How would you complete the following quote:
“One of the difficulties in understanding the brain is that…”
Charlie Rose is on the brain
Charlie Rose 12- part Brain Series started off last night apparently (I’m in Australia, as most of you know — I miss a few things). Heidi Tan dropped us a line to let us know it was happening. The series is also supported by the Simons Foundation.
Last night’s introductory topic was ‘The Great Mysteries of the Human Brain’: consciousness, free will, perception, cognition, emotion and memory with a roundtable of brain researchers.
Charlie’s co-host and guests included Eric Kandel from Columbia University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Cornelia Bargmann from Rockefeller University, Tony Movshon from New York University, John Searle from University of California Berkeley and Gerald Fischbach of the Simons Foundation.
If you missed last night’s episode, according to Heidi, you can catch it again tonight on Bloomberg Television at 8PM and 10PM ET, or listen to the interview simulcast on Bloomberg Radio. Bloomberg Radio is broadcast on 11:30AM in the New York Metropolitan area and is available on XM and Sirius.
For information about the series, you can visit: http://www.charlierose.com/. When I did, it automatically loaded the first episode of the series.
Update: I just posted a piece on the fourth episode in the series that also has links to the ‘collection’ of all the episodes and a schedule of upcoming segments. Please check out, Charlie Rose is back on the brain, for more information and discussion.
Conference: Mind and Its Potential
A great conference coming up on the 2nd and 3rd of December 2009 in Sydney, Australia: Mind and Its Potential. The Dalai Lama, Paul Ekman and Martin Seligman are the really big names, and then people like Susan Greenfield, Marc Hauser, Natasha Mitchell and many more fill a long list of “extraordinary speakers.”
The conference is premised on this theme:
Science is only just beginning to understand the extraordinary capacity of the brain to change and develop. The implications for how we learn, work and care for one another are profound. Here is your opportunity to hear the world’s top scientists, psychologists and philosophers explain how to apply the new science of the brain in education, medicine, business and your life.
The conference really emphasizes the following: “Practical applications of the new science of the brain: How do we learn? How do we teach? How do we overcome adversity and disability? How should we live our lives? Find out the implications for education, health care, business and your life!”
The first day of the conference really emphasizes plasticity and learning as fundamental to both understanding neural function and how we deal with issues like education, parenting, and exercise. The second day features the Dalai Lama and Martin Seligman discussing human flourishing and spirituality, ethics and morality in the morning, and then emotions and more in the afternoon. You can access the overall prorgam here.
There are also pre- and post-conference workshops with leaders in the field, as well as a Mindfest Festival that will be hosted outside the main auditorium during the conference.
For more information and to register, you can visit the Mind and Its Potential conference website.
Wednesday Round Up #87
The good stuff for this week, then anthropology and the mind, finished off by a great set of readings that consider changes in education and academia.
Top of the List
Michael Jernigan, The Minefield at Home
A US soldier from Iraq writes on injury, trauma, PTSD and coming home. A powerful first-person account that is part of the NY Times series, Home Fires: American Veterans on the Post-War Life.
Dave Munger, In Which I Resist Writing The Obvious Headline
Finding a genetic basis for anger using fMRI research with genetic analysis. Oh the juicy, misleading titles that could have been.
Nate Beeler, American Television Takes A Toll On The Brain
Ah, the cartoon that captures reality television. Except So You Think You Can Dance of course.
Joe Brewer and George Lakoff, Why Voters Aren’t Motivated By A Laundry List Of Positions On Issues
An overture to cognitive policy – the principles, frames, and point of views that make sense of political development.
For more, here’s Cognitive Policy Works: Politics For Real People basic statement on Cognitive Policy: “Cognitive policy is about the values and ideas that both motivate the policy goals and that have to be uppermost in the minds of the public and the media in order for the policy to seem so much a matter of common sense that it will be readily accepted.”
Alex Hutchinson, Global Impositioning Systems
The evils of GPS, or why not figuring how to get places reduces our sense of direction (it’s a skill after all)
Marco Roth, The Rise of the Neuronovel
An in-depth and critical essay on writers’ turn to writing not about the mind but about the brain. Most recommended.
Anthropology
Ed Yong, Culture Shapes The Tools That Chimps Use To Get Honey
Discusses the skills and strengths of chimps that give them an advantage in obtaining food and surviving.
Complete this quote! #2
How would you complete this quote:
“There is no scientific study more vital to man than…”
Neurophenomenology: 3 books in quick review
There are plenty of people who write about their life experiences through a first-person account of their neurologically diagnosed conditions. While they might not call themselves neurophenomenologists or neuroanthropologists, they offer us insightful texts to reflect upon. The following post is a brief pointer to three engaging and well-written books that combine data from the neurosciences with personal experience and thoughtful introspection:
My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet
Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens by Patricia Duffy Continue reading “Neurophenomenology: 3 books in quick review”
Neuroanthropology 