Pure Pedantry hosted Grand Rounds, the medical carnival. A great edition using a funny South Park theme.
Testimony of the Spade hosted the anthropology carnival Four Stone Hearth, with plenty to satisfy your sojourner heart.
Mouse Trap hosted the most recent Encephalon, rounding up brain and mind blogging, as an engaging “ode to the brain.”
Culture and Biology Interact
Seed Magazine, Interview with Lambros Malafouris
Podcast with the archaeologist studying material culture, our “extended mind,” and neuroarchaeology. For more, see Mind Hacks.
Jeremy Hsu, The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn
Scientific American on this human universal, including how narrative helps to organize emotion and empathy
Seed Magazine, Interview with Heejung Kim
Podcast with geneticist whose work illuminates the “competing yet complementary influences of genes and culture”
Drake Bennett, How Magicians Control Your Mind
Highlights from recent research on the cognitive neuroscience behind magicians’ tricks
Jonah Lehrer, Obesity and Food Culture
Eating habits, mixed-race adults, and obesity—some musings
Robert Krulwich, Virgina Woolf, At Intersection of Science and Art
The great writer, conveying our sense of the flow of ordinary sensations
Brain
The Neurocritic, Broken Social Scene
Individuals with Williams syndrome and autism (hyper vs. hypo sociality) and their reactions to pictures of social scenes—eye gaze and the importance of our social faces
Natalie Angier, The Nose, An Emotional Time Machine
Smell memories and becoming a better nose hound
Anthropology
Open Anthropology, Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, among Top 10 of World’s Public Intellectuals
A true public intellectual, as considered by the journal Foreign Policy
John Hawks, How to Blog, Get Tenure, and Prosper: Starting the Blog
A leader in anthropology blogging brings us his advice in the start of his series on blogging as a university professor
Open Anthropology, Doing Calypso the Right Way in the USA
Nice consideration of cross-cultural influences, complete with You Tube videos
LL Wynn, Cuisines of the Axis of Evil
A culturally informed and funny discussion of the same-titled book.
Mind Hacks, The Implicit Association Test: the basics and on suicide
Any use for this approach to examine culture beyond the cultural consensus/sharing model?
Ed Yong, Language Evolution Witnessed in Lab Experiments
Tracking people’s progress in artificial languages, and the structuring of language
General
David Brooks, The Biggest Issue
Technology and education race each other in the US’ economy—education progress has slowed, and technology has not. Decline and inequality appear as the result.
Warning: Habits May Be Good For You highlights the anthropologist Val Curtis’ work to synthesize anthropology, public health, and consumer behavior. She has a simple problem, how to teach children in sub-Saharan Africa to habitually wash their hands, thus lowering significantly the risk of many diseases. As Charles Duhigg writes, Curtis turned to consumer-goods companies for insight into her work.
She knew that over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors — habits — among consumers. These habits have helped companies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks, apply lotions and wipe counters almost without thinking, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues.
“There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” Dr. Curtis said. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.”
The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to — Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever — had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.
If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins — are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of canny advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands advertising that no morning is complete without a minty-fresh mouth…
“Our products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable.”
Habits
Habitual behavior is one topic that concerns brain science, psychology, economics and anthropology, each with disciplinary specific ways of trying to explain these everyday patterns. However, most of those explanations have two flaws: some variety of rationality as the way to understand habits, and some causal force (e.g., genetics, reward, subjective utility, culture) as forming the pattern. But things are not quite so simple, as “Habits May Be Good For You” shows:
Philosophy’s Other is a blog that provides abstracts, excerpts and other materials from a wide range of material online. Always something interesting every weekday.
Just today they link to “Darwin to the Rescue,” on the emerging trend to use evolutionary theory in literary criticism.
On Friday they had “Against Theoretical Archaeology,” debating the role of science in archaeology.
They also gave us “Negotiating Diversity” on how reason can still play a role in a multi-cultural society.
And more like that almost every day.
During the Critical Neurosciences Workshop in Montreal, one of the main questions we addressed was, What exactly do we mean by critical neuroscience? What is this field going to be?
Various analyses were presented: Is it the five varieties of the cultural brain? How neuroscientists and psychiatrists play to the popular press and get played by Big Pharma? Pointing out how the media can get neuroscience so wrong while reinforcing stereotypes? A round-up of the growing pains and inevitable limitations of science, and its emerging connections to the business world?
But in taking a larger look at the conference, I see a set of admirable characteristics in the young scholars there. Interdisciplinary. Not ready to accept the status quo of either just-do-lab-research or criticism-deconstruction-interpretation. Ready to take risks to work towards something that offers more possibilities than doing “good science” accompanied by the inevitable stereotypes and business applications.
And these scholars are working in three broad areas, which if developed together, will strengthen and enrich each other.
The first area is the obvious one, the emphasis on critical. Drawing on the Frankfurt school and its analysis of science as a core part of modernization and on Foucault and how ideologies and power shape the practice of science, a major theme of the overall conference was to examine how political economy and societal ideals shapes both neuroscience and its impact on society. Neuroscience can reinforce stereotypes, offer tools to companies who seek only profit, and rarely question its own assumptions as it proudly proclaims some aspect of human nature confirmed by its science.
It is not a lily white science, protected from the world by the boundaries of lab, producing knowledge unsullied by outside interests. The images of brain, the proclamations of hard-wired differences, its use in law and in advertising—these are things that fall squarely in the public domain.
Continue reading “The Three Aspects of Critical Neuroscience”
Neuroanthropology 