Mo at Neurophilosophy is celebrating the one year anniversary of his move to ScienceBlogs. He’s generated some amazing statistics over that year–more than a half million hits!
He has also provided us with his top ten over that time, as well as plenty of analysis of the traffic he gets using Google Analytics. Very impressive.
Experimental Philosophy
Joshua Knobe, Can A Robot, An Insect or God Be Aware?
Scientific American on experiments on our intuitions about emotions and intentions in non-humans and even corporations
Jonah Lehrer, God Is a Corporation?
The Frontal Cortex covers experimental philosophy
Vaughan Bell, The Science of Theory
Mind Hacks gets in on the game: testing philosophy of the mind
Morality
John Tierney, Deep Down, We Can’t Even Fool Ourselves
The double standard of morality revealed
L.L. Wynn, What Is a Prostitute?
Ethnographic research in Egypt places morality in context, in this case sex, family, and cash
Ted Fox, Welch and Coauthor Explore Ties Between Morality and Misconduct
Morality, social control, and deviance: looking for the synergy
David Sloan Wilson, Atheism as a Stealth Religion VI: Let’s Break Out the Good Stuff
From Sloan Wilson’s blog at The Huffington Post. This one covers Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s book, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide.
LizardBreath, Dirty, Disrespectful Outsiders
Nice critique of Jonathan Haidt and his moral psychology
The Brain
Abul Taher, Hey, Bashful—Hormone May Treat Shyness
Oxytocin nasal spray to boost your confidence? For a critique, see here.
Jonah Lehrer, Oxytocin
The good and the bad on recent research on the neurochemical de jour
This video really struck me, just the patterns of life and all that jazz.
The hattip goes to Ionian Enchantment, who has a thing for both ants and geckos. At Ionian Enchantment, Michael has also linked to a Carl Zimmer video on the evolution of mind and asked, Who’s the greatest modern thinker?
John Sherry is an anthropologist who is also chair of the Department of Marketing at Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business. I had coffee the other day with John, and was struck by how similar some of our approaches are. What unites us is an interest in behavior, for me behavioral health and for John consumer behavior, and a belief that anthropology can help unite interdisciplinary understandings of behavior and experience.
John has several online papers that focus on experience, embodiment and context. First up is Speaking of Art as Embodied Imagination: A Multi-Sensory Approach to Understanding Sensory Experience (it’s a large pdf, give it a moment).
Another good one is Fruit Flies Like A Banana (Or, When Ripeness Is All): Meditation on Markets and Timescapes. And here’s a short piece on Sporting Sensation. For more, check out his online cv with pdf links.
I’ve also come across a new blog uiGarden, which is about “Weaving Usability and Cultures”. (I covered similar blogs on “anthropology, design, business” back in April). Several posts there at uiGarden caught my attention:
A View of the Future: Trends Research, Ethnography and Design
Why Do People Become Attached to Their Products
Story Telling
Design for Emotion: Ready for the Next Decade?
And now for a more traditional round-up:
Irene Guijt, An “Aha” Moment in the Development Sector
Stories and practical examples, not grand narratives, as making the difference
Jason Palmer, Interview: The Cellphone Anthropology
Interview with Jan Chipchase, bringing anthropology to cellphones everywhere (for more on Chipchase, see our own Cellphones Save the World.)
Dori Tunstall, Design Anthropology: What Can It Add to Your Design Practice?
“Anthropology is engaged with issues of the global flows of people and goods, human rights and social justice, global feminism, technology adoption, the social effects of the environmental degradation, and local sustainability practices—all issues that have become important to designers.”
The Dana Foundation released Learning, Arts and the Brain: A Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition back in March. Led by Michael Gazzaniga (see Mind Hacks on him recently), the report “advances our understanding of the effects of music, dance, and drama education on other types of learning” as well as addressing the question, “Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?”
The overall summary , written by Gazzaniga, discuss motivation and sustained attention, the overlap between skills in arts and math, and even mentions aesthetics, openness, and dopamine. Gazzaniga highlights research on dance as indicative of overall synergies:
Our research indicates that dance training can enable students to become highly successful observers. We found that learning to dance by watching alone can be highly successful and that the success is sustained at the neural level by a strong overlap between brain areas that are used for observing actions and also for making actual movements. These shared neural substrates are critical for organizing complex actions into sequential structure.
The report itself has a range of chapters, including ones on music skills and cognition, dance and the brain, and arts education, the brain and language.
John Jackson, Hustle and Show
Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnography of Chicago gangs meets Hollywood
Luke Freeman, Anthropology Unites Mankind Rather Than Dividing It
Understanding cultural differences as key to the future
Nicholas Kristof, The Sex Speech
What would the perfect meld of Obama/Hillary have said about sexism in the US?
Shankar Vedantam, What Obama Might Learn from Emily Dickinson
Crime, poverty and vengeance mixed into one
Shankar Vedantam, See No Bias
Implicit bias trumps explicit ideology—or even the best-intentioned can have prejudices
Lisa Margonelli, Tapped Out
Review of Bottlemania, and why Americans spend $11 billion on bottled water
Maureen Flynn-Burhoe, Memory Work: Colonialism, Control, Civilization
Donna Haraway and the politics of nature
Neuroanthropology 