affective Dimension of Pain. Science, 288(5472), 1769-1772. DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5472.1769
Stephens, R., Atkins, J., & Kingston, A. (2009) Swearing as a response to pain. NeuroReport, 1. DOI: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e32832e64b1
Van Lancker, D. (1999) Expletives: neurolinguistic and neurobehavioral perspectives on swearing. Brain Research Reviews, 31(1), 83-104. DOI: 10.1016/S0165-0173(99)00060-0
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- September 5, 2010
- 09:50 AM
- 716 views
2 legs good, 4 legs better: Uner Tan Syndrome, part 2
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
Beginning in 2005, reports by Prof. Üner Tan of Cukurova University in Turkey alerted the world to a number of families in which some members walked quadrupedally. This is the second part of a (so far) two-part post on Uner Tan Syndrome. Although you’re welcome to read the first part, I’ll give you the one sentence summary if you just want to push on and a piece of video clip on the cases. I should warn you though, before you read the first part, that the whole thing is sort of like the straight set-up for this piece, which is a bit of a googly (kind of like a knuckleballer for all you non-cricket followers):
Üner Tan described four consanguineous Turkish families with fourteen individuals who habitually walked bipedally; subsequent genetic research showed that some of the families had defects in a gene known to be essential in cerebellar formation, but not all of the cases had the gene, and at least one family member with the gene walked normally, leading most researchers to argue UTS was genetically heterogeneous in origin; some theorists, including Tan, argued that quadrupedalism was either ‘reverse evolution’ or an atavism, but not everyone was buying that explanation (including me for reasons I didn’t make entirely clear in the first post).
Well, that was — technically — one sentence.
Nova preview: The Family that Walks on All Fours
But if you read that first post, I know what you’re saying: ‘Bloody loooong post, mate, laffed mi head off at the picture… but eef thas what yous blokes do at Newroant-whatevs, well, I’m not heaps intristed.’ (Apparently, you have a bogan Australian accent, at least in my head.)
Photo by Eadweard MuybridgeAu contraire – we’re just getting started! We’ve still got bipedal dogs and goats, kids who only get down on all four when in a hurry, Johnny Eck (aka the ‘Half Boy’), capoeira training in Brazil and some other surprises up our sleeve. We’ll show you how we roll at Neuroanthropology, with lots of weird SFW videos and obscure case studies!
One of the things that we try to bring to ‘neuro-’ to make it truly ‘neuroanthropology’ is a much more open consideration of human variation. This can sometimes take us to some extraordinary case studies, not simply out of a fascination with the exotic, but because a comparative look at extreme cases – like Uner Tan Syndrome – helps us to better understand human potential. So let’s go back to Prof. Tan…
More and more quadrupeds
One of the great things about Prof. Üner Tan is that he was not contented just to have a rare genetic condition named after him. (Which would be pretty cool, so if anyone needs a name for one of these things, mine’s available.) Instead, Prof. Tan seemed to search obsessively for other cases in which people walked quadrupedally.
The diversity of underlying conditions was already a problem for explanation, as I’ve discussed in the previous posting because no single genetic anomaly could be found in all the cases (see also, Tan and Tan 2009: 910). But as the number of cases grew, even though Üner Tan kept referring to them as ‘Uner Tan Syndrome,’ the more it became clear that he was not simple on the trail of a single ‘syndrome.’ Rather, he found a range of people who wound up quadrupedal. Moreover, they had become quadrupedal in different ways and for diverse reasons.
For example, Prof. Tan sent me a pre-print version of a ‘Letter to the Editor’ in the journal, Movement Disorders, describing the case of a 12-year-old boy who, about two years earlier, had begun to run on hands and feet. Unlike the prior cases, this boy was a ‘facultative’ quadruped, only using his arms to get about when in a hurry; like the other cases, the boy demonstrated a range of developmental problems (he didn’t speak) and cerebellar symptoms: ‘limb dysdiachokinesia, dysmetria, past-pointing, excessive rebound, kinetic tremor, trunk titubation, and inability in tandem gait’ (Tan et al. 2010). Unlike the other Uner Tan Syndrome cases who had never learned to walk upright, he could walk bipedally, but then at adolescence became more comfortable moving about quadrupedally in certain circumstances.
Clearly, the 12-year-old had some neurological issues, but unlikely the same degree of defect that produced the profound intellectual and motor deficits in the first four families (which were themselves the product of at least three different abnormalities). Moreover, by adding ‘facultative’ (that is, voluntary) quadrupedalism as a category of Uner Tan Syndrome, Prof. Tan himself was starting to focus much more on a single symptom, not a cluster, and allowing for that ‘symptom’ to be intermittent and voluntary. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in agreement we should consider facultative and habitual quadrupedalism together for theoretical purposes, but I’m not the one with the syndrome named after me, so I don’t have anything at stake if we undermine its credibility qua ‘syndrome.’
Two more subsequent cases, children 4- and 8-years-old, also had facultative quadrupedalism, getting about bipedally when walking slowly but switching to all four when moving fast. Tan and Tan (2009) found that the children could even ‘gallop’ when trying to sprint, not just using the diagonal-sequence, alternating gait that was found in the original set of families but bounding with the legs or arms moving in unison. These two children were otherwise normal, with no neurological abnormalities, except for a positive Babinski reflex, a foot response which usually indicates neurological problems, and an inability to balance when ‘tandem walking,’ walking heel-to-toe in a straight line (like a test sometimes given to suspected drunk drivers in the US).
All three of these children didn’t have the other hallmarks of Uner Tan Syndrome found in the first four families: no consanguineous marriages (their grandmothers were sisters), no other intellectual deficits, no abnormality in trunk stability, normal language abilities and coordination (Tan and Tan 2009).
Moreover, Tan also found some cases where the patients had no symptoms other than quadrupedal walking, such as a 36-year-old man in Adana, Turkey, with no cognitive deficits or cerebellar problems who walked quadrupedally, due in large part to a leg paralyzed by childhood polio and his refusal to wear a prosthesis (Tan 2007). Three more similar cases followed of neurologically normal individuals who walked quadrupedally due to polio-induced paralysis of their right legs (what’s with the right leg?; see Tan and Tan 2009: 911).
In other words, Prof. Tan was content to call anyone moving quadrupedally an example of Uner Tan Syndrome, even though the etiology of the condition was clearly different, accompanying subordinate symptoms were wildly different, and the primary diagnostic itself varied from voluntary behaviour to inescapable condition.
Uner Tan even pointed to the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his pioneering versions of moving pictures, in which he documented diverse people in everyday activities. Muybridge photographed an English child with a paralyzed leg who, like the last cluster of subjects examined by Tan, also walked on all four. I found the following short film clip by Keith Phillips on YouTube, based on Muybridge’s photos of the quadrupedal child:
Muybridge in Motion, a quadrupedal child
Tan repeatedly argues that these examples all demonstrate ‘reverse evolution’ or the unmasking of an ancient vestigial capacity for quadrupedal movement still hidden in the human nervous system. But, as he has found more and more cases, some with no genetic and minimal neurological abnormalities (except for, say, poliomyelitis), I think that the evidence points to a much more interesting possibility: in some cases, whether due to injury, cerebellar deficit or even something more exotic or elective — like circus or capoeira training — humans can develop in their seemingly unsuitable bodies a remarkable capacity to move about on all four. These human quadrupeds demonstrate how activity patterns can shape our bodies, how even defining traits of our species can be absent or developed in distinctive configurations.
Strange bipeds
The cases of some strange bipeds, however, help to build the circumstantial case against the idea that the quadrupedalism found in the cases of Uner Tan Syndrome is simply an atavism or a form of ‘reverse evolution’. Although these cases do not prove the absence of an ancient, masked ability to move quadrupedally, they do show that novel and evolu... Read more »
Dietz Volker. (2002) Do human bipeds use quadrupedal coordination?. Trends in neurosciences, 25(9), 462-7. PMID: 12183207
Dietz V, & Michel J. (2009) Human bipeds use quadrupedal coordination during locomotion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 97-103. PMID: 19645886
Hall, Brian K. (1984) Developmental mechanisms underlying the formation of atavisms. . Biological Reviews, 89-124. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-185X.1984.tb00402.x
Herz J, Boycott KM, & Parboosingh JS. (2008) "Devolution" of bipedality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(21). PMID: 18487453
Humphrey, Nicholas, Stefan Mundlos, & Seval Türkmen. (2008) Genes and quadrupedal locomotion in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science , 105(21). DOI: 10.1073 pnas.0802839105
Lovejoy CO, Suwa G, Simpson SW, Matternes JH, & White TD. (2009) The great divides: Ardipithecus ramidus reveals the postcrania of our last common ancestors with African apes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 326(5949), 100-6. PMID: 19810199
Susanne M. Morton,, & Amy J. Bastian. (2007) Mechanisms of cerebellar gait ataxia. The Cerebellum, 6(1), 79-86. DOI: 10.1080/14734220601187741
Tayfun Ozcelik, Nurten Akarsu, Elif Uz, Safak Caglayan, Suleyman Gulsuner, Onur Emre Onat, Meliha Tan, & Uner Tan. (2008) Mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor VLDLR cause cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans. . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(11), 4232-4236. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710010105
Ozcelik, Tayfun,, Nurten Akarsu,, Elif Uz,, Safak Caglayan,, Suleyman Gulsuner,, Onur Emre Onat,, Meliha Tan,, & Uner Tan. (2008) Reply to Herz et al. and Humphrey et al.: Genetic heterogeneity of cerebellar hypoplasia with quadrupedal locomotion. . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(23). DOI: 10.1073 pnas.0804078105
Stanford CB. (2006) Arboreal bipedalism in wild chimpanzees: implications for the evolution of hominid posture and locomotion. American journal of physical anthropology, 129(2), 225-31. PMID: 16288480
Tan, Meliha, Sibel Karaca, and Uner Tan. (2010) A New Case of Uner Tan Syndrome—with Late Childhood Quadrupedalism. Movement Disorders, 25(5), 652-653. DOI: 10.1002/mds.22951
Tan, Uner. (2007) A Wrist-Walker Exhibiting No “Uner Tan Sydnrome”: A Theory for Possible Mechanisms of Human Devolution Toward the Atavistic Walking Patterns. International Journal of Neuroscience , 117(1), 147-156. DOI: 10.1080/00207450600936866
Uner Tan, Sadrettin Penccedile, Mustafa Yilmaz, Ayhan Oumlzkur, Sibel Karaca, Meliha Tan, & Mehmet Karatascedil. (2008) “Unertan Syndrome” in two Turkish Families in Relation to Devolution and Emergence of Homo Erectus: Neurological Examination, MRI, and pet Scans. International Journal of Neuroscience, 313-336. DOI: 10.1080/00207450701667766
Tan, Uner, & Meliha Tan. (2009) Unertan Syndrome: A New Variant of Unertan Syndrome: Running on All Fours in Two Upright-Walking Children. International Journal of Neuroscience, 119(7), 909-918. DOI: 10.1080/00207450902828050
Thelen, E.,, & Ulrich, B. D. (1991) Hidden skills: A dynamic systems analysis of treadmill stepping during the first year. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 56(1), 1-98. DOI: 10.2307/1166099
Thorpe, S. K. S.,, R. L. Holder,, & R. H. Crompton. (2007) Origin of Human Bipedalism As an Adaptation for Locomotion on Flexible Branches. Science, 316(5829), 1328. DOI: 10.1126/science.1140799
Trommsdorff M, Gotthardt M, Hiesberger T, Shelton J, Stockinger W, Nimpf J, Hammer RE, Richardson JA, & Herz J. (1999) Reeler/Disabled-like disruption of neuronal migration in knockout mice lacking the VLDL receptor and ApoE receptor 2. Cell, 97(6), 689-701. PMID: 10380922
S Türkmen,, K Hoffmann,, Osman Demirhan,, Defne Aruoba,, N Humphrey,, & S Mundlos. (2008) Cerebellar hypoplasia, with quadrupedal locomotion, caused by mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor gene. European Journal of Human Genetics, 1070-1074. DOI: 10.1038/ejhg.2008.73
- September 3, 2010
- 10:44 AM
- 789 views
Human, quadruped: Uner Tan Syndrome, part 1
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
The photos that accompanied news releases about quadrupedal people living in Turkey, members of a family that allegedly could not walk except on hands and feet, looked staged when I first saw them. Three women and one man scrambling across rocky ground, the women in brightly coloured clothing, the sky radiant blue behind them, their eyes forward and backsides high in the air – like children engaged in some sort of awkward race at a field day or sporting carnival.
Members of a Turkish family with Uner Tan SyndromeFor an anthropologist interested in human motor variation and adaptation, the family looked too good to be true. Subsequent reports and a string of papers confirmed that the families did exist, and they suffered from a condition that came to be called ‘Uner Tan Syndrome’ (sometimes ‘Unertan Syndrome’ or UTS). This story is not new, having already broken and exhausted itself on the waves of internet enthusiasm, but I’ve been wanting to write a sober reflection on the lessons I take from UTS for a while now, and my first major post on our new site seems like a good place.
—-
Walking on all fours – we’ve all (or virtually all) done it – but most of us eventually become bipedal, even though the developmental pathways to striding around on two feet vary (see Adolph et al. 2010). The motor pattern is so dominant that bipedalism is considered a defining trait of our species, arising earlier in the paleoarchaeological record than many other distinctive hallmarks of humanity. When I teach my introductory human evolution course, students, like generations of evolutionary theorists, are always surprised by the skeletons of ‘Lucy,’ and now ‘Ardi,’ with ape-like brains and increasingly human-like lower bodies (if they’re not surprised, they pretend to be, probably to humour me).
I’ve previously written about my fascination with human flexibility in movement, including extraordinary forms of mobility (in a piece on the ‘Monkey King,’ an amazing Indian building climber), so Üner Tan, Emeritus Professor from Cukurova University in Turkey and member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences, has been generously sending me pre-print articles and other materials on Uner Tan Syndrome. This piece is made possible by his openness and dogged persistence in spreading the word about this remarkable condition.
Tan first described the syndrome in 2005, based initially on five members of the Ulas family from a small village near Iskenderun, Turkey (seen in those initial photos). He later found families in Adana and small villages near Gaziantep and Canakkale for a total of 14 cases (18 cases in total, but four of which may not have the fully fledged condition from other families) (see Tan 2005; 2006a, b, c; 2010).
From the initial reports, when the number of cases was quite small, Nicholas Humphrey and John R. Skoyles from the London School of Economics and Roger Keynes University of Cambridge, in an LSE discussion paper, opined, ‘even if it is indeed a one-off pathological condition, we think there may be anthropological lessons to be learned from it’ (2005: 11). I couldn’t agree more: although rare (though not ‘one-off’), cases of human quadrupedalism are a fascinating window in on the dynamic developmental processes that so reliably – but not inevitably – produce bipedalism in humans.
Symptoms of Uner Tan Syndrome
In the initial cases of Uner Tan Syndrome, the distinctive and defining symptom of quadrupedalism was accompanied by a number of other cognitive and neurological problems, including especially cerebellar irregularities such as ataxia in the trunk, or the inability to coordinate muscle movement, and intellectual deficits such as delayed or absent speech and ‘conscious experience’ problems.
Humphrey, Skoyles and Keynes (2005: 8 ) reported on a number of the cases and found:
signs of cerebellar dysfunction including: intention tremor, dysdiadochokinesis (inability to execute rapidly alternating movements particularly of the limbs), dysmetria (lack of coordination of movement typified by under- or over-shooting the intended position), and nystagmus (involuntary rhythmic eye movement, with the eyes moving quickly in one direction, and then slowly in the other). However, the cerebellar signs are relatively mild, and they are no more pronounced in the quadrupeds than in the one affected brother who walks bipedally.
MRI and PET scans of a number of the families found inferior cerebellar hypoplasia, an underdevelopment in the cerebellum, particularly the vermis, the narrow area between the two brain hemispheres; mild atrophy in the cerebellar cortex and slightly simplified cerebral gyri, or an overly smooth surface; and a reduced corpus callosum, the white matter structure that connects the hemispheres, in three of the families, but not in the fourth (see Tan et al. 2008). Different subjects seemed to have slightly different anatomical abnormalities, but the consistent neurological abnormalities afflicted primarily the cerebrum and overall gyrification, the parallel ridges, of the cerebellar cortex (see, for example, Ozcelik et al. 2008: 4234).
In spite of their other motor deficits, however, their balance (while quadrupedal, that is) was quite stable and the individuals involved were also capable of fine motor coordination. Some of the women affected, for example, did fine needlework. The fact that they were not more severely affected is important because, as Humphrey, Skoyles and Keynes (2005: 9) point out:
The capacity for walking upright is highly resilient in human beings. In fact humans typically remain bipedal in the face of much greater obstacles to balance and coordination than those experienced by the subjects we have described here. Individuals with bilateral labyrinthine dysfunction, and loss of lower limb proprioceptive sensation are nonetheless typically bipedal. Bipedality can even occur in the complete absence of the cerebellum. There is a recent report of a young man with congenital agenesis of the cerebellum who nevertheless learned to walk and ride a bicycle.
Why can’t they walk?
Because of the pattern of Uner Tan Syndrome within families and its association with consanguineous marriage, or marriage between cousins, most researchers initially suspected that an autosomal recessive gene mutation might be involved.
Sure enough, in 2008 in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Tayfun Ozcelik and colleagues (2008a) reported that the quadrupedal families had a cluster of related genetic abnormalities, mostly to chromosomes 9p24 and 17p, although one affected family did not have abnormalities to either of these chromosomes (for a review, see Tan 2010). In two of the four Turkish families, the abnormality occurred with the VLDLR gene on 9p24, which encodes the very low-density lipoprotein receptor, also implicated in another genetic disorder, Disequilibrium Syndrome (DES-H), where balance and movement problems are also compromised. Although DES-H sufferers have severe walking difficulties, however, no reported cases walk quadrupedally.
Cross-checking against unaffected family members and other members of the community confirmed the likelihood that a mutation to VLDLR might be the culprit, although a cautionary note is that one family member who had the genetic abnormality could walk normally.
VLDLR is involved in the reelin pathway, a glycoprotein regulated mechanisms that moderates neuronal positioning, alignment and migration in the cerebellum; reelin binds to the VLDLR gene and helps get neuroblasts in the right place and configuration for the cerebellum (for a more detailed discussion, see Türkmen et al. 2008). Mice with impaired reelin genes (RELN) or VLDLR abnormalities wind up with abnormal cerebellae, although VLDLR abnormalities can be asymptomatic in mice, only revealed on autopsy (or presumably, if they stuck the little mice in little mice-sized MRIs and got them to sit still) (see Trommsdorff et al. 1999).
However, Ozcelik and colleagues suggested after a thorough gene mapping study that Uner Tan Syndrome was genetically heterogeneous, even in the limited sample of the four Turkish families (2008a: 4234). I’ll come back to that at length in the next post because I think calling every example of habitual and facultative quadrupedalism an example of a single ‘Uner Tan Syndrome’ is misleading, but misleading in a direction that forces us to question whether Uner Tan and others cases of quadrupedalism are actually demonstrating something much broader than a gene causing a disorder, the extreme cases of VLDLR genetic abnormality being only part of the picture.
Tan and colleagues’ (2008) earlier PET and MRI-based study of the original two families likewise showed divergent results: the UTS sufferers in one family had central vestibular deficits, l... Read more »
Hall, Brian K. (1984) Developmental mechanisms underlying the formation of atavisms. . Biological Reviews, 89-124. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-185X.1984.tb00402.x
Herz J, Boycott KM, & Parboosingh JS. (2008) "Devolution" of bipedality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(21). PMID: 18487453
Humphrey, Nicholas, Stefan Mundlos, & Seval Türkmen. (2008) Genes and quadrupedal locomotion in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science , 105(21). DOI: 10.1073 pnas.0802839105
Lovejoy CO, Suwa G, Simpson SW, Matternes JH, & White TD. (2009) The great divides: Ardipithecus ramidus reveals the postcrania of our last common ancestors with African apes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 326(5949), 100-6. PMID: 19810199
Susanne M. Morton,, & Amy J. Bastian. (2007) Mechanisms of cerebellar gait ataxia. The Cerebellum, 6(1), 79-86. DOI: 10.1080/14734220601187741
Tayfun Ozcelik, Nurten Akarsu, Elif Uz, Safak Caglayan, Suleyman Gulsuner, Onur Emre Onat, Meliha Tan, & Uner Tan. (2008) Mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor VLDLR cause cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans. . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(11), 4232-4236. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710010105
Ozcelik, Tayfun,, Nurten Akarsu,, Elif Uz,, Safak Caglayan,, Suleyman Gulsuner,, Onur Emre Onat,, Meliha Tan,, & Uner Tan. (2008) Reply to Herz et al. and Humphrey et al.: Genetic heterogeneity of cerebellar hypoplasia with quadrupedal locomotion. . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(23). DOI: 10.1073 pnas.0804078105
Stanford CB. (2006) Arboreal bipedalism in wild chimpanzees: implications for the evolution of hominid posture and locomotion. American journal of physical anthropology, 129(2), 225-31. PMID: 16288480
Tan, Meliha, Sibel Karaca, and Uner Tan. (2010) A New Case of Uner Tan Syndrome—with Late Childhood Quadrupedalism. Movement Disorders, 25(5), 652-653. DOI: 10.1002/mds.22951
Tan, Uner. (2007) A Wrist-Walker Exhibiting No “Uner Tan Sydnrome”: A Theory for Possible Mechanisms of Human Devolution Toward the Atavistic Walking Patterns. International Journal of Neuroscience , 117(1), 147-156. DOI: 10.1080/00207450600936866
Uner Tan, Sadrettin Penccedile, Mustafa Yilmaz, Ayhan Oumlzkur, Sibel Karaca, Meliha Tan, & Mehmet Karatascedil. (2008) “Unertan Syndrome” in two Turkish Families in Relation to Devolution and Emergence of Homo Erectus: Neurological Examination, MRI, and pet Scans. International Journal of Neuroscience, 313-336. DOI: 10.1080/00207450701667766
Tan, Uner, & Meliha Tan. (2009) Unertan Syndrome: A New Variant of Unertan Syndrome: Running on All Fours in Two Upright-Walking Children. International Journal of Neuroscience, 119(7), 909-918. DOI: 10.1080/00207450902828050
Thelen, E.,, & Ulrich, B. D. (1991) Hidden skills: A dynamic systems analysis of treadmill stepping during the first year. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 56(1), 1-98. DOI: 10.2307/1166099
Thorpe, S. K. S.,, R. L. Holder,, & R. H. Crompton. (2007) Origin of Human Bipedalism As an Adaptation for Locomotion on Flexible Branches. Science, 316(5829), 1328. DOI: 10.1126/science.1140799
Trommsdorff M, Gotthardt M, Hiesberger T, Shelton J, Stockinger W, Nimpf J, Hammer RE, Richardson JA, & Herz J. (1999) Reeler/Disabled-like disruption of neuronal migration in knockout mice lacking the VLDL receptor and ApoE receptor 2. Cell, 97(6), 689-701. PMID: 10380922
S Türkmen,, K Hoffmann,, Osman Demirhan,, Defne Aruoba,, N Humphrey,, & S Mundlos. (2008) Cerebellar hypoplasia, with quadrupedal locomotion, caused by mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor gene. European Journal of Human Genetics, 1070-1074. DOI: 10.1038/ejhg.2008.73
- August 31, 2010
- 01:16 AM
- 466 views
The new linguistic relativism: Guy Deutscher in the NYTimes
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
How does language affect thought and perception? It’s a question we’ve looked at here at Neuroanthropology.net on a number of occasions, but Prof. Guy Deutscher, offers a nice general survey of the current state of play in the research over at The New York Times in ‘Does Your Language Shape How You Think?’ Posts on [...]... Read more »
Casasanto, Daniel. (2005) Crying "Whorf". Science, 307(5716), 1721-1722. DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5716.1721
Casasanto, D. (2008) Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought. Language Learning, 63-79. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00462.x
- August 23, 2010
- 10:12 AM
- 707 views
The dog-human connection in evolution
by gregdowney in Neuroanthropology
Evolutionary theorists have long recognized that the domestication of animals represented a major change in human life, providing not just a close-at-hand food source, but also non-human muscle power and a host of other advantages. Penn State anthropologist Prof. Pat Shipman argues that animal domestication is one manifestation of a larger distinctive trait of our [...]... Read more »
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Schleidt, Wolfgang M., & Shalter, Michael D. (2003) Co-evolution of Humans and Canids: An Alternative View of Dog Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus?. Evolution and Cognition, 9(1), 57-72. info:/
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Willerslev, R. (2004) NOT ANIMAL, NOT NOT-ANIMAL: HUNTING, IMITATION AND EMPATHETIC KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE SIBERIAN YUKAGHIRS. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10(3), 629-652. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2004.00205.x
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