Daniel Lende of the University of Notre Dame.

Daniel Lende is a neuroanthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. He and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discuss what this new field can teach us about craving, capoeira and the link between the brain and culture.

LEHRER: You’re a neuroanthropologist. What’s that?

LENDE: Someone who thinks that both brains and culture make us who we are, so good research needs to create bridges between anthropology and neuroscience.

The problem is that most modern science is still full of dichotomies. Culture versus biology is one of the biggest. I see it as the new nature-nurture debate. Our genes and our brains make us who we are. No, it’s language and history. The argument often degenerates from there.

How can we escape such useless dichotomies? As a neuroanthropologist, I have found it important to focus on concrete problems where we can build interdisciplinary understanding step-by-step. Anthropologists are generally trained to focus on practices, meaning, embodiment, inequality, social contexts and relationships. The trick is figuring out how these categories match up with new discoveries in the brain sciences.

LEHRER: One of those concrete problems that you’ve studied is craving. What can neuroanthropology teach us about craving and its most extreme form, addiction?

LENDE: Let’s begin with the neuroscience. In the scientific literature on addiction, dopamine has often been made out as the “bad boy” behind substance abuse. Although dopamine is often associated with the experience of pleasure—it represents “rewards,” such as chocolate cake or crack cocaine—it also helps make us want stuff. Wanting just needs a little push to get to craving.
 
There is one small problem: much of the dopamine research is done through lab work with rats and monkeys. As I tell my students, that is not the same as getting a late night pizza craving and picking up the phone to dial Dominos.

But I did see in my work with Colombian adolescents that research on incentive motivation and dopamine could help me understand how some adolescents got so deeply involved with drug use.

So I asked myself: How could I put this genuine advance in neuroscience into practice to actually understand people? As with almost all neuroscience research, the results are exciting, but they suffer from a serious translation problem.

This predicament is where neuroanthropology can be so helpful. In order to draw connections between neuroscience and real world situations, I went out and talked to people to understand craving and addiction from their point of view. This type of real-world data can both challenge and inform ideas based on animal models and neuroimaging studies.

In translating the dopamine research, my work with adolescents proved crucial. They knew what they experienced far better than I did. Using systematic interviews across a range of involvement with drugs (hard-core users to having never tried drugs), I saw three areas of overlap between research on dopamine and compulsive involvement with addictive substances.

First was the emphasis that researchers placed on “wanting.” I was lucky in Colombia; addicted adolescents often described their experiences as “querer más y más,” to want more and more. Second, dopamine affects shifts in attention, which meant that some adolescents couldn’t focus on anything else when they knew an opportunity to consume was about to come along. Third, adolescents described a sense of being pushed toward something—an urge that rose up without conscious desire.