Month: April 2008

Wednesday Round Up #7

Iraq and War Trauma

Thom Shanker, Army Worried About Rising Stress of Return Tours to Iraq
More tours, more anxiety, depression and stress…

Emory Wire, Fellowship Project Explores PTSD’s Effect on Families
Returning home and the ravages of post-traumatic stress; see Erin Finley’s description of her research here

Leslie Kaufman, After War, Love Can Be a Battlefield
“He used to tell jokes and funny stories and now he doesn’t do that anymore. I could tell he was different right away, but I thought it would pass.”

Dana Foundation, The Brain Injured Soldier
Two-part series of podcasts, with an accompanying press release

Jared Tanner, Traumatic Brain Injury: A Silent Epidemic
Covers brain injuries in general in the US—IEDs work similar and equally glaring damage in Iraq

Ginger Campbell, Treating Vets with Mirrors
Mirror box therapy and Iraq veterans who are amputees

Sharp Brains, TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), Iraq and Neuropsychology
Good coverage, with links, about the problem

Associated Press, Army Creates New Unit to Help Wounded Soldiers Get Better
“Warrior transition units” and a “culture of healing within this organization”

William Grimes, Empathy for the Brain, After Insult and Injury
Review of Michael Paul Mason’s book Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

Susan Okie, Traumatic Brain Injury in the War Zone
New England Journal of Medicine article on the how’s and the recovery from this type of injury

Theo Francis, Pentagon Seeks Battlefield Device to Diagnose Brain Injury
A camera and eye-tracking device to be developed; article also has good links to relevant work

RAND, Invisible Wounds of War
New study by the research group: “Psychological and cognitive injuries, their consequences, and services to assist recovery.” Comprehensive report on the overall problem

Mental Health

Stephen Dubner, How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made? A Freakonomics Quorum
A great discussion, with varying viewpoints and supporting evidence

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #7”

Differences in dyslexia

A fascinating article came out in the Science section of The New York Times: Patterns: Dyslexia as Different as Day and Night, by Eric Nagourney. The article is based on an original research piece by Wai Ting Siok, Zhendong Niu, Zhen Jin, Charles A. Perfetti, and Li Hai Tan, who examined the abnormalities in brain activity associated with dyslexia in Chinese speakers (in comparison to better documented examples of the disorder in English speakers).

The basic result is simple, but intriguing, especially in light of some of the other research we’ve discussed on how brain areas linked to language differ, Two languages, one brain and theory of mind:

The report, which appeared last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that changes in the brain that may contribute to dyslexia are different for English speakers and Chinese speakers.
The difference may be explained by the fact that English is an alphabetic language, the researchers said. A reader sees a letter and associates it with a sound. Chinese characters, on the other hand, correspond to syllables and require much more memorization.

In English-speaking individuals, dyslexia shows up in neuroimaging studies as weak activity in left occipitotemporal and temporoparietal regions of the brain. The researchers find out, however, that readers of Chinese with dyslexia have a different anomaly in their brain, perhaps due to the difference between alphabetic and ideographic languages. Children with (from the abstract) ‘impaired reading in logographic Chinese exhibited reduced gray matter volume in a left middle frontal gyrus region,’ an area that had already been found to be active in reading and writing Chinese characters. ‘By contrast, Chinese dyslexics did not show functional or structural (i.e., volumetric gray matter) differences from normal subjects in the more posterior brain systems that have been shown to be abnormal in alphabetic-language dyslexics’: the abstract details.

Continue reading “Differences in dyslexia”

Encephalon and More

The latest version of Encephalon, the collection of the best and brightest of brain-related blogging, is up over at Brain Blogger. Two favorites include Pure Pedantry’s Sound Encoding in the Rat and Cognitive Daily’s Consonants Tell Us Where Words Begin, What about Vowels?

Sharp Brains is also hosting student essays, including this one on Alzheimer’s, which is fun for me to point out. My undergraduate students have their own blog writing tasks for the end of the semester, so over the next month I will be posting stuff that they have written.

Some new people have been linking into our site. Searching for Mind provides a running list of interesting posts around the blogosphere, as well as some relevant news stories.

Putting People First at experientia.com focuses on “user experience, experience design, and person-centered innovation.” Here’s a good one on Tom Austin, an applied anthropologist, who argues that IT needs the social sciences.

Real Beauty and Why Women Want

In my medical anthropology class last Thursday, three students led our discussion of Caroline Knapp’s Appetites: Why Women Want, a memoir of anorexia, desire, femininity and feminism, and women and their bodies. To break the ice, they broke the class up into small groups and had the other students work on imaginary magazine covers for Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health (see also my previous post, Ethnography and the Everyday).

The startling thing, in retrospect, was not that it was a fun exercise, but that it was so easy to do. The students knew what each magazine aimed for, they got the stereotypical headlines down right, they mixed images and bodies and sex and fashion and pleasure into catchy titles. All those titles implied a need, and also a solution, an improvement. Even I got into the mix, adding some choice vernacular to the Men’s Health cover. The question lingers, why so easy…

Let me tell you first about the video that the student trio also showed, “Onslaught,” part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It’s media. It gets its point across, and much more. Watch it. It’s short. It helps sets up my Randy Pausch head fake.

Knapp’s book Appetites dwells on the media, on men and women and sex, and on mother-daughter relations.

Continue reading “Real Beauty and Why Women Want”

Moerman’s Placebo

I have been wanting to write a post about the placebo effect for some time, after finding a wonderful YouTube video about getting drunk without being drunk. And then today I saw a very different “placebo effect” that also drives home Dan Moerman’s point when he says that the placebo effect is better thought of as “the meaning response.” (Moerman is an anthropologist, of course.)

The video, How to Get Drunk Without Drinking, shows Derren Brown demonstrating “a method I used at university which allows people to recreate any drug state, adrenaline, alcohol, you name it, without actually taking the drug.” (If it doesn’t play, you can go directly to the YouTube version.) What is so striking about the video is Brown’s use of imagination, embodiment, practice, suggestion, and memory to accomplish the effect, and the ability of the brain to then switch between such different states so quickly. It’s also quite funny!

The other piece, The Cure by Sarah Manguso, is adapted from her forthcoming memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. Manguso writes of being twenty-one, her life in danger from an auto-immune disease, and her desire to make love to someone. Her own antibodies were attacking her body, as she wryly notes, “trying to destroy my nervous system — a misperception that caused me a lot of trouble.” She returned to college with a huge tube sticking out of her chest, a necessary part of the regular blood treatments she needed.

“My blood was removed and cleaned and put back more than 50 times. After that, my hematologist tried another treatment: massive gamma-globulin infusions. The second infusion kept me going for three months, and it was decided I wouldn’t have to have my plasma replaced again. My neurologist said I’d turned a corner, so after 11 1/2 months, my central line was pulled.”

“I believed, though, that I would stop secreting antibodies only after I had sexual intercourse. And though I looked worse than I ever had in my life, thanks to the steroids — I was fat and swollen, covered in acne, and had a gruesomely round face — I thought my legendarily promiscuous musician friend might still be interested.”

Continue reading “Moerman’s Placebo”

Open Access Anthropology

There are now a couple blogs on open access in anthropology that I wanted to point out:

Open Access Anthropology

Open Anthropology

Anthropology News also had a recent issue with articles covering open access in anthropology (can download pdfs).

Savage Mind’s Rex provides us some very useful guidelines on how to get the information we need about new articles and books through online alerting in his post, Total Information Awareness (for anthropologists). Especially useful for people not linked into mainstream academia or off doing fieldwork or just interested in staying up to date.

Rex also describes the Mana’o Project, an open access repository for anthropology, and actively encourages people to use it.

If you are interested in more from Savage Minds, they have a whole Open Access Open Source category. CKelty in particular has been posting on a regular basis recently in this area.