Day: March 26, 2008

Visiting Colombia

Colombia is one of the most amazing countries I know for travelers.  Everything a traveler might want—geographical regions from deserts to tropical rain forest, plains to high-mountain glaciers; human diversity from world-class art to world-class archaeology to colonial history, indigenous groups, and the most modern of metropolises.  And the people are warm, and the food plentiful and delicious. So it’s a pleasure to point to several recent articles that highlight the reactivation of tourism in Colombia. 

Today the New York Times covers Bogotá, the capital city of eight million located at 8200 feet, in its piece A Cultural Heart Beats Anew. 

Travel and Leisure covers the magnificent fortified colonial city, home of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this month in Cartagena, A Hidden Retreat. 

And last November the New York Times covered visiting the incredible Tayrona Park, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, in its piece In Colombia A War Zone Reclaims Its Past.  Tayrona, with neighboring Santa Marta, the hacienda of Simon Bolivar, the Guajira, and the Kogi indigenous group which lives in the mountains above, holds some wonderful memories.

Recent Deric Bownds

Deric Bownds has some recent entries which I’ve quite enjoyed.  Our Motor Adaptation as a Process of Reoptimization covers an article on how motor adaptation is not to return to some baseline, but to “maximize performance in that environment.”  An argument closer to both an evolutionary and an embodied view. 

Influence of Language on Brain Activity provides us with an article arguing that “language-processing areas of the brain are directly involved in visual perceptual decisions.” 

Awareness and Attention: Different Brain Processes points out that “subjective visual experience is shaped by the cumulative contribution of two processes operating independently at the neural level, one reflecting visual awareness per se and the other reflecting spatial attention 

And A Primer on Executive Function in the Prefrontal Cortex covers the functional neuroanatomy behind “flexible responses to situations with alternative choices.”

Wednesday Round Up #4

Books

Dr. Ginger Campell and her Brain Science Store
Ginger provides a handy Amazon collection of the books covered in her podcasts

Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time
Building schools amid the Taliban, Americans and more…  Recently covered in the Diane Rehm show.  800+ reviews on Amazon, averaging in at the max 5 stars 

Brian Fagan, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Drought is our great historical enemy, especially in dense populations… Recently reviewed in the NY Times 

Sandra Blakeslee & Matthew Blakeslee, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better
One reviewer: “The brain and the body are not separate entities, but are intertwined, interdependent, and interfunctional. Understanding this fact is essential to understanding how and why body maps work. This book explains that lucidly.” 

Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought
Literary murder and social history—how we view the causes of ourselves

Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
Pharmaceuticals killing people, and companies marketing them more.  See an illuminating review here  

Vision 

Cognitive Daily, Fun With Point-Light Displays—And What That Says About The Visual System
Creating order out of dots… includes some good QuickTime videos

Mixing Memory, Language, Neuroscientific Evidence for the Influence of Language on Color Perception
Critique of imaging, importance of evidence, and our visual system

General 

Cordelia Fine, Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism
Critique of the at times popular view that gender differences are “hard wired”

Brandon Keim, Brain Scanner Can Tell You What You’re Looking At
Functional imaging and a good computational program can “decode” the different photographs people see, reconstructing the content.   Worth a look!

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #4”