Sharp Brains is hosting Encephalon #61, and rounds up an outstanding version of mind/brain blogging.
Mind Hacks’ Medical Jargon Alters Our Understanding of Disease is some great medical anthropology. Then we have the Jerry Springer of brain blogs, Neurocritic, on Jerry Springer himself, with some justice thrown in too.
Plus sexism and anger, the purported placebo gene, materialism and the soul, a striking visual illusion, and even more.
So check out the latest version of Encephalon.
In response to Max and Enkerli, I’m putting up a Portuguese language version of our call for a ‘best of anthropology blogging’ anthology for 2008. Apologies to both our English-language and Portuguese-proficient readers for what is about to happen…
Prezado companheiros no mundo virtual. Neuroanthropology.net vai lançar um ‘melhor de 2008’ antologia de blogging sobre antropologia. Nós queremos atingir uma plateia maior fora de antropologia por nosso trabalho na disciplina.
Por favor, manda ao Greg Downey (greg dot downey @ mq dot edu dot au) suas entradas, ambos os artigos mais populares e os seus preferidos (os que você acha melhor). Também, inclua uma pequena explicação de seus artigos (posts), e vou incluir no Carnaval Blogagem 2008!
Por amor de Deus, perdoa-me a decadência do meu portgues. Há anos que eu não escrevia na idioma, e esqueci tudo. E estou fazendo isso ‘livre,’ sem assistência, mas quero muito incluir nossos camaradas escrevendo em outras linguas.
The Greenbelt is hosting the latest Four Stone Hearth of anthropology blogging. We have hominids, shoe leather, Greece, and more.
A couple favorite include uppity Stone Age Venuses and Remote Central’s take on stone tools during human evolution.
So check out the latest Four Stone.
Laurie Edwards at The Chronic Dose gives us this week’s Grand Rounds, touted as being the Best of the Year in medical blogging. And most of the material is indeed posts that regular bloggers selected as their best of the year.
One post I particularly enjoyed was Code Indigo from Notes of an Anesthesioboist, a poignant story of a patient gone missing.
Another was this reflection on the dictum “first do no harm” from Leslie, a chronic pain sufferer, who blogs over at Getting Closer to Myself.
Overall, Laurie splits the Rounds up into the best of health practice, the best of health policy, the the best of health humor, the best of health inspiration, and the best of health debut. Plenty of great material, so check out the Chronic Best Rounds.
In the depths of the Bad Semester (how I now refer to the last four months), Dr. Charles Whitehead contacted me to share notes on neuroanthropology. I’m trying to catch up with the immense backlog of material I need to work through, but I thought I would post a short note and a link to his website, Social Mirrors. It’s a pretty interesting spread of thinking, and Dr. Whitehead has provided numerous links to his papers and other material.
I especially like his piece with Prof. Robert Turner, downloadable here, on the effects of collective representations on the brain. In particular, the Turner and Whitehead article argues that the idea that certain areas of the brain are networked into a ‘social brain’ — implying that the rest of the brain is ‘not social’ — is hard to support. I’ll admit that I don’t necessarily use the same language or conceive of how the brain works in the ways described by Turner and Whitehead, but it is well worth the read to check it out, if for no other reason that it provides a corrective to some emerging ways of theorizing brain enculturation.
Turner and Whitehead take the multiple senses of the word, ‘representation,’ especially the conflicting use by anthropologists and social scientists, on the one hand, and brain sciences, as a point of departure. Normally, I just find the overlap annoying and have argued that it is one reason that anthropologists don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to neurosciences (for example, in Beyond Bourdieu’s ‘body’ — giving too much credit?). But Turner and Whitehead have something more constructive to say about the unstable term (from their conclusion):
The Online Education Database published their list of 101 Fascinating Brain Blogs this week. There are psychology, psychiatry, technology, neuroscience, ethics and law, multidisciplinary, mental disorders and abnormal psychology, mental health and various brain blog categories. We land in the multidisciplinary category, along with fellow anthro blog Somatosphere.
If you see some that are missing, please feel free to leave a comment below. I didn’t see one on addiction, and recently I have been checking out Addiction Inbox.
One blog on the list that I didn’t know about is the Neuro-Journalism Mill, separating neuroscience stories in the press into wheat and chaff. No suprise that the chaff list is much longer…
I also discovered Half-Full, which covers “science for raising happy kids.” Television, family conflict, being connected – all things that happen in my house!
The hat-tip goes to Laura’s Psychology Blog, and it’s great to see that she too makes the list of 101 fascinating brain blogs.
Neuroanthropology 