The measurement of brain volumes is a wide and imprecise science that has something in common with the type of generalist thinking that engenders sciences like phrenology or palmistry. Which aren't sciences. Because of the broad correlations between brain size, complex behavior, and evolution, a number of analyses have been applied to investigate these assumptions underlying the development of intelligence and the emergence of cognition. We begin with the assumption that bodies are ‘run’ by their brains, and that an increase in body size would lead to an increase in size of the controlling organ. Also within the background of our thinking is the idea that bigger brains equal better brains: more neurons, more processing, more developed intelligence. But how can we represent these general ideas in a more careful analysis that tells us something significant about brains and behavior?
The devil, of course, is in the details, and it is likely the constituents characteristics of a nervous system that may reveal the significant volume-dependent factors for the emergence of cognition. Cortical folding, lobe development and more extensive brain-body scales have come to describe how the brain as an organ might have anything to do with the body. Fifty years ago Von Bonin evaluated the index of cortical folding (IFC) as a ratio of the total cortical surface (unfolded) to the exposed cortical surface. The measure, however, is largely confounded as a marker of ‘intelligence’ by generalizations across cladistic orders; as a group, cetaceans have evolved extraordinarily high IFCs, larger than most mammals, yet not all whales and dolphins are seen as of the same intelligence. In order to parse apart these differences within orders, the 19th century neuroanatomist Olaf Snell devised an equation using specific ‘scaling effects’ to find the encephalization quotient (EQ) of particular species,
E=csr
where E is the weight of the brain, S is the body weight, C is a constant ‘cephalization factor’, and r is an empirically determined exponential constant for a given order. The EQs for various mammalian species include:
Dolphins 5.31
Chimps 2.47
Rhesus monkeys 2.09
Elephant 1.87
Whale 1.76
Dog 1.17
Cat 1.00
Rat 0.40
Though crude, the equation does help represent a statistic that better reflects relative brain size and cognitive intelligence. Man ends up at the top of the heap with an EQ of 7.44, while dolphins and chimps follow after, supporting the large comparative literature that uses those subjects as models for ‘intelligent behavior’. I remain glibbly mum about what it says about cats.
A problem with the use of these measures, however, is that they all treat the brain as a unitary organ; cognitive neuroscience posits that component processes are driven by differential neural activity. In order to make assumptions about intelligence we must define what component processes (and component brain areas subsuming those processes) inform our notions of intelligence and awareness. Would an animal with a brain that is 20% of its body mass but 97% sensory & motor cortex be smarter than an animal with more primate-like proportions? Even regionally-based analyses of comparative neuroanatomy have their own problems. As regions in the PFC become more functionally defined (e.g., the DLPFC is a ‘working memory’ area), comparative distinctions become more difficult. Behavioral analogues of executive functions are notoriously difficult to find even in higher primates, let alone species that might share a similar IFC or EQ across cladistic orders.
And, of course, why are the measurements of relative or absolute brain sizes important, besides inflating our own species’ egos? Each species evolves a brain size to its need. In order to represent the broad taxonomic trends that follow the adaptations of these needs, measures of brain volume can inform us about the general trends of emergent cognition among species, but they say little about specific within-species variances. A biological statistician looking at a Jerison plot of brain mass/body mass (see the picture) might notice the conspicuous lack of error bars or SD units; given the variability in both brain size and body weight between members of the same species (males vs. females, zoo vs. wild animals, age differe
nces), it may be premature to make assumptions about the amount of variability within or across species. Another problem with relative brain size is the bias introduced in measuring it. For example, take the differences in relative brain size between bats whose diet consists mainly of fruit (frugivores) or leaves (folivores). Regardless of the effects of the diet on brain anatomy, the way each of these foodstuffs are digested affects the calculation of relative brain size: folivores have big stomachs and retain their food for longer in order to digest, thus increasing the total body weight and decreasing the relative brain size.
Where the two fuzzy measures come together is even harder to evaluate. Perhaps there is both some requisite amount of absolute brain mass and some specific cladistic orders that engender cognition. Perhaps we can make a preliminary guess that absolute brain size is best represented by environmental needs (or niches) and the relative brain size by the principles of Hebbian learning. Specifically, animals who meet the requisite absolute brain size may then gone evolve to involve larger brains relative to either body size and possibly a larger intelligence, all on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis, though we shouldn’t always assume that these measures are correlated.
So, about 5 years ago I transferred into a little hippie college in
I landed in
Predictably, the main directive for the entire trip was to avoid Maria. The secondary directive was to find monkeys. And adventure. This mean that I spent fewer nights in the thatch cabin, and more of them roving about the island, sleeping in a tent on the most level surface I could find. Armadillos and coatis were frequent night-visitors, rustling up ground for bugs. I frequently stepped on toads, which in
About halfway through the trip, I went on a hike with a guide named Oscar, Maria, and a couple of British eco-tourists (Nigel and Hussein, he and she), up the coast and into the densest part of the jungle. Oscar is this black Patoi native-type who can pick a berry and say, “you see dis? you make a tea outta dis and it’a cure ya’ asthma,” and “don touch dat tree, it’a make you go blind fo tree hours,” and the like. He’s about 7 feet tall and wears gymshorts and a worn polo shirt. He smells of the ocean.
At the halfway point of our trek through the jungle, we were kind of disappointed because we hadn’t seen any monkeys. A few rare tree frogs, plenty of sloths, and lots of nuts that had been eaten by monkeys, but they have the tendency to scutter off before humans get close. Unless you go to surf cities in
So we are tired and decide to stop at a small lagoon for a swim. We are walking, all five of us, in a line down to the lagoon; I am bringing up the rear because Hussein is having breathing difficulties, and Oscar wants me to make sure she doesn’t trail behind and collapse. So we’re going slow. As we walk down, there are lots of big tree trunks to walk over, and the rule here is, (remember this for your next jungle safari), you jump off the log, rather than just stepping down. I can’t remember what I did, exactly, but as I descended from a particular large fallen juju tree, I felt something slam against the back of my pants and land 5 feet in front of me. I saw X’s. Now, I grew up in
It’s the first and only time I’ve ever screamed out ‘fuck’ without ever meaning to do so. I imagine that if I’m ever tortured with hot iron buttplugs I might make a similar sound; but at least that I’ll anticipate. Oscar walked back up and peered over to where I was staring. “Oh, dat is de famous eckees (equis = X in spanish) snake. Yeah, dat’s snake don like noise.” Or Italians, apparently. So Oscar cuts down a small tree, cuts it into a fork, because apparently he wants to catch the thing. He sneaks over, while the snake has been coiled up a few feet from me, and tries to catch it’s head in the fork. Miss. The snake runs (slithers) away, and into the lagoon, away from the tall Patoi. But Oscar follows him over, into the lagoon, and gets waist-deep before the snake turns around. I’ve got this great shot of the two of them, the snake coiled in the water, and Oscar with his stick raised high, both of them ready to strike. Oscar won. He slammed down the stick, 5 or 6 times, turning the water red with the snake’s blood.
He then takes the snakes body, lifts it up with the stick, and lays it on the bank that the four of us are standing. He says to me, “You want de skin, man?”
The show itself was far outside any such disappointing behavior; loud, and less strategic, the concert was a great sonic embellishment of their albums. The differences in tryin
g to reproduce are largely supplanted by noise and power, though Matt Friedberger had a decent set of effects pedals to mimic the orchestra weirdness of Blueberry Boat and Gallowsbird. The Who and Led Zepplin were on the stage in spirit as much as any other influence, much moreso than on their albums. Another big difference was Eleanor taking over most of the vocals, which is no surprise given the versatility and personality of her voice, but it disappointed me not hearing the of Matt’s lines from “Chief Inspector Blancheflower”:
And said Michael is there something that you need to say to me?
Well I don’t know how to tell you.
You can tell me any
Thing that you want ‘cept I started seeing Jenny:
I started seeing Jenny.
My Jenny?
And he looked down at the floor.
You know damn well she ain’t your Jenny no more.
- An incredible analysis of all the songs on Blueberry Boat
- Band Website
Dale Peck. Firebrand Literary Journalist. Publishing Badboy. Critical Hatchet-Man. I find it rather difficult to speak about the contrarians that i admire. Which is not to say that my admiration extends far beyond the words they get on a page. I suppose a nasty review or an opposing view is always more fun to read than a glowing or conciliatory one.
were less kind, holding a grudge for nearly 7 years against their native son. The characters in the novel are based on real people with the names changed and often times the portraits painted are not flattering. Many in Asheville took the book literally. So much so that for six years the Pack Memorial Library did not have a copy of the book. Not until F. Scott Fitzgerald, after being told the Library did not have a copy, went out and bought two and brought them there himself.
Before I started reading Tristram Shandy, I decided that the best way to do so would be to write it. The initial drive, the reason that I sought out the book to begin with, was because of a movie about the book that opened this week, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, starring Steve Coogan and directed by Michael Windterbottom, who also directed 9 Songs and 24-hr Party People. I, precedingly, had heard about the movie from reviews—reviews are inescapable in this era, they are ceded through all medias and avenues for those willing to give a fourth of a damn—and these reviews were on the whole positive. “Wonderfully absurd,” “mind-tickling” or “surprisingly unpretentious.” Everyone seemed to agree that Michael Winterbottom’s interpretation of the novel was at the least charming. Which is, I believe, a rare accolade for a movie with central metafictional elements: stories outside stories that are about the stories both, well, they tend to get the critical shaft.
And so, if I was to do the experience any justice, I had best write the story myself. I situated myself by the window of a local café (one that necessarily serves a decent array of liquors), and propped up a laptop and a used copy of Lawrence Stern’s most famous work. And, of course, I musn’t start at the beginning, so I flipped open to an arbitrary page and began typing the beginning of chapter 38 from Book III:
O Slawkenbergius! Thou faithful analyzer of my Disgrazias—though sad foreteller of so many of the whips and short turns which in one stage or other of my life have come slap upon me from the shortness of my nose, and no other cause that I am conscious of.
How fortuitous, right? What language, right off! Well, I suppose that it might have been luckier, or more apt, to come upon some passage about the beginning of something, or about the copying of something, or about some grad student in a Carolina café typing out a novel 200 years hence, but really, how much better can you get than Slawkenbergius? I didn’t even know what it meant! Who does?
Apparently not Microsoft Word. The mechanics of typing a novel have their own quirks, in comparison to the just the usual, lazy practice of reading it. The word processing program I was using to type the book out (good thing it was doing the processing, because I was doing less and less) was having problems with names like Slawkenbergius, or Prignitz, or 19th century conventions like heard’st and sensorium and makind—oops, that last one was just an unfortunate misspelling of mine. It did, however, redress my incorrect ‘cooly’ as ‘coolly.’ Give and take, my friends, give and take.
And so, as the typing and the drinking ran on in concert, the book and the experience flowed together in an every more lucid and shallow café experience. The this’ turned into his’, my ‘collusions’ turned into ‘collisions,’ and I was no longer able to guess the smudged words of my 2nd-hand text. Oddly, the spelling of Slawkenbergius became easier as time progressed. Perhaps, or perhaps not, I lost the narrative thread. Perhaps, because I found myself being distracted by nearly every moving object in my periphery, yet perhaps not, because when I was done staring at the perpetual motion alloy rims and looked back at the book, I started noticing the metafictional elements sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word. Not only references to the work under discussion, but questions of method, of binding, of production and post-production, and commentaries from also-fictional literary colleagues and critics. And reviewers.
After such a stunning luck with the invectives at the beginning of the chapter, the machinations underway in the story quickly made apparent that this was a disastrous way to begin this particular book. Already I’m in the middle of the career of the author’s literary alter-ego, well past the trappings of his youth and his introduction to the age of discernment. Suddenly I’m reading about the main opus of this fictional author Slawkenbergius, a book described by Sterne as ‘a thorough-stitched digest…comprehending in it all that is or can be needful.’ I was face first with the same elements and themes that were in my head before i opened the book: the completeness of literature, the potentials of such, and the examination of such by others post-production. Which, in some way, is great: I’ve never got exactly what I wanted out of a book so quickly. Given the stated aims of this here experience (ok, unnecessary confession, the first sentence of this entry was written before the book was open), I only had to read a few sentences to get reference to a nonexistent digest which contained so prodigious a source of knowledge.
Of course, when I found out what that great compendium was actually about—actual noses—my lucidity and my understanding began a slow decent back to earth, and I decided to hold off on the ale and opt for caffeine. For the best, I am sure. One of the main trappings of a metafictional book is its lack of concreteness, and so it was a relief to know that I might learn a bit more than my own awareness of reading (and, of course, writing) Tristram Shandy.
The brain does some wonderful things. It lets you see colors, it processes time and space, it organizes your motions, and it often remembers your name. All important and necessary functions in the world of today, and all with their own unique characteristics that help make our experience as humans so vivid. Science and psychology has sought to ask many questions about how the brain does these things, and in the process has answered many important questions and bettered many lives. Take Parkinson’s Disease, a complex brain disorder ameliorated by the use of L-DOPA, or surgical cures for epilepsy, over 75% effective in alleviating debilitating seizures. Or even new Alzheimer’s drugs which may stem the ebb of memory loss occurring in that affliction. One of the major tools for investigating brain diseases and brain functions is the functional magnetic resonance image scanner (fMRI for short). An fMRI scanner is a large, loud magnetic device that allows researchers to peer inside the living brain and look at what lights up inside during complex and vital functions.
Or, sometimes, not-so complex or vital functions. Since the scanner requires a subject to lay flat and relatively motionless during the scan, there are some definite physical constraints on what sorts of real-life behaviors you can look at. Outside of that, you can look at the brain doing any number of oddball activities. Since scanners usually have headphones and a TV screen (or a projection of one) inside the scanner, scientists can show you anything from Monet to pictures of butternut squash, and provide a soundtrack, no less. A number of recent studies have taken to the weirder possibilities of brain science. Steven Quartz and his team at CalTech sought to look for the “neural correlates of cool” by showing subjects inside the scanner pictures of 140 different products and celebrities; Quartz then classified subjects into High Cool (trendsetters), High Uncool (critics), and Low Cool (losers), based upon their biological responses to those pictures—not their actual vocal responses. Evidently, there’s no hiding behind your secret Lawrence Welk obsession; the scanner sees all.
If that’s not weird enough for you, then how about a study of male ejaculation? Researchers in the
And, for those less inclined to participate in a sex act within large supermagnetic scientific devices, there are more passive tasks. Like watching a movie. Scientists at 
ot without its carefully analyzed results: the data showed that different brains showed the same response to the same scenes in the movie. When Tuco assembled his new gun and carefully used his fingers to test the revolver’s cylinder, everyone in the study showed the same activity in brain regions responsible for hand movements; a comforting notion that perhaps we are more alike than we know.
Interesting results from a scientific premise that might have seemed more like a Blockbuster night than a report worthy of the journal Science. Which brings to mind an interesting point: what do these studies mean? How do we interpret them? Scientists argue that knowing the individual variations in response to pictures and movies, helps to aid in the proper diagnosis and treatment of certain visual brain disorders, and even how well those diagnoses can be generalized. The Dutch study mentioned above even claims important implications for the growing (apologies) industry of male sexual function. However the most common—and perhaps most valid—justification for these studies may be the same thing these scientists tell their grant committees; that this information can be helpful to understanding the brain as a whole and that any task, no matter how weird, may give us a better picture of what’s happening inside.
