 It's my pleasure. And it's also really exciting to have this self-selected, super interesting bunch of people in the room. So I've actually been uncharacteristically daunted by trying to imagine what all I would tell you guys. Because for many years, I've been doing this for a long time, as Lauren said. And for a long time, what I was talking about was aspirational. It's like, OK, culture and biology have to get together somehow. That's how it has to work. But especially in putting together this talk, I've been really impressed at how far we've come. And so this makes it a particularly exciting moment, I think, for us to engage with the kinds of questions that you're interested in in ways that really capitalize on both theory and method that has come so far. So I'm going to try to weave this through as in the presentation this morning. Also, I have what might look to you like an unduly long list of readings. But these are things for you to refer to. They're online. And I'm going to weave through those particular readings as I go along to use them to illustrate the points that I'm making. So I'm really going to try to combine theory, because I think theory is super important, as it is in conversation with evidence. And so we're going to try to do that as we go along. Oh, all right. If I turn this on, it'll help. OK. Or maybe not. I'll just use zero. So one of the readings is talking about the interface between culture and neuroscience. And it's all too easy in many ways to analyze the limitations of neuroscience. And I think that we're really, those of us in the room, anyway, are keenly aware of those limitations. And so what we're going to be doing, though, over the coming week, is really, in many ways, thinking through some of the insights that we have actually gained through neuroscience, as it is being brought into conversation with other disciplines. So the limitations, in many ways, of what neuroscience is dealing with, I think can actually be an opportunity. So this is one thing that I want to invite you to do, is very often, because I trained mainly in anthropology. It came from basic science, went into anthropology, and learned to critique everything to death. But one of the things that is important is to critique, and yet then say, so now what? What are we going to do next? In the case of neuroscience, then, with any method that we're using, thinking through its limitations, because any method, any paradigm, is going to have a limitation. Thinking through the limitations, and then working with those limitations, and as I'm going to talk about, one way to work with it is in conversation with other ways of looking at the same phenomenon. And this is where the biocultural dynamic comes into play that I'm going to be talking about. And so as I said, it's easy to be critical on the other side. And we are making attempts to bring the technology into the field. This is the latest, and I can't say that it looks any more user-friendly than that fMRI machine. But while what I'll be saying sometimes will appear critical, I also want to say that no matter what we do, we're always just approximating what people, what's actually going on with people. And so I learned this really early on in my career, where I thought I was going to do better and differently. I came loaded with the bio part and loaded with the cultural part and was working on reproductive health. And we did a very, this is the early 90s, we did a really elaborate study on the relationship between breastfeeding practices and inner birth interval, which was a big deal in those days. And this is working in the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. We did elaborate stuff with energetics and looking at breast milk production and double-labeled water and hormones. And we came back after a couple of years. And so this kid had been in the study and we're talking to one of the moms and excitedly telling her about the project that you were in. This is what we learned about. What you guys are doing is spacing birds in this particular way. And I love this comment, which actually is reflected by another anthropologist where she heard very much the same thing. But you know it is right what you say, but it is not the way we think. So in other words, I was presenting one layer of reality, which is this is what's going on with the biology. This is not necessarily coming into consciousness for them. We're worried about bird spacing. They're worried about infant survival. That's what they're worried about is, are their babies OK? Are their babies doing well? And so this, for me, is kind of a touchstone in terms of going back and forth between layers of knowing. That is, what comes to consciousness? What is in people's minds is important, but it's not the only important thing. So how to go back and forth between that. So going back to the FMRI machine, what we're dealing with then is, and there is a limitation here, in that we have a person. So we've got a person who we're looking at their behavior. But the behavior is extremely limited, in the sense that it's mostly, sorry, it's going to be what's in their brain. And so that's one thing that I want to encourage you guys to think about is to actually then continually think about what's going on with the rest of the body. Because what we know now is that embodied cognition is the way things work. And so just looking at what's in the head, an easy fix for contextualizing what's going on with that person is to actually look at the rest of the physiology. And increasingly, people are doing this. But then the other, of course, is to think through context. And there are multiple layers of context that we'll be talking about over the next several days. And so the immediate context, a lot of work has been done to engage people in tasks and interactions in the context of the machine. And so there's a great deal of work around this. But actually, I invite you as, because the readings that I gave you are, I think, fantastic, there's a lot of fabulous work going on. But it's a look at what you are told about the participants and also look at what labels are used to designate the participants. And there is a remarkable paucity of information about the people who are in these machines. And so I want to encourage all of you who are doing work of this kind to really then think about, well, who are these people who are coming into the machine? Likewise, for those of you who are coming from the side of cultural anthropology, this is one of the huge areas where you have a lot to bring. Because we can learn a lot from about context and link that to people who are then going into an MRI scan. So this is an exciting area, I think, where we can start to build those conversations. So that's sort of a lead in. And what I'm going to do today then is take a developmental perspective, because that's what I tend to do. But also, I think that approach allows us to build a kind of live course lifespan approach that would be congenial with the sorts of things that you guys are interested in. But I'm going to build this through the layers, actually, that Lawrence was talking about at the outset to talk about a little bit of evolutionary history and design. Because the focus here is that the biologist side of me finds it incredibly useful to think about, what is this organism designed to do? What are the problems that we're equipped to deal with? Well, what are the ones that we're not equipped to deal with as well? So several of you are working on technologies that are novel. Are these indeed challenging? And what are the particular challenges that they represent that our design is not necessarily equipped to deal with? So we're going to go through a bit of life history theory because I'm going to show you how useful that can be to actually generate hypotheses that you can test. But then also to interpret data that might not make sense otherwise. And then we'll move into through this to really understand how embodiment then works. Why is this such a powerful site for us to understand? The sources are not just human well-being, but also the sources of dysfunction. And then I'm going to end with looking at how all of these come together to help us begin to see how there are some, I won't call them universal processes, but general processes that are actually set up to produce local solutions. Because humans are a weed species, we have ramified throughout our history into all kinds of settings. And so plasticity and adaptability are part of the design. So that's our plan. But then a start from a place that I think will be comfortable for all of us, and that is the recognition that none of us is born alone in the world. Rather, we're all born into a world of culture. And much of the time we're probably going to talk about, hopefully not get down in the weeds about what is culture, but to think about how it works and what constitutes it. So commonly people think about culture as beliefs and values and meanings. But another thing to know, if you don't already, is that because very often when you say the world culture, people get a little glazed over. It becomes like a black box. But actually, culture is, cognitively anyway, is not just a bunch of set, a random bag of beliefs, values, and practices. Rather, they're organized into models and schemas about how the world works and how we then can act appropriately, how we can interpret what's going on with other people. And so there is an organizing structure, a set of logics that shoot through any cultural matrix. And those logics then really shape the behaviors and the daily practices. And the products, the room that we're in, for example, is a cultural production, right? And so the setting that we're operating right now then is a cultural frame. And it's from this logic, and it's really within psychological anthropology, that fairly early on, actually starting with Franz Boas, there was a focus on context, on environment. What is the setting in which individuals are operating? And how does that actually, the setting, then shape the way people function and behave? In the case of human development, then, there emerged the idea that, or the recognition, that this infant, for example, does not randomly grow up in a human setting. Rather, it grows up in a series of very specific settings that are shaped by not just the culture in general that it's in, so those of you who come from Canada, or Turkey, or Brazil, or whatever. You didn't grow up in Canada, or Turkey, or Brazil. You grew up in a series of settings that were highly localized, that represented a slice through that culture and a series of actors who were then shaping the experiences that you had. And so we're going to try to take that set of ideas from psychological anthropology and follow that as it helps us to understand what's going on with neuroscience and even mental health. So the idea here, then, is that every culture, then, has a notion of babies and what they need and human development and what parents should do to foster child development. And so, again, that set of notions about what children need, what parents should do, shape the context in which the kid grows up, and that these are, then, often consciously, too, and in many ways unconsciously, structuring the outcomes from the developmental process. And one of the things that is a sneaky aspect of culture, right, is that all of this gets naturalized. It is often going on outside of consciousness in the sense that, well, of course, we know what to do. Of course, things are the way they are. And we're going to look at that in the context of a couple of interesting examples, trying to. But as I said, I want to back up from that story that I just told you about human development to then think about our evolutionary history and why things might work that way. And biocultural theory has sort of permeated studies of human evolution for a long time without actually being formalized in a very good way. The idea there was that humans started using tools. Well, they became bipedal. They started using tools to shape the brain. It shaped what was possible to do and that there was a ratchet effect between behavior and biology through time. And that's what made us human. So to make it more specific, the idea here then is that you have a biology that gives you a particular set of capacities, right? But that culture is another way of communicating capacities. So this room is full of affordances. All of those devices that you have, the chairs that you're on, the tails you're using, all of these then are affordances that are allowing us and also constraining us to behave in certain ways. And so the convergence of biology and culture is really what's shaping behavior, because if it isn't possible for us to learn these things or if it isn't possible to enact certain forms of knowledge, then this dynamic wouldn't work. And so the biology and the culture have to work together to then allow us to be effective in the world and in this model anyway, to meet selection pressures, right? To flourish and survive and reproduce in the world, which in other words is enhancing fitness and is going to drive evolution in terms of shaping the favoring the genetics that allow us to engage in this kind of dynamic. The thing here, though, is that very often the focus has been on genotype. And what I'm going to be arguing using the evidence as we go along, and for many of you, maybe a foregone conclusion, but sometimes constructing the narrative is really important, as Lawrence was saying. The focus has been on genotype, and that's the definition of evolution. Well, what we're undergoing now is a real change in our understanding of evolutionary process. And this is based on an old dynamic that we know from way back, which is that actually natural selection operates on the phenotype. It doesn't operate on the genotype. And so the capacity to adapt, in other words, to meet specific environmental demands, the capacity for adaptability is actually selected for. So what the genotype is doing, in many cases, is on the one side ensuring that the things that shouldn't change, like you should get one head and two hands and two feet, right? So the basic plan needs to come through. But in many respects, the environment is going to tell the genes what it needs to know in order for you to function appropriately. And so now we're all excited about a gene environment interaction, but basically that's where it's at in many respects, right? Especially if we're trying to understand humans. So the reason I'm showing you this, don't worry. We're not going to go through all those million years. But actually, there has been a huge focus on the brain in understanding human evolution. And that, in some ways, has eclipsed understanding other things. But I want to point out to you here is that neat model that I was telling you about, where we become bipedal and we start using tools and then we start foraging in a different way. And that makes us smarter and smarter. It turns out not to be the case that bipedalism actually happened way before tools happened and then tools happened. And we were still, and humans expanded all over the globe and they started to get bigger. Still, the brain isn't getting all that much bigger. And it was really, it appears to be in a fairly late phase, well, late in the last 800,000 million years, that this brain expansion happened. And this appears to be in the context, then, of a great deal of cultural elaboration that we're still not entirely understanding. But in other words, our brains, this is kind of sending us a big signal that there is a ratcheting effect that it appears to be cultural and we're still not clear exactly what goes in there. Is it language? It looks like that might be part of it, but it may have to do with social dynamics, the use of fire, and so forth. But so the focus on the brain has left out some other things and that I wanted to draw your attention to here, because when we were talking about that baby, the baby is in the social context, right? And the social context is parents and caregivers. And actually, as it turns out, it takes three generations. The hunter-gatherer folks have figured out finally that human reproduction doesn't add up calorically. It takes three generations to do reproduction. And so a big shift across human evolution was the expansion of longevity, which actually occurred fairly late. And what this meant, then, is that you have a reservoir of adults who are available for taking care of kids and also doing all that culture stuff, right? So big shift here in terms of the demographics. And that intersected with an underlying biology where the human brain, yes, is unusually large, but it also has a very distinctive postnatal trajectory. And the one that folks were impressed with for quite a while was that incredibly steep trajectory in the first two to five years. And this is where the whole global focus on the first 1,000 days and the importance of the quality of environments and care and health for little kids comes from because things that affect brain development here are really going to have long-term effects. What I would like to point out to you, though, we're not going to have time to go into that, is that we're now into talking about the second decade. It isn't just the first 1,000 days. Development doesn't stop then. But actually, there's some really, so here's the difference between quantity and quality. That is, there's a bunch of wiring stuff that goes on in puberty in the second decade. That turns out to be really important for a whole lot of things. And by the way, for those of you interested in global mental health, it's over this period that the big psycho-behavioral challenges appear. And they're not all just the result of early experience. So what we essentially have, then, is an organism that is context-expective. I like that phrase. Because if you think of the developing human and actually just humans as context-expectant, this helps us to appreciate the openness and, indeed, the dependency that humans have, the interdependency on the context. Just even if there's something as basic as wiring our brains. We need that input and throughput, for example, in the visual system to wire it up. I'm using the brain here because we're doing neuroscience. I'll talk a bit more later on about the immune system, which turns out to be another really cool system. I invite you to pay attention to that system as you go along in your studies. Because it is another major communication system. And it runs all over the body, does a lot of stuff with the nervous system. And so it's another one of those systems that is blatantly context-expectant. The immune system learns to be competent through exposure. So I'm saying context-expectant. And the model that I showed you before was kind of like culture, and then things happen. And this isn't the only model. But I wanted to not walk you through it necessarily, but to give you a sense that one can operationalize the things that I'm talking about and try to lay out then, all right, what do I think is going on? So I would say, honestly, one of my biggest problems with, well, we're talking about neuroscience. So many imaging studies is that very often the model is so tiny, it's not very interesting, right? I mean, in terms of like, what are we trying to understand about human cognition? Now, I know you've got to get it down to the point of, what do I expect to see in the scanner? But actually, having a larger model about what you think is going on and being very planful about what do I think, for example, if I'm looking at a child trauma, for example, where did that trauma come from? So what's going on in terms of the powerful moderators? So parent characteristics, family relationships, I'm going to show you some stuff about that. Household contextual things. So it's like, OK, I'll hear the things I can look at or not. And then also, what's going on with the kid? And again, we have some really nice gene environment stuff that we already see differential vulnerability. And because then, if I'm going to be looking at something as specific as what's going on in the brain, it's really going to help a lot if I have a better sense of what it is I'm really testing and what that information is going to tell me about how humans function. And I would suggest that that's going to help us a lot in terms of the translational challenge of, how do we understand how some of the imaging stuff relates to, say, a mental health problem? So I'm going to one of the readings, not going to go through the details of the study, but here I wanted to touch briefly on the title of this workshop. It's about social and cultural neuroscience. And not to get down to the weeds about what's the difference between social and cultural. But actually, I do, in my own mind, I don't know about you, make a distinction. And I think it's easy to be sloppy about that distinction. And however you want to draw the lines, I think it's important to think about this. This is a study about an imaging study done by a social neuroscience anthropologist in my department, Jim Rilling. And it has some really nice combination of methods. So one is the EAR, the electronically activated recording, so that you have snippets of naturalistic sound throughout the day. And you can analyze those sounds for all kinds of things. In this case, we're looking at child directed speech from the father and the content of that speech. But then also, they're using stimuli, putting these fathers in the scanner, and presenting this stimuli that on one side are their own children, and then also not their children. And looking at brain responses to those child images. And what he found was that, in this particular case, the dads are relating to their daughters. There's more active engagement. They're singing more of them. There's more analytic language. And they have more emotion talk to their daughters. Whereas boys, there's more rough and tumble play. There's a little more achievement language, making your goals. And they're responding to the neutral faces of boys. And they're responding more to the happy faces of girls. So this, to my mind, is about social behavior. It's telling us about social stuff. And I'm not criticizing this study. But what it does leave latent is the question of culture. What is the model about child development? What is the model of gender differences? And is that latent? Is it conscious? And so very often, when we say we're looking at culture, we're actually looking at social behavior. And we still haven't asked the question, how does that get back to the cultural logics that lie behind this? And even more so, for a number of you, you're interested in the structural pieces. Why was this dad able to relate to the child as much or in the way that he did? And it begs the question of that. But that's fine. We've got to start somewhere. That's a cool study. OK, so I said at the outset that I really find thinking about design to be very valuable. And for that, actually, when people think about evolution, there's a whole line of theory and evidence that is often overlooked. And this is life history, which is, if you look at these creatures, it's actually a really interesting question. What makes a mosquito a mosquito or an elephant an elephant? I mean, this is a huge deal, right? What evolutionary histories led to this? Why do we have this? And basically, what life history theory says is that, well, each of these organisms has a set of ways to be in the world that is capitalizing on a particular niche. So a mosquito has a particular niche. Elephants have a particular niche. And what they're essentially doing is using resources through time in a very particular way. So it's a mosquito or butterfly uses a specific set of resources within an environment. And it's pacing the use of those resources through time to build a life, basically. And in life history theory, the life is, this is an evolutionary guide, right? That you've got to grow. You've got to get to a certain size. You're going to reproduce. But you've got to stay alive. That's maintenance. And I think this is really important and useful because it also helps us to really get up and be serious about constraints, because many of us are interested in things like poverty and inequality and the things that constrain people. And a lot of this is the lack of resources or the skewed nature of resources that are forcing certain kinds of choices on individuals. The focus, very often when people think of, especially if it's in behavioral ecology, but outside of evolutionary stuff, is to think in terms of over talking about material resources. But for those of us, especially you here in the room, the big one is information. Information is a huge resource. And our central nervous system is just one of many big systems that we use to collect information about the environment. And again, culture then is another big information capturing distribution stream. And very often then when people are disenfranchised, it isn't just material resources. It's social resources. It's very often information, ways to know how to function. OK. So this stream of research has been out there for the last 40, 50 years. And what's interesting is that independent of this developmental psychology came along and started to see phenomena that made the life history people very, including me, very happy. And so the biological embedding phenomenon was made, actually Gilbert Gottlieb, if you don't know his work, fantastic stuff, really about how information gets transmitted in all kinds of ways. He studied ducks and showed that learning to be a competent baby duck and attach, whether you believe in that or not, but be a competent baby duck starts embryonically in the shell. And in the normal world, a baby duck will have a quacking ducky mom who's sitting and dad who's going to be sitting on it. And in other words, that the biology was context-dependent, really great theoretical and empirical work that he did. And Michael came along and is still doing phenomenal work on first rodent models and now looking at humans. A whole panoply of developmental psychologists also got into looking at how early experiences then shape the functioning, the psychological development, and then increasingly mental health and physical development, physical health. And again, this idea of a biologically embedding of experience. And then going even further back to realize that these things start in utero. So godly had done that with ducks a while ago, but then it took a little while and folks started to realize, right, that there's information transmission about the harshness or the goodness of the world that is transmitted during gestation. And now, of course, people are working on intergenerational pathways of transmission. That's the whole developmental origins of health and disease. So hopefully now then you're beginning to get a sense, though, of why from a perspective of life history theory, this makes a whole lot of sense, right? Because what we're seeing is examples of how organisms have built in ways to channel development, using information about the environments in which they are currently functioning and are likely to function in the future. Because mom is representing or the context are representing the environments in which you're likely to be having to survive in the future. So a lot of this was initially oriented to then sort of cognitive, psychosocial, stress-type experiences, stress and trauma was a big focus. But I wanted to give you this example because it was coming out of my work of looking at the impact of low birth weight on physical health and survival. And so I was a collaborator in the Great Smoky Mountains study with Jane Castello and Adrian Nangold for this is a big longitudinal study. And so just I told Jane, I want you to go look at the effects of low birth weight on risk for depression. Because this was, among many other things, this study was oriented to try to explain the dramatic increases in rates of depression, specifically among girls, not so much among boys, that occurs in the second decade. And to my surprise, although that's sometimes theory actually is true, we did find increases in depression, but it was really the low birth weight girls who were carrying all of the effect. There were not so many differences between normal birth weight girls and either low birth weight or normal birth weight boys. It was really those girls who were low birth weight. And you go, OK, fine. But here's the cool part. There was actually a sensitization effect. And this is going to be driving the sort of things that I'm going to be talking about now, which is that it isn't about that those early experiences set you open, that's how you're going to respond in future. What you do is, in many of these systems, you potentiate a differential response under certain conditions. And so that's what we saw here, which is that surprise, we know this, that when bad things happen in your life, that's the number one predictor of risk for depression, the most proximal predictor. And indeed, we had really intensive information about exposures to all kinds of stressors and risk factors. And as those risk factors went up, so does the prevalence of depression in girls. But what essentially happens if you're a low birth weight girl is that there's a sensitization effect. You shift the curve of response to the left. In other words, it takes a lower threshold of bad things happening in your life to become depressed in this context. So here we have an example. So there's a site with Meanie and other folks, Gunner and so forth. There are psychological cues. There are social cues that are telling us what's going on. But also, the body is doing a readout. So low birth weight is also about information, resources, what's going to be available. And so I'm going to be tracing these kinds of interactive effects now through. In fact, I'm going to set this up, and then we're going to take a break from 10.30 to 11. So I'll just set this up to get it started on interaction, and then we'll come back in half an hour. And so I want you to, over the break, hopefully, just chat and relax. But also, think about how interesting this is. So this is early work by Caspi. Big battles we know about MAOA and any of these allele-like variations and what they really do and mean. But what we're looking at here is, this is their Dunedin study, right? And so they're looking at child maltreatment in that big longitudinal birth cohort that they have. And none likely, but not necessarily reported, and then reported and severe. And then they have a variety of measures of antisocial behavior. And we can already say, well, there's some culture stuff going on here. What's antisocial? How does that get labeled? Maybe it's likely a good thing to do under certain circumstances. But anyway, begging that question, they're getting rated for levels of antisocial behavior by childhood maltreatment. The dominant allele gives you a high MAOA activity, high being relative to the subdominant allele. And it shows you that indeed, as childhood maltreatment goes up, yes, surprise, you get an effect on antisocial behavior. But in the subdominant, less frequent allele, which gives you lower MAOA activity, these individuals are more sensitive to the environment. That is, they're showing much higher rates of antisocial behavior than are these individuals who have the dominant allele. And so this is the thing we focus on, right? I do too. We study risk, right? And I'm gonna end, if we get that far this morning, talking about resilience too, because look at the other end of the curve. And Steve Soomi had had some really interesting stuff on his monkeys earlier on, showing a similar thing that these alleles very commonly are associated with a benefit under good conditions and a cost under crummy conditions. And so there is a bigger variation across a quality of environment for this less frequent allele. So if times are good, you either no effect, you don't pay, or very often you're due better, and then there was a cost under those other conditions. And this led Tom Boyce, who's another, if you don't know his work already, very nice work over decades, looking at these similar dynamics in kids, mainly focusing on physical health. But he came up with the idea of dandelions, that is these guys are designed to be robust, right? To do okay, even when things are pretty crappy, or at least you notice that it's not so bad. Whereas these, they called the orchids, so the sort of orchid and dandelion approach, which is that orchids are fabulous, we love them, they're great, but they do best under certain conditions, right? So I'm gonna leave you with a break with this thought, which is this allele variation is all over the place, right? So all those transporters and receptors and enzymes that regulate neurotransmitter turnover and production show variation, and humans have pretty high levels of variation as well. So we're gonna be following some of that variation we'll go into the next session. So that gives us a half hour break, and... 25, 25 minute break, or do you mind for a second? Okay, sorry. 25 minute break, and I'll take like five minutes at the beginning for comments or questions, so be ready with that if you want. Thanks. So you wanna keep going? I have a question. Okay, all right. Yeah, so you said in the beginning that you wanted to use the limitations of neuroscience instead of just criticizing them using them to kind of reach the field. So could you give me an example of how we could do that or just a practical example of instead of only criticizing just using limitations to go further, I guess? Yeah, well, one of the things I'll probably show you an example later on, but one of the things is to really operationalize the variables so very often, so you could say, for example, if you're interested in ethnicity, right? And in fact, I think I'll get to that right at the end is whether the default mode network looks different if you are in a individualist versus an inter... What do you call it again? Collectivist versus individualist. Is your insula gonna react differently if you have a collective view versus if you have an individual view? So you could operationalize that sounds really neat. We know the DS of what it looks like. DMN, right? We know what it looks like, but then you have to say, wait, ethnicity? So actually, what is collectivist? What would be a representative of that? What would... Who am I gonna put in the scanner? And what am I gonna know about that person that is really going to get me to where I wanna go? And that is gonna make me think much more deeply and Chinova's been doing this for years and lots of other people as well to sort of really think about what am I talking about when I'm talking about that mode of relating to the world. And so that's what I meant is, and then it would get us, and there are several of you in the room who would be able to contribute to really thinking carefully about self and the construction of self and how we think that might get represented. And then again, what do I wanna know about the people that I'm putting in the scanner? Because actually it maybe won't be ethnicity ultimately. It might be some things about the construction of self that you really wanna be looking at and you wanna pick people along some axis like that. Does that make some sense? Yeah, I guess I'm still struggling with the idea of like, okay, so you have these people in the scanner and you wanna compare groups but it feels like no matter how you wanna categorize it's never gonna be okay because every person is so different in his own way. So whether you look at culture or ethnicity or other factors, it's still gonna be very challenging to compare these groups, especially if you consider the differences. But I think it's also, I need a little bit more time to get around how to like, practically dance to it. Yeah, because then like very often what we're interested in, okay, I came from basic science, went into anthropology and learned about its racist roots too late. I mean, I arrived in graduate school and oh my God, I can't believe it. And so I confronted my advisor and it was sort of like, ah, I think I'm in the wrong place. This is like oh, and he said no, no, no. We're not, we got over just studying difference. It's the differences that make a difference that we're interested in and I thought oh, okay, that's fine, I can get along with that. Well, it's like wait a minute, that immediately gets you into cultural stuff, right? Because why does stuff make a difference? It makes a difference in a context. So I think that can be an important thing is to really, especially for many of you, we're interested in the bottom line. What is people's quality of life? How can they accomplish the things that they need and want to accomplish and feel reasonably comfortable? And so some of the differences are gonna wash out. I mean, human variation is all over the place and what in it is meaningful? And I'm not sure that consoles you a whole lot because then how do you decide which are the differences? But that's often what we're looking at here is, I find anyway is that like, okay, another good example, back in the day there were good genes and bad genes. There really were and there are still a few of those but there are not so many around because if that gene is so bad then mostly gets eliminated in the process of evolution. So what we used to think of as bad genes and we're looking for candidate genes for schizophrenia till we're blue in the face, it's that those genes are doing a whole lot of other things and so we really have changed that would be another example of how digging into what looks like very mechanistic stuff gets us to a larger insight about how things work. Yeah, Sam, you have a comment or question? No, thanks. I really wish it was time to comment on every single point you raised. I just, I have a comment and a question about the last couple of slides on the questions of finding the relevant factors that modulate environmental sensitivity. I guess as someone who also trains an anthropologist I'm really interested in cultural and generational differences in that as well and sometimes I wonder if the valence of an event can ever be intrinsically good or bad or stressful outside of the normative cultural context that assigns it as such or in other words say if we expect to be stopped by our parents to be a good thing, we need to do things like it's a bad thing. So I really wonder if you can talk about this in any culture-free way. That's a really big question. The more specific question that I had is again in the context of what seems to me like the current public culture in which we talk a lot about trauma, we talk a lot about adversity, we talk a lot about risk factors and I wonder how applicable that is university to the human experience and I wonder if you know of any study where too little adversity also leads to increased environmental sensitivity in a way that would be relatively culturally universal. Asma. Penalogy. Yeah, right. I mean, those are the obvious ones and I guess you're thinking about the mental health equivalent of that and I think that's why a lot of us are, the reason that immune system came immediately to mind I'll get around to it at the end is that it's so tightly linked to mental health stuff. So what's going on with depression today? And I'm sort of reminded this is a bit but for those of you who are into contemplative studies, there was a Rinpoche who came over from Kathmandu and he was giving a teaching and afterward he said, oh you guys, your minds are like Cadillacs and I tried to understand what he meant by that is like well we all, good nutrition, good health, we've got these buzzing brains and that really made me think about well, if we evolved and actually nutrition wasn't always that wonderful and health wasn't always that wonderful, is our brains a bit like that immune system that's all wrapped up and looking for trouble? I don't know. Are we turning into orchids? There are cohort studies of the cohort of people that went through the Great Depression, actually had less depression as they aged than younger people, so it's not individuals and it's not exactly neuroscience but there is some suggestion of data in that cohort data of people that went through the Great Depression. Yeah and actually I'm forgetting the name, there was an economist who came out with a paper was like three or four years ago tracking, I forget how he tracked health indicators but actually in the US in the 20th century and when the economy was doing well people's health got worse and vice versa because they were able to engage in all kinds of health risky behaviors, alcohol smoking, driving more cars, et cetera. So I'm not sure that's getting exactly to your question but I think this is a good thing to have out on the table now. Years ago on Saturday, a lot of you stressed, you know there was an optimal level of stress for development, maybe there is a kind of over-cushioning kind of a hyper-concern that gets in the way of the adaptive flexibility. Yeah I mean at least in the US the psychologists are actually trying to have that conversation out there with hyper-protective parents who think that an ideal parent is about the child never experiencing adversity and so you get these psychologists who are quietly trying to say that maybe a little challenge would be an experience of failure, yeah. This is also an interesting question for critical neuroscience because as a culture we have particular ideas about what constitutes depression and vulnerability and then we have, we read of the studies that say low birth weight is linked to increase with depression, you know the potential nocebo effects of reading these studies concerned greatly because of the high epistemic authority of these medical studies. Yeah, yeah and we tried to control for everything but I still have everything being you know family environment, maternal everything, parent everything but you know the environment that produces that low birth weight child persists into the reality that also produces results in the depressed girl so. My concern was for how the cultural model of the idea that oh if I was a low birth weight girl therefore I might be a high risk for depression and that belief itself might be a risk factor for depression. Yeah, yeah well there are various layers of, right exactly, yeah, yes. Also relates to that, so I'm interested in like how like the public interpretation of these scientific findings so like as people in academia like were constantly surrounded by these ideas but like years before I started university like if someone told me about this I would have no idea what they were saying like I was still thinking of science as this like authority of knowledge, right? Providing us with universal truths. So I think like I know there's probably no one answer to this question or like it's gonna be hard to tackle this question but like how can like people within this field like neuroscience or science in general kind of like tell the public and make it known to the public that all this is situated in that like all this is very context dependent because as you were saying before like just the fact that you say like low birth weight and girls needs to higher depression like it does have an influence on the person that's all, right? Like just that knowledge, so. Yeah, I mean I think this is, we all deal with this all the time, just one comment to make is that humans discovered zero few thousand years ago. Probability, 19th century. So probability is not something that humans do well with but we've forgotten about that, right? And we think that a probabilistic space is like oh that's just how one, no. And so you're putting your finger on a very important social and cultural dynamic because a certain model of knowledge which is as you said the truth is popularly inscribed in various ways and reinforced by the way some scientists behave and others like to use science that's the other, the social use of science and then how that expectation if it's not met leads to the belief in there is no, every truth is constructed. It's all up for grabs, right? So that's, I'm happy to tell you I don't have a solution to that. Right, but it's good to get that on that table. Well and we have some interesting historians here where I'll be curious over the time whether have we learned anything from history? Is there, how might that speak to your question? I think you, and then we'll. Just a small comment or question about a wealthy society, something that's present in wealthy societies is this constant reward. And so when we constantly reward people and our brains then the brain areas involved in the reward are the same parts of the brain involved in addiction and it's known that people who are soliciting these parts of the brain are more prone to depression. And so there's maybe a fine line that is not that clear between rewarding a child to make them happy and rewarding a child in a way that their addiction system will get triggered. Right. This is talked about in the economics lawyer term in terms of the hedonic treadmill. It's very hard something that's part of how our society and how our economy works. Right. And so the first is intrinsic motivations which can be for many other reasons. The interest one has in something like the feeling of whatever connection of the people that doesn't have to function in a certain way. Anyway. Yeah, addiction to constant stimulation too. So I'm just gonna turn right around and feed your addiction a little more. And thank you for the comments. So we're gonna talk again about how these sort of dynamics play out and playing with some of these background contextual factors. And I'm just reminding you of some of the structural components because again, what I'm gonna be moving into now is not just social dynamics but also structural factors that are playing into the kind of person environment and interactions that I was just talking about. And so pointing to then that very much of the time when we're talking about apparently I, if I use, sorry, if I use this pointer, it's nice for the recording. I'm not so sure that it's nice for my mouth hand coordination but anyway. So I think I can't. We're used to really thinking of social dynamics down at this level and then anthropologists may push up to this level. Economists and some anthropologists and sociologists also like to talk about structural factors. And one of the issues is that very often we've got one element or the other or a few elements but it's very difficult to put them all together. And so I wanted to give you some examples from the reading that I shared with you to sort of start walking through some of that. So, and I think this is why the term embodiment has gotten so much currency. Hopefully by now you have a background that gives you a sense of why I think embodiment happens, right? That the organism is designed that this is going to happen and also the context in which we're operating work with that premise of culture gets under the skin. And so this is an example of what I was telling you about earlier which is that culture is not just a grab bag of stuff rather there are identifiable models or ideas about all kinds of domains so that organize the field of knowledge and of action. And so similarly then if it's about caregivers then it's gonna be their sense of how you should treat their infant with respect to these remote goals who humans are often thinking about as Lawrence said things that are happening or may never happen but remotely into the future. And that when we talk about development we're also then often making the child a passive recipient of this. And so I have never done it. I think actually no one else has to actually ask children about their models about development. What do they think children need and how do they develop it? Anyway, we do have studies that ask adolescents about that and this is a really nice study that was done by Elizabeth Sweet and colleagues where she was working with adolescents in Chicago and talking with them about social status. One of the most important things for adolescents especially in the setting where we're operating here where you've got everybody in school same age mixed gender, peer situations that social status becomes an enormous preoccupation. And so what she did was ask them about what is required for social status. How do you get social status? How do you know who has higher or lower social status? And they were able to come up, kids had a very clear model of what was required and we've seen this repeatedly as well in similar work that it's a combination of material things and social things. So the social things were like hanging out with friends at the right kind of restaurant, being on the track team. Material stuff was about having the right phone, having the right shoes and actually right down to the not just cool shoes but they had to be K Swiss shoes. And so the specificity of this model was so great that one could almost think of this as cultural coercion in the sense that it was a very small eye of the needle of what would constitute status among these kids. And so I'm gonna show you then a method that some number of you may be familiar with but some of you may not but actually has proven to be very useful if you're trying to sort of unpack the culture box and particularly get at the cultural models that I was telling you about. And this was developed by Bill Dressler, it's called cultural consensus. And what we're looking for here, it doesn't mean necessarily that culture is coherent because it's not entirely. Domains often don't match up. But when we're looking at a certain field of action if that field of belief is in forming action, we ideally should be able to disembed a shared sense of this is how things work, this is what one should do. And the reason the logic behind this is that it's a very cognitive view but it's that we need to know what others are gonna think and do so that we can act accordingly. So I wanna emphasize this because we could define culture in a lot of ways and we will over the week. But in this view, it's a very cognitive view. It's about what people hold in mind. Doesn't mean they're always conscious about it but it's what informs how they think about things. And is based on this idea of schemas and models. As pretty straightforward and actually pretty efficient. And it's a great way to just get out there and talk to people because the first thing you do is you do one-on-one interviews. You talk with a range of people who try to get at themes in a domain. So in this case, you'll be talking about, well, I've heard that social status is a big deal here. What does that really mean? We've often found too that focus groups can be a way to sort of ratchet up conversations and a combination none of focus groups and individual interviews can be a way to go. And you do this iteratively until you come to saturation and you begin to have a sense of oh, it looks like either like this is multiple domains or there's this going on and these are the kinds of dynamics that are in play. These are the words, terms, logics that are involved and you put together a survey. To get at that domain. And you give it to a community sample so it should be drawn from the same community where you'd be wanting to do your work but not the folks you're gonna have in your study. And you see if it hangs together. You see if there is consensus in the sense of basically just a factor, a fancy factor analysis where there are things in that domain hang together and you sort stuff out if it's irrelevant and you may have to do this a couple of times to sort of really see whether you get to mapping a domain. And so once you achieve, once you get to a point where yeah, I think I really got a sense of social status in this case, huge sample convergence on the set of things that goes in the status in this case. You then turn around and you give this interview so it's a survey again, to your target sample. And now what you're doing is you have an answer key which comes from your community sample, right? So this is what the community out there is saying in this case, what's involved in getting social status. And you ask in this case kids, do you have case with shoes? Do you have this so-and-so cell phone? You look for consonants. So to what extent is that individual achieving, achieving whatever, having the ingredients for cultural compliance, as we could call that, fitting in to the cultural model. And so consonants then again means, this is pretty interesting, right? Because it says that, yes, culture is shared. We might have a sense of what's involved, but there is not a level playing field necessarily and the extent to which people can live out that cultural model or schema. And consonants, as Bill Dressler has shown through years of work, is actually a potent driver of mental and physical health. And so in this particular, and I'll show you one of his studies in a moment, but this is sweet then, is drawing on this background to look at kids who have high status consonants, okay? So these are the kids where we would say they're doing what the local culture says they should be doing in order to achieve high status. And it's playing this off against background information about parent income and education and occupation. So they've got a combined measure of SES and they've split the sample by lower or higher SES and we're looking at blood pressure, which in this series of work Dressler started, it's been a powerful indicator of these dynamics. And what you're seeing here, if we're just looking at, we'll start with the high SES kids, okay? So if you've got resources, then if you are able to achieve, if you perform the cultural model, then your diastolic and systolic blood pressure is much lower than if you are not able to achieve for whatever reason, if you're not performing the cultural model, you may resist it for whatever reason. And you may think that this difference is not very much, but actually at that, this level of difference has actually been at that age, so this is 16, 17, 18, has been shown to predict to adult cardiovascular issues. So these are actual differences that make a difference. But then now we get to the lower SES kids, that is the kids who don't have the resources. There are kids who don't have the resources, but yeah, they achieve that. They get the shoes and they do the track team and all the rest and they do it, but they pay for it and blood pressure. And this literature coincides with a long literature in the U.S. that's quite separate on John Henryism. But then also, if the kids who have low resources and have low consonants then actually in terms of physics, maybe not so much socially, but actually physically are doing somewhat better. Okay, so we're seeing these sorts of, now we're not talking about genetics at all, right? In this case, we're really talking about family conditions, so it's resources in the family, external conditions in terms of a shared model of what's required for social competence, and then the interactive effect on blood pressure in these kids. So that's in kids, but this goes on throughout life, right? And so often, we're looking at adults and we're looking at the cumulative effects of this structural stuff, cultural stuff going on. And so this is another paper that you can refer to that we've logged in, a really nice piece by Lance Gravely, where you work in Puerto Rico where there is a very clear cultural model, a lot of ethnic diversity, a lot of heritage both from Europe and from Africa, very little, none, indigenous at this point, and there is a, he could extract a clear cultural model based on skin color, face, hair, used a series of 72 photos. So again, I posted those papers so that you could kind of go in later on and sort of look at how people did this stuff, so it would give you a sense of some of the different approaches that people can use. And so using these pictures, he elicited in a similar way with the cultural consensus. I just told you about that there are a set of categories of Blanco, Trigueño, and Negro that are applied to ethnic categories within Puerto Rican society. And what's pretty interesting is he partnered with geneticists to get at African ancestry, you can imagine there are a lot of caveats around that, you can read that section in the paper. But what you see is that yeah, there are distinct genetic profiles in each of these groups, but enormous amount of overlap. And so then we can talk about what kind of, what, so here would be an example of what you were just asking me about, right? You use this to then go back in and dig in on how did that person wind up being Trigueño? What was the key factor? Or what was the key factor here or here? You could work across a range of variation to really try to dig into what construct color. Because color is an important cultural category. And we might be using that category if we were doing research of some kind, right? And what he also did was then go in and take a sample, they self-assigned by group, and but then they also were externally assigned. And what I'm showing you here is the external assignments by two raiders who were using this system. And I'm mapping for you that Trigueño and Blanco sort of behavior is similarly. Same sort of model. So you could see Swede actually modeled her study and the analysis on this earlier gravelly piece. And if, again, we look at what are viewed as higher status individuals, Trigueño and Blanco, that if, so this is that adult individual's SES, right? Again, a composite category. So you have lower blood pressure, both systolic and diastolic. If you are higher status and you perform higher status in the sense of you have higher SES. If you can't, that's where blood pressure is higher. And the reverse is true. The same sort of pattern we saw in the other study where higher status, high SES, negative individuals were paying for that more in terms of blood pressure. And again, we could get under that to sort of say, well, all right. How do these categories then operate to construct those differences in this, in these biological profiles? No. Okay. And then here is a really recent paper by Dressler. If you wanna track the stuff, he's been working over about 30 years and has linked both physical and in this case, we're looking at the mental health side of things because finding that individuals who know the cultural model, they know what's out there and what's desired but are not able to perform that are much more vulnerable to depression. And so here, recent work in his sample in Brazil. So this is Middle's medium-sized town slash city. And their model up here, let's see if this, it's only working fitfully. Their model is that a genotype in this case then is gonna be sort of a mediator. That is that the genotype of the individual is really going to, in some ways I would say moderate, but anyway, change the relationship between childhood adversity and your performance as an adult. Because socioeconomic status, many of you already studied this, affects the risk for childhood adversity. Childhood adversity has been linked to risk for depression and we'll talk more about the social behavioral effects. But he's focused on one of the core domains in social life for Brazilians, which is family life. So one of the core achievements through the life course is around family, around your relationships with family. This beats professional or even economic achievements but having and building and cultivating family relationships is core. He's found this through over 20 years of research. And so what they're looking at here is the, it's a serotonin, not the transporter, yeah, serotonin receptor variation. And these are the, this is the dominant and the heterozygous individuals. And then these are the subdominant alleles. And what he finds is that under conditions in lower income neighborhoods, so where stress is higher, so it emerges only in lower income neighborhoods. And then we could ask, why are, how did people wind up in those neighborhoods? But individuals who had experienced high childhood adversity and have this recessive genotype are more likely to be depressed. And we see the same sort of crossover effect. Those who have the dominant allele are, it actually doesn't, that level of childhood adversity in this context does not have the same sort of effect. And what he, in their mediation analysis found was that this effect is because seems to be linked to their ability to achieve consonance in family life, in meeting the cultural expectations for having and cultivating a family. And if you were, had experienced low levels of childhood adversity and you have this genotype, you're actually, is this a significant difference? You can see the low variance. You were more likely to be able to achieve consonance in the supervalued domain. But if you have high levels, then you're much less likely to be able to do so. So you see that for those of you who are interested in the mental health then, that there's a context effect that's concurrent, but that background structural effect having to do with one exposure to adversity and two, the cultural model. And so what's really cool in this paper is saying, okay, we found at least three layers of context. And if you were thinking about the, if you think about the models I was showing you earlier, so one, there are socioeconomic status, so culture is constructing them. Another is this cultural consonance, the importance of family, family life. And so what is going to constitute consonance? And then lastly, it's the family life itself and that includes the individuals in it. Okay, so the net effect here, and I think that's why some of us are not surprised that we're finding a lot of these dynamics, given the background that I told you, is because of, again, the person environment interaction that we're designed to engage in. And so we're finding that genetic variability is widespread, as I told you earlier. And what's going to be interesting then is also to then, not just to think about, oh, this gene does this under those circumstances, but there's very little actually looking at the frequency of these genes and actually the extent of the variability and then actually even compositional effects. So in terms of niche partitioning, could it be that you want an ideal mix of people with different genetic compliments to actually fill all the social niches that we've got? And so if we're thinking about risk then, these interactive effects are something that we're going to have to expect. And if we're really going to understand them, hopefully this gives you some ideas. All right, so segueing over to another way to another way in which culture operates and we get the sort of biocultural dynamics. I've already alluded to the developmental trajectory, just even if we look at the brain. And society's then consciously or unconsciously, and I'll show you some conscious examples, are taking advantage of these trajectories. And again, that can be really interesting in terms for some of us, in terms of how does a society construct the ecologies through which individuals move or how they allocate those ecologies. So some people get into these spaces and other people get into those spaces and how does that actually affect outcomes? And so we're all familiar with this, which is this huge dominant cultural model that we have, that that developing brain is what education is for, right? And so we fill that brain with learning. And I'm a project of education. I professionally do formal education. Some people get a little outraged when I point this out that formal education is really weird. In the history of humanity, not. So putting a whole bunch of kids in the room and having butts on seats and you have to state regulate for hours at a time is just not the way things have been. And this has been globally exported, right? As a cultural practice without a whole lot of reflection of what is it we're actually doing here and as we export the model, what were some of the hidden assumptions behind formal education in the Western cultural context that may or may not fit well with what we think it's doing elsewhere? And I'm just putting that out there as a question because it's really not thought about a whole lot. And so I think it's important to think about and so education, formal education is a practice and we could analyze it as such. Similarly, and that's where a number of you have gone into this, is that human suffering has always happened and so every society has various practices that are associated with ways to prevent or alleviate physical or mental suffering. But also there are many practices that are oriented to helping people acquire the kind of knowledge and skills that they need in order to pursue a certain life track. And so as some of you know, these days I'm doing a lot of work with Tibetan Buddhist monastics, they're part of a program that is working with them on their interest in science education and how Buddhism and science can talk to each other. And that's been really interesting to me because it has also pointed out some of very consistent practices that are very highly elaborated that we have left long behind and one of them is memorization. So if any of you is interested, I wanna see the brain on memorization, that's different from the way that we do learning because memorization requires intense focus, repetition, and the monastic faculty are regarded as and the advanced students regarded as a form of meditation and learning self-regulation. So that's a practice. We could study those practices, right? You can be thinking about the context in which you're working and sort of saying, well what are the practices that happen all the time that are actually shaping the kinds of dynamics in this case of the way that memory is acquired and stored and accessed, how learning gets associated with attention regulation and self-regulation in general. But another cool thing is, what we're doing right now is so pacified, right? We're sitting in seats and I'm talking, I'd like to think with you, your minds are busy and engaged rather than at you, but still, what this tradition also does is say, that's fine if you've memorized the stuff, but now you've gotta use it, you've gotta enact it. And of course we do this all the time, right? We try to use the knowledge that we've got, we go out there and we talk to people and we behave and we learn how what we're doing is appropriate or not. But we don't do this as much in the educational setting and so again, a practice, a very clear practice that has some very clear goals about learning and the acquisition of critical thinking that we could be thinking about, what does that do? How does that work? So I'm not gonna get into this a lot because this kind of study of practices and I think some of you will be doing it actually is also another way for us to get under the scan of understanding biocultural dynamics as they affect human functioning and differential well-being. And the reason this stuff is so potent, oh yeah, and I wanted to say one more thing, which is that I have a way of exceptionalizing this, right? So I called this a practice. Debate is a practice. Memorization is a practice. Formal education is a practice. Well, you know, every day of your life is a practice. That is, you're getting up, you sleep in a certain way, you get up a certain way, you get around the world in a certain way, you relate to people in a certain way. All of this is practice. And based on what we know about neuroplasticity, you're constantly tuning your brain and body through these continual practices. And this is this really nice NIH cartoon that sort of gets, we know a ton about this, right? Here's a good example of how all that sort of really molecular level of neuroscience is giving us a different kind of appreciation. It's really transformed our sense of not just memory, but our sense of how we know and that actually knowledge then is embodied, not just in our brain, although this is a very brain-centered model. And so I wanted to put this out to you guys because these actually, we know all of these things and again, life are things that affect the brain. So there's, we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of ways that we could be examining how the mind works is shaped through a variety of ways to live. But I wanted to take us to a space where it's not my comfort zone, I have to say, because I'm not a heavy meaning analyst, but meaning obviously is a huge part of what we'll be talking about because stress has it in here and emotions has it in here, but it's like we separate them out whereas we know that cognition and experience are constantly merging these two and that the attempt to understand meaning is really at the core of how we try to get at the nexus between what's going on inside and then what's going on outside. And we know also that both in terms of mental and physical health, that meaning really matters. And so I for one have gotten super excited about cognitive sciences and how to ally the techniques from the cognitive sciences with field work particularly. And I think Kathy will be talking about that later this week. By now everyone has seen a screen and so people like Jeffrey here looking at how folks are using those kind of screen-based online experiences, how that affects them. And so we could use, anthropology has been really slow to use some of these techniques to actually try to understand cognitive processing in very different settings. So we do have experience sampling and people are using this more and more. We also have remote sensing and monitoring. To the extent that by now we can know so much about what people are doing that there are serious ethical issues involved as well. But I think this is a really exciting area that I'm not gonna have a lot of examples about except that's why I included the piece about thinking too much. So for those of you who are psychiatrists, how many of you have encountered that in your patients where they just, they talk about thinking too much as a complaint? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, just for other people this evening, it's all right, you're a psychiatrist. So several of you have, and maybe does anybody wanna say something about what? You know, what are they complaining about when they're complaining about thinking too much? You wanna say? For example, I want to say, you know, whether they have diagnosis for a symptom, or a CED, for example, it says composal, it just could not get themselves out of the, these kind of fixation. So they're talking about elimination. They're kind of thinking about, I mean anxious about anxious, right? They're thinking about, you know, the more they think about it, the less the chance they get out of it. So that's about they're thinking a lot. They just cannot sleep at night, you know, before bedtime, because they're thinking, thinking, thinking. About what's going on during the day, what's going on, you know, what will be, you know, the next day, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's part of the complaints about those CED, and other anxiety. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, what's pretty interesting is that, we certainly found out in the GSMS that anxiety, and many others have as well, that anxiety is kind of pro-deromal for depression in many cases. Doesn't always lead to depression. But often the anxiety comes first, and then you see the depression later. And the thinking a lot comes up again and again in the ethnographic reports about mental health problems. And so there's been a recent series of papers that are cited in this one, where they're pulling together that evidence, and going, oh, wow, you know, this is really, whereas before, when Susan Nolan hooks him up, like, well, is that 30 years or so, was really showed the importance of rumination, at least in girls, as leading to depression, and that important role for rumination. It hadn't really been moved out to kind of think about, how does that play out elsewhere? And it turns out that we see this repeatedly in many different settings. Now what gets interesting then is that, so we have this thinking too much, but, and what Devin Hinton is arguing is that, there are some, I don't know, we would call it, universal generalizable processes that nevertheless have very local content. And so that's part of what I'm gonna be wanting to end our time with this morning, is helping us to think toward how there might be general mechanisms, I'm not saying universal yet, but general processes or mechanisms that then are underlying in a dynamic way the production of diversity, right? And this can help us to have our cake and eat it too, in terms of getting a handle on where this diversity comes from, what are some underlying processes, moving beyond categories of culture or genes or something like that, but looking at the processes and then seeing how those become localized to help us understand, unpack the diversity that we're looking at. So what Hinton argues is that that these ethnographic reports seem to suggest the following kind of processes, which is you start out with some negative stuff, something that's not working in your life that puts you in a bad mood, right? And the bad mood can, if you're so inclined, can interact with other stuff that may push you to start having some depressive symptoms. It may increase your blood pressure, let's say it could do so transiently, that's okay. But also this negative mood then alters the way you respond to experiences and so many people have talked about this in terms of reactivity, right? Or hypervigilance or hypovigilance. So it's your disposition, the way that you are translating what's going on around you. And I think we've all had that experience where we're driving down the street with our friend in the car and somebody cuts us out and nothing terrible happens, but it's a really bad move. And you may be pissed off about this briefly, but then it's like that goes by. But your friend in the car is still talking about that later in the day. It's like, I can't believe this person coming out. So there are differences in how we respond to just we're in the same space, same thing, but that can be in a very different emotional dynamic space is part of what he's talking about here. And so if you are mellow and relaxed, you're gonna respond differently to the people around you, make calmer decisions. And actually we know the underlying neuroscience for both of these things, right? That the dysphoric arousal that is being driven by this can have just little tiny effects. That's what he's saying at the outset, just little effects. But that this stuff can compound. So if you're not interacting as effectively with others, if you're not feeling as good about things, making as good decisions about things, this may lead to more negative stuff that's happening in your life. And that compounds with things that you're worrying about, things, negative stuff that you may have experienced before. So here is kind of the fuel. So what is the baggage that you may come with in terms of previous traumatic experiences or negative experience or not, as the case may be, right? And I like that he included anger here because that's an important emotion that when we talk about negative emotions, we're often focusing on the depression, but frequently depression comes along with anger and hostility. So he's saying you get this dynamic that's driving, starts driving that you really get, start to get caught up in this stuff that's driving the negative mood, that's driving more somatic symptoms and mental symptoms. So you may start to feel really hyper alert or really like things are not going well. You're monitoring your behavior all the time, watching for mistakes that you may make or watching others for what they might do to you. And he documents in some really nice ways, and we see this in other places that, I mean, I've shown you already how blood pressure can be affected pretty readily under some of these conditions, but a variety of somatic conditions that relate to ability to regulate attention, visual, and he gave a variety of examples of, again, how this starts to be very culturally bound as well. And as these things build up, what he found was showing clinically, he and others, is that this leads to the catastrophic cognitions, which is I knew things always go wrong and I'm losing it here or the world is out to get me and all of the above maybe, that then really feel the dysphoric arousal, drive this some more and then feedback into more thinking a lot. So he's putting that out there, which I think is gonna be interesting for other cross-cultural psychologists, psychiatrists, too, to look at as potentially a way of thinking about what's fueling, what's behind this repeated appearance of thinking a lot in a variety of settings, which, however, plays out in different ways, even in terms of the symptoms that are involved. So again, this idea of general processes that may lead to local specificity. And so there's a really nice paper that was just posted electronically, Journal of Youth and Adolescents, where they're showing that anxiety in adolescents. It's a two-year follow-up study and they did a bunch of immune markers and a big psychiatric work-up. The kids are on average 16 and a half years old, so that's gonna put them at 18 and a half, two years later, and all of these kids had anxiety to start with. And what he found was that the anxiety, the levels of anxiety, the extent to which those levels are associated with IL-6, that is inflammatory response, predict at baseline, predicted their probability of being depressed two years later. So in other words, when he's talking about somatic symptoms and these sort of dynamics, these aren't really separate, right? It's the mind and the body working together and the immune system in this case is really that interface. And again, it's not just gonna be IL-6, it's gonna be driving it, but really interesting, it's gonna look at. So I thought particularly for those of you who are, and a number of you are interested in global mental health, that it also nice to look at that paper in terms of the series of studies that they did to sort of get at what's going on in a Vietnamese immigrant slash refugees in the US. And so in one study, they looked at the frequency and the timing, just the phenomenology, right? How often does this happen and when does it happen? Because you then can say, are there triggers? Are there settings that trigger these kinds of things? That can be really helpful for understanding again, it can be very culturally based. What are the triggers? Also, what are the safe spaces? So again, Kathy, I think you might be talking about that later this week, to really be thinking about literally a social and cultural ecology of experience and where do people feel safe? Where do they not feel safe? Where are the triggers? Where are the sources of resilience? And then they did a really nice study just to look at content. So what's in there when you're ruminating or thinking too much? And what do you think this is about? Where did this come from? What does it mean? Helping them to understand what is the cultural model that these individuals are going to be using for interpreting their experience? That's really important, right? And then to get at what are they helping them to sort of see what are these symptoms? And there are actually two interesting levels. One is what they just say. It's like, this is what I have. The other is to actually, and one of you mentioned phenomenology, that's a really, you know, Husserl and all the rest. I mean, that's a really interesting area that some people are trying to put back in there in terms of what can a first person or even the second person they count look like in terms of the phenomenology of what goes on in the mind. So one is just what do people say? How do they talk about it? The other is to try to walk them through that. And it's like, was it, you know, how's that feeling now? Because again, that's a lot of culture work just goes in there as people are experiencing. And then what kinds of fears, what are the emotional loadings on all of this stuff? What's making this negative for them? And then what are the ways that, what are the local treatments? And again, really nice in terms then, not just of, you know, which kind of curandero do you go to, but what are the sources of resilience? Do you go and find your friends? Do you go to the local temple? They found that there are some really nice Buddhist affordances that Vietnamese are using. And then the last is historical processes. In this case, looking at the colonial history that was also providing a set of narratives about mental health and the sources of mental illness. And who was using those, turns out educated folks were using them because they had been exposed to that colonial education system if they were older. And older individuals who had not been educated were using a different set of models to interpret this. So hopefully that sort of, I think that's gonna be a really interesting area to continue to explore. And a bunch of you already here are doing it, but I wanna get back to this point about thinking. And this is another area where the cognitive sciences really, really given us a lot to think about and work with. And that is that we now know that a lot of what our brain is doing, especially using the default mode network, is simulating stuff, right? Running models of things. So that's the way we remember. We remember by running that simulation. When someone is talking to us, this is activating parts of our brain. You know, see that the cat ran across the street. You're gonna be having areas of the brain that are involved in processing motion, cat, if being activated during the process of listening. And that whole field of embodied cognition then is really helping us then to see the importance, again, of how culture is working in this essential way for a very fundamental way that we operate, right? Because simulations for remembering, for planning, what am I gonna do next? When you try to imagine what you'll do when the session is over today, there are all kinds of simulations that will go by in a flash without you even knowing it until you land on the one that, one or two or three things that you wanna think about, do I do this or do I do that? And so getting into these sorts of arenas to actually get under the skin of the way these simulations are working with or against folks, I think is another really interesting area where neuroscience can be helpful. And so here is a recent study where this was done at UCLA. And these are all American students at, sorry, at USC, so it's Demasio's group. Some of you probably know this study. And they used online sources, blogs basically to get at series of core themes about what's socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior. And they honed in on a set of 40 little scenarios of socially acceptable, sorry, socially unacceptable behavior or questionable, I guess would be socially questionable, so ethically ambiguous. But what they were trying to do here was also tap into different core values. So we all hold a series of values about how things should be, right? And the cultural models that I was talking about earlier also have, and the consonant stuff I was talking about, we see the power of living up to or not living up to those models and this is what ethics and norms are all about. So there are different sets of core values, ones about propriety, about respect for others. There is sexuality, age appropriateness, cheating, some economic stuff. And then they had three groups, and here is a good example. I mean, I love DeMarzio's group, but just look at this section on the participants because they say they have Americans, Chinese and Iranian. They're all USC undergraduates. So the Americans are the latent category. You don't know if they're white or black or what they are. But anyway, let's assume, no, we won't assume anything, but they're not Iranian and they're not Chinese. I guess that's what we know. But what is really interesting is that as individuals looked at, read these scenarios, depending on which core values they in a previous survey had ascribed to as most important for them, so that these values that are tapped into at the scenarios, they were asked, what's kind of prioritized? What's the most important? And as they read through a scenario that they found to be particularly relevant to a core value for them, this really ramped up the default mode network. So in other words, in terms of that sort of self-reflective, very powerful simulation network that is behind the kind of thinking I was just talking about, the more infraction, the more that core value was threatened, or the more powerful the value was that was threatened, the more activated these areas became. And so again, that's just one study. It'd be really interesting to see what you guys think about ways to unpack that. So I'm gonna end on a more positive note because I've been talking a lot about risk and depression and stuff like that. And of course there's a whole, a lot of us, what we're really interested in is human flourishing and how to promote that, and either prevent suffering or alleviate it. And so I wanted to share this one because, which I don't think I'd put on your readings, because it sort of combines what I've been saying about actually don't just use the brain as a readout for everything that we wanna know, that our bodies are processing information all the time and very often other systems will be telling us things that our conscious minds won't even know is going on. So what people can consciously tell you and what they're aware of is really important, it's way important. But hopefully what I've been showing you, a lot of this stuff is latent, it's not necessarily conscious, and it's working all the time. And so we need not just neuroscience, we need other stuff to get at what's going on and then start to do some really interesting stuff that anthropologists anyway have been interested in a long time, which is the sort of, how does that work between what we're conscious of and what we actually think and then what we do and what's going on outside of our consciousness and how do those two things, how does culture work through those two routes? And so, and a number of you would know, I'm kind of predisposed to think that way because I've, yeah, I trained in neuroscience, but actually because I work in very remote populations for a long time, no way to use a scanner or anything like that. So use the body as a lens to understand the intersection between person and context. So here, this is work with Brandon Court, who's a transcultural psychiatrist. It was worked in Nepal for a long time and in the aftermath of the Civil War in Nepal, was funding from UNICEF and picked up a sample of ex-child soldiers, matched to never conscripted peers, so same age, same gender, same village in five different districts scattered across Nepal. And this is a five-year follow-up and there had been an intervention to promote reintegration of the kids into their communities and we were interested in how they were doing five years on. But meanwhile, also we'd met Steve Cole, for those of you not familiar with his work. He does, I guess you could call it social immunology, that is, he really takes seriously using the immune system as a way to understand how the body is processing information about threat or non-threat because the immune system permeates our bodies. So it's even better than the nervous system in terms of its reach and potently reallocates resources on a moment-to-moment basis. And he had worked with Steve Sume using the Rhesus model that Steve on early trauma and genetics and gene trauma interaction to identify a potential series of markers, immune markers for exposure to trauma. And then worked that through with Teresa Seaman and others at UCLA in clinical and then community populations to identify what he calls the conserved transcriptional response to adversity. And so this is a profile, sorry, I should have included that slide, but I didn't. But basically what you have with the immune system is a whole lot of genetics, right? That's driving what the immune cells are doing. And so instead of just looking at one gene, you can look at a whole series of genes and see where the immune system is going in terms of is it going into defensive inflammatory mode or not. And so I was electrified when I heard a talk from Steve and thought, well, this is really fascinating in terms of then how we could try to understand how this would play out in this key point. Tom McDade and I for many years had argued and Tom has assembled beautiful data to show the importance of ecology and exposures over the early, from early, especially early on in life and how the immune system functions. And so one thing we were interested in was how generalizable was the CTRA? Would we see the same kind of inflammatory mobilization to social threat as Steve saw in these Western settings in a setting where there's high pathogen and parasite load? So that was just one thing. Does social context beat out pathogens and parasites in terms of attention from the immune system? And then number two, if it does, what insight could it give us into these ex-child soldiers and their peers and how they were recovering after the war? And so first what we were kind of surprised, I have to admit, surprised to see was that actually the CTRA is present in this population. So it's not that set of responses that are linked to social exposures goes away. And so it was present. And it furthermore behaved the way that we would expect that it would. We use the civilians, so those who had not gone to war, doesn't mean they weren't exposed to trauma during the war, but anyway, we use civilians then as our contrast group. And then this is how much more expressed these inflammatory markers are. In child soldiers who had no PTSD, so across the board, trauma exposure, actually civilian or non-civilian, is associated with increased CTRA, but separating that out. If you'd been a child soldier, you had increased levels of CTRA, but if you had PTSD on top of being an ex-child soldier, then you had really massively higher CTRA expression. So you get the reanimation of those experiences is driving this basically inflammatory response. So I think you can begin to sort of imagine the story that people are thinking about in terms of really needing to track what's going on with what's driving inflammatory responses and how that may play through in terms of the kind of mental illness stuff that you're interested in. But here's another thing, a lesson in humility also. I was a student of Arthur Kleinman, so I have a permanent lifetime cynicism, I guess I might put it, about cross-cultural measures of anything, probably. And so, I mean, I've slowly got into studying depression and things like that. But in talking with the kids, the field staff, you know, listening to them of what they were saying, Bram said, you know, it sounds a lot like resilience. It sounds a lot like some of these resilience measures I've been hearing about. And so he pulled out one of the standard resilience measures and I'm like, yeah, this is crap. You know, we translated in the sense of the standard way of that it would be interpretable and tweaked it a bit for local salience. But we just plugged that in because both of us are interested in positive ways, you know, toward coping. And to our profound amazement, this is a resilience measure, was a huge moderator of the CTA response. So these are former child soldiers with PTSD. So they meet all the former criteria for PTSD. But you can see there's a clear dose response in CTRA where resilience, the greater the resilience, the lower the CTRA till you reach the point where there's no difference between the civilian baseline. And this was, at least to me, pretty amazing. And so what we're interested in now is sort of taking the components of that and to ask the important question of, you know, these are obviously not trades necessarily that these individuals, where did this resilience come from? What is it that they're really talking about? And what was interesting here was that there were two things in the resilience index that seemed to be key. One is this sort of sense that you have, there's meaning and purpose in your life. And again, that sounds pretty corny, but you know, this matters. So and when people are, often when we're talking about deprivation, some of the deprivation is really a challenge of meaning as much as anything else perhaps. And then the other is self-efficacy. So a sense that I'm in charge of with my world, I can guide my own actions. Again, our question then becomes, where does that come from? But here to me is an interesting example of how a biomarker has drawn our attention to a set of dynamics that we were like, I don't know how to study resilience, but we still don't quite know how to study resilience, but we have some better ideas and we can go back and start digging under the skin of that to understand what's going on. So hopefully, when we talk about G by E, what I've been trying to convince you of is that it's actually B by C and it's been there all along, that it's biology and culture, it's biology and context, it's baked in, it's by design. And so it's up to us to figure out what each of these, what are the dynamics and how is that working? I've used development and embodiment as sort of core touchstones here to give us some examples and also tried to convince you that the exciting thing is we moved way beyond categorical thinking. We still use categories because we have to, that's how language works, but to really focus on processes has helped us then to see, and I think neuroscience also is helping us to see some of the dynamics involved that then have shared components but get instantiated in localized ways to produce localized outcomes. And hopefully this is gonna allow us to better trace pathways to differential well-being. So that's, we've got like a few minutes or not. My clock is behind, I think. Oh man, okay, well. Yeah, comments, questions. Yes. Thank you for this interesting question. So you, with regards to studies on embodiment, decided some work on set-out, social factors, use of primal processes, blood pressure. I want to ask if you know of any studies in anthropology that examines, that uses the right neuroscience measures. Are there any studies that looks at how, for example, very socialization practices, apparently more closely related to brain function, and if there are what kind of techniques, measurements they use. And also, I think it would be interesting to think about this, how you describe the general process to elision between general processes and localized outcomes, particularly in problem area, like parenting, socialization, and how cultural variation in parenting is the face of childhood brain maturation. Are there any work that people are interested in in theoretically, but also in terms of, you know, the students and all of that? Yes. And these are all wonderful questions. I hope we all hold these in mind as we go forward. Sarah Harkness and Charlie Super have done this sort of work for years in terms of looking specifically at parenting practices and then differential outcomes. But no, I think Charlie, so he would be your person potentially because I think he was partnering with people at, they're at University of Connecticut and was partnering with people in the medical school at Hartford, and I know that we're looking at cortisol and I thought they were gonna do some psychophysiology and I'm not sure. But Charlie would be, he's a developmental psychologist and I think you would find the work relevant and some of the models that they developed relevant. I bet, I'm not aware of outside of the US. Does anybody, I mean we have a brain trust here if anyone is aware of such work. But I mean, here is a really interesting, because for example, we were, you know, we talk a lot about executive function and we sort of know what that looks like in the brain and we know how emotion and executive function interact to a certain degree. But then to look at different socialization practices even within, I've often been fascinated by gender differences, that's why I showed you the reeling study, you know, boys and girls that could be, you know, they're in the same society or they are even in the same household. Even subtle differences, but sometimes very large differences in socialization practices lead to quite different state regulatory outcomes, it's a huge deal in South Africa because anyway, yeah, there's very different treatment of boys and girls vis-a-vis acting out in violence and so forth that has long-term consequences for the guys themselves and women. Yeah, Connie. That's right, yeah, no, talk about it. Yeah, that's a good one, yeah. Well, I should let you all go to lunch and thank you for a good morning. I look forward to more good conversations. We'll be back at two o'clock.