Ouroboros is hosting the latest brain/mind Encephalon carnival. Damaged learning, former voodoo, informed consent, emotional expressions, and bad moods… Enough to make your mind run in circles.
Fear of Twitter: technophobia part 2
When I was a lifeguard in high school, two of my fellow lifeguards — Steve and Pete — sought to converse as much as possible quoting directly lines from the Chevy Chase movie, Fletch. This is what qualified as comedy. Steve was apparently the ‘more clever’ of the two as he probably achieved Fletch Quotation Ratios as high as 20%; Pete, though quite well tanned, likely only managed 10% FQR at best. I hadn’t seen the movie, and I was never much for quoting film scripts (not even Monty Python), so I assumed that Steve’s high FQR was either a symptom of premature senility or a sign of the impending collapse of Western civilization.
Recent fears about the negative cognitive consequences of the social networking site Twitter, which I mentioned in an earlier post, Is Facebook rotting our children’s brains?, led me to recall Steve and Pete’s battle for high FQR. In both cases, concerned observers might wonder whether patterns of mental activity can lead to long-term neural degeneration; I haven’t checked in on Steve or Pete in more than 20 years, but I suspect they’re both locked in institutions living out a cruel Chevy Chase imitation from which they can no longer escape.
Twitter, even more than other Internet-based social networking applications, seems to provoke apocalyptic fears of mass mental degradation. Over at Alternet, for example, Alexander Zaitchik asked Twitter Nation Has Arrived: How Scared Should We Be? In the piece, Zaitchik wonders whether what was ‘once an easily avoided subculture of needy and annoying online souls’ was bringing about the apotheosis of all that is loathsome in American pop culture: ‘look-at-me adolescent neediness, constant-contact media addiction, birdlike attention-span compression and vapidity to the point of depravity.’ Rob Horning of Pop Matters warns about ‘Twitterification’ in a piece titled, Foucault’s Facebook. Keith Olbermann named Twitter ‘worst person in the world,’ …for the one episode at least (see video at You Tube); Olbermann found someone already Twittering in his name, even using his email address. And if you’re not already convinced that Twitter is the unmentioned fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, John Mayer’s Twitter obsession is blamed for Jennifer Aniston pulling the pin on their relationship.
Fortunately, even if we are on the non-stop plane to cognitive Armageddon, Web 2.0 assures us that we will have clever guerilla videos about our own immanent destruction as our in-flight entertainment. From SuperNews, we have a helpful cartoon, ‘The Twouble with Twitters’, to explain to us ‘the latest socially networking micro-bloggy thingy,’ especially if you’re a slow-on-the-uptake parent not sufficiently worried about adolescent technology use (are there any?).
More after the jump…
Continue reading “Fear of Twitter: technophobia part 2”
Cultural Evolution in Full Text
I’ve managed to round up a bunch of pdf or full text links for recent papers on cultural evolution and on the evolution of language.
Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater (2008), Language as Shaped by the Brain
Simon Kirby, Mike Dowman & Thomas Griffiths (2007), Innateness and Culture in the Evolution of Language
Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish & Kenny Smith (2008), Cumulative Cultural Evolution in the Laboratory: An Experimental Approach to the Origins of Structure in Human Language
Christine Caldwell & Ailsa Millen (2008), Studying Cumulative Cultural Evolution in the Laboratory
Kenny Smith, Michael Kalish, Thomas Griffiths & Stephan Lewandowsky (2008), Introduction: Cultural Evolution and the Transmission of Human Behaviour
Andrew Whiten & Alex Mesoudi (2008), Establishing an Experimental Science of Culture: Animal Social Diffusion Experiments
Alex Mesoudi & Andrew Whiten (2008), The Multiple Roles of Cultural Transmission Experiments in Understanding Human Cultural Evolution
Thomas Griffiths, Michael Kalish & Stephan Lewandowsky (2008), Theoretical and Empirical Evidence for the Impact of Inductive Biases on Cultural Evolution
Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson (2008), Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution
Tim Lewens (2007), Cultural Evolution (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Esther Hermann, colleagues & Michael Tomasello (2007), Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition:The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis
Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson (2008), Gene-Culture Coevolution and the Evolution of Social Institutions
Anthro Hits the Links
Open Anthropology has put together a great collection entitled Economics Blogs in a Time of Crisis: Policy, Development, Globalization, and Transformation. From neuroeconomics to bonobo land and political economy, you can find something to fit your taste (ah, capitalism) in Max’s list.
Somatosphere gives us Teaching Anthropology of the Body. You can get Eugene’s syllabus, other syllabi he finds useful, links to readings, and even some reviews. As a bonus, Eugene’s summarizes some new stuff available over at LSE’s BIOS focusing on interdisciplinary approaches to biomedicine and technology.
Over at Savage Minds Rex has given us a list of useful syllabi on virtual worlds and technology. A lot of great reading, including Tom Boellstorff’s courses on culture and power in cyberspace. Over at Digital Ethnography Michael Wesch got his students to summarize 94 articles that explored anonmity online.
Rex also outlined the books for his ethnographic methods class. Some great recommendations, and since it’s Savage Minds the large community there also provides more suggestions.
Kerim gave us YouTube EDU, describing some online video resources for academia at youtube and elsewhere. He laments the conspicuous absence of anthropology. Something that Pamthropologist also does with Academic Earth’s video collection. But that’s something Max Forte is trying to rectify all on his own. He has been building an online collection of open video, much of it revolving around economics, critical theory, globalization, and the like. So go explore!
The Bleeding Heart Show gives us a few links on Pakistan and Afghanistan, definitely stuff that is worthwhile but outside mainstream media. Elsewhere Erkan gives us a round-up of journalism coverage of Obama’s trip to Europe and Turkey.
Poverty and the Brain: Becoming Critical
Poverty Poisons the Brain was one of our most popular posts last year. Recent research has brought that topic back into public light. It’s good research, but today I will get critical about what really matters in our emerging realization that social disadvantage results in neurological disadvantage.
Gary Evans and Michelle Shamberg recently published a PNAS paper, Childhood Poverty, Chronic Stress and Working Memory (pdf). Here’s the abstract:
The income–achievement gap is a formidable societal problem, but little is known about either neurocognitive or biological mechanisms that might account for income-related deficits in academic achievement. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood. Chronic stress is measured by allostatic load, a biological marker of cumulative wear and tear on the body that is caused by the mobilization of multiple physiological systems in response to chronic environmental demands.
The Evans and Shamberg paper has gotten prominent media attention. Over at Wired, Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain got an enormous number of diggs. Brandon Keim’s opening lines are, “Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.”
Stone Sport
Two carnivals out this week.
Four Stone Hearth, the best of anthro blogging, is out at Quiche Moraine. Shamans, animal models of human sociality, pelvis sexing, lego archaeology, and much more!
The Athletic Alley is hosting its weekly sports carnival. From amateur to pro, adult fitness to youth sports, there’s a bit of everything for the sports aficionado.
Neuroanthropology 