The body farm - why we scream

I saw a re-run of Stephen Fry in America this afternoon where he visits the Anthropology Research Facility, better known as the Body Farm in Tennesee. The Body Farm is basically an outdoor forensics lab that studies the decomposition of bodies, in order to make more accurate time-of-death estimations. The first thing I thought was how bizarre. But more importantly I found myself asking why do people scream when they see a dead body?

But first, for those who haven’t heard about this research effort, the story goes something like this. It began with a mistake: Bill Bass, Professor of forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee gets a corpse's time of death wrong by more than a century.

 Bass explains that the body was that of a man killed in the Battle of Nashville in 1864, during the Civil War.

Apparently the body was so well persevered that there was still pink tissue on the femur. This was an example of a growing problem when helping the state police investigates bodies. He took his ideas to the university, and was given land where he could study corpses.

Coming back to the question of why people scream when they see a dead body. Seeing a dead body, particularly that of a recent death rather than skeletal probably makes the psychological state of an individual recognize a "life or death" scenario, which results in an increase in impulse and state of alarm.

The scream may be a leftover from more primitive times. It’s possible that the scream is a mechanism, an aid in the survival of the tribe when the likelihood of risk and danger is determined to be high due to some circumstance, a body. I.e, the scream could very well be for warning others in the tribe – the same others who share the same genes whom will later propagate.

Psychology in the new world physics

We have a reasonably good working knowledge of brain structure as a substrate supporting information processing. This structure–function relationship presupposes that physically describable brain mechanisms explain, questionably, the processing of every kind of psychologically described experience.

There are cases, for instances in which the conscious act of willfully altering the mode by which experiential information is processed itself changes, in systematic ways, the cerebral mechanisms utilized. More recently, neurological literature has coined the term "self-directed neuroplasticity" to serve as a general description of the principle that focused training and effort can systematically alter cerebral function.

At the same time attempts to understand the functional activity of the brain have so far mostly been based on some principles of classical physics that have been challenged by more contemporary quantum-based, uncertainty-bearing new physics.

According to the classical conception of the world, all causal connections between observables, tangibles are explainable in terms of mechanical interactions between material realities. But this restriction on modes of causation is not fully maintained by the currently applied principles of physics, which offer an alternative conceptual foundation for the scientific description and modeling of the causal structure of self-directed neuroplasticity.

Utilizing the conceptual framework of contemporary physics has at least one advantage for neuroscience and neuropsychology - Notions such as "feeling," and "knowing" are intrinsically mentalistic and experiential, cannot be described exclusively in terms of material structure.

Contemporary physics might allow data from the emerging field of self-directed neuroplasticity to be described and understood in a way that is more rationally coherent and ultimately useful than what is permitted by theories in which all causation is required to be fundamentally mechanical.

Something fishy in the way we talk

We know that gestures are a form of nonverbal communication in which visible bodily actions are used to communicate important messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Some of us use gestures more than others and some hand gestures are typically culturally sensitive. The thumbs up gesture in the USA is usually accepted to mean “well done” whilst in countries such as Russia and western Africa it’s an insult.

Gestures are, however, much much more interesting when we consider their origin. It seems fish have a role to play. Apparently, according to Andrew Bass from Cornell University, the evolutionary origins of the behavioral coupling between speech and hand movement is traced back to a developmental compartment in the brain of fishes.

Pectoral appendages (fins and forelimbs) are mainly used for locomotion. However, pectoral appendages also function in social communication for the purposes of making sounds that we simply refer to as non-vocal sonic signals, and for gestural signalling.

Studies of early development in fishes show that neural networks in the brain controlling the more complex vocal and pectoral mechanisms of social signalling among birds and mammals have their ancestral origins in a single compartment of the hindbrain in fishes. This begins to explain the ancestral origins of the neural basis for the close coupling between vocal and pectoral/gestural signalling that is observed among many vertebrate groups, including humans.

Alcohol Related Neurodevelopmental Disorder

I attended the Research-to-Practice Seminar on the topic on Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder a few days ago. Professor Elizabeth Elliott AM, Professor Paediatrics & Child Health, Children’s Hospital Westmead gave a wonderful overview of the research on this disorder.

                                                                     Elizabeth Elliott and Jack Dikian 2013

Given the level of alcohol related problems reported in the media in recent years Prof Elliott fittingly discussed aspects of FASD framed against a broader societal issues involving alcohol consumption.

Concerns have surrounded the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy since biblical times. However research and academic interest in the teratogenic effects of alcohol on the developing embryo is relatively recent. Since Jones first described Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) in the 1970s considerable interest and conflicting evidence have emerged in the areas of FAS and its less severe form, Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAE) or Alcohol Related Neurodevelopmental Disorder (ARND).

The diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is based on a set of criteria comprised of abnormalities in three main categories: growth retardation, characteristic facial features, and central nervous system anomalies (including intellectual impairment). The intellectual impairment associated with FAS is permanent and FAS is now regarded as the leading, preventable cause of non- genetic intellectual handicap.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome A Literature Review - Prepared for the National Expert Advisory Committee on Alcohol By Colleen O’Leary can be found below:

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/alcohol/publishing.nsf/Content/746BAD892492B586CA2572610010C29A/$File/fetalcsyn.pdf