Hierarchy

Anthropology.Net, The Social Brain Hypothesis: Are Our Brains Hardwired to Deal with Hierarchies?
Subconsciously processing dominance hierachies

Marc Dingman, Neuroimaging and the Social Ladder
Social hierarchy: can we see it in an fMRI?

Ira Flatow, Mapping the Social Brain
How the brain responds to social status

Constance Holder, A Head for Social Hierarchy
More on the work by Caroline Zink: superior players change our own thinking

Free Will

Cognitive Daily, Changing Belief in Free Will Can Cause Students to Cheat
No free will, more likely to cheat—if responsibility doesn’t count, who cares?

Foolish Green Ideas, Tight Fit
Very funny take on the “no free will” research

Brain Mechanisms

Chris/Mixing Memory, Emotion, Reason and Moral Judgment
Brain damage, moral scenarios, and general vs. personal rationality

Frank Sengpiel, Motion Perception Is Learned, Not Innate
Pdf of Nature Neuroscience article—visual cortex gains discriminative ability through patterns of activation, bringing nature and nurture together

Prof Zeki, The Objectivity of Subjective Experiences
Beauty, the orbitofrontal cortex, and experience

Wray Herbert, The Gist of the Matter
Our brains are like hybrid engines—two different motors of thinking; plus, rationalizing risk

Wray Herbert, The Neurology of Stereotypes
We all detect the stereotype—but only some of us know to indicate it’s not true

Maggie Fox, Abuse Changes Brains of Suicide Victims
Epigenetic changes due to childhood abuse, and the long-term tragic effects

The Neurocritic, I Have To Praise You Like I Should
People give a damn about their reputation—and it’s as rewarding as anything else

Book Reviews

Lee Siegel, No Way Out
Review of John Edgar Wideman’s novel on Fanon, “a psychiatrist and revolutionary, whose book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is a classic meditation on force, the psychology of colonizer and colonized, and the effects of torture”

Kathryn Harris, Diagnosis: Female
Review of Lisa Appignanesi’s “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors”

Abigail Zuger, Quieting the Demons and Giving Art a Voice
Review of Marya Hornbacher’s Madness: A Bipolar Illness, and also providing its own reflection on creativity and mental illness

General

Carol Tavris and Avrun Bluming, Taking the Scary Out of Breast Cancer Stats
Reassuring but non-scary news does not make the headlines: understanding absolute vs. relative risk

PsyBlog, 10 Mind Myths: Do Any of These Catch You Out?
Say vs. Do, 10% of Our Brains, and More

Carl Camden, Teachable Moments
How a tenured psycholinguist professor turned to business and thrived

Daniel Haggard, The Computer Game Affliction: How They Addict You
“It’s not the in-game character that is being rewarded – say for killing an orc.? It is the player”

Daniel Little, Philosophy and Society
What are the connections between the two areas? A good and short review