Category: Links

Wednesday Round Up #5

Food, Drink and Exercise 

Eric Asimov, Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?
Good discussion of families, teenagers and learning to drink responsibly at home

Nicholas Bakalar, Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing on the Pounds
Breakfast helps keep most adolescents thin (or perhaps less hefty…?)

Ginger Campbell/John Ratey, Exercise and the Brain
Podcast discussion of Ratey’s book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, and how exercise helps the brain

UPenn Press Release, Images of Desire: Food and Drug Cravings….
Cravings, habits and memories…

UFlorida Press Release, Imaging Disorders of Desire: Opiates, Brownies, Sex and Cocaine
Interview with Anna Rose Childress

Race 

Adam Geller, Where Should Conversation on Race Start?
In our mixed reactions to Obama’s speech, and much more

Eduardo Porter, Race and the Social Contract
Diversity and investment in public infrastructure

Mireya Navarro, Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race
Navigating the tight space between racial divides

General 

Sue Sheridan, Random Bytes
Sue has her own round-up, including make-up wearing Neanderthals and the evolution of complexity

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Encephalon at Of Two Minds

The most recent edition of the brain sciences blog carnival, Encephalon, is being hosted on the blog, Of Two Minds. Encephalon Goes to Paris (Hilton) includes a couple of references to work here on Neuroanthropology, but we do get called out on our severe reservations about twin studies (ooooo… don’t get me started…).

This won’t be news to many of you. In fact, a fair few of the visits we’ll get over the next few days will probably come from Encephalon-related browsers, but if you don’t already know about it, there’s a pile of interesting material in this edition. I won’t even attempt to summarize all the interesting stuff that you’ll find links to on everything from video games to synesthesia to the history of lithium to olfaction and sensing danger. If you’re not visiting here from there, you may want to pay a visit.

New neuroscience podcasts and Brazilian racial genomics

Vaughn at Mind Hacks points out several sites with good neurosciences lectures to download on a recent post, Lancet and MNI neuroscience podcasts. The ones from Lancet Neurology can be found here; and the ones from the Montreal Neurological Institute are here. In a post in February, Neurology podcasts – the shocking truth, Vaughn offers still more lectures available online from a number of sources (maybe we should try to do this at Neuroanthropology, especially if we can match Vaughn’s description of one podcast as an ‘excessively thorough lecture given by a voice synthesiser’ — now there’s something for which I can strive!).

On the Lancet Neurology site, there’s a number of good-looking lectures, but many are discussions of the whole volume by editor Helen Frankish. This might be an easy way to get a grip on a wide variety of current research, but they are more likely to be kind of technical for the non-specialist.

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Wednesday Round Up #4

Books

Dr. Ginger Campell and her Brain Science Store
Ginger provides a handy Amazon collection of the books covered in her podcasts

Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time
Building schools amid the Taliban, Americans and more…  Recently covered in the Diane Rehm show.  800+ reviews on Amazon, averaging in at the max 5 stars 

Brian Fagan, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Drought is our great historical enemy, especially in dense populations… Recently reviewed in the NY Times 

Sandra Blakeslee & Matthew Blakeslee, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better
One reviewer: “The brain and the body are not separate entities, but are intertwined, interdependent, and interfunctional. Understanding this fact is essential to understanding how and why body maps work. This book explains that lucidly.” 

Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought
Literary murder and social history—how we view the causes of ourselves

Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
Pharmaceuticals killing people, and companies marketing them more.  See an illuminating review here  

Vision 

Cognitive Daily, Fun With Point-Light Displays—And What That Says About The Visual System
Creating order out of dots… includes some good QuickTime videos

Mixing Memory, Language, Neuroscientific Evidence for the Influence of Language on Color Perception
Critique of imaging, importance of evidence, and our visual system

General 

Cordelia Fine, Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism
Critique of the at times popular view that gender differences are “hard wired”

Brandon Keim, Brain Scanner Can Tell You What You’re Looking At
Functional imaging and a good computational program can “decode” the different photographs people see, reconstructing the content.   Worth a look!

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Contagious stress and children redux

Sandy G at The Mouse Trap reviews my earlier post on how parents’ stress can affect their children in a posting entitled Stress contagion: from parents to the child? It’s a thoughtful response — thanks, Sandy G. And there’s lots more interesting stuff at The Mouse Trap to check out for our readers. I especially enjoyed a rambling, but incredibly engaging piece, Catch 22: Psychosis, Culture and the Mind Wars; it’s a great read with so many fruitful tangential thoughts that I may have to come back and post on it again.

Sandy G. does a nice job of summarizing the four channels I suggest might be operative in transmitting stress effects to children from their parents. I think he unfairly dismisses the ‘other communication channels’ (#3); there’s some evidence, including even cross-species effects, that there are ways we affect each other’s emotional states that are not imitation and ‘chameleon’ effects. I give the example of pheromones, but that’s not the only way that this could happen. But, fair enough, Sandy doesn’t think it’s plausible, I do. The evidence is hardly conclusive so this kind of disagreement is exactly the sort of thing we need to inspire new research (‘SandyG laughed at my theories… wahahahaha, this will show him!’).

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Brain TV and Online 3D Images

University of California at San Diego has a webcast series, Grey Matters: From Molecules to Mind, with lectures by leading neuroscience researchers.  Topics include decision making, brain development, addiction and more.
Hat Tip: Neurophilosophy

The Visible Body is an on-line 3D guide to anatomy.  You can focus in on particular structures, including the brain, and rotate them at your convenience.  Great guide and it’s free if you sign up on the Argosy website. 
Hat Tip: Neurophilosophy

Brain Place is an online resource focused on SPECT imaging: single photon emission computed tomography.  You get 3D images that you can rotate—sort of 3D x-rays.  Good for tracking global changes, for example, with substance abuse due to changes in blood flow or glucose utilization.  Some striking images of “holes” in the brain due to tumors or drug abuse. 
Hat Tip: My Students