These are posts when we were just getting started, and haven’t seen as much love as some more recent or more popular ones. My new student assistant Erin Brennan helped me pick them out, so many thanks to her.

Neuroanthropology

Wending between Faust and Wimsatt

On Stress – Blakey

Addiction and Our Faultlines

Visual Rewards

Human Variation

Obama and Race

Puzzles and Cultural Difference

Loneliness and Health: Experience, Stress, and Genetics

Will Power as Mental Muscle

Anthropology

The Family Dinner Deconstructed

Prison Nation

Play

The Neurobiology of Play

Taking Play Seriously

Play and Culture

Play and Embodiment

Today I will cover Greg’s posts. I’ve decided to split the posts into three themes: (1) work that comes out of Greg’s main research interests in perception, sport, and skilled activity; (2) his critical takes on ideas of “innateness” (whether in neuroscience or in evolutionary psychology); and (3) his anthropological examination and reflection of recent mind/brain research.

Perception and Skilled Action

Exercise is ‘mindset’ as well as activity

Brainy muscles

Tools, mirrors and the expandable body

Trust your hand, not your eyes

Children integrating their senses

Critique

Craving money, chocolate… and justice

‘Innate’ fear of snakes?

More on persuasive, irrelevant ‘neuroscience’

Anthropology and Neuroscience

Thinking about how others think: two ways?

(insert clever French grammar title here)

‘Blind to change’ or just ‘mostly blind’?

Tightening your belt on your mind

ARC's Splash Mural

ARC has three main projects, one on vital systems security, another on biopolitics, and the final one covering synthetic biology and nanotechnology. This synthetic anthropos (“artful design and composition of the human thing”) is the most relevant to this site, and is run by Paul Rabinow.

ARC also has a collection of on-line “concept” papers, alongside working papers and web documents within each project. Chris Kelty, one of the directors of ARC, also posts on Savage Minds and wrote recently that “ARC Seeks Passengers and Drivers.” So check that out.

BIOS is the “international centre for research and policy on social aspects of the life sciences and biomedicine.” As another consortium, they have a wide-ranging set of research themes including biopolitics, neuroscience and society, and biomedicine and identity.

There is also a podcast available, “Beyond the Genome: the Challenge of Synthetic Biology“, based on a distinguished panel discussion on “Synthetic biology is heralded as the next frontier. But what is synthetic biology and how do we imagine its future directions?”

BIOS also gave me this link to the affiliated European Neuroscience and Society Network, “a multidisciplinary forum for timely engagement with the social, political and economic implications of developments in the neurosciences.” Check out the publications list by ENSN members, with quite a few articles that you can download. One interesting one that jumped out at me is Folk Neurology and the Remaking of Identity.

I found out about this through “Some Guy Went and Built a Sentry Gun” which provides some much needed cultural context, including 134 comments.

As befits the site, there is a video theme to this Encephalon, with a Steven Pinker intro, Bjoern Brembs covering spontaneous behavior (in drosophila), Jonathan Haidt on morality and happiness, Laura Collins on anorexia, The Karen Carpenter Story (also anorexia), Albert Bandura and social aggression, and a sleep walking robot all featured onsite!

A couple other posts that jumped out at me were Modern Medicine for Manipulation of the Mind on oxytocin, trust and pharmacological treatment and Socializing Promotes Survival of New Nerve Cells and May Preserve Memory on zebra finches and neurogenesis.

Also to note, we will be hosting the next Encephalon on June 23rd, so please send in your submissions to encephalon dot host @ gmail dot com before then!

The hat tip goes to the very cool Bioephemera, or biology + art (also see the old version here for more art & biology). That led me to Saint Gasoline, or a fine mixture of intellectualism and fart jokes, and their discussion of the trolley problem.

Talking it out has long been considered essential to recovering from a trauma. But new research shows that expressing one’s thoughts and feelings after a traumatic event is not necessary for long-term emotional and physical health, a finding that could change the way institutions devote money and resources to mental health services following collective traumas.

The research looked at the effects of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and found that ‘individuals who communicated their thoughts and feelings about the attacks reported more physical health problems and emotional distress over time, even after controlling for exposure to and distance from the attacks.’

What I appreciated about the release though is that Silver didn’t feel the need to propose that a uniform therapy form need replace the current orthodoxy. That is, she simply acknowledges that people are different, and that different coping and recovery techniques might work for various people. I found the lack of one-solution-fits-all rhetoric pretty appealing. Certainly, we find in different cultures that people cope in a variety of ways; imposing therapeutic techniques, rather than just creating or offering therapeutic opportunities, often is counterproductive.

The page is provided by the Online Education Database, which appears to be a network of online educational resources.

Thanks to Fiona for providing it, although the anthropologist in me is still squeamish with the notion of ‘brain health.’ I still think that it often encourages an idea that there is a ‘best way’ to have a brain, when, in fact, there are a number of ways that brains are grown, and they likely all have mixed ‘health’ consequences. But I’ll write more on that some other time…

I wish it could embed it here, but here’s the Colbert Report link at least.