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By now, it should come as no surprise when scientists discover yet another case of experience changing the brain. From the sensory information we absorb to the movements we make, our lives leave footprints on the bumps and fissures of our cortex, so much so that experiences can alter "hard-wired" brain structures. Through rehab, stroke patients can coax a region of the motor cortex on the opposite side of the damaged region to pinch-hit, restoring lost mobility; volunteers who are blindfolded for just five days can reprogram their visual cortex to process sound and touch.
Still, scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we ("we" being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The "me" circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.
"Cultural neuroscience," as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Some of the findings, as with the "me/mom" circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences. For instance, it is a cultural cliche that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians pay attention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism-collectivism split). Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non-Asian—Americans recruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations—holistic context—while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects.
Psychologist Nalini Ambady of Tufts found something similar when she and colleagues showed drawings of people in a submissive pose (head down, shoulders hunched) or a dominant one (arms crossed, face forward) to Japanese and Americans. The brain's dopamine-fueled reward circuit became most active at the sight of the stance—dominant for Americans, submissive for Japanese—that each volunteer's culture most values, they reported in 2009. This raises an obvious chicken-and-egg question.
Cultural neuroscience wouldn't be making waves if it found neurobiological bases only for well-known cultural differences. It is also uncovering the unexpected. For instance, a 2006 study found that native Chinese speakers use a different region of the brain to do simple arithmetic (3 + 4) or decide which number is larger than native English speakers do, even though both use Arabic numerals. The Chinese use the circuits that process visual and spatial information and plan movements (the latter may be related to the use of the abacus). But English speakers use language circuits. It is as if the West conceives numbers as just words, but the East imbues them with symbolic, spatial freight. "One would think that neural processes involving basic mathematical computations are universal," says Ambady, but they "seem to be culture-specific. "
Not to be the skunk at this party, but I think it's important to ask whether neuroscience reveals anything more than we already know from, say, anthropology. For instance, it's well known that East Asian cultures prize the collective over the individual, and that Americans do the opposite.
Ambady thinks cultural neuroscience does advance understanding. Take the me/mom finding, which, she argues, "att
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A university of California counselor said ______.
Futurists love computers. After all, 40 years ago electronic digital computers didn't exist; today microchips (微型集成电路片) as tiny as a baby's fingernail are making all sorts of tasks faster and easier. Surely the future hold still more miracles.
Some of the computer experiments now going inspire imagination of the future. For example, scientists are working in devices that can electronically perform. some sight and hearing functions, which could make easier for the blind and deaf. They are also working on artificial arms and legs that respond to the electric impulses (脉冲) produced by the human brain. Scientists hope that someday a person who has lost an arm could still have near-normal brain control over an artificial arm.
Video games, computerized effects in movies, and real-life training machines now being used by the U. S. Army are causing some people to predict new educational uses for computers. Computers could someday be used to imitate travel to other planets, to explore the ocean floor or to look inside an atom.
Experiment with electronic banking and shopping inspire predictions that these activities will soon be done from home computer terminals (终端) . Cars, too, might be equipped with computers to help drivers find their way around or to communicate with home and office computers.
Many people, including handicapped (残废的) workers with limited ability to move around, already are working at home using computer terminals. Each terminal is connected to a system at a company's main office. Some futurists say the day may come when few people will have to leave home to go to work—they'll just turn on a terminal.
Which of the following would be the most appropriate title for the passage？
It can be inferred from the passage that ______.
The FDA may rescind its approval of Avastin, a colon-cancer drug.
If the summer of 2009 was the season of "death panels," as the debate over health-care reform. exploded, this is the season of "17.5k dead women a year." That's the body count scaremongers are predicting if the Food and Drug Administration rescinds its provisional approval of the drug Avastin for metastatic breast cancer, a decision expected by year's end. Although the move has nothing to do with the new health-care law, uncertainty about "Obama-care" has given opponents an opening to terrify people about what's coming—like bureaucrats rationing health care to save money.
The reality is far different and, for those who care more about helping cancer patients than about scoring political points, much sadder. That's because in 2008, when the FDA gave "fast track" approval for Avastin in breast cancer that has metastasized—usually to the lungs, bones, liver, or brain—it was conditional on the manufacturer, Genentech, running additional clinical trials of the drug's safety and efficacy. There was good reason for that. Avastin is an angiogenesis inhibitor, a class of cancer drugs that have not lived up to their hype: although they stop one mechanism by which malignant cells grow blood vessels to sustain them, the cells often activate a different mechanism and go on proliferating.
Although Avastin does extend the lives of patients with metastatic colorectal and kidney cancer, and remains FDA-approved for those uses, the new studies show it does not work the same miracle against metastatic breast cancer (MBC). Instead, Avastin increased what's called progression-free survival (how long before cancer spreads or grows) by about one to three weeks, depending on which chemo agent it was paired with. But it did not keep women alive any longer than chemo alone. To some advocates, progression-free survival without an increase in overall survival is still welcome, since it suggests patients have a better quality of life during their last months.
But it's hard to make that case for Avastin. Not only did it not keep women alive, but it also caused hypertension, hemorrhaging, bowel perforations, and other side effects. "It seems as if the drug's toxicity cancels out any benefit," cancer surgeon David Gorski of the Karmanos Cancer Institute told me. Perforated bowels do not equal a better quality of life.
These dismal results are what led an FDA panel to vote 12—1 in July to rescind the conditional approval of Avastin for MBC. Critics of health-care reform, predictably, saw nefarious motives-—in particular, evidence that Obamacare will ration expensive drugs. (Avastin costs some $88,000 a year, though few patients live that long.) The Wall Street Journal editorialized about the "Avastin mugging," and Sen. David Vitter accused the FDA of "assigning a value to a day of a person's life. "
If Avastin did extend lives for, let's say, $ 10,000 a day, Vitter might have a case. But it doesn't extend life at all. That makes allegations like the 17,500 dead women (from a right-wing blog) "utter demagoguery of the most vile and despicable sort," Gorski wrote on the blog Science-Based Medicine.
There are stories galore of women with metastatic breast cancer who are alive "because of Avastin. " Indeed, patients have been flooding the airwaves and blogosphere with claims that Avastin helped them. But the only way to tell whether Avastin deserves the credit for keeping patients alive is through large studies. "There are always patients who live longer than average," biostatistician Donald Berry of the MD？ Anderson Cancer Center told me. "They attribute it to the treatment; people love to make attributions. " But when the proportion of patients alive at any given time in a study is the same whether they are receiving Avastin or not—as the two large trials found—then crediting Avastin is "very
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