Author: dlende

Wednesday Round Up #56

I know things have been kind of sparse on my side of late; for those of you wondering, it’s just the time crunch. Three conferences in two weeks; teaching; funding to secure; and even more stuff. But Greg and I are excited about what’s to come, and soon we’ll be making a big announcement on the Neuroanthropology front.

So with that opening, let’s get down to business – the top, mental health, anthro and the brain.

Top of the List

Mouse Trap, Self Relevance and the Reality-Fiction Blur
Sandy’s useful summary and reflection on a new PLoS article, Reality = Relevance? Insights from Spontaneous Modulations of the Brain’s Default Network when Telling Apart Reality from Fiction. Neuronarrative also summarizes and reflects on the success of reality TV. My take – it means self-reference and specific memories can make even imaginary things “real”, and that’s a big step towards culture.

Sue Sheridan, Very Funny
The Onion Video: Experts Agree Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat

Brian Crecente, Maria Montessori: The 138-Year-Old Inspiration Behind Spore
Learning as exploration and growth in imagination, and how that inspired a modern-day video game that is sort-of about evolution

Archaeoastronomy, An Astronomical Experiment YOU Can Contribute To
A worldwide study of light pollution and why we don’t see the sky at night like we once did. Hurry to participate – the deadline is March 28th!

Supercourse: Epidemiology, The Internet, and Global Health
More than 3000 lectures from world experts, delivered in 26 different languages. Wow.

Mental Health

David Dobbs, Soldiers’ Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD
Scientific American article on overdiagnosis and mistaking adjustment back to civilian life as dysfunction. David provides some great follow-up and engages readers over at Neuron Culture, beginning here, with sources and links, and debate on war and medicalization, and finally David responding forcefully to a snarky critique.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #56”

Wednesday Round Up #55

I’m off to a conference, so you’re getting the Wednesday round up a day early. The typical stuff on brain and anthro, plus some happiness, eating and other stuff thrown in. Enjoy!

Top of the List

Mo Costandi, Experience Induces Global Reorganization of Brain Circuitry
Plasticity in action, now showing that small changes can produce bigger changes elsewhere

Hugh Gusterson, Empire of Bases
The global reach of the US military. It’s no longer the military-industry complex, it’s just the military complex. It’s hard to fathom, and all that money that might be spent differently…

Dave Munger, Training in Working Memory Can Improve Preschoolers’ Performance in a Variety of Tasks
The title says it all. Train visual working memory, get benefits elsewhere.

Brian McKenna, How Anthropology Disparages Journalism
A call for anthropology to engage what could be one of its closest allies, as well as to take on what journalism offers for getting our message beyond the Ivory Tower

Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore, Clean and Virtuous: When Physical Purity Becomes Moral Purity
Scientific American: “How “embodied” metaphors, rooted in our physical understanding of abstract concepts, shape our view of the world.”

Brain

Deric Bownds, The Myth of Language Universals
Deric is as intrigued by this new Behavioral and Brain Science target article as I am, The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #55”

Grand Encephalon

brain-coral-university-of-melbourneThe latest mind/brain Encephalon carnival is out at Ionian Enchantment. Lots of good stuff, so check it out. A couple of favorites include Dr. Shock’s look at online gaming (what a surprise there – and he reminded me that I need to check out Quake Live) and Podblack’s poetry – practive vs. impulse – debate.

ACP Internist is hosting this week’s medical blogging Grand Rounds in a well-done newspaper style format. Looks like there is broad support for health care reform among patients. The rise in number of psychiatrists in the US has gone hand-in-hand with increasing use of drugs and a proliferation of diagnostic categories, all to justify both the work and getting paid for it, argues Phillip Hickey. Neurofeedback is now being used to deal with ADHD, reports SharpBrains. And here’s a great debunking – we don’t actually lose the majority of our heat through our heads.

What Is The Value of Neuroscience?

Jonah Lehrer has a great post, The Value of Neuroscience, over at The Frontal Cortex. He writes about struggling with a common question he got during his recent tour for his new book, How We Decide.

The question is, “What practical knowledge have we gained by looking at decision-making in the brain that we didn’t already have, either through introspection or behavioral studies?”

His answer is, “The best answer, I think, is that learning about the brain can help constrain our theories. We haven’t decoded the cortex or solved human nature – we’re not even close – but we can begin to narrow the space of possible theories.”

That is both an elegant and a practical answer – it claims neither too much nor too little for neuroscience, and provides a way to think about neuroscience. Ways of thinking are often much harder to grasp than what to think, where neuroscience churns out an enormous quantity of information but not necessarily an enormous range of hypotheses about people as people.

Lehrer’s answer echoes my own view of evolutionary theory, that its greatest utility is in limiting the range of possibilities when confronting the diversity and commonality of people’s behavior lives today and in the recent past. People are often aghast when I say this – but what about all the predictions, the selective forces, Darwin’s genius? But there is evolution’s strength – certain possibilities are more likely, and others are often not on the table. Combine that with the mechanistic understandings from neurobiology–the outcomes of evolutionary adaptations and present function–and suddenly the range of possibilities is constrained further.

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Grand Stone

stone-mountainThe latest anthropology Four Stone Hearth carnival is out over at the Swedish Osteological Association – kudos on the new site!

They have a very entertaining skeleton dance video to open this edition, worth it just for that. Lots of archaeology this time, which is great to see (and what a suprise from an osteological association…). John Hawks discusses peer review and Micele Lamont’s new book. And since it’s a topic I hope to talk about in the future, check out Culturge’s Homo evolutis, based on the TED talk by Juan Enriquez.

The latest medical Grand Rounds is out at Doc Gurley. Kudos to her for running a live version of the carnival – the Internet sweeps into that venerable medical tradition. You can actually see the video of the live broadcast on her site!

There’s a slideshare on a basic intro to genetics from Medicine and Man. And for the culturally inclined, as well as those with heart disease (refrain from joke…), there is a revelatory piece from Dr. Rich on Where those cardiology guidelines come from.