The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'

By Carol Clark

A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.

“Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included Emory economist Monica Capra; Michael Prietula, a professor of information systems and operations management at Emory's Goizueta Business School; a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. (Click here to see the full list of names.) The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.”


The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain responses of 32 U.S. adults during key phases of an experiment. In the first phase, participants were shown statements ranging from the mundane, such as “You are a tea drinker,” to hot-button issues such “You support gay marriage” and “You are Pro-Life.” Each of the 62 statements had a contradictory pair, such as “You are Pro-Choice,” and the participants had to choose one of each pair.

Click here to download the full list of questions, and the responses by the subjects.

At the end of the experiment, participants were given the option of auctioning their personal statements: Disavowing their previous choices for actual money. The participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.

“We used the auction as a measure of integrity for specific statements,” Berns explains. “If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for that statement and that it wasn’t sacred.”

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.


“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”

Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. “Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says.

The experiment also found activation in the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotional reactions, but only in cases where participants refused to take cash to state the opposite of what they believe. “Those statements represent the most repugnant items to the individual,” Berns says, “and would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage.”

The study is part of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, titled “The Biology of Cultural Conflict.” Berns edited the special issue, which brings together a dozen articles on the culture of neuroscience, including differences in the neural processing of people on the opposing sides of conflict, from U.S. Democrats and Republicans to Arabs and Israelis.

“As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can’t separate the two,” Berns says. “We now have the means to start understanding this relationship, and that’s putting the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience onto the global stage.”

Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.

Images, top and bottom: iStockphoto.com.

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Teen brain data predicts pop song success

Trees and reality TV drive discovery in 2011

In 2011, flashes of inspiration made fundamental science at Emory seem almost easy. A hike in the woods sparked a breakthrough in number theory, while an episode of “American Idol” led to an insight about the human brain.

Actually, it takes a certain brilliance to find big ideas hiding amid trees and reality TV. To paraphrase Louis Pasteur, whether you are an athlete or a couch potato, chance favors a prepared mind.

Here’s a roundup of the hottest topics on eScienceCommons for 2011.

New theories reveal the nature of numbers: For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. The eureka moment finally occurred when mathematicians were hiking through the fall foliage in north Georgia and noticed patterns in the trees and the switchback trail. Partition numbers are fractal, repeating in an infinite pattern, they suddenly realized.

Teen brains can predict pop song success: A neuroeconomist was watching “American Idol” with his two young daughters when a contestant started singing “Apologize” by One Republic. The song sounded familiar, and the scientist realized that he had used it in a study. That led to a re-analysis of brain-response data of teens listening to obscure songs. The results show that teen brain activity may help predict the popularity of music.

Dawn of agriculture took toll on health: Anthropologists confirmed that when populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of the location or the types of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and the health of the people declined. In modern times, the stature trend has reversed: The average human height is increasing, as food becomes increasingly commercialized and abundant. But is our health improving, in an era of obesity?

Anxious kids confuse ‘mad’ and ‘sad’: Psychologists found that children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones. Non-verbal communication is a critical, but often overlooked, aspect of child development. The good news is that non-verbal communication skills can be improved at any age.

Chimps, bonobos yield clues to social brain: It’s been a puzzle why our two closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have widely different social traits, despite belonging to the same genus. Now, a comparative analysis of their brains shows neuroanatomical differences that may be responsible for these behaviors, from the aggression more typical of chimpanzees to the social tolerance of bonobos.

Chemists reveal the force within you: A new method for visualizing mechanical forces on the surface of a cell provides the first detailed view of those forces, as they occur in real-time. Mapping such forces may help to diagnose and treat diseases related to cellular mechanics. Cancer cells, for instance, move differently from normal cells, and it is unclear whether that difference is a cause or an effect of the disease.

Hominid skull hints at later brain evolution: An analysis of a skull from the most complete early hominid fossils ever found suggests that the large and complex human brain may have evolved more rapidly than previously realized, and at a later time than some other human characteristics. While some features of Australopithecus sediba were more human-like, most notably the precision-grip hand, the brain was more ape-like.

Biochemical cell signals quantified for first time: Just as cell phones and computers transmit data through electronic networks, the cells of your body send and receive chemical messages through molecular pathways. The term “cell signaling” was coined more than 30 years ago to describe this process. Now, for the first time, physicists have quantified the data capacity of a biochemical signaling pathway and found a surprise – it’s way lower than even an old-fashioned, dial-up modem.


Mummies tell history of a modern plague: Mummies from along the Nile are revealing how age-old irrigation techniques may have boosted the plague of schistosomiasis, a water-borne parasitic disease that infects an estimated 200 million people today. An analysis of the mummies provides details about the prevalence of the disease across populations in ancient times, and how human alteration of the environment may have contributed to its spread.

Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past: Paleontologists discovered a group of more than 20 polar dinosaur tracks on the coast of Victoria, Australia, offering a rare glimpse into animal behavior during the last period of pronounced global warming, about 105 million years ago. The discovery is the largest and best collection of polar dinosaur tracks ever found in the Southern Hemisphere.


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Beer, bugs and brains: Hot topics in 2010
2010: A science odyssey

How much time do you have left?

Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried in a race against time.

Imagine your arm is “tattooed” with a watch that shows how much time you have left to live. You can see the seconds ticking down.

That’s the premise of the new science-fiction thriller “In Time,” starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. It’s 2161 and genetic engineering stops people from aging after 25 years. One major downside of eveyone staying in their prime, of course, is over-population. So people die within a year of turning 25 unless they are strong enough to work for more minutes, or wealthy enough to literally buy more time. The poor live in a separate “time zone,” segregated from the zone of the rich, who can exist for millennia if they are sufficiently well off.

Even in the real world of today, statistics favor the wealthy for longevity.



"Here in the U.S., we have large and enduring economic inequalities in health," says Hannah Cooper, assistant professor at the Rollins School of Public Health. “People in the lower socio-economic strata tend to be two to three times more likely to die early than people who are in the highest economic strata."

Some of the factors that may play a role in how much time you have left include: whether you have health insurance, the crime rate and pollution levels near your home, your access to fresh fruits and vegetables, your mental state, and whether you are exposed to toxins or other hazards in your workplace.

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AIDS: From a new disease to a leading killer
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Where's the beef? Mideast looks to East Africa

A herd of thirsty cattle arrives at a watering trough in Isiolo, Kenya. Much of the livestock from the Horn of Africa is destined for the Middle East. (iStockphoto.com)

By Carol Clark

Muslims are gathering in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for hajj, an annual five-day pilgrimage, set to begin on Saturday. The largest pilgrimage in the world, the hajj draws millions of Muslims, and they will be feasting on ritually sacrificed meat.

Much of that livestock, more than two million animals, will come from the Horn of Africa.

“It’s big business, but it’s unclear how much small-scale livestock producers in East Africa really benefit from the growing demand for their products in the Middle East,” says Emory anthropologist Peter Little.

That’s one of the questions Little plans to tackle during the next phase of his research into how East Africa pastoralists make a living amid the vagaries of a harsh environment and climate change.

Little, who has been studying the region’s pastoralists for three decades, recently received an additional $700,000 from the Livestock-Climate Change Collaborative Support Program, to continue working on a joint project in the region. The LCC program, centered at Colorado State University, was established in 2010 through an agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Emory is partnering with Pwani University College in Kenya and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia for the current phase of the project. In addition to Little’s deep experience in the region, Emory brings a strong public health component to the research, and the expertise of disease ecologist Uriel Kitron, chair of environmental studies.

“One thing we will be looking at is how the warming of East Africa is creating different kinds of disease vectors, affecting both livestock and humans,” Little says.

The project ultimately aims to increase incomes and food security in the extremely vulnerable Horn of Africa. The region is currently confronting yet another drought disaster, and violent conflict between Kenya and Somalia.

“It’s a challenge working in the Horn of Africa on many levels,” Little says. “But the research questions are exciting, and so is the potential to have an impact. It’s a worthy goal.”

Small-scale livestock keepers have managed climate variability and many other challenges by moving to new sources of water and pastures. Fences and settlements are increasingly restricting their moves, however, while new technologies, such as cell phones and trucking of water and feed, have expanded access to information and resources. Little is known about the current market risks facing mobile pastoralists, although the livestock trade continues to be an integral part of the economies of the region.

Students from Emory and the African universities will also be involved in the project, which includes training local counterparts to continue the work of pastoralist development in the region after the project ends in 2015.

Related:
What we can learn from African pastoralists
Famine in Somalia driven by conflict

A few things you may not know about water

"Water Study" will lead participants through a "scientific experiment" in campus creeks.

By Carol Clark

Chances are you haven’t thought much about water lately. Unless you are a rancher in drought-stricken Texas, and you just relocated your cattle out of state because nothing is left for them to eat. Or if you are a young girl in rural Kenya, facing a miles-long walk to fetch water for the family, and a return trip bearing the heavy load.

We tend to take water for granted in lush Atlanta. But it’s moving front and center at Emory this year, through a series of events that will draw from science, art, the environment and the imaginations of all those who want to dive into the experience.

You can fall in behind dancers in haz-mat suits, as they lead people through a “scientific experiment” along the creek in Baker Woodlands. The interactive performance, called “Water Study,” takes place every evening from Oct. 15 to 19. And you can join a line of people accumulating across campus at noon on Oct. 18, to pour water from vessel to vessel until the last drop vanishes.



More water-related surprises are on the way in November, and in the spring. To prime the pump, so to speak, here are a few random facts about water.

Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, and all of that water came from space after the planet cooled down. One theory is that the water came from meteorites. The Herschel telescope, however, recently zeroed in on the properties of a comet, and learned it has water with the same deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio as Earth’s oceans.

Texas is experiencing its most severe one-year drought ever. Drier than normal conditions are expected to continue at least for months, and possibly until 2020, according to a state climatologist. The National Weather Service reports that livestock and agriculture losses have topped $5.2 billion. During the past 11 months, more than 6,000 square miles have burned across the state, an area larger than the state of Connecticut.


Comet McNaught shoots over the Pacific Ocean off Chili. Comets are like icy time capsules that may hold clues to our solar system’s evolution, including the source of Earth’s water. Credit: European Southern Observatory.

Water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase during the last century, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. By 2025, the FAO projects that two-thirds of the world population could be under stress conditions of water scarcity.

Globally, diarrhea is the leading cause of illness and death, and 88 percent of these deaths are due to a lack of sanitation facilities and safe water for drinking and hygiene, according to the United Nations. More than one in six people worldwide don’t have access to safe water.

Environmentalist and author Janisse Ray, on the banks of the Altamaha River. Photo by Carol Clark.

Georgia’s Altamaha River flows 135 miles across the bottom third of the state. Its banks are mostly wetland wilderness, and it is one of the few almost entirely undammed rivers in the United States. Environmentalist Janisse Ray describes the river in her new book Drifting into Darien: “The Altamaha’s size and nature have led it to be called Georgia’s Little Amazon, the most powerful river east of the Mississippi. Despite this distinction, most people remain unaware of it, which prompted Reg Murphy in his National Geographic article to call it 'the river almost nobody knows.'"

Now is a great time of year to paddle the Altamaha.

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Famine in Somalia driven by conflict
Sewage raises West Nile virus risk

A Somali girl pursues her passion for math

By Patrick Adams, Emory Magazine

Maaria Osman is small and slight, with hazel eyes and a round face framed by a tight-fitting hijab, the traditional head cover worn by women throughout the Muslim world and by all female teachers and students at Abaarso Tech. The school in a remote area of Somaliland is an experiment in education started by Jonathan Starr, who graduated from Emory in 1999 with a degree in economics.

Shy and reserved, Osman speaks softly in halting English. She is not yet fluent in the language.

Yet at 12, Osman is one of the best math students in the school. Last year, she had the highest score of the math section of the national exit exam, the test administered to all eighth-grade students around the country in the last days of what is, for the vast majority of Somali students, their final year of formal education.

Photo of Osman, left, by Patrick Adams.

That Osman even took the exam was unusual. According to a recent survey by UNICEF, only slightly more than a quarter of Somali girls of primary school age are enrolled in school. That figure is attributable in large part to the collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991 and the decades of conflict that ensued. But the biggest obstacle to Somali girls’ enrollment, says UNICEF, is the tendency of mothers to keep their daughters home to share the burden of domestic labor.

For all of their daughter’s ability in the classroom, her uncommon facility for multiplying fractions, for instance, Osman’s parents had just such a plan in mind. It wasn’t that they weren’t aware of Abaarso Tech or the fact that Osman could attend the school for free. It was that her curricular achievements were immaterial to the family’s immediate needs.

But Starr persisted. Enlisting the help of some of his best female students and their mothers, he mounted a recruiting strategy worthy of a Big Ten football program. And at last, the effort paid off.

In the eight months since her arrival, Osman has exceeded expectations. Not only has she outperformed many of her peers, including a handful of diaspora students from the U.S. and the U.K., she’s exhibited a work ethic bordering on obsession.

“She does math problems in her spare time,” says math teacher Mike Freund. “Literally every night, she’ll finish her homework and come to me to ask for more. She’s incredible.”

Read the full article in Emory Magazine about the unique economic model for Abaarso Tech, which has brought a biochemistry lab, dedicated teachers and a scholarship for study in America to a parched patch of earth, in a region best known for its piracy and poverty.

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Blazing a new path for development work

What happened to Obama's passion?

Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” writes about the importance of story-telling in this New York Times opinion piece:

It was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.

Photo, left: iStockphoto.com

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.”

When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. … Americans needed their president to tell them a story about what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end.

Read the whole article in the New York Times.

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Famine in Somalia driven by conflict

A worn-out tank sits abandoned in Somalia, where the central government has lacked control over much of the country since 1991. Credit: iStockphoto.com/ranplett.

“In the Horn of Africa, droughts are natural but famines are man made,” says Emory anthropologist Peter Little, who studies the politics, economy and ecology of the region. “The famine in Somalia is an unfortunate intersection of failed rain, politics and conflict.”

Drought occurs every five or six years in the Horn of Africa. In Somalia, which has lacked the control of a central government over much of the country since a civil war in 1991, the effects of the current drought have been greatly compounded by fighting, Little says.

The U.N. has declared famine in two regions of south Somalia where the Islamist group Al-Shabaab has been fighting to maintain control. “A phenomenal number of people have been displaced,” Little says. “People have been forced out of farming and livestock areas and have clustered around towns where there is a little bit of security.”

Fighting disrupts markets and trading, and complicates delivery of food aid. In an attempt to escape the situation in recent months, more than 350,000 Somalis have poured into northeastern Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, which was designed to hold fewer than 100,000 people.

“Somalia is like a roller coaster, and right now it’s near the bottom of the hill,” Little says.

After years of being a failed state, things were beginning to look up for Somalia around 2003, when the World Bank put together an economic memorandum for the country. “People were actually becoming modestly optimistic about solutions,” Little says. “I was asked if I might be interested in joining a 2006 mission to Mogadishu, to look at long-term development, but things blew up again and it was cancelled.”

Since 2007, the situation has been steadily deteriorating, he says. “The food security situation has been awful for the past three years, particularly for the most vulnerable: Children, the elderly and women.”

Although the famine declaration in July brought Somalia back into the media spotlight, “the story has been bubbling for a long time,” Little says.

Related:
A Somali girl takes a rare chance to pursue her passion for math
What we can learn from African pastoralists

What we can learn from African pastoralists

The most severe drought in decades is taking a terrible toll on even the rugged cattle breeds of southern Ethiopia. Despite the harsh environment, the pastoralist way of life endures. Photo by Peter Little.

By Carol Clark

Emory anthropologist Peter Little was in southern Ethiopia last February, during the height of a major drought that continues to scorch the Horn of Africa. He is researching how climate change is affecting livestock herders in the region. During the past year, drought has killed about 20 percent of the cattle, or about 225,000 animals, within Ethiopia’s Borana pastoralist community.

At a watering hole, Little watched herders bring their animals in from northeastern Kenya and Somalia, where the effects of the drought are compounded by armed conflict. “I was amazed by the skill and discipline of these herders,” Little says. “They got thousands of thirsty animals to line up like schoolchildren. Some of the camels hadn’t had water for seven days.”

First the herders themselves approached the water’s edge with buckets and canteens. Then the goats were sent in an orderly procession to drink, followed by the cattle, and finally the camels.

Double click on the photo, below, to get the panoramic view:
Calm amid the crisis: Despite drought, herders and their animals from Somalia and Kenya converge on an Ethiopian watering hole in a systematic order. Photo by Peter Little.

“We could learn a lot from African pastoralists about how to collectively manage resources,” Little says. He contrasts their cooperative use of extremely limited water supplies to the inter-state battles fought over Atlanta’s Lake Lanier reservoir, and the ever-shrinking Colorado River.

Related: Check out this satellite animation of the ongoing drought on Wired.com.

Pastoralists occupy about half of Africa, herding goats, camels, sheep and cattle through the semi-arid rangeland and savannah edging the continent’s deserts and tropical forests. Often garbed in striking traditional dress, pastoralists can be a boon to tourism, but a bane to governments that want to control the movements of people.

“If God wanted us to farm,” a Borana elder told one researcher, “He would have put four legs on a farm so we could move it.”

Pastoralists are the ultimate survivors, making a livelihood in harsh environments for millennia. At first glance they may seem like people subsisting on the margins of society, but the reality is much more complex. Pastoralists are on the vanguard of many of the biggest issues facing Africa: from the effects of climate change to disputes over land to wildlife conservation.

“There are a lot of misunderstandings about pastoralists, even among other Africans,” Little says.

In Ethiopia, pastoralists have developed an elaborate system of deep wells and covered cisterns – some of them 500 years old (see photo, at left).

Zoologists are intrigued by African pastoralist animal breeds, hardy enough to get by on less water and survive extreme heat. Cognitive psychologists are interested in the thought processes enabling pastoralists to continuously make life and death decisions on the fly. Ecologists can learn how grasslands are created and maintained over time by studying the practices of pastoralists.

Little is fascinated by the social networks and relationships that help give pastoralists their resiliency. His latest book, co-authored with John McPeak and Cheryl Doss is called "Risk and Social Change in an African Rural Economy: Livelihoods in Pastoralist Communities."

During the early 1980s, Little was one of the first anthropologists to do in-depth studies of the political aspects of environmental and food problems, a field now known as political ecology. In 2003, he published “Somalia: Economy without a State,” which refuted the conventional wisdom that Somalia’s economy, which is heavily dependent on pastoralism, deteriorated into chaos after the state’s collapse in 1991.

Certain sectors of Somali society, including pastoral communities, remained vibrant and dynamic, Little says. “The people showed incredible innovation. They learned to develop a unique set of informal finance, trade and banking institutions in order to survive and make a living.”
Afar herders of Ethiopia with their goats and camels. iStockphoto.com.

Top five myths about African pastoralists

Myth #1: The pastoralist lifestyle and land use are bad for the environment.

Pastoral traditions often play an intrinsic role in wildlife conservation, Emory anthropologist Peter Little says. “For instance, the Maasai, who raise cattle near national parks in Kenya and Tanzania, maintain grasslands and prevent the encroachment of invasive bush species in the parks, which are bordered by dense forests. Pastoral grazing systems tend to fit well with migratory herd species and other forms of biodiversity. In contrast, wildlife doesn’t do as well with fenced farming and more settled human populations.”

Myth #2: Pastoralists have little connection to the global economy.

Pastoralists play a vital role in many African economies, and hold the potential to drive more growth, Little says. Overland trucking routes and boats transport their livestock to supermarkets throughout northern Africa and the Middle East.

Pastoralism accounts for about 25 percent of gross national product (GNP) in Ethiopia and closer to 30 percent in Sudan. About 80 percent of foreign earnings for Somalia come from livestock. Somalia is one of the world’s top exporters of live animals, annually supplying as many as three million animals to the Gulf Arab states in the run-up to the annual haj.

Myth #3: Pastoralists are traditionalists who resist change, wander constantly, and are ruled by the sacred bond they have to their animals.

“Just because you don’t dress like everyone else doesn’t mean you’re opposed to modern technology,” Little says. “Many pastoralists use cell phones now to get information on rainfall, grazing or market prices.”

Or maybe they are just phoning home, since not every member of a pastoral system is necessarily mobile, Little adds. Some family members may have settled in towns where they attend school, own shops or sell livestock products, such as milk.

A Maasai herder, left, in traditional dress, carrying his cell phone. iStockphoto.com.

The movements of mobile pastoralists are dictated not by whim, he adds, but complex systems of land-use rights and changes in the seasons and weather.

And while animals may serve as powerful symbols in the religion and rituals of pastoralists, livestock are primarily a source of food and income. “They also value their animals as commodities,” Little says.

Myth #4: Large swaths of land in Africa are unclaimed and worthless.

Virtually no land in Africa is unclaimed or unused, Little says. What looks like barren wilderness to a casual observer is more likely a community’s source of forest products, like wood and meat, or part of a seasonal grazing area.

“Moving animals to follow rainfall patterns and pastures often makes good use of lands that can’t be cropped without expensive irrigation,” Little says.

Increasingly, however, foreign investors are willing to pay for that irrigation, he adds. Spurred by rising food prices, water shortages in their own countries, and interest in bio-fuels, investors from Europe, the Middle East and India have been buying and leasing hundreds of thousands of hectares in Africa in recent years to create large-scale, commercial farms, Little says. “Much of this land is being carved out of customary pastoralist grazing lands,” he notes.

Myth #5: Pastoralism is a disappearing way of life.

“Pastoralists have been an important fixture for millennia,” Little says, noting that they include many of the revered figures in the Bible and Koran. Consider the origins of the word “pastor.”

“Pastoralists may adapt and change, but as long as people eat meat, there will be some version of them around.”

Related:
Famine in Somalia driven by conflict
Climate change, from the hooves up
Dawn of agriculture took toll on health

When government made things worse

By Elaine Justice

Government wrangling over raising the debt ceiling, cutting spending and raising taxes has a familiar ring to Emory economic historian Leonard Carlson, who says that throughout the nation’s history, colliding economic philosophies have produced mixed or even negative results.

During the Great Depression, he says, “a couple of really stupid policy decisions come to mind.” Herbert Hoover, who ran for president during a period of prosperity, promised tariff protection if elected. Then, despite the devastation of the 1929 crash, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed in 1930.

“Every economist advised against the idea,” says Carlson, adding that leading economists even petitioned the government to no avail. International trade plunged even further as a result.

In 1937, in the midst of the Depression, Congress, increasingly antagonistic to then President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, pushed to cut government spending and raise taxes, causing unemployment to spike again briefly. Looking back, says Leonard, “it’s another example of a move that nobody thought was a good idea at the time, but government went ahead and did it.”

He cites other 1930s Depression examples, such as the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy and the reserve ratio at a time when banks were still reeling from the aftershocks of bank runs after the crash. Banks, nervous about their cash reserves, stopped making loans, further slowing the economy.

“Right now,” says Carlson, “almost every economist is saying don’t default on the national debt, and we still could do it.”

Monkeys embrace 'friends with benefits'

When did the word “dating” start sounding dated?

The new romantic comedy “Friends with Benefits” features Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, acting out the idea that men and women can be both friends and occasional sex partners, without any romantic rituals or messy emotions.

So is this concept a step forward or back on the evolutionary scale?

Rhesus monkeys, known for their brief and frequent sexual liaisons, appear way ahead of humans when it comes to having friends with benefits. The females are the ones in charge of this system.

“Because of the social structure, females essentially control what goes on in a rhesus monkey group,” says Emory psychology professor Kim Wallen, who studies the behavioral neuroendocrinology of sex. “The females control pretty much everything, including sex.”

Although rhesus monkeys don’t form committed sexual relationships, it is not a random free-for-all. They are still constrained by their social structure and social contexts, Wallen says.

“I think that a common theme of what we know from rhesus monkeys and what we know from humans is that sex is actually not a behavior that can be taken lightly. Even though rhesus monkeys may be promiscuous by human standards, sex is actually still a very difficult and challenging aspect of the social life of rhesus monkeys. It threatens the social structure, so they’ve had to develop behavioral ways of dealing with sex. And I think the same is true of humans.”

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Teen brain data predicts pop song success

By Carol Clark

An Emory University study suggests that the brain activity of teens, recorded while they are listening to new songs, may help predict the popularity of the songs.

“We have scientifically demonstrated that you can, to some extent, use neuroimaging in a group of people to predict cultural popularity,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist and director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy.

The Journal of Consumer Psychology is publishing the results of the study, conducted by Berns and Sara Moore, an economics research specialist in his lab.


Photo credit: iStockphoto.com.

In 2006, Berns’ lab selected 120 songs from MySpace pages, all of them by relatively unknown musicians without recording contracts. Twenty-seven research subjects, aged 12 to 17, listened to the songs while their neural reactions were recorded through functional magnetic resolution imaging (fMRI). The subjects were also asked to rate each song on a scale of one to five.

The data was originally collected to study how peer pressure affects teenagers’ opinions. The experiment used relatively unknown songs to try to ensure that the teens were hearing them for the first time.

Three years later, while watching “American Idol” with his two young daughters, Berns realized that one of those obscure songs had become a hit, when contestant Kris Allen started singing “Apologize” by One Republic.

“I said, ‘Hey, we used that song in our study,’” Berns recalls. “It occurred to me that we had this unique data set of the brain responses of kids who listened to songs before they got popular. I started to wonder if we could have predicted that hit.”

A comparative analysis revealed that the neural data had a statistically significant prediction rate for the popularity of the songs, as measured by their sales figures from 2007 to 2010.

“It’s not quite a hit predictor,” Berns cautions, “but we did find a significant correlation between the brain responses in this group of adolescents and the number of songs that were ultimately sold.”

Previous studies have shown that a response in the brain’s reward centers, especially the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum, can predict people’s individual choices – but only in those people actually receiving brain scans.

The Emory study enters new territory. The results suggest it may be possible to use brain responses from a group of people to predict cultural phenomenon across a population – even in people who are not actually scanned.

The “accidental discovery,” as Berns describes it, has limitations. The study included only 27 subjects, and they were all teenagers, who make up only about 20 percent of music buyers.

The majority of the songs used in the study were flops, with negligible sales. And only three of the songs went on to meet the industry criteria for a certified hit: More than 500,000 unit sales, including albums that had the song as a track and digital downloads.

“When we plotted the data on a graph, we found a ‘sweet spot’ for sales of 20,000 units,” Berns said. The brain responses could predict about one-third of the songs that would eventually go on to sell more than 20,000 units.
Brain regions positively correlated with the average likability of the song: cuneus, orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum.

The data was even clearer for the flops: About 90 percent of the songs that drew a mostly weak response from the neural reward center of the teens went on to sell fewer than 20,000 units.

Another interesting twist: When the research subjects were asked to rate the songs on a scale of one to five, their answers did not correlate with future sales of the songs.

That result may be due to the complicated cognitive process involved in rating something, Berns theorizes. “You have to stop and think, and your thoughts may be colored by whatever biases you have, and how you feel about revealing your preferences to a researcher.”

On the other hand, “you really can’t fake the brain responses while you’re listening to the song,” he says. “That taps into a raw reaction.”

The pop music experiment is merely “a baby step,” Berns says. As a leader in the nascent field of neuroeconomics, he is interested in larger questions of how our understanding of the brain can explain human decision-making. Among his current projects is a study of sacred values, and their potential for triggering violent conflict.

“My long-term goal is to understand cultural phenomena and trends,” Berns says. “I want to know where ideas come from, and why some of them become popular and others don’t. It’s ideas and the way that we think that determines the course of human history. Ultimately, I’m trying to predict history.

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Dawn of agriculture took toll on health

"Early agriculturists had a harder time adapting to stress," says anthropologist Amanda Mummert. 

By Carol Clark

When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined.

Amanda Mummert

“This broad and consistent pattern holds up when you look at standardized studies of whole skeletons in populations,” says Amanda Mummert, an Emory graduate student in anthropology.

Mummert led the first comprehensive, global review of the literature regarding stature and health during the agriculture transition, to be published by the journal Economics and Human Biology.

“Many people have this image of the rise of agriculture and the dawn of modern civilization, and they just assume that a more stable food source makes you healthier,” Mummert says. “But early agriculturalists experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress, probably because they became dependent on particular food crops, rather than having a more significantly diverse diet.”

She adds that growth in population density spurred by agriculture settlements led to an increase in infectious diseases, likely exacerbated by problems of sanitation and the proximity to domesticated animals and other novel disease vectors.

Eventually, the trend toward shorter stature reversed, and average heights for most populations began increasing. The trend is especially notable in the developed world during the past 75 years, following the industrialization of food systems.

“Culturally, we’re agricultural chauvinists. We tend to think that producing food is always beneficial, but the picture is much more complex than that,” says Emory anthropologist George Armelagos, co-author of the review. “Humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture, especially when it came to the variety of nutrients. Even now, about 60 percent of our calories come from corn, rice and wheat.”

"Humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture," says anthropologist George Armelagos.

In 1984, Armelagos and M. N. Cohen wrote a groundbreaking book, “Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture,” which drew from more than 20 studies to describe an increase in declining health and nutritional diseases as societies shifted from foraging to agriculture.

The book was controversial at the time, but the link between the agricultural transition and declining health soon became widely accepted in what was then the emerging field of bioarcheology.

The current review was undertaken to compare data from more recent studies involving different world regions, crops and cultures. The studies included populations from areas of China, Southeast Asia, North and South America and Europe. All of the papers used standardized methods for assessing health at the individual level and examined how stressors were exhibited within the entire skeleton, rather than a concentration on a particular skeletal element or condition.

“Unless you’re considering a complete skeleton, you’re not getting a full picture of health,” Mummert says. “You could have an individual with perfect teeth, for example, but serious markers of infection elsewhere. You could see pitting on the skull, likely related to anemia or nutritional stress, but no marks at all on the long bones.”

Adult height, dental cavities and abscesses, bone density and healed fractures are some of the markers used to try to paint a more complete picture of an individual’s health.

“Bones are constantly remodeling themselves,” Mummert says. “Skeletons don’t necessarily tell you what people died of, but they can almost always give you a glimpse into their ability to adapt and survive.”

While the review further supports the link between early agricultural practices and declining stature and health, it’s important to keep re-evaluating the data as more studies are completed, Mummert says.

"Even now, about 60 percent of our calories come from corn, rice and wheat," Armelagos says.

One confounding factor is that agriculture was not adopted in an identical fashion and time span across the globe. In some ancient societies, such as those of the North American coasts, crops may have merely supplemented a seafood diet. “In these cases, a more sedentary lifestyle, and not necessarily agriculture, could have perpetuated decreased stature,” Mummert says.

The way the human body adapted to changes we made in the environment 10,000 years ago could help us understand how our bodies are adapting now, she says.

Some economists and other scientists are using the rapid physiological increases in human stature during the 20th century as a key indicator of better health.

“I think it’s important to consider what exactly ‘good health’ means,” Mummert says. “The modernization and commercialization of food may be helping us by providing more calories, but those calories may not be good for us. You need calories to grow bones long, but you need rich nutrients to grow bones strong.”

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How college shapes health behaviors

A new study finds that students at more selective colleges are less likely to smoke. Credit: iStockphoto.com.

David Glenn writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a forthcoming Economics of Education Review paper:

Jason M. Fletcher, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University and a scholar at the Columbia University Population Research Center, and David E. Frisvold, an assistant professor of economics at Emory University, looked at nearly 4,000 people who have participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They found that people who attended selective colleges (defined as those whose median SAT scores were in the top quartile) were less likely to smoke, to be obese, and to eat fast food than were those who attended less-selective colleges, both while they were in college and when they were in their mid-20s. (To those who might object that students at selective colleges are more likely to have been socialized into healthy habits as children, Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Frisvold controlled for a long list of individual variables, including smoking and obesity during high school. They believe that they have isolated the effects of the colleges themselves.)

As in [another Economics of Education Review study], binge drinking was an exception here. Selective colleges seem, if anything, to be associated with more drinking.

Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Frisvold are most interested in discovering the mechanisms through which education might influence health behaviors. Their new paper did not find any clear patterns, but they suggest that "health literacy and health knowledge as well as peer effects during college" are the most likely channels.

Read the whole article.

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Meth: A global view of 'the most American drug'

A meth lab explodes: In some rural areas, the American dream also seems to be going up in smoke. (iStockphoto.com)

From the Mideast to northern Africa and Wisconsin, extraordinary scenes of unrest are roiling the world stage. All of these political dramas stem from some of the same factors driving a methamphetamine epidemic in rural America.

People everywhere should understand that “our personal lives are tied to these tremendous global forces,” said Morgan Cloud, Emory professor of law.

Cloud is one of the founders of a new Emory course covering nearly every aspect of the meth epidemic. It brings together faculty and students from law, business, religion, economics, anthropology, biology, public health, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and more.

The course takes its name, and built its curriculum, from the book “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town,” by Nick Reding. Through personal stories of people ravaged by meth, the author shows how 30 years of deregulation and globalization affected Oelwine, Iowa.

For more than 100 years, “there was no such thing as unemployment in Oelwine,” Reding said in a recent public talk at Emory.

The town’s long prosperity, built around farming, the railroads and meatpacking, began to change in the late 1980s. Agribusiness emerged to displace family farms. Local people no longer owned the land, the grain elevators or the stores where they shopped. A conglomerate bought up the meat packing plants, dissolving the unions: Workers who once earned $18 an hour were reduced to $5.60 an hour, without benefits.

The impact was “apocalyptic,” Reding said. A collective feeling of depression settled on the town. People fled in droves. Tax revenue dried up. Schools faced threats of bankruptcy and law enforcement staff was slashed.

Meth filled the vacuum, giving users the ability to stay awake through three shifts at the packing plant and make ends meet. “It’s the most American drug,” Reding said. “It helps you achieve the dream of superseding class through a lot of hard work, and you feel good while doing it.”

Other forces also fueled the drug epidemic and the changing way of life, Reding said. “Big pharma” lobbied against laws to change the ingredients of common cold medicine, used to make meth. Immigrants poured in to take the low-paying jobs. Five Mexican cartels took over 85 percent of all the U.S. drug trafficking business, channeling their distribution into the flow of immigrants.

When his book was published last year, Reding said he received death threats, and accusations that he had betrayed America. “A lot of people seem to resist the idea that drugs and poverty could go together in rural America the way they do in the inner cities.”

Reding, who teaches journalism at Washington University in St. Louis, is working on a new book, "Heartland," a portrait of what the Midwest might look like in 40 years.

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Fishing for a living comes with a catch

Ocean fish, and independent fishermen, are threatened by overfishing.

By Carol Clark

Fishing for a living is tough, dangerous work. It’s easy to stereotype the rugged individuals who do it as callous exploiters of wildlife. But in the course of her research into New Zealand fisheries, Emory environmental studies professor Tracy Yandle has gotten a different picture.

“Most of the fisherman I've interviewed are wonderful guys who care about their resources and the sea,” Yandle says.

One told her about setting a net halfway across an inlet, only to return and find the net missing. His first thought was that someone had stolen it. “Then he looked across the harbor and saw a whale struggling, trying to make it out to sea with a net wrapped around its tail,” Yandle says. “The fisherman took off in a tiny boat with an outboard motor, caught up to the whale and managed to hack off the net. He described it as the greatest day in his life, to rescue this huge whale.”

But independent fishermen, like many of their catches, are becoming endangered. Both are the victims of overfishing, as the world appetite for fish keeps growing, and the technology to do mass harvests from the sea keeps improving.

“Fish is a vital food source, and fishing is an important way of life for many poor, rural communities,” Yandle says. “As we lose fisheries, there is going to be a lot of human suffering.”

She cites the collapse of the Atlantic cod industry in Newfoundland during the 1990s as one example of how large-scale fishing techniques can decimate a local way of life.

In the 1980s, New Zealand’s orange roughy stocks came close to crashing, as large trawlers and massive nets replaced smaller-scale fishing methods. “I interviewed some guys who said they were hauling in so much fish, the engines were having trouble getting the nets up onto the boats,” Yandle says.

The New Zealand government moved quickly to limit catches and prevent a collapse, but the orange roughy populations have yet to fully recover.

Yandle is analyzing data going back to 1986 from New Zealand, to track how changes in regulatory policies are affecting fisheries there. New Zealand is one of the only systems in the world that privatized to allow fishermen to buy and sell the rights to catch a certain amount.

Emory's record-setting taco line, featuring sustainable Alaskan cod, aimed to raise awareness of the power of consumer choices.

At the global level, the problem of overfishing, much like climate change, is at a tipping point, Yandle says. Large predator fish are particularly at risk, according to a panel of experts during the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Think of it like the Serengeti, with lions and the antelopes they feed on,” panelist Villy Christensen of the University of British Columba was quoted by the Washington Post. “When all the lions are gone, there will be antelopes everywhere. Our oceans are losing their lions and pretty soon will have nothing but antelopes.”

Consumers can help by choosing sustainable fish from supermarkets and menus. Yandle recommends this link to Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program, which gives a pocket guide to ocean-friendly seafood choices, and also lists the ones to avoid.

“I think awareness of the problem is growing,” Yandle says. “People used to ask me which fish they should avoid because of high mercury levels. Now they more often ask about fish they should avoid due to ethical concerns.”

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Legacies of slavery move into the light

One hundred and fifty years after the U.S. Civil War started, the impact of slavery in institutions of higher education remains largely unexamined. As part of the movement to change that, hundreds of scholars came together for Emory’s “Slavery and the University” conference Feb. 3 to 6.

“We learned a lot about the political and economic connections. So many major universities, both north and south, were funded by the Atlantic slave trade,” says anthropologist Mark Auslander of Brandeis University. “And we learned about how violent the slavery system had been, even at colleges.”

Auslander, who formerly taught at Emory’s Oxford College campus, is working on a book about Catherine “Miss Kitty” Boyd, a well-known, yet mysterious, historical figure in the Oxford community. Miss Kitty was an enslaved woman owned by Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew, the first president of Emory’s board of trustees. Andrew’s ownership of Miss Kitty helped triggered the 1844 schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which is considered one of the templates in the forming of the confederacy.

While trying to sort fact from myth in her complicated life story, Auslander tracked down Miss Kitty’s descendants.

“I’m still grasping with the reality of it all,” says Darcel Caldwell, who learned that she was Miss Kitty’s great-great-great granddaughter when she got a phone call from Auslander.

“I had no idea that I had ancestors that had such an impact on this country,” she said. “It helps me figure out where I fit in, and I think that’s one great advantage that a lot of black Americans don’t have.”

Caldwell was among those who gathered at Emory’s Old Church in Oxford, built in 1841, for the concluding ceremony of the conference, and to honor Miss Kitty’s legacy.

“By focusing on institutions of higher education as one critical place where enslaved labor played an important role, and where arguments for and against African slavery were developed, discussed and debated, we begin to understand how central slavery was to society as a whole,” says Emory history professor Leslie Harris. “By knowing these histories we can better address the issues with us today.”

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Brain responds to 'art for art's sake'

By Quinn Eastman

What is art? Critics and historians have debated the question for years. Now Emory imaging research reveals that the ventral striatum, a region of the brain involved in experiencing pleasure, decision-making and risk-taking, is activated more when someone views a painting than when someone views a plain photograph.

The images viewed by study participants included paintings from both unknown and well-known artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Klee, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh, and photographs representing similar subjects.

The results are published in NeuroImage.

The ventral striatum is part of the "reward circuit," a set of regions of the brain involved in drug addiction and gambling, says senior author Krish Sathian, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine and psychology at Emory University School of Medicine.

The reward circuit also includes other parts of the brain such as the orbitofrontal cortex. Sathian emphasizes that the reward circuit is not just activated by experiences such as gambling or drug-taking, but is also involved in reinforcing behaviors under conditions of uncertainty, such as financial decision-making, for example.

Read more

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Mathematician eyes odds of Mega Millions

The bigger the jackpot, the longer the lines to buy lottery tickets. And when the jackpot gets really huge, people are more likely to splurge on 100 tickets. In this Fox Atlanta news video, Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi gives his two cents on the odds of winning the $355 million Mega Millions jackpot, the second biggest in the lottery's history.

(You may have to hit "refresh" to get the video to appear. It's acting finicky.)

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Climate change, from the hooves up

Cattle call on climate change: East Africa faces a stark reality of higher temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Photo by Dana Hoag.

In East Africa, pundits aren’t debating whether climate change is real. Temperature has already increased and precipitation has decreased in some parts of the region, where many people depend heavily on rain-fed agriculture for survival. Even slight variability in climate affects rural livelihoods in dry areas of Ethiopia and Kenya, in densely populated communities already faced with widespread poverty and limited supplies of food, water and livestock forage.

A new project is looking at the issue of climate change in East Africa from the hooves up. Known as CHAINS, the project is focused on how climate variability, animal diseases, natural resource management and land use are influencing livestock commodity chains in semi-arid and arid regions of Ethiopia and Kenya.

While previous research has focused on brokers, traders and export firms that are higher up in the economic chain, the new project is looking at the pastoralists who are actually producing the livestock that support these systems, says Emory anthropologist Peter Little.
Maasai people in Kenya rely heavily on cattle for their livelihoods. Photo by Dana Hoag.

“It seems likely that uncertainty over extreme climatic events, especially their frequency and intensity, and their effects on human and animal welfare, markets, animal disease and conflict will continue in the region and even worsen during the next decade and beyond,” Little says.

Emory researchers will work with scientists from Pwani University College in Kenya, Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and the International Livestock Research Institute. They will interview pastoralists and others involved in the livestock chain, from production to final sale. The aim is to collect information to help communities manage risks and improve their livelihoods amid the forces of climate change.

The first CHAINS site centers on northeastern Kenya, where disease and drought are exacerbating land-use conflicts and disrupting cattle movements and trade. The second site is located in the Boran plateau of southern Ethiopia, where it is unclear if small-scale producers of goats, cattle and camels are benefiting from a growing export trade. In addition, large-scale commercial farming operations, drought and disputes over territorial boundaries and wells are undermining indigenous pastoral systems.

CHAINS builds on previous work that Little and his collaborators have done in East Africa on livestock markets and climate change adaptation. Other researchers in the project include Steve Stahl from the International Livestock Research Institute; Workneh Negatu from Addis Ababa Univeristy; Hussein Mahmoud from Pwani University College; Andy Catley from Tufts University; Polly Ericksen from the Livestock Research Institute; and Uriel Kitron and Carla Roncoli, both with Emory.

CHAINS is funded through the Livestock-Climate Change Collaborative Research Program, established through a U.S. AID grant to Colorado State University’s Animal Population Health Institute and the university’s Institute for Livestock and the Environment.

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