>From: ">To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: FW: What do you think when you look at...
>Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 09:30:34 -0400
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>-----Original Message-----
>From: Wone, Al
>Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 9:15 AM
>To: CUNNINGHAM RONALD (spl1rdc) (E-mail); Thomas, Essa
>Subject: FW: What do you think when you look at...
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>Interesting
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>-----Original Message-----
>From: Almuatalib Hasan Numanlia Wone [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2000 10:04 PM
>To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;@mindspring.com;
>Subject: What do you think when you look at...
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>Science
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>September 5, 2000
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>How, but Not Why, the Brain Distinguishes Race
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>By DAVID BERREBY
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>Fred LeBlanc for The New York Times (top); Frances Roberts for The New York
>Times (above)
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>Allen J. Hart, top, a social psychologist at Amherst College, and Prof.
>Elizabeth A. Phelps, above, a neuroscientist at New York University, are
>among the researchers studying what happens in the brain when it perceives
>race.
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>Related Articles
>• Do
><http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/082200sci-genetics-race.htm
>l> Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows (August 22, 2000)
>• How Race Is Lived  <http://www.nytimes.com/race> in America
>• Science/Health <http://www.nytimes.com/science>
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>fter a decade of mapping brains in tasks like recalling numbers, perceiving
>facial expressions and using verbs, neuroscientists have recently homed in
>on a much more controversial subject: the act of categorizing other human
>beings.
>In recently published papers, two separate teams of brain scanners joined
>by
>social psychologists describe how one particular part of the brain becomes
>more active when people look at members of a different race.
>Scientists involved in both studies emphasize that the work does not mean
>racial differences are more scientifically real than, say, ghosts or
>leprechauns — both of which would also produce measurable effects in the
>brains of people who were scared of them. Nor are they surprised that
>looking at people from a different race causes changes in the brain.
>"Everything causes changes in the brain," said Dr. Elizabeth A. Phelps, a
>neuroscientist at New York University.
>But the two papers are the first published efforts to map exactly what
>happens in the brain when it perceives a racial difference. It is the first
>time neuroscientists have published papers on the kinds of messy questions
>many prefer to leave to social psychologists and sociologists.
>"What really stands out in this work is the union of social psychology,
>neuroimaging and psychiatry," said Dr. Allen J. Hart, a social psychologist
>at Amherst College who worked on one of the studies, which appeared in the
>Aug. 3 issue of the journal NeuroReport. "Social psychologists have been
>heading toward the study of emotions and group perception, and the imagers
>have been heading toward mapping emotion. And now we've met."
>Both teams — Dr. Hart and his colleagues, who used a magnetic resonance
>imaging scanner at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and a
>Yale-N.Y.U. collaboration that used Yale's M.R.I. scanner — focused on the
>amygdala, a well-studied cluster of nerves that lies deep inside each brain
>hemisphere. Because of its involvement in strong emotions, memory and
>learning rules, the amygdala is a promising target for research on how
>perceptions of race could affect the brain, the researchers said.
>Work on animals and people suggests the amygdala behaves like a spotlight,
>calling attention to matters that are new, exciting and important to know
>more about. "It's a learning area," said Dr. Paul Whalen, a neurobiologist
>at the University of Wisconsin who was the amygdala expert on the
>Massachusetts General study.
>"It really seems to be about noticing," said Dr. Phelps, a co-author of the
>Yale-N.Y.U. paper. "It's involved in grasping that something is emotionally
>significant."
>In the Mass General experiment, scientists placed four men (two who
>described themselves as black and two who said they were white) and four
>women (divided the same way by race) in an M.R.I. scanner. As they lay in
>the tunnel, with the machine banging and clanging as its powerful magnets
>shifted alignment, the volunteers saw photographs of black and white faces
>flash by.
>An M.R.I. device feeds magnetic signals into a computer, which turns them
>into an image in which the parts of the brain with concentrations of
>glucose
>and oxygen — the fuel of brain-cell activity — are "lit up." The earliest
>scans in the Mass General experiment showed the volunteers had nearly equal
>amounts of amygdala activity no matter whose pictures were flashed.
>That is not surprising, Dr. Whalen said, because in a novel setting "the
>amygdala fires to everything at first." But after a short time had passed,
>one set of pictures elicited more firing up than the other. White subjects
>showed lower amounts of amygdala activity when they looked at white faces;
>blacks showed less amygdala activity when they looked at blacks.
>The study, the authors noted, did not look at other areas of the brain (the
>amygdala is branched into many other regions). Nor did it link amygdala
>activity to any particular behavior or prejudice. Indeed, after the tests,
>the volunteers said they felt no strong emotions about the photographs, one
>way or the other.
>The other study, being published today in The Journal of Cognitive
>Neuroscience, tried to address this by relating amygdala activity to
>particular states of mind. Conceived by Dr. Phelps and Dr. Mahzarin R.
>Banaji, a social psychologist at Yale, this experiment used only white
>volunteers. They found that those whose amygdalas fired up most at the
>sight
>of blacks were those who scored higher on two other measures of unconscious
>feelings about blacks.
>The 14 volunteers in the Yale scanner saw pictures of young men of both
>races. Days later, the researchers gave the volunteers two other tests to
>measure their unconscious responses to blacks.
>In one, the volunteers sat at computers and classified the photographs by
>race at the same time as they classified words flashing on the screen as
>either "good" or "bad."
>When they take this "implicit association test," Dr. Banaji said, many
>Americans (most whites and half of blacks) are measurably quicker to
>associate positive words like joy, love and peace with whites and negative
>words like cancer, bomb and devil with blacks. The responses are outside
>conscious control, Dr. Banaji said. People whose conscious political
>positions are egalitarian and antiracist are often upset to find that they,
>too, were quicker to be positive about whites and negative about blacks.
>True to Dr. Banaji's expectations, she said, most volunteers in this study
>showed a preference for white faces over black. And those who showed the
>most unconscious preference were those whose amygdalas showed the most
>activity when they looked at black faces.
>The Yale-N.Y.U. team also showed the photographs again to the volunteers
>while electrodes measured how strongly the muscles around their eyes were
>preparing to blink. Unconsciously preparing to blink is a response to
>something alarming, and the amygdala is clearly on the circuit of brain
>areas that creates the response, Dr. Phelps explained.
>Knowing a volunteer's level of amygdala activity at the sight of black
>faces, the team's paper says, also allowed them to predict how he would
>score on the startle measure. "We didn't see the amygdala effect in
>everybody, but when we did see it, we found we could make the prediction,"
>Dr. Phelps said.
>In a second experiment, the N.Y.U.-Yale group showed a new batch of
>volunteers a set of famous faces — including Joe Namath, Tom Cruise, Denzel
>Washington and Michael Jordan. "We thought perhaps familiarity with a
>person
>would remove the effect," Dr. Phelps said. And, in fact, with famous faces,
>the racial difference in amygdala reactions disappeared.
>"Of course, it could also be an effect of fame, rather than just that these
>faces were familiar," Dr. Phelps said. "We don't know."
>In fact, authors of both papers emphasize that there is a lot they do not
>know. Neuroimagers do not map the whole brain any more than tourists on a
>tight schedule would visit every block in Manhattan. The scientists
>concentrate on one landmark at a time, which leaves open many questions
>about what is happening in the other parts of the brain to which the
>amygdala has connecting fibers.
>Beyond the uncertainty, neuroscientists interviewed about the two papers
>were uncomfortable with issues like stereotype, prejudice and identity. But
>they believed that those issues were relevant to their field. The reason,
>several said, is that there is no such thing as "the brain." Each brain is
>different, having been shaped by its environment.
>A large part of a person's environment is other people. So one of the most
>important ways that a brain is shaped is by experiencing how other brains
>judge its owner. That deserves more attention than it has gotten, several
>researchers said. For example, the NeuroReport paper notes that brain
>scanners have generally used photos of white faces when they studied how
>"the brain" reacts to "the face." If blacks respond differently to white
>faces than do whites, that fact will have to be taken into account, the
>authors write.
>Until the recent work, "we in neuroimaging have attempted to minimize the
>differences among people," said Dr. John Gabrieli, a brain researcher at
>Stanford. "We have people do things like memorize nonsense words, as if we
>could somehow get at pure thought, unmediated by the environment. It's not
>clear to me why we've had many studies of things like short-term memory for
>numbers before we had even one on the social influence of brain function."
>With so many questions, the scientists hesitate to speculate about what the
>amygdala work means. Among the theories, there is "bottom up" — the
>amygdala, always seeking important information, notices a racial difference
>and that perception then goes into the conscious thoughts. But there is
>also
>"top down" — racial thinking, picked up from other people, teaches the
>amygdala that race is important to notice.
>Very likely, Dr. Whalen says, the best explanation will have a bit of both
>top and bottom in it. It could be that the mind is tuned to racial
>difference in a way it is not to others, he speculated. At the same time,
>he
>said, "learning trumps everything else" in the life of the brain. For
>example, he expects that the amygdala of a black person raised among whites
>would "scan" like that of a white person. "It's not the color of the skin
>of
>the person in the magnet," he said. "It's what color the eyes are used to
>seeing."
>Despite their unease about venturing into what one journal recently called
>"social neuroscience," none of the researchers doubts that the work will
>continue.
>"Everyone knows it's preliminary and impossible to interpret at this
>point,"
>Dr. Whalen said of the studies. "But that doesn't make the answers any less
>interesting."
>
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>Sincerely,
>
>Almuatalib Hasan  Numanlia Wone
>"Live each day as if you will live forever.  Worship each day as if each
>day
>is your last"
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