Month: May 2008

More Resources

Columbia University’s Brain and Mind video archive has some prominent speakers of neuroscience, psychiatry, development, and the like. It’s quite a good collection of 15 videos, including Michael Rutter, Nora Volkow, John Searle, and Eric Kandel. The hat-tip goes to Neurophilosophy.

Psique has put up an impressive collection of online neuroscience resources, all sorts of tutorials and information, a link which I will definitely add to our Web Resources.

Over at the London School of Economics, the Brain, Self and Society program has put together an extraordinary list of worldwide links covering academic institutions and research centres, academic societies, neuro-blogs, history of neuroscience, and journals.

Indiana University’s online journal Mind/Brain has just released its latest issue. It’s a great collection, including David Bricker’s piece, What’s A Mind Made Of? and Douglas Hofstadter’s The Elusive Apple of My ‘I’ . And more stuff on autism, addiction and mental illness, stress and the brain, and language learning. The hat-tip goes to Thinking Meat, which has been linking to a lot of good stuff recently.

Laughing Rats and Biomedical Ironies

In the near future I’ll post a student-led series on humor and neuroanthropology, building off work we’ve done on breast cancer and humor over the past two years. So this had me poking around the web this morning, where I found this video on Jaak Panksepp and his laughing rats.

Panksepp sees laughter as having mammalian roots (Physiology and Behavior pdf), and as being grounded in affective neuroscience (the title of his book). As this informative interview on his intellectual career relates, he has built a bottom-up approach to understanding the brain and mind.

By coincidence, today I also happened to read an excerpt from Cynthia Willett’s forthcoming book, Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom.

Continue reading “Laughing Rats and Biomedical Ironies”

Wednesday Round Up #11

Being Smarter

Paul Brown, How To Be Smarter
A round-up of recent ideas and recommendations

New York Times, Well: A Guided Tour of Your Body
Get to know yourself: Great graphics and summary pieces

Christopher Null, Brain Game Can Boost IQ—Here’s 5 New Brain Games to Play Now
Univ of Michigan game that boosts IQ, and another five commercial ones that are actually fun

Vaughan Bell, The History of the Brain
Everything you ever wanted to know, wrapped up in one radio program

Roni Caryn Rabin, For A Sharp Brain, Stimulation
Neurogenesis and the aging brain

Children & Being Smarter

Michael Merzenich, Children Left Behind
No Child Left Behind’s reading program leaves children behind…

Michael Merzenich, Poky Young Brains Speed Up
Learning difficulties, temporal processing, and specialized interventions making a difference

Bruce Hood, How Brains Develop
A Nature book review of two recent ones on children’s brain development

Will Dunham, Study Shows Breast-Fed Children Are Smarter
Well-designed study shows strong support for breast feeding as making kids smarter

Stereotypes, Beliefs & Knowledge

Richard Fenyman, Cargo Cult Science
Belief over data… even in science

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #11”

David Brooks Bonus

I wrote on David Brooks’ editorial Neural Buddhists earlier today. In his piece Brooks recommends a series of authors, but no titles and no links, to help grasp this new brain science and its implications for our understanding of ourselves. Here’s his list, with Amazon links inserted to relevant books.

Andrew Newberg and Why We Believe What We Believe
Daniel J. Siegel and The Developing Mind and The Mindful Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga, with his 2005 The Ethical Brain and Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique coming out in June (see this excerpt from Edge)
Jonathan Haidt and The Happiness Hypothesis
Antonio Damasio, with his classis Descartes’ Error (which kicked off a lot of this popular shift)
Marc D. Hauser, a little questionable in my mind, but here’s his Moral Minds.

Greg has described other books, such as Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture (see his excellent critical review here, Why Brain Science Needs Anthropology) and John Medina’s Brain Rules. I might add Liars, Lovers and Heroes by Steven Quartz and Terrence Sejnowski and The Accidental Mind by David Linden

I also ran across another book this morning which looks like a great addition, John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality. Horgan is a journalist (including a former stint at Scientific American), and helps run the Center for Science Writings blog, which looks quite good!

Some other people are already reacting to Brooks editorial. Mary Martin at Animal Person has an interesting take, examining more the athiesm and religion angle. She also recommends the Mind & Life Institute, which does “Collaborative Research among Buddhists and Western Scientists.”

The Neural Buddhists of David Brooks

It definitely appears that the New York Times columnist David Brooks is on a neuroanthropology kick. Today he’s published an editorial called The Neural Buddhists, which complements previous ones on globalization and cognition and demography and cultural identity.

Brooks’ editorial comes down to three things: dispatching soulless science; presenting the new touchy-feely brain; and taking on our culturally hard-wired Protestantism.

Richard Dawkins stands in nicely as the representative of the old science—genetic determinism, lumbering machines, neo-Darwinian atheism. Tom Wolfe, as Brooks points out, described this world view well in his essay Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died. On this site Greg fought the good fight against Dawkins’ memes in February, while I had fun taking on Dawkins’ protégé, Steven Pinker, and his argument about hard-wired morality back in January.

Unfortunately for people like Dawkins and Pinker, but fortunately for the rest of us, the brain plays a different game. Here’s what Brooks says about the new neuroscience:

The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Ah, music to my ears. Indeed, Greg took down the computer metaphor some weeks ago. I wrote on emotion’s role in decisions making (sorry, rational-genetic man). Still, a lot of old brain crap gets out in both scientific journals and the popular press. So Time Magazine’s version of love, the not-quite touchy-feely view, got Hannibal Lecterized at the start of the year.

Continue reading “The Neural Buddhists of David Brooks”

Encephalon Is Black For More!

The New Encephalon is up at PodBlack. As Kylie Sturgess, our host this time, puts it, this is “a selection of the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere.” She does a nice job organizing it by Erik Erickson virtues!

Some notables include Brain Blogger’s Domestic Violence and Executive Dysfunction and Giovanna Di Sauro’s discussion of gender and fruit flies. I say gender because of this quote, “behavioral differences between the sexes might not be necessarily due to differences in neural circuitry, but in the presence or absence of sex-specific regulators of such circuitry.”

Jake Young also has one of his excellent discussions, complete with background, of double dissociation and separate auditory processing of “where” and “what.”

Finally, Neuroscientifically Challenged takes on Gherlin and the Omnipresence of Food, which is a good addition to what we’ve done here on the brain biology of eating and obesity (see our food & eating category for more).