Author: dlende

Oldies but Goodies: Greg Downey

Well not that old, but I thought I might highlight some posts from our early days when our daily visits were pretty low. These posts deserve some attention alongside the top ten I posted on Sunday.

Today I will cover Greg’s posts. I’ve decided to split the posts into three themes: (1) work that comes out of Greg’s main research interests in perception, sport, and skilled activity; (2) his critical takes on ideas of “innateness” (whether in neuroscience or in evolutionary psychology); and (3) his anthropological examination and reflection of recent mind/brain research.

Perception and Skilled Action

Exercise is ‘mindset’ as well as activity

Brainy muscles

Tools, mirrors and the expandable body

Trust your hand, not your eyes

Children integrating their senses

Critique

Craving money, chocolate… and justice

‘Innate’ fear of snakes?

More on persuasive, irrelevant ‘neuroscience’

Anthropology and Neuroscience

Thinking about how others think: two ways?

(insert clever French grammar title here)

‘Blind to change’ or just ‘mostly blind’?

Tightening your belt on your mind

Got Questions? Find Answers at Encephalon 52

Ouroboros is hosting Encephalon this time around. This edition provides plenty of answers to those questions we’ve always had, such as the relationships between depression and neurogenesis, the molecular basis of bipolar disorder, and particularly important for me, the perceptual basis of tone deafness (I now have an explanation for my wife…). Plus lots of good stuff from the usual suspects.

It’s a comprehensive edition, so check it out. One I really liked was a review of “grandmother neurons,” or the idea that a single neuron encodes a single concept. Over at Neurotic Physiology, we have “context, personality, and brain imaging,” examining recent research on attachment styles, social cues, and differing underlying neural correlates. Finally, the Neurocritic gives us a gender perspective on Olympics coverage, boiling down to fewer clothes = more coverage. So there’s some neuroscience, some interactions, and some anthropology for you!

100,000!

Last night we hit 100,000 on-site vists. Greg and I want to thank everyone who has come to our blog. It’s been a great ride over the past months, something we’ve both enjoyed. We never imagined that the site would grow so quickly.

Thank you as well to everyone out there who has stumbled or linked or commented or otherwise enriched what we do here. And thanks also to the people who read the blog through the feed. While you don’t go into the official stats, we know there are a lot of you!

Finally, if any of you are interested in what the top 10 have been since last December, here they are:

Cultural Aspects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Thinking on Meaning and Risk

Poverty Poisons the Brain

Girls Gone Guilty: Evolutionary Psych on Sex #2

Brain Doping Poll Results In

Brain vs. Philosophy: Howard Gardner Get Us Across!

Synesthesia and Methaphor – I’m Not Feeling It

Psychopharma-parenting

Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct

Dopamine and Addiction – Part One

Anthropology and Neuroscience Podcasts

Drugs Round Up

Brain

Science Daily, Cocaine Addiction Linked To Voluntary Drug Use And Cellular Memory, Study Shows
Voluntary use, memory, and predisposition to use again—active choice matters, and from there, a short jump to meaning (why choose drugs…)

Alexis Madrigal, Memory Disruption Could Aid Addicts
Blocking associative memory in rats works. Are people next?

Hal Arkowitz and Scott Lilienfeld, Do-It-Yourself Addiction Cures?
Self-change happens, and it can work

Reuters, Feeling Poor Spurs Lottery Ticket Purchases
Research confirms what the lottery business already knows—feeling subjectively poor makes it more likely to buy that ticket to a quick-fix dream

Pure Pedantry, Ricardo Ricco & Epo Abuse and Heptaminol? Where Do They Even Find This Stuff
The scientific low-down on performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France

Jane Brody, Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions
Coffee and your health—sorting out the myths and the realities

Henry Fountain, It’s Always Happy Hour for Several Species in Malaysian Rain Forest
Alcohol-swigging small mammals like their fermented fruit

Mark Kern, The Seductiveness of Bad Habits
Health and unhealthy habits and addiction

Continue reading “Drugs Round Up”

Cultural Neuroscience

Shihui Han and Georg Northoff have just published Culture-Sensitive Neural Substrates of Human Cognition: A Transcultural Neuroimaging Approach. This article will prove foundational for “cultural neuroscience,” a term Han & Northoff use near the end of the article. I highly recommend that everyone read the full version (pdf), but will outline and comment on it here.

In this Perspectives piece in Nature Neuroscience Reviews, Han and Northoff review the evidence on how culture influences neural mechanisms, highlight the need to integrate social neuroscience and cultural cognition research, argue for transcultural neuroimaging as an effective method for cultural neuroscience, and lay out implications for the future of this emerging field.

But if you don’t take my word for it, here’s their abstract:

Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.

Cultural Effects on Cognition

Han and Northoff systematically cover research on “cultural effects on cognition,” including perceptual processing, attentional modulation, language and music, and number representation and mental calculation. Their Figure 1, presented below, summarizes research on culture and attention, highlighting context-dependent differences in attention between Americans and East Asians.

Continue reading “Cultural Neuroscience”

Wednesday Round Up #24

Extended Mind

Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs?
The noted philosopher of mind delivers his Edge piece on the extended mind, embodiment, and technology

Paul Rabinow & Gaymon Bennett, A Diagnostic of Equipmental Platforms
Working Paper #9 of ARC: Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaborative.
The paper, through focusing on “equipment” (what mediates method and technology), aims to “bring the biosciences and the human sciences into a mutually collaborative and enriching relationship.”

Lambros Malafouris, The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Body, Brain and Culture Conflate
Neuroarchaeologist on cognition, brain and material culture

Taede Smedes, Review – Mind in Life
A philosopher gives his take on Evan Thompson’s massive new book, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind

M. Wheeler, Final Report – The Interactive Mind: A Series of AHRC Workshops
The Arts and Humanities Research Council sponsored a series of meetings on the interactive mind. This final report, while also filled with technical information about the meetings themselves, contains a nice summary of the major cross-disciplinary themes of the workshop. A good guideline to how to think about the extended mind.

Tim Ingold, Culture from the Ground: Walking, Movement and Placemaking
Homesite for this integrative project. The research is now out as a new book, Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers, The Extended Mind
Online paper that lays out the case for “active externalism”

Theresa Sheft, Reading Notes for Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Background and summary to the iconic essay, which you can read in full here

Robert Logan, The Extended Mind Model of the Origins of Language and Culture
How the extended mind relates to hominid evolution, particularly the emergence of language and culture. For more from Logan, see his website.

Robin Prior, Extending the Extended Mind
Past, present and future of the extended mind – a worthwhile MA thesis. For the summary and lots of useful links, see Prior’s site.

Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition
Recent book that critiques embodied cognition and the extended mind. For the book summarized into a paper, check out their online essay, Why the Mind Is Still in the Head.

Brain

Mind Hacks, The Best Is Yet to Come: Reward Prediction in the Brain
Computation, dopamine and the reward model considered

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #24”