All kinds of conference announcements are coming into us here at Neuroanthropology! We have another one that may be of interest to our readers, scheduled for London in May 2009. Among the guest speakers will be Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford), Rom Harré (LSE), George Gaskell (LSE), and Fathali Moghaddam (Georgetown).

The London School of Economics is proud to announce the hosting of the 10th Anniversary Inter-University Graduate Conference: Culture, Cognition and Construction, May 22-23 2009, London, in collaboration with Cambridge University.

The Conference has traditionally supported the integration of diverse viewpoints across the social science disciplines. As the title suggests, this year’s event focuses on the cultivation of synergy between constructionist and cognitivist perspectives in the social sciences. Graduate and post-graduate students are invited to submit abstracts of no longer than 250 words to lsecamconf (at) psych.lse.ac.uk.

The deadline for submission is April the 10th 2009. For further details visit our website
at http://www.psych.lse.ac.uk/lsecamconf

For all our Australian readers, the 9th conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science will be held at Macquarie University, Sydney, from Wednesday 30 September to Friday 2 October 2009. The Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science is hosting the event, and my colleague, John Sutton, will be convening the event. The announcement can be found here.

Lots of interesting speakers are already confirmed, including Thomas Metzinger of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität and Barbara Tversky from Stanford.

If you’re in Australia, and you’re interested in neuroanthropology or cognition and culture more broadly, drop me a line because we may try to put something together around the conference to meet up and talk over future directions in the field.

From January 13-15, 2009 the Decade of the Mind IV Conference will take place in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico – really the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort & Spa in Albuquerque. Here’s the blurb on the Decade of the Mind Initiative:

Recent advances in brain research, in combination with the scientific consensus that mind emerges as a result of the activities of brains, has led to the notion of a new “Decade” project — one dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of mind within the context of neuroscience. In May 2007 a group of leading scientists met at George Mason University’s Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study to map out what such a national initiative might look like.

The Decade of the Mind initiative is trans-disciplinary and multi-agency in its approach. Success will require research that reaches across many disciplines.

Continue reading “Decade of the Mind Conference”

Our double session on the Encultured Brain: Neuroanthropology and Interdisciplinary Engagement was quite a success. The room was full, the papers well delivered, the discussants provided both constructive criticism and encouragement. Greg and I even got congratulations from people who heard about the session through meeting buzz. Never had that happen before!

So all that was great. But it’s not what I plan to dicuss here. The session, and ensuing conversations, pushed my own thinking, and I want to provide my general take on the session.

The place to begin is with the end, I think. In his comments Robert Sapolsky highlighted two important points. First he emphasized our changing view of the brain, with the main emphases in neuroscience now being the twin concepts of plasticity and connectivity. Genetic programming and innate modules are relics of past thinking. How neurons connect up and how neural function is shaped by other parts of the brain and by the environment now play a central role in understanding what our brains do. Not including these two basic concepts – with clear links to development, activity, experience, and culture – means missing the boat on where neuroscience is at and the potential lessons it carries for other fields.

Sapolsky’s second point was to not get caught up by the technical brilliance (or mirage, depending on your perspective) of neuroscience. Its technical prowess also carries large constraints, such as being limited to animal models or neuroimaging, extreme cost, and being confined to the laboratory. These technical aspects are largely problems of neuroscience, and should not carry over to anthropology (neuroanthropology or otherwise). Our focus on behavior, our work with people and primates in natural settings, our ability to focus on how people actually live – these are our strengths. We can flesh out what plasticity and connectivity – the interactive brain – mean for people and primates.

In her comments on the session, Naomi Quinn pointed out that we as anthropologists still have some way to go in this new endeavor. She highlighted the eclectic nature of the panel as one demonstration of that (who us, all over the board?). But the more serious point she had was our lack of a common language. Without a common set of ideas and a core set of references, we risk continuing to be all over the board rather than building the innovative research program that appears in our rose-colored dreams. Part of adding flesh to brain research means developing some shared meaning among ourselves about the different parts in play. Quinn’s challenge is an important one.

So that’s part one of my reflections. I’ll link to other parts here as I build on specific talks to discuss how to think more specifically about plasticity, connectivity, and common language. As a whole, the talks themselves present some powerful synergies – if we can just see our way to that.