Great stuff covering the breadth of neuroanthropology – learning, research, addiction, art and criticism, and thinking about games and game design. One immersive round-up.

For our latest onsite, you can see Can Video Games Actually Be Good For You?, Robbie Cooper – Immersion, and the Contemporary Culture of Entertainment.

Also, the last round-up on video games, brain and psychology is one of our more popular posts, and includes links to more on-site stuff. Or simply check out our video game category.

Learning

Alvaro Pascual-Leone & Lotfi B. Merabet, Take Two Video Games and Call Me in the Morning
Scientific American article on how it can, with some quite context on how to think about plasticity, motivation, and virtuality.

Michael Abbott, Teach Me to Play
Great post at The Brainy Gamer about learning styles and game designs. See also his reporting from the Games for Change conference, Flashes of Light

Ben Silverman, Is Gaming Good for the Mind?
Certainly helps seniors with cognition. And it’s a commercial game, Boom Blox on the Wii.

UPI, Video Game Improves Seniors’ Mental Skills
So go play Rise of Nations!

Ute Ritterfeld, Michael Cody & Peter Vorderer, Serious Games: Mechanisms and Effects
Forthcoming edited volume that looks quite good – here’s the Routledge description

Braid, A Short Essay about Serious Games
We just follow the yellow line… A critical take on what games teach us

Adam Bohanon, Computer-based Games and Knowledge Acquisition and Retention
A summary of a recent study – not really more effective than traditional approaches. Not worse either.

Gideon Caplovitz & Sabine Kastner, Carrot Sticks or Joysticks: Video Games Improve Vision.
It’s behind Nature Neuroscience’s formidable wall, but at least you get the citation

Greg West et al., Visuospatial Experience Modulates Attentional Capture: Evidence from Action Video Game Players
Another abstract-only link, but check this out: using video games to show that “visuospatial experience modulates the earliest sensory aspects of visual processing”

Research

Amanda Lenhart, Teens, Video Games and Civics
A new Pew study is summarized. Virtually all American teens play, and the experience is rich and varied

Nick Yee, The Unbearable Likeness of Being
Reflections on embodiment in virtual worlds after ten years studying them, part of the Daedalus Project

Martin Klasen et al., Think Aloud during fMRI: Neuronal Correlates of Subjective Experience in Video Games
Pdf of a short article that outlines a quite intriguing method for matching fMRI work with participants voicing their thoughts as they play. Probably could be employed with a much wider range of activites.

Chris Lavigne, Why Video Game Research Is Flawed
Researchers don’t understand video games and so build bad studies that yield flawed results, or “What do 23 martial-arts fighters have in common with a talking Australian marsupial? According to one team of video game researchers, they’re identical.”

Diana @ CyberAnthro , The Information Needs of Gamers: A User Group Analysis
Information science, anthropology, and a gamer too – “Gamers as Collaborative Information Seekers, Consumers, and Producers”

Wai Yen Tang, Emotional memory in violent video game players and non-players (Bowen & Spaniol, 2009)
Effective summary of some interesting research, including an interview with the lead author

Center on Media and Child Health, Research Wrap-Up: June 19, 2009
See the latest research that this leading center finds relevant. From conditioning attentional skills to profanity in video games.

Gonzalo Frasca, Etica y Videojuegos
Un blog en español! But in this case it’s about an English book, The Ethics of Computer Games, and you can even get the introduction as a pdf

Daniel Johnson, ‘Lingua Franca’ – Mapping The Gamer Dialect
Linguistic expertise and the mapping of terminology

Lucas @ EduRealms, A New Project – World of Warcraft In School
Yes, WoW is used for learning!

Ramon Antonio Vargas, ‘City of Heroes’ Character ‘Twixt’ Becomes Game’s Most Hated Outcast Courtesy of Loyola Professor
David Myers pwns online villains and gets real-world death threats, all part of his interactive approach to studying social customs online. Complete with video interview.

Video Games and Human Values Initiative
Join the Ning group focused on advancing “our understanding of how video games and their culture can shape our values constructively for the enrichment of society”

Addiction

Dave Munger, Pathological Video Gaming in Kids: How Common Is It?
Nice summary and reflection on the recent research by Douglas Gentile, which indicated rather high levels of obsessive, detrimental gaming (8.5% of young gamers)

Educational Games Research, Video Game Addiction: Fact or Fiction
A reflection on the Douglas Gentile study, and on parents’ concerns vs. actual problems

Owen Good, New Study Delivers Old Figure: 8 Percent are Game-Addicted
Here’s the gaming site summary of another study which took place in Australia and New Zealand

Paddy Maguire, Compulsive Gamers ‘Not Addicts’
It’s a social problem, not a classic addiction, for most youth playing hours and hours

John Grohol, It’s Alright: Teens Playing Video Games
It’s not as bad as the stereotypes

Farhad Manjoo, How I Got Addicted to Playing Games on My iPhone
Slate feature – “They’re Fast, They’re Cheap, and I’m Out of Control”. More about addiction in the popular sense.

Art and Criticism

John Lancaster, Is It Art?
Do video games count as art? Certainly a big industry, and an in/out social phenomenon, but is it art? Interesting piece at the London Review of Books

Keith Stuart, Evercracked! and the Best Videogame Documentaries Ever
It’s a short list but it’s what we’ve got

Keith Stuart, Do Game Reviewers Really Understand Innovation?
Why don’t innovative games get more critical lauds, as innovative movies do?

Gus Mastrapa, Media Coverage: The Case For Games Journalism
The things journalists get right

Roger Ebert, Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker
The movie critic argues that games are not art: The vast majority of games “tend to involve (1) point and shoot in many variations and plotlines, (2) treasure or scavenger hunts, as in “Myst,” and (3) player control of the outcome. I don’t think these attributes have much to do with art; they have more in common with sports.”

Brian Crecente, The Death of (Video Game) Criticism
Arguing with Roger Ebert over at Kotaku

Clint @ Click Nothing, On Authorship
More arguing with Roger Ebert, in this case about what counts as art and authorship

Thinking about Games and Game Design

Stephen Dinehart, Dramatic Play: A New Paradigm
Gamasutra on drama and video games – or what Aristotle to Richard Wagner would contribute to game design. Very thought provoking piece.

Michael Abbott, Would Someone Please Pass the Trine?
The Brainy Gamer celebrates a forthcoming game. “If, like me, you fancy yourself an amateur video game anthropologist, Trine (pronounced like ‘mine’) is a mini-compendium of genre and gameplay from the last 25 years.” So here’s a trailer:

John Gaudiosi, Are Our Games Alive?
Is it artificial life? If not, how soon? And I ask, with games that act as symbol system, do we just see them alive?

Brice Morrison, Why A Game Designer Outgrew Video Games
This designer wants games that appeal to intelligent adults, that go beyond just fun

Critical-Gaming Network, Game Design 101
Get an overview of the basics according to a classical game mechanics approach

Francisco Souki, Game Mechanics That Tell Stories
Thinking about how player interactions that generation meaning happen

Daniel Primed, Zelda: Twilight Princess – Conformity, Innovation and Relevancy
A great analysis of one boss battle, as well as the weight of legacy on the rest of the game

Clint @ Click Nothing, Live and Let Die
A prominent game designer promotes letting the play do the heavy lifting in games, not the narrative – the emotional dilemmas can be built in

Moving Pixels, Games as Language Systems
“Video games actually carry many of the expressive properties of language itself.”

Games for Change, G4C Festival Day One Summary and Day Two Summary
Get the wrap-up on a great conference!

Vorpal Bunny Ranch, Gendered Violence
Do female protagonist change the whole tone (and splatter) of a game?

International Hobo, A Game Has Never Made You Cry
Or narrow vs. wide definitions of games

Paul Farmer is a doctor and an anthropologist, and spoke as part of NPR’s series This I Believe. Farmer co-founded Partners in Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care for the poor around the world. He helped develop DOTS (directly observed therapy), a way to provide care for HIV/AIDS that works in resource-poor settings, as well as community-based approaches to treating multi-drug resistant TB in developing countries.

As an anthropologist he has emphasized the importance of structural violence, the negative impact that systems of power can have on people through racism, gender inequality and political violence, with significant articles in both Current Anthropology and PLoS Medicine.

His most recent book is Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. You can also read about his lifework in Tracy Kidder’s biography, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.

Hat-tip (and thanks) to Ryan Anderson over at Ethnografix and his anthropological list of inspiring people and work.

Link to full text of Paul Farmer’s This I Believe NPR recording.

The fourth edition of the Language, Culture and Mind conference will take place at Åbo Akademi University on June 21-23rd, 2010. Åbo Akademi is located in Turke, Finland.

The main goal of the LCM conference is: “to articulate and discuss approaches to human natural language and to diverse genres of language activity which aim to integrate its cultural, social, cognitive, affective and bodily foundations [and] to contribute to situating the study of language in a contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue, and to promote a better integration of cognitive and cultural perspectives in empirical and theoretical studies of language.”

Plenary speakers are:

Bradd Shore (Emory University)
Dan Zahavi (Centre for Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen)
Cornelia Müller (Berlin Gesture Centre and Europa Universität Viadrina)
Peggy Miller, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Topics include:

•biological and cultural co-evolution
•comparative study of communication systems
•cognitive and cultural schematization in language
•emergence of language in ontogeny and phylogeny
•language in multi-modal communication
•language and normativity
•language and thought, emotion and consciousness.

To present something, here’s the basic info: “Abstracts of up to 500 words, including references, should be sent to lcm4turku@gmail.com as an attachment, in pdf or rtf format. Indicate if the abstract is for an oral or poster presentation. Note that there will be proper poster session(s), with one minute self-presentations to the audience in the plenary hall, just before the poster session. The deadline for abstract submission is Dec 15, 2009.”

All the details on participation are here.

And here’s the main LCM IV Conference website.

So this week, we’ve got a bunch of short things up front – faves, science & health journalism, brain health, book recommendations, and the environment. Then I go onto anthropology and neuroscience.

Top of the List

Bruno Latour, What Is the Style of Matters of Concern?
Latour’s Spinoza lectures – one on our understanding of nature, the other on aesthetics and active philosophy (or, stop committing violence to our common sense…)

Jason Mitchell, Contributions of Functional Neuroimaging to the Study of Social Cognition
Pdf of a 2008 paper from the Harvard psychologist – a nice overview that also addresses some of the critiques

Nicolas Baumard, In Praise of Neuroscience (for once)
Looking at how parts of the brain are specialized for culture, seen through the localization of the Visual Word Form area (part of how you read) across subjects and societies and in neuronal constraints on writing systems

Alex Golub, Golublog
Alex has been writing on his return to fieldwork in Papua New Guinea – great to read the series of posts sharing the trials and dilemmas of doing ethnographic work

Incubus, Are You In?
Just a song I enjoyed

Bob Herbert, Behind the Façade
The best thing I read this past week -the NY Times columnist discusses Michael Jackson and our culture of immaturity and irresponsibility.

Troublemaker’s Fringe – Problems in the Journalism of Science and Health

Petra Boyton, Reporting Back from Last Night’s Troublemaker’s Fringe
Petra, Vaughan Bell and Ben Goldacre get together to discuss bad journalism of science and health. What an event. Petra slants her comments towards the eight problems she sees in today’s journalism.

Vaughan Bell, Fringe Benefits
You can get Vaughan’s slides from his talk at Troublemaker’s Fringe over at Mind Hacks. Technology scares journalists… into writing crap, complete with some disturbing headlines. Vaughan places our present-day concerns in historical context, all the way back to Socrates.

Ben Goldacre, Steve Conner Is an Angry Man
A journalist takes critique badly, even before the pub event happens, and of course writes a snarky column about it

Brain Health

Christopher Hertzog et al., Fit Body, Fit Mind? Your Workout Makes You Smarter
Scientific American piece on how exercising helps protect against cognitive decline as we age

Alvaro Fernandez, Bird’s Eye View of Cognitive Health Innovation
Sharp Brains guru shares slides from his recent talk

Eric Kandel, A Biology of Mental Disorder
The Nobel Prize winner shares his thoughts on recent developments in a Newsweek feature. See also the Brain Boosters piece in the same issue.

Books & Reading

Newsweek, Fifty Books for Our Times: What to Read Now. And Why.
Quite a list – I really enjoyed looking it over

Nicholas Kristof, The Best Kids’ Books Ever
NY Times columnist shares his recommendations. See what his kids like over at his blog, where readers also weigh in with all their recommendations.

Joanne @ Tomorrow Museum, Why Teenagers Read Better Than You
That passion of early engagement

Environment

Si @ Immanence, Some Favorites
Book recommendations focusing on recent ecoculture titles that “make important contributions to the study of nature/culture in their many intersections and blurrings.”

Sanjida O’Connell, Farmers May Be Planting the Root of All Evil
Agriculture as the worst invention in human history – a new take with new data

Sydney Herald, US, Indonesia Sign Debt for Nature Agreement
One of the better ways to help protect environmentally important areas (unless you are into dependency theory, and see debt as creating these sorts of problems in the first place)

International Institute for Environment and Development, Video and Audio
Get a great wealth of video lectures by leaders in the field of environment and development

Barbara Rose Johnston, Water Culture Wars
An environmental anthropologist reflects on the 5th World Water Forum over at Counter Punch

Anthropology

Carl Lipo, Graduate Programs around the World
A map of places to study anthropology at the masters and doctoral levels

Ed Yong, Hidden Beliefs in Science Stereotypes Predict Size of Gender Gap across 34 Countries
Fascinating study. I wish more anthropologists did work like this to test some of our ideas.

Vanessa Woods, Bonobo Release – Benii!!!
A bonobo going back to the forest. And he understands gravity too!

Ryan Anderson, Destroying Baja
Surfing and anthro research, or a nice reflexion on tourism, development and the environment

Douglas Hume, Madagascar
A professor at Northern Kentucky shares resources about his favorite country (and site for fieldwork). Hume has also put together an extensive list of resources and readings related to the book and controversy, Darkness in El Dorado.

Herbert Lewis, Boas, Darwin, Science and Anthropology
Pdf of a 2001 Current Anthropology article on how Boas’ philosophy of science still matters to what we do today

Shafeen Charania, Epic Movements
Global peace, the importance of benchmarks, and ideas from gaming! Quite a synthesis.

Jonah Lehrer, Population Density
Lehrer discusses the recent Science article that points to social networks and demography as crucial in cultural evolution, not simply brain adaptations or technological advances

Anthony Funnell, The Technological Anthropologist
Genevieve Bell talks about adoption of technology from the perspective of her work in Intel’s User Experience group

Diane Levin, Mediation Channel Surfing: in a round-up of links, some tasty ideas to snack on
Meditate on these interdisciplinary links!

Sarah Arnquist, Testing Evolution’s Role in Finding a Mate
Speed dating seemed to be a good way to test the men as indiscriminate/women as choosy paradigm (well, a good way to get data – but did they have speed dating in the Pleistocene). Now new research shows that both genders are indiscriminate (it’s speed dating, after all!), and that social conditioning matters

Duncan Campbell, Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall – The Ten Trusts
Podcast with the famed animal behaviorists and co-authors of the book, The Ten Trusts

Neuroscience

Deric Bownds, Risky Behaviors: Genetic Predispositions Countered By Behavioral Intervention
Fascinating study – hopeful and disturbing all at once (if used right… sort of thing). The main point is that interventions do work, and genetics are not destiny

Stephen Casper, Book Review: Margaret A Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science
A comprehensive review of a comprehensive book over at Neuro Times, a great new blog

Benedict Carey, Why the Imp in Your Brain Gets Out
Our urges run wild

John Eberhard, Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture
2008 edited volume from Oxford Press – looks fascinating

Mo Costandi, Mental Time Travel
Memory as reconstructive – so does it play a role when we think about the future?

Pete Mandik, Chomsky Has No Patience for Externalism Whatsoever
Video interview with Chomsky. Personally I’ve never gotten the contrast between his internalist science and his externalist politics…

Candida Peterson and Michael Siegal, Representing Inner Worlds: Theory of Mind in Autistic, Deaf and Normal Hearing Children
Pdf of a 1999 comparative study that comes to this conclusion, “These results point to an interplay among biology, conversation and culture in the development of a theory of mind.”

Annette Ruth, Conceptual Models of Neuronal Dysfunction in Autism: Biochemical Toxins, Neuroregulation, and Implications for Neurogenesis
A Notre Dame undergraduate’s prize-winning paper

Nicholas Wade, Hoopla, and Disappointment, in Schizophrenia Research
One gene does not cause it all – “schizophrenia is caused by a very large number of errant genes, not a manageable and meaningful handful.”

Alan Saunders, Is Philosophy Irrelevant to Science?
ABC radio program from The Philosopher’s Zone with guest James Franklin

Noah Gray, The General Public Knows Very Little about Neuroscience
But the pictures sure do look pretty

Created by RPM at Evolgen

But since I was one of the prime offenders with the explanatory flowchart, and I seem to be using them more and more, I wanted to offer a stalwart defense of the use of flowcharts and diagramming in neuroanthropology, especially as both contribute to the practice of partial explanation. So, to pick up a theme from a number of my posts, ‘yes-you’re-right-but-I-still-disagree,’ here’s why I find flowcharts particularly useful and think anthropologists should be doing a lot more diagramming to highlight complex patterns of causation, situating more broadly the parts of complex systems that they are exploring.

But before I go any further, I need to direct all our readers to the recent announcement of the first Neuroanthropology conference which Daniel posted. Although I want to post, I feel like I also want to keep drawing attention to this announcement. But on with it…

As with all of her comments, I felt that Prof. Quinn cut to the quick, highlighting an issue in a cautionary fashion rather than rejecting specific arguments our panelists were making (at least I don’t think she was just calling me out…). In the case of flowcharts, Prof. Quinn suggested that diagramming relationships was a preliminary step, not a final goal – at least that’s one of the ways that I took her comments – and I agree.

Quinn’s comment is ironic as one of the discussion points in a conference I just attended in Scotland at the University of Aberdeen was that drawing as a practice, actually sitting down and making a picture with pencils or charcoal, has been disappearing from our field. Fewer and fewer anthropologists, some participants asserted, use sketching or other visualizations as a technique within anthropological research or theory-making.

Stop! It's a flowchart, originally from http://xkcd.com

My own growing use of diagrams, grounded in a dynamic systems approach to neural variation, as I look back over my posts, is definitely trending steadily upward (see, for example, talent diagrams and balance diagrams). Although I take Prof. Quinn’s cautionary note to heart, something like a flowchart, I believe, can help us to see what portions of emergent systems we are examining in any single research project or discussion.

The diagramming process can be a way of acknowledging and preserving the centrality of causal processes that are not themes in our work. A good diagram can exceed our narrative, showing the threads in a dynamic system that we are not tracing at this moment, in a sense acknowledging visually the limits of our own theoretical narratives.

The use of such unresolved diagrams can help us to avoid the tendency to see different emphases in explanation as inherently antagonistic, heading off unnecessary and pointless debates (shades of, ‘It’s the genes!’ ‘No, it’s the environment!’ ‘Nature!’ ‘Nurture!’).

In other words, causal diagramming can aid tremendously in what we could call partial explanation: proposing inherently and self-consciously incomplete causal narratives in complicated, emergent systems. I believe that, in any complex system, the researcher will be aware of contributing variables that cannot be fully encompassed in the current project or even by their academic discipline. With important contributing factors beyond the scope of the project, a partial explanation is both the only possible outcome, as well as a potentially helpful contribution to the overall, communal effort to explore a complex system, especially if it highlights a neglected set of dynamic relations. (Don’t worry, this is vague, but I’ll get really concrete in a minute).

In contemporary cultural and cognitive anthropology, many theorists are either uncomfortable with any sort of causal explanation or working with surprisingly simple causal assumptions, even if they may not be explicit about it, or even aware of it. For example, certain post-structuralist positions assume that, in terms of social efficacy, ‘power causes everything’ – although you’d never say it that clearly. When pushed to talk about causes for things like psychological variation in individuals, I know I used to get pretty evasive, or offer a whole list of likely contributing factors, without really attempting to clarify how those factors might be related, weighted, interacting, checking or negating each other, or otherwise concretely linked to the ‘outcome.’ Similarly, talk about ‘mutual causation’ or cycles of reiterative causation still assume relationships even though the discussion can often stop there, without specifying in any greater detail.

In fact, trying to describe causal relationships in polypotent (or multi-causal) systems can lead to two opposed unproductive tendencies: simplistic reduction to a single scale or reduced set of causes in what is really an emergent and multicausal system; or a non-systematic piling up of causal relations until outcomes look either impossible to predict or inevitable and over-determined (but usually only in retrospect). In other words, sorting out and even visually representing causal processes may actually be more important when we are not dealing with a simple chain of one-way interactions, although it’s hardly easy.

Nested relations and neuroconstructivism

One excellent example of the use of flowcharts to sort out mutual causation and interrelations between processes on different scales appears in Westermann et al. (2007), an article on neuroconstructivism that I discussed in an earlier post. While traveling through London a couple of weeks ago, I managed to get ahold of the two volume collection on the same subject; I may eventually write more about the two books soon, although I found that the first chapters of the first volume were pitched at a frustratingly general or introductory level (possibly because I’m not a member of the intended audience).

Figure 4 from Westermann et al. 2007

In a recent presentation to the Macquarie University Centre for Cognitive Studies, I offered several modified versions of Westermann and colleagues’ diagram in order to discuss where I thought ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ factors entered into the dynamic relations that they describe and how these sorts of considerations might be operationalized as research-ready factors (instead of left vaguely as just ‘culture’ or ‘society’). Of course, I was talking about sports, and I didn’t mean to be exhaustive, but I thought that the diagram worked out nicely.

Figure from Westermann et al. 2007, modified by Downey

One thing the modified diagram highlights is that ‘culture’ and ‘society’ themselves are aggregate dynamic systems that need to be resolved into constituent processes and factors. As I was doing this diagram, I was reminded of the sorts of systems thinking of someone like Talcott Parsons, which is hardly surprising as there is a lot of shared ground between contemporary dynamic systems theory and the sorts of cybernetic systems theory that probably influenced Parsons’ own modeling of social systems. (No, I haven’t yet pulled out Parsons again to think through him again — hey, I’ve got conferences to help organize, a farm to look after, and just spent three weeks on the road in Europe. I’ll get to it…)

But another thing that the Westermann and colleagues diagram suggests is the difficulty involved in skipping intervening levels of analysis. For example, in some discussions of the neurological roots of religious thinking, or in evolutionary contributions to behaviour, there may be a tendency to gloss over intervening scales of interaction between the level of the brain region or even the neuron and the level of institutionalized religious tradition or the evolutionary time-scale phylogeny. The point is not that there’s no relation between these levels of phenomena, but rather that there are emergent processes at each level between them, which intervene and contribute to the final outcome.

After all, with processes as complex as human cognitive capacity or behaviour patterns or social psychological development, it’s very clear to all but the most militant reductionists that any comprehensive theory is going to need to take in factors beyond the expertise of any one researcher, even any one intellectual discipline. This doesn’t mean that specialized knowledge is any less valuable, only that we need to have a clear sense of how partial explanations fit together and a way of acknowledging other causal relations without becoming bogged down in the complexity.

Dynamic systems modeling & partial explanation

Often in sciences, physics is held up as the ideal for explanatory elegance, rigorous description of interactions that can be rendered as mathematical relations. Of course, biological, psychological, and social phenomena — let alone ecological and meteorological systems — are notoriously resistant to this sort of rigorous reduction. But it’s also important to find manageable ways to grasp complex systems, so we don’t just give up. I was inspired to use graphic modeling as a thought tool for staking out systems more comprehensively than I could investigate or explain by dynamic systems theorists, especially Peter Taylor.

Peter now teaches in the Critical and Creative Thinking Program at the Graduate College of Education of the University of Massachusetts Boston. Originally from Australia, Peter trained in ecology and science and technology studies before moving into promoting reflective practice and training teachers. He has published widely on complexity, including his book, Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement (Chicago, 2005; the table of contents and prologue are available here, a summary here).

I met Peter when I spent a year at Brown University on a post-doc, participating in a seminar on embodiment in which Peter was an active player (thanks to Anne Fausto-Sterling for the opportunity). One of the things that Peter was so good at was using visualization strategies to combine what initially appeared to be opposing perspectives on core issues. I found this synthetic approach more rigorous than many of the synthetic theoretical work I had encountered before meeting him, particularly amenable to dealing with complicated human-environment relations.

Peter has explored environmental phenomena that he characterizes as having ‘unruly complexity or “intersecting processes” that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time.’ In his writing, he has used a range of diagramming techniques. For example, he offers the following diagram in a discussion of soil degradation in Mexico, suggesting the deep historical depth and complex relationships that caused the environmental degradation (see Taylor 2001).

From Peter Taylor 2001

The strands, however, are cross-linked; they are not torn apart. In this sense, the account has an intermediate complexity — neither highly reduced, nor overwhelmingly detailed. (Taylor 2001: 318)

One of the salutary effects of these sorts of diagrams of ‘intermediate complexity’ is that they tend to highlight the incompleteness of our own explanations, going beyond what any one scholar or scientist could be expected to grasp. Self-conscious partial explanation produces space for collaboration and engagement rather than falsely pitting researchers investigating different strands of a phenomenon against each other. Being overly ambitious with a partial explanation, assuming that one has The Theory instead of a theory among many, can put researchers in conflict who should be cooperating.

To go back to the red arrows and additional boxes I added to the Westermann and colleagues diagram, the diagram makes obvious that the causal dynamics I am focused upon are nested within a tangle of additional relations. A person would have to be particularly obtuse to disregard the partiality of any subset of the relations included in the diagram.

But the practice of diagraming more comprehensively and expansively than we might thoroughly discuss in our writing and explanation also wards off some of the least generous criticisms of our work, for example, the assertion that a person who focuses on social or cultural influences in psychological development necessarily must be ignoring genetic factors.

I agree with Naomi Quinn, that a flowchart is not a theory. In fact, a flowchart might even be adequate to link up a number of theories, illustrating their complementarity and intersection by acknowledging each theory’s partiality.

Stumble It!

References:

Taylor, Peter. 2001. Distributed Agency within Intersecting Ecological, Social, and Scientific Processes. In Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray, eds. Pp. 315-332. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Westermann, Gert, Denis Mareschal, Mark H. Johnson, Sylvain Sirois, Michael W. Spratling and Michael S.C. Thomas. 2007. Neuroconstructivism. Developmental Science 10(1): 75–83. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00567.x (pdf available here)

Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid.com

So please send us links to your recent postings on anthropology of all sorts. If you can submit them to me by the 12th or 13th, that’d be brilliant; you can reach me at greg{dot}downey{at}mq{dot]edu{dot}au. If you’ve read something totally boss on someone else’s anthropology blog, please don’t hesitate to send along the link, and we’ll try to direct more readers to the piece.

Four Stone Hearth brings together the four subfields of anthropology: archaeological, linguistic, biological and socio-cultural. It’s a veritable anthro-polooza of anthro-blogilization, so make sure you’re part of it!

And check back after the 15th to see who showed up, and whether any of our guests drank too much and went crowd surfing or hooked up with someone inappropriate.

Credits: If you like this cartoon, visit Hugh MacLeod at Gapingvoid.com for many more of his back-of-a-business-card sketches.

Robbie Cooper is a photographer and videographer who mixes his artistic work with an ethnographic eye and a neuroanthrological sensibility. After all, this is someone who goes from Gilles Deleuze to Paul Ekman as he describes his work!

As a photographer Robbie has recently focused on capturing our digital representation of our selves – the avatars we create in online worlds like Everquest and World of Warcraft. Previously he had done photojournalism in Africa. As a video artist, he shoots stunning and provocative video, capturing people in some of their most intimate, involved moments with a clear and human-centered approach.

He published his avatar photographs in the glossy book The Alter Ego, featuring portraits and bios of gamers from the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. You can read more about the book in reviews by Colin Pantall and Escapist Magazine, as well as read this interview with Robbie and his co-author and listen to some good coverage of Alter Ego on NPR.

On his homepage you can access a good slice of these pictures, complete with a text overview you can all up. This is the Alter Ego series in the Immersion side of his work. For just the photos you can go directly to this slideshow from the NY Times.

The NY Times also featured his Immersion video, which captured young gamers as they played. The portrayal of their involvement is intimate and intense, and I recommend either the Times video for the quality (you can also get even better video on Robbie’s homepage through the Immersion – but it’s a few more clicks).

The Immersion video is also up on YouTube so I’ve embedded it below. Alongside the video, you can see the Immersion photo series on Robbie’s website – it’s there in the Immersion link after you click on Simulations.

His latest work builds on the Immersion approach. This time it’s Immersion – Porn (yes, you can get the video on that link). In this video informants introduce themselves and then we get to see their own immersion into themselves, top-up only. It was produced exclusively for Wallpaper.

I’ve also been enjoying his Immersion blog. Of late he’s had a humorous take on Ekman’s emotional faces, an intense video of close combat in Iraq, and babies as challenging both science and philosophy.

Link to Robbie Cooper’s homepage and art.
Link to Robbie Cooper’s Immersion blog.

Five links that range across the things that interest us here at Neuroanthropology.net. Enjoy!

Global Voices Online
“The world is talking. Are you listening?”: Bringing together and highlighting stories that most global media ignore

Top 10 Psychology Blogs for Curious Minds
From BPS Digest to We’re Only Human, it’s a quality list

The You Tube Reporters’ Center
Interviews and advice from top-notch journalists on how we can all do better reporting

Top 20 TED Talks for Busy School Administrators
Definitely not for professors – they might watch too much. Especially if they are trying to get tenure.

Neuroimages
Neurophilosophy’s Mo Costandi has set up an image-only site, Neuroimages. Some beautiful stuff.

A great issue of Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology carnival, is over at Afarensis: Anthropology, Evolution and Science.

From sex on the moon and virtual communities to orangs as our closest relatives?, this edition is extensive, with highlights from all four fields.

Also note that Afarnesis is now at a new site – moving from the old scienceblogs to the new wordpress. Besides getting his own real-life monster name, you can find out why your dog looks guilty and the relationships between lungfish, trout and humans.

From this edition I’d like to highlight two pieces on evolution of intellience, Blair Bolles’ meditation on tool use, language evolution, and the context of adaptation, and Razib’s piece on the evolution of the brain and the role of social competition in the increasing cranial size in our lineage. The two pieces work quite well together.

There is plenty more great stuff over at Four Stone Hearth #70, so run or walk (like a good afarensis) there now.

Link to Four Stone Hearth #70

So the favs first, then a great round-up of recent evolution stuff. Then onto anthropology, neuroscience and health.

Top

David Dobbs, What If You Could Predict PTSD in Combat Troops? Oh, Who Cares…
You actually can. And it has to do with general health – the bottom 15% account for 58% of PTSD cases. But will anything be done about it?

Le Monde, Le Corps Incarcéré
Amazing interactive feature of the French paper, featuring reporting and social scientists on the whole process of incarceration

Walter Glannon, Free Will and Moral Responsibility in the Age of Neuroscience
Pdf on neuroethics that appeared in 2006 in the journal Medical Ethics

Ellen Dissanayake, If Music is the Food of Love, What about Survival and Reproductive Success?
Music as a behavioral and emotional capacity and its link to ritualization. Pdf of a compelling 2008 article.

Michael Smith, Green vs. Gold Open Access
What’s the best way to go? Creating open journals or open repositories?

Evolution – or Men Fighting Back against Sharon Begley vs. Other Men Just Getting on with Things

Sharon Begley, Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
“The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves” – Begley bashes evolutionary psychology

David Sloan Wilson, Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance
Huffing over at the Huffington Post – what evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior might do better to keep the fickle public’s eye

Gad Saad, The Never-Ending Misconceptions About Evolutionary Psychology
“Persistent falsehoods about evolutionary psychology” – up in arms about Sharon Begley’s recent Newsweek article critical of EP. Or, it’s still all about sex. Don’t believe me? Twelve of the fifteen findings that Saad highlights about EP in this subsequent post are… drum roll… about sex.

Dan Sperber, Evolutionary Psychology Under Attack
Culture and Cognition passes on refuting, except in passing, and dwells on why someone doing neuroanthropological work (well, to my passing eye) doesn’t call himself an evolutionary psychologist

Edge, The Simplifier – John Bargh
The person Sperber wished called himself an evolutionary psychologist, since he draws explicitly on evolutionary theory and a consideration of neurological mechanisms. (Want to know why I called him a neuroanthropologist? Cause he also said this in his Edge interview, “A lot of recent research on unconscious effects is showing that it’s culture, early learning and culture, and not genetics that that is responsible for effects in adults.”)

Jesse Bering, Dreaming of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content
Well maybe he dreamed about fighting Begley? Or, considering whether dreams might be adaptive or not…

John Hawks, Rooks, Tools and “Domain General” Cognition
Rooks do not have specialized cognitive adaptations for tool-making yet are rather skilled at it in captivity – what does this imply for the brain’s g-spot vs. EP specialization?

Peter F. MacNeilage, Lesley J. Rogers and Giorgio Vallortigara , Evolutionary Origins of Your Right and Left Brain
The division of labor is phylogenetically old… like 500 million years old. I thought all the action happened in the Pleistocene

Michael White, Evolution 101
A positive review of the book Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne.

Anthropology.net, Neanderthals Dried Fresh Meat, Wore Tailored Clothing – Energy Study
“European Neanderthals living in the Eemian interglacial, dated to around 125,000 years bp might have conserved much needed energy by drying and storing meat, wearing fitted clothing, and sleeping beneath blankets of mammoth skin, behaviours that would have greatly increased their chances of surviving decreasing temperatures with the onset of ice ages.” Hmm, Neanderthals are smart and have cultural traditions…

John Noble Wilford, Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
A 35,000 year old bone flute from Germany – and thus a well-established musical tradition already there

Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan,& Mark Thomas, Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior
June 2009 Science paper (pdf) – and how demography matters in maintaining (or not) cultural complexity 90,000 years ago

Anthropology

Brian @ AAA Blog, Sidney Mintz & Lévi Strauss
Mintz reflects on the famed French anthropologist and his impact on the field

Dinah Winnick, Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: An Interview
George Marcus and James Fabiun in action! Plus new ways to think about doing anthropology

George Johnson, Scientist Tries to Connect Migration Dots of Ancient Southwest
Big picture archaeology

Public Anthropology, Second Annual Public Anthropology Publishing Competitions
Submissions are due October 1st. You can actually get a book contract!

Daniel Goldberg, On Clinical Anthropologists
Where are the medical anthropologists working in medical settings?

Philanthropology, PD: Day 100 – Wow, Already One Hundred Days
One hundred days into a postdoc, and the accompanying blog diary. But really this day covers the problem of association studies in genetics

MIT – Visualizing Cultures
Seeing is believing…

Katie Roiphe, Feverish Liasons
A review of the polemic “A Vindication of Love” – author Cristina Nehring “sees our modern goals of marriage, security and comfort as limited and sad”

Maria Popova, Exactitudes: Cultural Photo-Anthropological Data Viz
People dress up different – or so they think. Visual cross-cultural anthro in action.

Gaymon Bennett & Paul Rabinow, Invitation: Synthetic Biology and Human Practices: A Problem
Introduction to the e-book Ars Synthetica, which aims to bring human practice and transform the present instrumental understanding of biology

Brains

A Day in the Life of a Traveling Neuropsychologist, Case 1 Comments
A new blog that looks worth following. This particular day is about a soldier before and after his accident.

Clara Moskowitz, First Image of a Memory Being Made
Now captured – the connections made when a long-term memory established. In a sea slug. Here is the actual image of protein synthesis happening at synapses.

David Chavanne, Neuroscience and Culture
Take a multi-dimensional view of culture, and suddenly neuro research gets tough!

Edge, Life is the Way the Animal Is in the World
An interview with Alva Noe, interdisciplinary embodied philosopher. For more, The Nation gives a snippet of Noe’s take on consciousness

Caindevera, Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain
Making history interdisciplinary, with a tilt towards the neuroanthropological – an argument for neurohistory

Ingfei Chen, Brain Cells for Socializing
Smithsonian feature on von Economo neurons

Anil Ananthaswamy, Language May Be Key to Theory of Mind
Blind children don’t rely on facial cues to intuit others’ internal states – so is it language?

PsyBlog, Consumer Psychology
A round-up of studies on the psychology of consumption, from beliefs to happiness

Malcolm Ritter, Brain Scans Show How Hypnosis Can Paralyze a Limb
Love this line: It’s as if the motor cortex “is connected to the idea that it cannot move (the hand) and so … it doesn’t send the message to move,” Cojan said.

NOVA, Musical Minds
PBS special on Oliver Sacks and music and the brain. Here’s the NY Times review, and here’s some more info on the main case studies used.

Health

Dr. X, Vintage Photos: Venice Beach 1930
Obesity is often portrayed as a modern problem – television, fast food, etc. This photo tells a different story. Plus just a great shot.

Greg Laden, Evidence for Gene-Autism Link Just Published
A large PloS study identifies 27 loci; Greg urges us to consider heterogeneity

Nicholas Kristof, It’s Time to Learn From Frogs
Endocrine disruptors are used widely in agriculture and industry and make it into our environment, where they affect frogs, fish and… yes, humans

David Romanelli, Happiness: 3 Amazing Tips from the World’s Oldest Case Study
GeorgeValliant’s lifework summed up in three good guidelines – a healthy outlet, an engaged humility, and sharing happiness