The good stuff for this week, then anthropology and the mind, finished off by a great set of readings that consider changes in education and academia.
Top of the List
Michael Jernigan, The Minefield at Home
A US soldier from Iraq writes on injury, trauma, PTSD and coming home. A powerful first-person account that is part of the NY Times series, Home Fires: American Veterans on the Post-War Life.
Dave Munger, In Which I Resist Writing The Obvious Headline
Finding a genetic basis for anger using fMRI research with genetic analysis. Oh the juicy, misleading titles that could have been.
Nate Beeler, American Television Takes A Toll On The Brain
Ah, the cartoon that captures reality television. Except So You Think You Can Dance of course.
Joe Brewer and George Lakoff, Why Voters Aren’t Motivated By A Laundry List Of Positions On Issues
An overture to cognitive policy – the principles, frames, and point of views that make sense of political development.
For more, here’s Cognitive Policy Works: Politics For Real People basic statement on Cognitive Policy: “Cognitive policy is about the values and ideas that both motivate the policy goals and that have to be uppermost in the minds of the public and the media in order for the policy to seem so much a matter of common sense that it will be readily accepted.”
Alex Hutchinson, Global Impositioning Systems
The evils of GPS, or why not figuring how to get places reduces our sense of direction (it’s a skill after all)
Marco Roth, The Rise of the Neuronovel
An in-depth and critical essay on writers’ turn to writing not about the mind but about the brain. Most recommended.
Anthropology
Ed Yong, Culture Shapes The Tools That Chimps Use To Get Honey
Discusses the skills and strengths of chimps that give them an advantage in obtaining food and surviving.
Neuroanthropology 