Month: February 2010

Wednesday Round Up #103

I really like this round up – one of my better efforts of late, I think. Some great stuff up top, and then lots of good material on new media, social networking, gaming, etc. Then a neuroanth mash-up, followed by drugs, genetics, mental health, and of course chickens.

Top of the List

Emily Polis Gibson, Children’s Hospital Rotation
A powerful poem about attending to an anencephalic newborn, a baby without a brain. Written by a doctor in Washington State

Science Friday – Ira Flatow, Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall on studying chimpanzees, preserving habitats, and what lies ahead for the field of evolutionary science. I particularly liked her answers to people’s questions, including an adorable 13 year old girl, in the second half as she powerfully described how she moved from working on chimps to working for conservation and human development.

Research Digest Blog, Evidence-based Tips for Valentine’s
Miss out on Valentine’s Day? Well, better dig into the research on how to enhance your irresistibility

Desde el Manicomio, Adrian
Some beautiful and award-winning photos of an autistic child in his daily life

Reader Comments – NY Times, Comments on Bob Herbert’s Watching China Run
These reader recommended comments are some of the best critiques of US society and culture that I have read in a long time

Daniel Elkan, The Comedy Circuit: When your Brain Gets the Joke
Neuroimaging humor, with a look at why a joke is funny to some and not funny to others.

David Sloan Wilson, Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms IV: The Limiting Factor of Cultural Evolution Is Not Origin But Spread
I had an illuminating conversation with David when I visited Binghamton University last week. He has really pushed evolutionary thinking into applied arenas, and here examines the intersection of cultural evolution and economics, with childhood education and risky adolescent behavior both discussed.

Tara Parker-Pope, As Girls Become Women, Sports Pay Dividends
Showing that sports participation has direct benefits for development with “ lifelong improvements to educational, work and health prospects”

New Media

Vaughan Bell, Don’t Touch That Dial!
I thought Facebook rotted my brain… right? Not so fast, says the master behind Mind Hacks, in this “history of media scares, from the printing press to Facebook”

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #103”

Graduate Student Pecha Kucha Session @ New Orleans


Denice Szafran, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Buffalo, is putting together a Pecha Kucha session for the annual American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans. Pecha Kucha is a new visual format for giving a talk, which features 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each. Here’s her call for submissions over at the Anthropology Cooperative:

I am putting together a session proposal for the 2010 AAA meeting in New Orleans, and would like to call for submissions of abstracts.

The session will focus on graduate student works-in-progress, and will be Pecha Kucha – 20 slides, 20 seconds each. Often the only people who are aware of graduate student work are our advisors and committees, and this will be a chance to show the discipline what we are up to and where we are researching, and get feedback from the audience. This format is an exciting way to do that. With this method we will be able to accept 12 presenters for the session, and all research areas are welcome.

If you are interested, or think you might be, please submit an abstract to me at dszafran@buffalo.edu by February 24 so that I can assemble the invited session proposal by the March 1 deadline. You will be notified by February 27 whether your abstract will be included with our submission (just in case we get more than we can handle).

As Denice notes, Lorenz over at Antropologi kicked up interest in Pecha Kucha with his post in January, Pecha Kucha: The Future of Presenting? It bears some similarity to our speed presentation format that we used successfully last October at the Encultured Brain conference. Lorenz included a bunch of links to learn how and explore more. You can also go directly to PechaKucha.org.

Here’s a video about this new format:

Another example, this one from Wired and introducing Pecha Kucha and then discussing the social uses of signs:

Public Release of the DSM-5 Draft

The draft of the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, was released this week. This guide to the diagnosis of mental and behavioral health problems will shape the delivery of psychological, psychiatric, and social care for years to come.

You can access the entire draft here at the American Psychiatric Association DSM-5 Development Website. There the APA writes about the comment policy:

The draft disorders and disorder criteria that have been proposed by the DSM-5 Work Groups can be found on these pages. Use the links below to read about proposed changes to the disorders that interest you. Please note that the proposed criteria listed here are not final. These are initial drafts of the recommendations that have been made to date by the DSM-5 Work Groups. Viewers will be able to submit comments until April 20, 2010. After that time, this site will be available for viewing only.

It is interesting to note that the APA included a press release announcing that the DSM-5 Development Process Includes Emphasis on Gender and Cultural Sensitivity.

Actual proposed changes are set up in an interesting way. The opening tab is the proposed revision, but there is also are rationale, severity, and DSM-IV tabs. So it does provide more information than one might think.

So, as one major example, Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent, has an extensive draft proposal for the DSM-5. Here the rationale isn’t that great, since it largely focuses on single episodes of depression. On the severity side, it’s clear what the APA group is thinking about in terms of differential ratings. And it’s easy to compare the DSM-5 with the DSM-IV criteria.

Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks includes some extensive commentary, and a wealth of links, on the DSM-5 Draft in the piece The Draft of the New ‘Psychiatric Bible’ Is Published. He opens by saying:

It’s a masterpiece of compromise – intended to be largely backwardly compatible, so most psychiatrists could just get on diagnosing the few major mental illnesses that all clinicians recognise in the same way they always did, with some extra features if you’re an advanced user.

One of the most striking extra features is the addition of dimensions. These are essentially mini questionnaire-like ratings that allow the extent of a condition to be numerically rated, rather than just relying on a ‘you have it or you do not’ categorical diagnosis.

John Grohol, writing over at Psych Central, also provides an initial overview of the main changes in the DSM-V and then provides a review that features the good, the bad and the ugly.

If you’re looking for just the critical, the Psychiatric Times has a piece Opening Pandora’s Box: The 19 Worst Suggestions For DSM-5. Dr. Allen Frances, who chaired the DSM-IV Task Force, identifies two areas that are quite worrisome (and predictable) for a critical medical anthropologist:

(1) Dramatically higher rates of mental disorder, including “millions of newly misidentified false positive ‘patients’ [and] massive overtreatment with medications that are unnecessary, expensive, and often quite harmful”

(2) Unforeseen consequences, where DSM5 options often have an “insensitivity to possible misuse in forensic settings. Work Group members cannot be expected to anticipate the many ways lawyers will try to twist their good intentions.”

You can explore the legal aspects more over at In the News.

For specific diagnoses, Dr. Petra has particularly good coverage on the proposed changes in sexual disorders. Liz Spikol looks at the diagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder with a critical eye.

For more reading, Furious Seasons has some good initial thoughts on the DSM-5. Additional coverage can be found at the NY Times and New Scientist.

The Sociology of Neuroscience: A Call for Papers

Volume 11 of “Advances in Medical Sociology” will be dedicated to the theme Sociological Reflections on Neuroscience. You should send abstracts detailing potential contributions by next Monday, February 15th, 2010. Details on abstract submission are at the bottom of the post.

Sociological Reflections on Neuroscience will be edited by Ira van Keulen (Rathenau Institute) and Martyn Pickersgill (University of Edinburgh). Here’s the call for papers:

The Advances in Medical Sociology book series seeks submissions for a new volume on sociological reflections on the neurosciences. Neuroscience is an increasingly influential and prestigious branch of biomedicine, gaining ever more traction within a variety of policy, professional and public cultures. In some respects, neuroscientific ideas and concepts are replacing genetics as a paradigm for understanding the body, the mind and social order, and the relationships between these domains.

Neuroscience therefore demands attention from sociologists. However, to-date, debate around the ‘new brain sciences’ has been limited within sociology, and it has mostly been ethicists who have opened up discussions on the important ethical and epistemological issues neuroscience raises. As a consequence, many of the discussions on the social, ethical, legal and policy implications of the rapidly growing field of the neurosciences have been primarily speculative and theoretical. Thus for this volume of Advances in Medical Sociology: Sociological Reflections on Neuroscience we are specifically looking for articles based on empirical research, from socio-historical analysis to ethnographic research, from surveys to in-depth interviews.

This edited volume of Advances in Medical Sociology aims to be a benchmark text in sociological analyses of neuroscientific research and practice. Accordingly, we call for papers addressing a wide variety of issues pertaining to the sociology of neuroscience, including – but not limited to – the following topics:

1 Knowledge representation in (medical) neuroimaging studies.

2 Changing perceptions of neurological conditions (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease) and ‘cognitive functions’ (e.g. attention, memory) within the clinic and in wider society.

3 The neuroscientific (re)construction of psychopathology (e.g. autism, ADHD, depression).

4 The links between neuroscience, clinical practice and subjectivity (including the politics and meanings of ‘neurodiversity’).

5 The rise of novel clinical neurotechnologies (e.g. neurofeedback, deep brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation).

6 Representations of the (diseased) brain within and beyond the media.

7 Changing perceptions of the mind-body relationship.

8 The governance and regulation of medical neuroimaging (including the development and implementation of clinical neuroethics).

9 The international production and flow of neuroscientific concepts, knowledge and technology.

10 Neuroscientific understandings of ‘sociological’ terms and concepts such as gender and racism.

This list should be treated as suggestive rather than prescriptive, and we welcome papers that with other germane issues (such as the degree to which longstanding sociological concepts like ‘biographical disruption’ and ‘medicalisation’ have explanatory or descriptive power in thinking about neuroscience, and the potential contribution neuroscience might make to sociology).

Potential contributors should email a 300-500 word abstract by Monday February 15th 2010 to: socofneuroscience@rathenau.nl. Informal enquiries to this address are also welcome. Name and institutional affiliation of author(s) should also be supplied, including full contact details of the main author. Proposals will be reviewed by the editors, and authors notified by 5th April. The deadline for full submissions (7500-8500 words) will be 1st September. Publication of the volume is expected in late 2011.

Wednesday Round Up #102

Top of the List

ScienceDaily, Ancient Human Teeth Show That Stress Early in Development Can Shorten Life Span
George Armelagos, a professor of mine at Emory, is featured in Science Daily with some excellent work showing how stressful events occurring early in life, as indicated by tooth enamel, can mean a shorter life span.

Susan Carey, The Origin of Concepts
The Harvard professor has a video lecture over at Cognition & Culture, where she discusses her new book The Origin of Concepts

Jane Brody, Rules Worth Following, for Everyone’s Sake
Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, is reviewed very favorably over at the NY Times. I also liked his earlier interview with Tara Parker-Pope, where he presented this book as the practical version of Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Anthropologists could pay great heed to what he says:

I’ve spent 10 years looking at agriculture, food and health. I’ve done it mostly as a reporter with a lot of research and adventures and explorations. At the end of the day people want to know what to do with this information. What’s the practical import of what you’ve learned? It’s the question I always get when I’m speaking to readers… I kept hearing the word pamphlet, and I wanted to write a book that would reach as many people as possible. It’s a real radical distillation of everything I’ve been working on. It’s really just to help people to act. It’s about daily practice more than theory.

Frans B. M. de Waal, The Evolution of Empathy
How empathy is essential to who we are, in the context of apes and other animals also exhibiting this trait.

Vaughan Bell, Death of a Gladiator
A gladiator graveyard is discovered in Turkey. Really cool research on how scientists determine the gladiators’ cause of death, with a focus on traumatic brain injuries.

Owen Slot, A Great Sporting Achievement
“Why the key to becoming a successful athlete is using less, not more, of your brain.”

Mind

Daniel Carlat, Lilly: “Execute the *%#&*! out of them!”
How drug companies manipulate science and doctors in order to sell their drugs.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #102”