It’s simple – favs, brain, anthro. A good way to finish off one year of this.

Top of the List

The Horizon Report: 2009 Edition
The latest edition on the coming trends in the increasing convergence of new media and education. It’s a big report, and they have an executive summary, as well as discussion of trends over the short, medium and longer term.

Cogprints: Cognitive Science E-Print Archive
Self-archived electronic versions of papers in the areas of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and more

NPR, ‘Sons of Gandhi’ Take to Brazil Streets for Carnival
Peace, love and sex in Salvador’s oldest and largest parade group

The Neurocritic, Very Gradual Change We Can Believe In
Darwin in Obama street colors… very clever

Tara Parker-Pope, The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
Recess helps kids learn better – and now there are studies to back it up, particularly focusing on how attention works

Brain

David Dobbs, This IS Rock-It Science: Scientists to rock out March 3, NYC
Joseph LeDoux and the Amygdaloids rock in this video – prefaced by a lecture by LeDoux on emotions, brain wiring, and control

10 Classics from Cognitive Science
The editors of the esteemed journal picked ten foundational articles and now you can get the full text. They range from Johnson-Laird’s (1980) Mental models in cognitive science to Hutchins (1995) How a cockpit remembers its speeds

TED, Juan Enriquez: Beyond the Crisis, Mindboggling Science and the Arrival of Homo evolutis
Both sober and funny, Enriquez discusses three trends –focused on bioengineering and robotics – and how those will change our economy and the way we live.

Putting Stuff Together, Siftables, The Tangible Interfaces of Tomorrow
For another trend – embodied computing, I’ll call it – that will further increase the synergy with how technology will further change how we live, see this great TED presentation on interactive computing

Daniel Goldberg, On the Philosophical Foundations of Law & Neuroscience
Voodoo correlations and voodoo law?

Michael Merzenich, The Posit Brain Plasticity Institute
Turning (brain) plastic into product… But for a worthy cause!

Sandy G., Support for the Aberrant Salience Hypothesis of Psychosis
The Mouse Trap supports its argument about dopamine, salience and schizophrenia with this 2009 online paper, Do patients with schizophrenia exhibit aberrant salience?

Deric Bownds, Modulation of the Brain’s Emotion Circuits by Facial Muscle Feedback
“blocking the feedback of frown muscles to the brain lowers the level of amygdala activation during a subject’s imitiation of an angry facial expression”

Consumer Reports Health Blog, Tip of the Day: Flex Your Brain Muscles
Now that’s mainstream – Consumer Reports on how you can brain train

Wayne Hooke, Sexual Dimorphism In Human Male Faces May be the Result of Natural Selection
Looking at Lucy and colleagues for clues on why big buck teeth might have been beautiful

Joe Kloc, A Hormone to Remember
“Oxytocin emerges as a key player in our facility for social memory.” Yet another case where actual neurotransmitter function is just not the way we anthropomorphize it (dopamine = pleasure, oxytocin = love, etc.)

David Derbyshire, Social Websites Harm Children’s Brains: Chilling Warning to Parents from Top Neuroscientist
Top neuro-sciendit (scientist plus pundit) Susan Greenfield sounds the clarion call. The Guardian actually jumps on board too. For a more balanced consideration of what we know, see Robert Mackey’s take in In Social Networking Killing Us?

Anthropology

Ian Kuijt, The Regeneration of Life: Neolithic Structures of Symbolic Remembering and Forgetting
Pdf of a 2008 Current Anthropology article: “The social construction of identity and memory can be expressed through public ritual.”

Simon Batheleme, Perception and Culture, part II: The Muller-Lyer Illusion
Cognition and Culture does perception and culture

Carl Dyke, Hunting Dodo with Blunderbuss
A lively and informed discussion of race and racism with the recent chimp/police cartoon

John Jackson, Young People Talk about Violence
A clip from a forthcoming documentary – Latino teens in Philadelphia talk about violence, its effects, and how they deal with it

joneilortiz, Bourdieu on TV News and the Political Microcosm
“the news talks almost exclusively about the political world itself rather than its effects on the world it’s supposed to govern.”

Kalman Applbaum, The Colonization of Pharmaceutical Science by Marketing
Considering the processes by which marketing corrupts pharmaceutical science – and the difference that can make. Daniel Goldberg follows up with some thoughtful commentary here.

John Hawks, Neandertal Longevity and Pulp Cavities
Very few old Neandertals – with substantial differences in adult mortality rates compared to early humans.

Kerim, Learning an Endangered Language
What it means for a language to be called “endangered” and how that shapes what we might do about worldwide linguistic diversity

Natasha Mitchell, The Philosophy of Good Intentions
Reading the minds of others through philosophical experiments

NPR, Different Sins for Different Sexes
The ultimate Vatican study – men and women sin differently! Or at least say they are doing so…

Richard Florida, How the Crash Will Reshape America
An urban designer discusses the US’s changing urban/suburban landscape in The Atlantic

Moore Groups, Atlantis Schmatlantis
But I thought Google Earth showed Atlantis really existed…