Month: May 2008

Monkeys and robots teaming up — worried?

As Daniel discussed in January in Monkey Makes Robot Walk!, a number of researchers are working on brain-machine interfaces by attaching prostheses to monkeys. Science Daily carries a new story, Mind Over Matter: Monkey Feeds Itself Using Its Brain, about a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine experiment in which a monkey successfully used a human-like prosthetic limb to feed itself. As the Science Daily story reports:

Using this technology, monkeys in the Schwartz lab are able to move a robotic arm to feed themselves marshmallows and chunks of fruit while their own arms are restrained. Computer software interprets signals picked up by probes the width of a human hair. The probes are inserted into neuronal pathways in the monkey’s motor cortex, a brain region where voluntary movement originates as electrical impulses. The neurons’ collective activity is then evaluated using software programmed with a mathematic algorithm and then sent to the arm, which carries out the actions the monkey intended to perform with its own limb. Movements are fluid and natural, and evidence shows that the monkeys come to regard the robotic device as part of their own bodies.

According to the team, this is the ‘first’ example of the ‘use of cortical signals to control a multi-jointed prosthetic device for direct real-time interaction with the physical environment (’embodiment’)’ (from the abstract to the Nature article) (I’m always dubious about such ‘firsts,’ especially as this team has been announcing work on this project since at least 2004; but the research is still fascinating even if not a ‘first’).

Continue reading “Monkeys and robots teaming up — worried?”

Hosting Four Stone Hearth

This coming Wednesday June 4th, Neuroanthropology will host the next Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology blog carnival that rounds up the best and the brightest of the anthro blogosphere. remote central hosted the last version, which was a most worthy edition.

If you’d like to contribute something, please either email the host site (just remove the spaces and change the at): submit at fourstonehearth.net or send something to Greg (greg.downey at mq.edu.au). We want to put together a wide-ranging edition, with both a four field and a neuroanth flavor. Perhaps a four field umami with a dash of neuroanth sweet & sour?

We look forward to seeing your submissions!

Daniel and Greg

Open Anthropology

Open Anthropology, a blog run by Maximilian Forte, is dedicated to moving anthropology out of its academic straight-jacket. As Forte describes in About This Project, this project has two aims: one, “to significantly restructure and move anthropology beyond its current confines, beyond the constraints of professionalization and institutionalization;” the other, “to transform anthropology into something that is neither Eurocentric nor elitist” and thus move beyond anthropology’s roots in colonialism. It is about creating new world knowledge.

Open Anthropology has two recent posts which resonate with themes that crop up on Neuroanthropology—an anthropology open to wider influences, an anthropology engaged with a wider public, an anthropology that forgets its own fears, both self-inflicted and institutional.

First, in Towards a More Public Social Science Forte posts the statement by Social Science Research Council president Craig Calhoun. Calhoun outlines four steps for a more engaged social science: (1) Engagement with public constituencies must move beyond a dissemination model. (2) Public social science does not equal applied social science… [T]he opposition of applied to pure is itself part of the problem. It distracts attention from the fundamental issues of quality and originality and misguides as to how both usefulness and scientific advances are achieved. (3) Problem choice is fundamental. What scientists work on and how they formulate their questions shape the likelihood that they will make significant public-or scientific-contributions. (4) A more public social science needs to ask serious questions about the idea of “public” itself… Can ideas of the public be reclaimed from trivialization by those who see all social issues in terms of an aggregation of private interests? What are the social conditions of a vital, effective public sphere and thus of an important role for social science in informing public culture, debate, and decision-making?

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Wednesday Round Up #13

Neuroanthropology

David Freedberg, Empathy, Motion & Emotion and Composition & Emotion
Two pdfs on art and the neurosciences by the Columbia art history professor

Sam Harris et al., Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty
Pdf of 2008 article from Annals of Neurology: “truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense”

John Horgan, Brain Chips and Other Dreams of the Cyber-Evangelists
Yearning for brain chips, and the problems therein

Literary Trends

Kenneth Goldsmith, In Barry Bonds I See The Future of Poetry
Welcome to our post-human future

Anne Harrington, The Inner Lives of Disordered Brains
The Harvard historian of science’s excellent take on the recent rise in neuro-lit

Jonathan Gottschall, Measure for Measure
Literary criticism needs to embrace science

Henry Bowles, It’s in the Genes: Criticism Devolved
How about criticism of the literary embrace of dubious science?!

Bob Meagher, Socrates on the Campaign Trail
Hope or fear this fall? Socrates will help guide you

Elinore Longobardi, Think Globally, Read Locally
Journalism needs to embrace anthropology

Three-Toed Sloth, Books To Read While Algae Grow In Your Fur
Books recommendations; eclectic from liberalism and math brains to comic books…

Lorenz at Antropologi, Anthropology Blogs More Interesting Than Journals?
For some of us at least… a summary from a quick-and-dirty ethnography of blogging

Language

Liz Danzico, Telling Stories Using Data: An Interview with Jonathan Harris
“Stories should have feeling, to the extent that they want to be human.”

Michael Price, Outside Language Looking In
Children who learn signing at home: language helps organize the mind’s underlying architecture

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #13”

New Humanities Initiative Proposal

Yesterday in The Battle between the Sciences and the Humanities I blogged about Natalie Angier’s NYT’s article on the interdisciplinary New Humanities Initiative being created by David Sloan Wilson and Leslie Heywood at Binghamton University. I contacted both of them about the article and the post, and also offered to put up their proposal here as the Initative does not yet have its own website. Sloan Wilson assured me that a website will be up soon as part of the EvoS site at Binghamton. But he also sent me the proposal and letter of support for our readers to look at.

So here is the proposal itself: new-humanities-proposal

And the letters of support for their NEH grant: new-humanities-letters

It is heartening to read in their opening:

It is important to emphasize that integrating the humanities and the sciences is not a matter of making the humanities more “scientific.” It is genuinely a two-way street, in which intellectual perspectives and subject areas currently associated with the humanities occupy center stage as part of the study of what it means to be human from a scientific perspective, and where the humanities are instrumental in articulating the transformative power of the imagination, a perspective that, for the first time in a very long time, is again taken seriously by science.

Still, as I wrote yesterday, I do think there need to be concrete projects and people in the middle to work the synthesis. I am all in favor of building an evolutionary approach that can reach across the table, as I’ve done that sort of work myself. Similarly, imagination and meaning can also reach out to science, as my research with drug abuse has shown me.

But the reaching out approach still leaves the synthesis on the table, and here is where I think endeavors like neuroanthropology can step in. Evolution and imagination meet in the everyday behaviors and sociocultural and neurological processes that shape how we live and what we experience.

So, in the end, I believe we need all three things. Two cultures that work better together, that have a more open orientation and theoretical stance to what creative people are doing “on the other side.” And then the specific work that Leslie Heywood discussed yesterday about wolves—a synthesis on a specific subject, with wolves and people and a real relationship with an actual wolf (well, seven eighths of one) there in the middle.

In any case, I wanted to get these documents out to people for their own perusal. I look forward to hearing what people think.

Also, by happy coincidence, today’s weekly round up fits perfectly with this initiative, with sections on neuroanthropological work, literary trends, language, and evolution. So please check it out!

Don’t Deep Six Number Forty Six

The 46th Edition of Encephalon is up at Neurocritic. It’s a great edition, really a stand-out.

Here are some favorites. Cognitive Daily has a discussion of the persistence of racism even among the well-intentioned.

Neuroscientifically Challenged writes on The Neuroscience of Distributive Justice.

In My Mascot Only Gave Me Sex Appeal Podblack Cat takes on superstition, luck, and natural disasters, with a focus on toys, Tibet and the earthquake in China.

And the Neurocritic himself has a very nice You’re My Favorite Person… on beauty, relations, dopamine, and immune activity.