We will be hosting the next edition of Encephalon, the blog carnival bringing the best and brightest (and latest) of mind/brain related materials together. The carnival goes up Monday, so please send your submissions to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com before then. Thanks!

And if you want more info on Encephalon as well as a list of previous editions, see the overall host site at Sharp Brains.

This summer I am part of a teaching discussion built around the book Good Video Games and Good Learning by James Paul Gee. By luck, during our first meeting in a common space of the student union, we started discussing World of Warcraft. None of us were experts there, but a student overheard us and came up and introduced himself. Turns out, he was a guild leader. He subsequently joined the group, providing plenty of gaming insight.

We had our second meeting yesterday, and our WoW student made the following point: in video games, there is progressive learning, so that you are still using some of the same principles in the end game as you learned in the beginning. These principles often extend throughout the differing domains and challenges of the game. Oftentimes, the repeated iterations and feedback of the game help the gamer develop an ever firmer grasp of those principles. But in most learning, students don’t get that sort of feedback—they get one or two shots, and then they move onto the next thing.

Some of us responded how, as teachers, how we’ve incorporated feedback and revisions and the like into our teaching strategies. And I said that, in principle, faculty in departments do sit down and discuss some of the basic core capacities they want students to have, and create a progression of expertise from introductory to high-level classes. But I was struck at the same time how difficult this same process can be for people attempting to create interdisciplinary approaches.

There is the obvious institutional side—disciplines have histories and sets of standards and expectations, and people who have gone through the process of formation themselves, and the ability to set their own agendas of teaching and learning. Any interdisciplinary effort works against all those social and intellectual structures already in place. However, institutes like the New Humanities Initiative can help provide a critical institutional space to help get people in conversation.

I was struck yesterday that the cognitive or learning challenge is the greater of the two. Institutes are easy to create. But a coherent set of learning principles that can be applied from introductory to expert situations, with a set of individuals who can agree on how and what needs to be debated to get students properly trained in a new type of thinking? Wow, that’s difficult—and a distinct challenge to anything we might try to propose here at Neuroanthropology.

Continue reading “The Interdisciplinary Game”

Paul mentioned this intriguing review, Mind, Brain, Law and Culture, at the end of his post on Norman Doidge. Welcome back from the field, Paul!

Written by Andrew Scull, a sociologist at UC San Diego and an expert in the history of psychiatry, this review appeared in the journal Brain in 2007. In it, Scull took on the books Law and the Brain, edited by Semir Zeki and Oliver Goodenough, and Brain and Culture by Bruce Wexler. I’ll deal as briefly with Brain and Culture as Scull does, before getting to the meat of Scull’s critique.

Scull reviews Wexler’s book favorably, as did Greg back in February, praising it for an integrative approach: “Rather than positing a rigid separation between the biological and the social, Wexler insists that the two interact and mutually influence each other in powerful ways. It makes no sense, in his view, to regard the brain as an asocial or a presocial organ, because in important respects, its very structure and functioning is a product of the social environment.”

Like Greg, Scull likes the first two-thirds of the book, but is less sanguine about the last third, where Wexler moves away from plasticity to speaking of difference. These chapters are more speculative and vulnerable to criticism, evoking generalizations based on selective snippets of anthropological and historical evidence.

Continue reading “Andrew Scull Takes the Law (and the Brain) Into His Own Hands”

The new anthro Four Stone Hearth carnival is up over at PaddyK’s Swedish Extravaganza. It’s a great collection, held together by Paddy’s, um, unique sense of humor (check out his popular posts, such as How to measure my d— and How to understand women).

Some of my carnival favorites? Terry at Remote Central gives us a history of humanity in generational time! Well done.

And Alexandre at Linguistic Anthropology asks a great question, Does the French language belong to the French? I know what my Belgian friends would say…