NPR’s The World Cafe gets out “new and significant music and the artists who create it.” You can get livestreams and discover songs, as well as get recent sessions. The most recent is ‘Flowers’ for Kathleen Edwards.

BBC Music/World offers even greater range. DNA with DJ Edu is one of the most popular of all their World Shows.

National Geographic Music is also comprehensive, providing more information and background on particular countries and artists as well as the music. Here’s one from Sidestepper, a Colombian artist, who mixes cumbia, vallenato, and salsa.

Putumayo World Music provides collections of world music, often by themes. (Putumayo is, of course, located in Colombia.) They also have a weekly one-hour radio program.

In the near future I’ll post a student-led series on humor and neuroanthropology, building off work we’ve done on breast cancer and humor over the past two years. So this had me poking around the web this morning, where I found this video on Jaak Panksepp and his laughing rats.

Panksepp sees laughter as having mammalian roots (Physiology and Behavior pdf), and as being grounded in affective neuroscience (the title of his book). As this informative interview on his intellectual career relates, he has built a bottom-up approach to understanding the brain and mind.

By coincidence, today I also happened to read an excerpt from Cynthia Willett’s forthcoming book, Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom.

Continue reading “Laughing Rats and Biomedical Ironies”

I wrote on David Brooks’ editorial Neural Buddhists earlier today. In his piece Brooks recommends a series of authors, but no titles and no links, to help grasp this new brain science and its implications for our understanding of ourselves. Here’s his list, with Amazon links inserted to relevant books.

Andrew Newberg and Why We Believe What We Believe
Daniel J. Siegel and The Developing Mind and The Mindful Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga, with his 2005 The Ethical Brain and Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique coming out in June (see this excerpt from Edge)
Jonathan Haidt and The Happiness Hypothesis
Antonio Damasio, with his classis Descartes’ Error (which kicked off a lot of this popular shift)
Marc D. Hauser, a little questionable in my mind, but here’s his Moral Minds.

Greg has described other books, such as Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture (see his excellent critical review here, Why Brain Science Needs Anthropology) and John Medina’s Brain Rules. I might add Liars, Lovers and Heroes by Steven Quartz and Terrence Sejnowski and The Accidental Mind by David Linden

I also ran across another book this morning which looks like a great addition, John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality. Horgan is a journalist (including a former stint at Scientific American), and helps run the Center for Science Writings blog, which looks quite good!

Some other people are already reacting to Brooks editorial. Mary Martin at Animal Person has an interesting take, examining more the athiesm and religion angle. She also recommends the Mind & Life Institute, which does “Collaborative Research among Buddhists and Western Scientists.”

Over the last week or so, The New York Times has just had a lot of great material that I wanted to share with you.

First up is a piece on traditional healers and US immigrants entitled “Illegal Farm Workers Get Health Care in Shadows.” Interested in curanderas? Then take a look. Because it includes a video too.

Benedict Carey has a piece “I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really.” Tend to fib? “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” says Dr. Richard Gramzow.

Jennifer Senior’s review Chronicle of a Death Foretold covers the new book Blood Matters by Masha Gessen. Gessen is a “previvor,” and writes about her learning and decisions about what to do about her extremely high genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer

The next one is primarily because I know the person who starts the article off! I used to train with Jenny Higgins at Emory, so it’s great to see her as the lead-in for Gina Kolata’s piece on training for triathalons and the difficulties of peak performance.

Carl Zimmer wrote on Lots of Animals Learn, But Smarter Isn’t Better. “Why have most animals remained dumb?” is a good evolutionary question, and it has to do with the costs involved in being smart. Zimmer also addresses how learning as widespread in the animal kingdom, so bye-bye to notions of animals operating primarily by hardwired instincts.

Janet Rae-Dupree had her short and sweet Can You Become A Creature of New Habits? How about making good habits to overcome old habits, and trying to canalize creativity too.

Hurt Girls: The Uneven Playing Field analyzes the higher rates of injury in women’s sports, asking is there an injury epidemic? A Magazine piece, so it’s comprehensive.

Continue reading “Times Tidbits”

Starting tomorrow I will put up the posts that my students have been working on all semester for my class Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse. They started with a group presentation to the class, then worked through several drafts as I gave them feedback. Now each group gets their chance to share something with the world, rather than simply turn in a final paper (but they get to do that too–I’ve got my bases covered).

The topics include stress, brain imaging, and denial, among others, and I will post one a day over the coming days (I’ll probably skip Sunday, though). While I do not necessarily agree with everything that they say, these are the arguments that they developed–their takes on the material. And they’ve got some good takes.

So look for their posts over the coming days!