Just how connected we primates are

I feel bad just dumping links onto the page, but if I don't do it this way it just isn't going to happen:

Cop still feels guilty about shooting chimp to save woman’s life

Radiolab's tragic story about Lucy, who was raised by humans.

Physical language

From NYT: Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare — both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.

But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.
“It is the first language we learn,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, “our richest means of emotional expression” throughout life.

Read full NYT articles

Abstract thoughts prompt literal physical response

From New York Times:

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.
As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.
“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”
The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.
“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”
Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.
Read full post

Gender in the brain

Scientific American recently published an article suggesting that boy brains and girl brains were not as biologically different as one might think.

Excerpt: "At first glance, studies of the brain seem to offer a way out of this age-old nature/nurture dilemma. Any difference in the structure or activation of male and female brains is indisputably biological. However, the assumption that such differences are also innate or “hardwired” is invalid, given all we’ve learned about the plasticity, or malleability of the brain. Simply put, experiences change our brains....

"...[For example] If the sex difference in the straight gyrus (SG) is present early in life, this strengthens the idea that it is innately programmed. Wood and Nopoulos therefore conducted a second study with colleague Vesna Murko, in which they measured the same frontal lobe areas in children between 7 and 17 years of age. But here the results were most unexpected: they found that the SG is actually larger in boys ! What’s more, the same test of interpersonal awareness showed that skill in this area correlated with smaller SG, not larger, as in adults."

Here is Rafe's response to the article:

This article is terribly written, with ridiculous assumptions.

The first one - "On the other hand, sex differences that grow larger through childhood are likely shaped by social learning, a consequence of the very different lifestyle, culture and training that boys and girls experience in every human society."

This is patently ridiculous. Virtually all sex differences grow larger with age as males and females diverge hormonally. Obviously we wouldn't use culture to explain the accelerating gap in height and mass, or bone structure or secondary sex characteristics. Even gaps in things like aggression and neuroticism increase with age to peak in the early twenties before coming more in line with each other as we age beyond the 20's.

Secondly, "Individuals’ gender traits—their preference for masculine or feminine clothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles—are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than is their biological sex."

This is just wishfull thinking. There is no experimental evidence to support this; essentially we are just talking about two sides of the same coin the masculinity or feminity of the body vs. the mind. Both are largely genetic, we just don't fully understand all the mechanisms.

It pisses me off that they have to frame every story about this like somehow culture is the good guy riding in, that we can't write it off, it might just save us from the big bad genetic bad guys after all. It's editorializing and literally twisting the actually meaning of the study backwards, the important lesson of that study is yet another consistent and persistent cognitive difference between the sexes but they try to make it seem ok by implying it really all might be cultural.

Facial expressions cultural?

Read on:

A study in the journal Current Biology finds that Eastern and Western facial expressions related to emotional states may differ enough for possible nonverbal miscommunication.

Westerners traveling to Asia may expect some language barriers. Perhaps enthusiastic facial expressions will help them be understood. Well, not so fast. According to research published August 13th in the journal Current Biology, Easterners and Westerners might not speak the same facial language.

University of Glasgow researchers enlisted 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians. They had everyone examine pictures of expressive faces that were labeled according to a recognized western system called the Facial Action Coding System. The faces were purported to be happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry or neutral, and the participants categorized them as such. Turns out the East Asians were less likely to categorize the faces by Western standards.

By tracking the subject’s eye movements, researchers concluded that Westerners look at whole faces. But Easterners kept their focus mainly on the eye region. So while Westerners may use their whole faces to show that they’re elated, Easterners may express that feeling mainly around their eyes. Which means that facial expressions are not a universal language. That’s a fact that international travelers are sooner or later forced to face.

—Cynthia Graber, Scientific American Podcast

Musicians hear better

Interesting study I read on Wired about a small, small study showing that musicians can pick out different sounds from a sea of noises, be it voices or flute toots or whatever, better than non-musically trained humans.

What got me really interested was the part about how people with learning disabilities have a hard time picking up voices out of a crowd in general, and what musical training might imply for helping this.

Like I said, small study, but really interesting to see where it might go.

Read on.

Opining on the human brain

I found this really article interesting, http://www.slate.com/id/2223835/?GT1=38001

It's a review about a book suggesting a cognitive theory on how baby's brains process the world.

"Gopnik argues that babies are more conscious than adults. Her conclusion is based on the study of how attention and inhibition—the capacity to block out distractions—evolve over the course of development. Adult attention is willful and endogenous. Although it can be captured by external events—we will turn if we hear a loud noise—we also have control over what to think about and what to attend to. By sheer will, we can choose to focus on our left foot, then think about what we had for breakfast, then focus on ... whatever we want. Adults are also blessed, to varying degrees, with the power to ignore distractions, both external and internal, and to stay focused on a single task.

"This is all harder for babies and young children. They are largely at the mercy of the environment. Simple experiments demonstrate that babies are, for the most part, trapped in the here and now, a conclusion supported by the finding that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and control, the prefrontal cortex, is among the last to develop. Gopnik uses the example of an adult being dumped into the middle of a foreign city, knowing nothing about what's going on, with no goals and plans, constantly turning to see new things, and struggling to make sense of it all. This is what it's like to be a baby—only more so, since even the most stressed adult has countless ways of controlling attention: We can look forward to lunch, imagine how we would describe this trip to friends, and so on. The baby just is. It sounds exhausting, which might explain why infants spend so much of their time sleeping or (like some travelers) fussing.

"For Gopnik, this lack of inhibition and control is a gift. It makes babies and children ideally suited for the task of acquiring information about physical and social reality. When it comes to imagination and learning, their openness to experience makes them "superadults"—not just smart but smarter than we are. She's particularly interested in the power to think about alternate realities, other possible worlds. In several fascinating chapters, she explores how this power is manifested in children's play and in their creation of imaginary companions, plausibly arguing that the capacity to reason about worlds that do not exist is crucial to children's rapid learning about everything from cause-and-effect relationships to human behavior. Gopnik suggests that their neural immaturity gives them greater imaginative powers than adults have: She proclaims, "Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They [children] think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good one and make them real."

It immediately made me jump to the idea that babies are innately ADHD.

I don’t want ADHD people to immediately jump on me and accuse me of calling them immature babies. First, I like the attitude that this brain perspective isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What I AM suggesting, as is Gopnik and LOTS of research on ADD brains, (sources available), is that the ADD brain is more primal, and that by understanding this we non-ADD people can help understand and appreciate ADD thought processes better, and maybe help tap into their gifts (wild and crazy problem-solving, for example).

Gopnik's theory has faults (see page 2 of original article) but I still like the basic concept she’s getting at.

Just an interesting take on how humans develop.

More animal adventures at the zoo

My co-writer has posted another article about our adventures at the zoo at his other blog Natural Athletics.

He focuses mostly on his personal interactions with the animals in the first half of the article (not to downplay those; a couple of moments as he describes them are amazing!), but I think the most important part of his article in the latter third where he discusses the health of animals when interacting with humans. Since my graduate work has been focused on what we can do to help enrich animals lives (including humans), I found this part particularly applicable to my own life and studies. But that's just me.

Speaking of, I should really be writing my thesis right now...which hopefully explains the sporadic posting over the past, well, two years, but hopefully that will soon change. In the meantime...hi ho, hi ho, it's off to word-processing I go...

Gesturing builds brains

If anyone has ever made fun of you for using your hands a lot while you talk, you can just tell them about this new research that shows gesturing builds more connections in brain, making you overall better-wired, i.e. smarter.

From the article:
"The authors [of the research] suggest that students who also gestured attempted to make sense of both the speech and gesture in a way that brought the two meanings together...The study also has more practical implications for teaching, suggesting that teachers can help students learn new concepts by teaching them gestures."

Woot! I’m connected! *waves arms in excitement*

Kindness for the win!

A new study found it's not survival of the fittest that promotes humans to the next generation, but survival of the kindest.

Woot! Kind people rule!

Love really is blind

Turns out that when someone is in love, they tend to subconsciously divert their gaze from other cuties. They truly have eyes only for their true love (yes, I realize that's not how the song goes, but I can't stand bad grammar).

NY mom lets kid ride subway, gets socially whipped

I did not know about this until the article in Newsweek came out, but apparently a woman let her 4th grader ride the subway alone to go home early from a shopping trip. I say good for her. Kids today are too protected, coddled, and not trusted to be responsible human beings. She even created her own blog, Free Range Kids. I hope this trend continues, with books like A Nation of Wimps and most modern psychologists promoting independence in children rather than protecting, it's time that America regained its independent, rugged streak and grew up a little bit!

Guys are clueless, and we're cool with that.

This study done by Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences says that guys are clueless when it comes to women's visual cues when trying to determine whether the woman is being friendly, sexual, sad, or rejecting.
Traditionally the argument has been that guys interpret every cue from women as a sexual advance. The researchers say that guys misinterpreted both friendly and sexual cues, so therefore they're just clueless or less able to communicate all around.
I'm still not convinced. I still think there's a biological advantage for men who misinterpret cues as sexual, whether the cues are or not. Maybe these college age kids weren't as sexually aggressive as others. Maybe men are intimidated by women in this new age of political correctness. I also imagine it has to do with the context. If a woman flashes a man a small at the bar versus the library, what is he going to think?

In another study, researchers found that people who are socially awkward make the best long-term mates (score one for the nerds!).

Power of communication: "In My Language"

This video, which I found on the blog neuroanthropology, was created by a woman who is severely autistic. The first three minutes show the woman interacting with her environment, and then the woman, through typing on the computer, provides a translation of what she describes as her native language. She is severely critical of people who do not understand and appreciate how she views the world and who call her non-communicative.

This video is fascinating to me on so many levels (warning: possible spoilers). Watching her behavior from a psychologists' standpoint is interesting with observing her self-stimulating behavior and how her mind is processing all this. But it also from a visual anthropology perspective. She chose to include these specific examples of her language in the movie, and even though she explicitly says they do not symbolize anything in particular, I wonder why these were chosen. Why did she choose to use a visual format to explain herself? Was this video made originally for Youtube, or some other audience? There is obvious editing, and not so much a storyline but definite parts to the movie. How did she decide on this structure, and who helped her, if anyone? Did anyone else film her (from what I can tell I don't think so). How was she aided in this project? She gives credits at the end of her film, but they're all thanks as opposed to assigned jobs.

From a communication studies and linguistics perspective, she's challenging the definition of language. She argues that she has a discourse (several, actually) with her environment, with the objects in her house; they even get a credit at the end of the film. She also uses the "dominant language," as she describes it, to explain herself and language and berate those who do not appreciate hers for what it is.

She also points out that most of us would probably not look at her on the street, or deliberately look away, which is absolutely correct, which makes a great statement about humans' fear of the different, "disabled," and unknown.
(end spoilers)

So a really interesting video on many levels, and I'm sorry my visual anthropology class is essentially over this quarter because I think it'd be great to show to the class and have them discuss it.

Communities and Brains

This was interesting article about how living in larger households, or in this specific study living as a couple versus living separately after a divorce, consumes less resources overall and is better for the environment. Communes for the environment!

Speaking of groups, I found this an interesting use of group loyalty and playing with America's usual perceptions of two supposedly polar opposite institutions, or just a cheap way for the military to get some publicity: Miss Utah, who is also an active member of the military, will be competing for the title of Miss America. What's interesting is the military is actually paying for her training and travel to the competition.

On to brains.

One study has found that a high fever ( > 100.4) reduces symptoms of autism in children. Apparently the fever connects or stimulates nerve cells in the child's brain. I'm curious why they only studied children (2-18) and not grown-ups. Perhaps because grown-ups don't go to the hospital when they have a high fever.

And finally, 5-year-old chimps have better short term memories than college students, according to one study series done by researchers at Kyoto University. What was amazing to me was that the chimps were memorizing things in less than 3/10 of a second sometimes. That seems a) impossible for a human brain, and b) an adaptation to living in a setting of constant potential predation (baby chimps are tasty!). However, and even the researchers admit this, the real test would be to see how the young chimps fare against human kids.

Who cares

This thought process originally started with me feeling sorry for myself, but then it lead to a really interesting question:

I'm fascinated with the things I've been learning and studying lately about play and all the different tendrils it has in other elements of human life, otherwise I wouldn't be pursuing it. And obviously somebody cared enough to study it and write about it, and somebody at a publishing company thought it was worth publishing. But who really cares about this stuff?

Honestly.

I don't mean that as a sarcastic or rhetoric question. I mean, who else in the world is interested in how humans play with each other and how it effects their lives, how they work, how they love, how they are seen by society and how play lets them try on other roles and grow skills. What about how humans play with themselves (and I don't mean that in a dirty way), and what kind of learning do we do while playing versus while studying or memorizing.

This of course leads to the more general question of what is worth studying, and why? Why are certain seemingly insignificant things given millions of dollars for research while other equally insignificant things aren't? How and why do we place value on knowledge? What is the process? And the difference between what's considered important knowledge by the public versus the government or the military or academics.

All of this is a bit existential, but my point is there is reasoning behind why we value knowledge, and which bits of knowledge, and certain types of knowledge. Even if it doesn't seem like it. And while I'm certainly not going to try and tackle that particular question, and it's important to me to ask about the knowledge I'm going after and what its applications are in the bigger scheme of things, i.e. would other people even care.

networking

Interesting tidbit about how the internet is taking the place of gossiping - or rather forming strong social bonds - around the campfire.

rules and regulations

A psych study found that women actually have dominant roles in marriage relationships when it comes to anything involving the family unit or couple, including vacations: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19713567/
This of course flies in the face of a bunch of other studies, but as the article points out most other studies looked at how much money each couple made and used that as a main variable, whereas in this study they asked each couple who makes the decisions on what subjects and used that as their main criteria. I'd like to see this study repeated several times, but at the same time anecdotally it makes sense, or to quote a very amusing movie: "Yes, the man is the head of the house, but the woman is the neck. And the neck can turn the head anyway it wants." (Bonus points to whoever recognizes that quote).

An interesting commentary on how race is perceived in Brazil and how goverment regulations there might actually be reverting the national mentality back to the way it was in the 1880s: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2124080,00.html