Author: dlende

Wednesday Round Up #82

So favs, anthro and mind this week. Thanks to my new assistant Casey with help putting together the list!

Top of the List

John Sutton, Batting, Habit and Memory: The Embodied Mind and the Nature of Skill
Pdf of this 2007 paper: “This essay focuses on the distinction between explicit autobiographical remembering and the kind of habitual or ‘procedural’ memory involved in complex embodied skills like batting.”

Stanley J. Ulijaszek et al., Multidisciplinary Obesity Research: A Local Strategy for Breaking New Ground
The authors of this article talk about the different causes of obesity and how new research on this topic must be produced to get to the root of this problem and help fight it.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, How Humans Became Such Other-Regarding Apes
Humans feel, question, critique, problem-solve, and form communities. Apes ape. The evolution of our humanity.

The Neuroskeptic, fMRI Gets Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish
Do a lot of statistical tests, get some remarkable results! Like fish brains lighting up when the results smell as bad as dead fish! For more, see Mind Hacks’ Scientists Find Area Responsible for Emotion in Dead Fish

William Lu, Observation of Tool Use Activates Specific Brain Area Only in Humans
Explores the tool-use of species other than humans.

Dr. X, Last Words
Last words from prisoners executed in Texas since 1982. Haunting.

The Neurocritic, Tortured Brains Tell Tall Tales
“Neuroscience shows why torture doesn’t work”

Anthropology

Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon
The first chapter to Lara’s book, “AL-DAHIYYA: SIGHT, SOUND, SEASON,” which brings to life this suburb of Beirut

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #82”

PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury: Trauma Inside Out

by Drew Matott and Drew Cameron
by Drew Matott and Drew Cameron
By Zoë H. Wool

Jake was fond of saying that even though he had become dumber, he wasn’t quite dumb enough. He knew that the improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq had mangled his body, brain and self.

Jake (a pseudonym) lost 30 IQ points due to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) from that IED blast. According to the military, he was still smart enough to function and hold down a job, so they didn’t plan to include TBI in his disability rating.

He fought them on this, just as he fought them on the decision not to amputate his leg. After countless surgeries and rehabilitation techniques, his leg was almost useless, allowing him maybe 30 minutes of use before it started rebelling against its reconstructed form. The pain that caused was excruciating; he simply couldn’t use it more.

Eventually Jake won his battle to lose his leg. It was the best thing that happened to him during the year I got to know him while doing my dissertation fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. (yes, that Walter Reed).

Dealing with, or writing about, TBI is rarely as clear as an amputation. The same is true of TBI’s nearly constant companion, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). TBI and PTSD are not injuries that you can see, unlike a lost leg. Despite the high numbers of TBI and PTSD cases from Iraq and Afghanistan, the relationship of these conditions to more obvious forms of combat trauma remains a fraught one: Witness the debate about PTSD and the Purple Heart.

Most people think that the Purple Heart, that most iconic of military honors, is awarded to American military members injured in combat. As with most issues military, it is not quite that simple.

In 2008, after months of consultation, the decision was made not to award the Purple Heart to those suffering from PTSD because, in part, the medal “recognizes those individuals wounded to a degree that requires treatment by a medical officer, in action with the enemy or as the result of enemy action where the intended effect of a specific enemy action is to kill or injure the service member.” PTSD doesn’t count.

Though the decision was officially framed in rather bureaucratic terms, the debate which surrounded it raises much deeper issues about the nature of trauma. Thinking through these issues has led me to think about the Cartesian split between the (internal) mind and the (external) body and the nature of trauma inside and out.

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Sidney Mintz and Reflections on Sweetness and Power

Sweetness and Power
The Racliffe Institute for Advanced Study hosts a conference series on Women, Men and Food. Video from the six conferences is available online, ranging from the introductory Food for Thought to Studying Gender, Studying Food.

The one I want to highlight is Sweetness, Gender and Power: Rethinking Sidney Mintz’s Classic Work. That classic work is Sweetness and Power: The Place fo Sugar in Modern History, which links the production of sugar in slave plantations in the Caribbean with the rise of sugar consumption in England – economic history explained through anthropology. Given my interests in consumption, here’s what he writes early in the book:

What turned an exotic, foreign and costly substance into the daily fare of even the poorest and humblest people? How could it have become so important so swiftly? … The answers may seem self-evident; sugar is sweet, and human beings like sweetness. But when unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire – or are given – contextual meanings by those who use them… Uses imply meanings; to learn the anthropology of sugar, we need to explore the meaning of its uses, to discover the early and more limited uses of sugar, and to learn where and for what purposes sugar was produced (6).

The Radcliffe conference features four prominent academics – Amy Bentley, Vincent Brown, Judith Carney, and Sucheta Mazumdar – who place their work in light of Mintz’s ground-breaking book. The topics cover the academic study of food, enslaved women, gender and capitalism, and China and sweet potatoes. Mintz himself wraps up the conference with his own retrospective on his work, including an early line from his friend Eric Wolf, “Well, Mintz is a peculiar anthropologist.”

Link to the Sweetness, Gender, and Power: Rethinking Sidney Mintz’s Classic Work conference videos.

Conference: Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture

Emory University’s Center for Brain, Mind and Culture is hosting a free conference that is open to the public, The Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture, on November 12th and 13th, 2009.

The keynote address “Darwin in Genes and Culture” will open the conference at 1:00 PM on Thursday and will be given by Matt Ridley, author of books such as The Origins of Virtue and Nature via Nurture. That keynote will be followed a session on brain evolution. On Friday sessions on the evolution of mind and the evolution of culture will fill the morning and afternoon. You can see the entire schedule here. Prominent Emory scholars like Jim Rilling, Melvin Konner, and Frans de Waal will be joined by some great outside people like Pascal Boyer, Sally McBrearty, and Joe Henrich.

Wednesday Round Up #81

Back on Wednesday with a beefy one. Favs up top, drink and drugs, mind, anthropology, and then health. Enjoy.

Top of the List

Beatrice Golomb, This Is Your Brain on Politics
See Beatrice’s talk on how politics and drug company money trump science in the development, use and marketing of pharmaceuticals

Pamthropologist, Those Pyramid-Building Aliens
Frontal assault on bad archaeology and stupid cultural beliefs

Scicurious, Never Go Grocery Shopping Hungry: The fMRI Study
Those fMRI magnets really play havoc with your credit and debit cards… Or, actually, how being hungry or not changes what parts of your brain lights up when you imagine a restaurant menu

Lorenz Khazaleh, The Anthropology of Suicide
A call to research and examination of what we do know from something that takes a million lives a year

Raymond Tellis, Darwinism without Darwinitis
Looks like a brilliant talk – get the lecture and the slides here

Bird Dog, Don’t Ever Talk to the Cops
A police investigator tells you why you shouldn’t talk to the cops. Lots here about verbal interaction, besides the reflections on law and police procedure

Drink and Drugs

Michael White, The Science of Scotch
Good science, sublime taste

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #81”

Antonio Damasio: Art and Emotions

Antonio Damasio, the author of Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, opens this hour-long video featuring three substantive talks. Damasio is the head of the recently founded USC Brain and Creativity Institute.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher gives her talk, Art, Emotion, and Romantic Love, at exactly twenty minutes in. Isabelle Peretz, with The Emotional Power of Music, is at 39:00 minutes.

These talks were part of a symposium, Evolutionary Origins of Arts and Aesthetics, held last March at the Salk Institute. You can download videos of all the talks at the conference website, or simply catch them at the YouTube playlist, Evolutionary Origins of Arts and Aesthetics.

Come on, don’t you want to see, Art in Neanderthal and Paleolitic Cultures? Actually, this video starts by introducing the symposium, and if you stop at 5 minutes in, you can see Jean Pierre Changeux speaking broadly about the conference. Jean-Jacques Hublin’s presentation on Neanderthal art kicks in at 7:50, and Randall White follows with Paleolithic Art at 30 minutes. White’s talk is the most anthropological – and crucial to thinking about what art is and what art means and how we are to understand it.

The conference was put on by CARTA: Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, with the tagline “to explore and explain the origin of human phenomena”.

CARTA is a virtual organization formed in order to promote transdisciplinary research into human origins, drawing on methods from a number of traditional disciplines spanning the humanities, social, biomedical, biological, computational & engineering and physical & chemical sciences.

CARTA is hosting another great symposium on October 2nd, 2009: Human and Non-Human Cultures.