Author: dlende

Wednesday Round Up #93

Here’s this week – top, mind, teaching & new media, anthropology, and science & life.

Top of the List

David L. Chandler, Rethinking Artificial Intelligence
A broad-based MIT project that aims to reinvent artificial intelligence for a new era. By going back and fixing mistakes, researchers hope to produce ‘co-processors’ for the human mind.

Petra Boynton, Celebrating This Blog’s Fifth Birthday!
“Sex educator, Agony Aunt, Academic” – here’s to five more years!

Sandra Kiume, Brain-Based Sex Differences
Mythbusting sex differences in the brain. Includes a video with Lise Eliot.

Sarah Kershaw, Addiction on 2 Fronts: Work and Home
Explains why Dr. A. Thomas McLellan accepted the nomination to be the government’s number two drug-control official – his life and his research surrounded by addiction.

Jessica Palmer, Beautiful Hunger
A YouTube video on swarming sea creatures. Another great one from Bioephemera is Eat Your Veggies.

ScienceDaily, First Evidence of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue
New white matter from 100 hours of reading – communication matters!

Mind

Benedict Carey, Study Suggests Methods and Timing to Treat Fears
Testing variations in extinction training for traumatic memories/associations – the sooner the better. Ed Yong provides greater depth about the actual research.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #93”

Wednesday Round Up #92

This week it’s music, anthropology and mind once we get the highlights out of the way.

Top of the List

Ed Yong, How Our Skin Helps Us To Listen
How your skin, along with your ear, is also involved in listening. So, can you hear me now? Your body matters to your brain, and our old concept of dedicated mental modules, encapsulated for specific functionality, just doesn’t match up with the reality of how the brain works.

Lisa Maruka & HotBook, Class Schedule: History of the Book: Literacy, Technology, Culture
Get a whole semester’s worth of reading on reading! Some fascinating links to understanding books using an interdisciplinary approach.

Neuroskeptic, Mental Illness vs. Suicide
Do countries with more mental sickness have more suicides? The assumption has often been yes, but worldwide data doesn’t support that. A good consideration of both the data and the assumption

Dr. X, Happy Thanksgiving
I loved these photos of a small boy at Thanksgiving

Scicurious, Mapping the Glutamate Receptor
Neurotopia with some pretty pictures and great description of a new paper in Science that gets all colorful (and structural too) with glutamate

Independent Lens, Journals of a Wily School
This documentary is amazing. It shows what anthropologists often hope to illustrate – the impact of both inequality and meaning, in this case for a young pickpocket in Kolkata who is part street leader, part police informer – and you get to see him caught up in both realities at once.

Music

Jonah Lehrer, Creation on Command
How does an act of imagination come about? Looking at how jazz improv and brain scans help reveal our internal artist

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #92”

Coffee Thursday @ 10:00AM at the AAAs

I’m leaving for Philadelphia and the annual American Anthropological Association meeting on Wednesday. My workshop Taking Anthropology Online is Thursday at 12:00. But I’d also like to use the meeting to talk with people about neuroanthropology.

So if you want to get together, I’m planning to be at the Starbucks in the Marriott at 10AM on Thursday. Leave me a comment below or send me an email at dlende at nd dot edu. Or just feel free to come by – here’s some photos of me if you don’t know what I look like. It should be a chance to network, as well as talk about our encultured brains.

Hope to see some of you soon!

-Daniel Lende

Wednesday Round Up #91

Top of the List

Jamil Zaki, The Two Human Natures
The view of human nature as violent and anti-social has a long social history, according to Marshall Sahlins, and a new blog looking at a more social view of ourselves and society

Fabiana Kubke, Making Science Culturally Appropriate
Fascinating snippet on using human brain tissue in New Zealand and intersections with the Maori concept of tapu (where our word taboo comes from)

Steven Mithen, The Music Instinct
Online article in the Annals of the NY Academy of Science that examines the evolutionary basis of musicality. The title above links to the abstract. Though it doesn’t always load, here’s a link that can hopefully get you the full text.

Online Tools

Erkan Saka, Online Tools for My Students
One of the early leaders of anthropology online puts up his list of all the online software he uses, complete with tricks and insights into a wide variety of programs

Kerim, House Cleaning
A list of links about Anthropology, including a list of anthropologists on Twitter and another list of anthropology blogs

Alexandre Enkerli, Vague Experience
Google Wave – looking at its uses (reflections in French)

John Postill, Still Networking in Iran
Keeping in touch with Iran via Facebook and Twitter

Thanksgiving

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #91”