This week it’s a bit of war in between the top and anthropology & mind.

Top of the List

David Schneider, Your Internet Brain’s on Coleridge
“The questions that neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists are contending with today, Coleridge was wrestling with in the early 19th century via minute observations of his own mind in the process of thinking and perceiving. The similarities are sometimes startling.”

Paul Ehrlich, On Closing the Culture Gap
Human activity is destructive at a massive scale – climate change, nuclear conflict, biodiversity loss. We need to combine the humanities and the sciences to better understand and address our own actions. For more, see Seed’s Are We Beyond the Two Cultures?

Ed Yong, Dangerous DNA: The Truth About the ‘Warrior Gene’
The story of one gene epitomizes popular misconceptions about how our DNA shapes us. But it can also teach some crucial lessons, says Ed Yong.

Ryan Anderson, Model Behavior
Looking at experimental economics and ethnography, and considering the limitations of both

Dirk Hanson, Impulsivity and Addiction
The dangers of a hypersensitive dopamine structure.

Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky , Digital Power and Its Discontents
A debate with Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky on the subjects of dictators, democracy, Twitter revolutionaries, and the role of the Internet and social software in political lives of people living under authoritarian regimes.

War

John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, Hardly Existential: Thinking Rationally About Terrorism
Many people hold that terrorism poses an existential threat to the United States. Yet actual statistics suggests that it presents an acceptable risk — one so low that spending to further decrease its likelihood or consequences is scarcely validated.

Benedict Carey, Psychologists Explain Iraq Airstrike Video
Many veterans have made the point that fighters cannot do their jobs without generating psychological distance from the enemy. It’s almost like they’re playing a video game. They have to do this so that the people don’t seem real.

Anthropology

Nadia Sussman, Bodies Altered in Pursuit of Beauty
“The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become like a new religion,” Zed Nelson, a photographer, says. Pictures included.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #111”

This week it goes tops, mind, anthropology, technology, and finishes with some great sex.

Top of the List

Greg Hickok and David Poeppel, Self-Destruction of the Mirror Neuron Theory of Actual Understanding
Mirror neurons now reflect our fantasies.

Patricia Cohen, Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know
Literary criticism meets evolutionary theory and neuroscience – or the hot new thing, in this book review at the NY Times.

Lorenz Khazaleh, Beware: No Pecha Kucha Allowed Without Consent from Tokyo
I’ve recommended the Pecha Kucha approach. No more. STAY AWAY.

Kerim, Hard Problems in Anthropology
Over at Savage Minds, a proposal for two “hard problems” in anthropology, with lots of ensuing discussion and other proposals

Lori Oliwenstein, Caltech Scientists Find First Physiological Evidence of Brain’s Response to Inequality
“the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person’s head, rather than the poor person’s.”
What’s interesting to me is that once you get beyond a set notion of hard-wired reward, here’s the start of a rich experimental that could get at some neurological parts of how inequality also gets established, as in rich people paying more attention to when poor people get more than they should…

Onion News Network, Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday
Funny The Onion piece, complete with video.

Mind

The Neurocritic, Voodoo and Type II: Debate between Piotr Winkielman and Matt Lieberman
A debate between those supporting the statistical analyses behind fMRI studies and those critiquing them – or the latest round in Voodoo Neuroscience

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #110”

Tops on down…

Top of the List

International Cognition and Culture Institute, ICCI – Mini Grant Competition
Up to five grants will be awarded to encourage anthropologists with good ethnographic knowledge of their field sites to perform an experimental study that will help provide comparative cross-cultural data on children’s and adults’ reasoning about human social kinds. The deadline is soon!!

Tom Bowman, WWII Combat Cameraman: ‘The Public Had To Know’
During World War II, Norman Hatch was a combat cameraman who witnessed — and filmed — some of the most bitter fighting in the Pacific theater. Includes his Oscar winning video of actual WWII combat.

Mo Costandi, Fossilized 13th Century Brain with Intact Cells
An extraordinary artifact is astonishingly found intact. How this is so? The brain preserves very well!

Mike Fahey, Accused Game Cheater Gets Knife Through Head and Survives
An argument between Counter-Strike players at a Chinese net café over alleged use of a ‘wallhack’ cheat led to a 17-year-old boy being stabbed through the head with a foot-long knife. This boy ended up living to tell the tale. Includes a graphic photo.

Daniel Carlat, What Is The New Psychiatry?
The field of psychiatry is changing, and we need to change with it. This means utilizing every tool we are given to our advantage, not just the biomedical tool kit.

Mind

International Cognition and Culture Institute, Learn About Social Neuroscience
This article seeks to understand how the brain mediates social behaviors, and how social behaviors influence brain function.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #109”