Category: Uncategorized

Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam and Dreams

My niece sent me the first link, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam, which is as relevant today as it was then.

And for the second, I Have A Dream, came, of course, at “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation” against the “flames of withering injustice” and “the long night of [our] captivity”

The third is Miri Ben-Ari’s Symphony of Brotherhood, an uplifting and haunting piece of music that resonates deeply with me.  I’m not a big fan of music videos, and this one is not particularly well done, so I listen to it with the video in the background.  It’s the music that speaks.

Recent Deric Bownds

Deric Bownds has some recent entries which I’ve quite enjoyed.  Our Motor Adaptation as a Process of Reoptimization covers an article on how motor adaptation is not to return to some baseline, but to “maximize performance in that environment.”  An argument closer to both an evolutionary and an embodied view. 

Influence of Language on Brain Activity provides us with an article arguing that “language-processing areas of the brain are directly involved in visual perceptual decisions.” 

Awareness and Attention: Different Brain Processes points out that “subjective visual experience is shaped by the cumulative contribution of two processes operating independently at the neural level, one reflecting visual awareness per se and the other reflecting spatial attention 

And A Primer on Executive Function in the Prefrontal Cortex covers the functional neuroanatomy behind “flexible responses to situations with alternative choices.”

Geek Love for Gary Gygax

As a former D&D player myself, and still hooked on fantasy novels and the occasional RPG on the computer, I just had to put up this editorial Geek Love by Adam Rogers, honoring Gary Gygax, who passed away this past week.

Here’s the beginning to pique interest:

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Brainy muscles

A recent story in The New York Times by Gina Kolata, one of my favorite science writers, highlights one reason why I think neuroanthropology has to be broader than ‘cognitive anthropology’ was in the 1980s and 1990s (and why ‘cognitive science’ itself has really expanded with the more recent wave of thinking about embodied cognition). In an article on whether or not weight training is really good for athletes, titled Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?, I think Kolata does a much better job presenting the case for the efficacy of weight training than the arguments against it. Even several of the physiologists and trainers who Kolata suggests are less than rapt with weight training make comments that are more specifically about weight training done badly than against the practice as a whole; they criticize poor form, badly designed programs, and even not working hard enough, hardly criticisms of the overall efficacy of weight training.

Most of the athletes and other experts seem to me to be pretty strongly in favor of weight training, and I have no doubt that there’s good reason. Most athletic training has been radically transformed with the advent of weight training, and approaches that have come out of weight training (such as targeting specific muscle groups and working different parts of the body to failure) are also applied even in non-weight training exercises, such as selective sprinting, whole body exercises, and the like. Some of my research on capoeira, no-holds-barred fighting (or MMA), and other forms of wresting training suggest that actually training with ‘weights’ — barbells, dumbbells, and the like — can be less than ideal, but most of the modifications that this research suggests are consistent with the theory and practice of weight training, even if they expand the activities involved (body weight exercises, whole body dynamic lifting, jumping, etc.).

But one of the few critics says something that I found extremely interesting, and it resonated with some of the stuff I’ve been writing in my sports-related manuscript (hopefully a book soon) about how neural plasticity affects athletic performance. Specifically, Dr. Patrick O’Connor, a University of Georgia exercise scientist, says that ‘a sport like rowing, swimming or running requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns that may best be developed by actually doing the sport.’ A sport like ‘rowing, swimming or running’ that ‘requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns…’ hmmmm? So that would be like, what, every sport?

Continue reading “Brainy muscles”

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchI’ve been away from Neuroanthropology for a few days, typing my fingers numb working on a grant application for the Australian Research Council. I won’t go into it too much here (maybe later), but I will say that I have NEVER seen a more complicated, bureacratized, byzantine system than the ARC grant competition. I felt semi-conscious when I finished the ‘interactive’ budgeting section alone (I put ‘interactive’ in quotes only because the system would have to give the applicant something back to call it ‘interaction’). Many thanks, especially to Daniel, for covering my absence while I was ‘away,’ or at least pulling out clumps of hair trying to figure out what the instructions on the application were asking me to do.

But I’ve been wanting to post a number of things, including a recent article by Ashley Newton and Jill de Villiers that appeared in Psychological Science. Special thanks to Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily whose posting about this article drew it to my attention. (And Prof. Munger is also responsible for creating the ‘Blogging about refereed research’ system that we’re trying to work with on Neuroanthropology.)

Newton and de Villiers ran experiments in which subjects were asked to solve ‘false-belief’ problems, questions about how individuals would act when it was likely that they had developed false beliefs; for example, if the subject see Max watch Sam put food in one place, then Max leaves the room, only to have Same move the food to a new location. Will Max believe the food is in the first place, or in its actual location, when he returns to the room? These problems test the subject’s ability to reason about another person’s beliefs, even when they are false. Young children tend to get these problems wrong, saying that Max will look for the food in the new location because the child knows the food is there. Very young children do not recognize that Max will have a ‘false belief.’ (Alright, so ‘false belief’ problems aren’t that hard, but the researchers made the tasks a bit more difficult…)

Continue reading “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?”

Exercise that brain

US News and World Report has a recent article on “Keeping Your Brain Fit.”  An initial point: “”Some of the myths about the brain—that it was not changeable, that there was nothing you could do about cognitive decline—have really been dispelled in the past 10 years,” says Lynda Anderson, director of the Healthy Aging Program at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

What to do?  Keep using your brain, which means keeping active mentally and physically.  Stay curious and engage in learning and novelty, which will hopefully help your brain generate new synapses, recruit neurons to new activites, avoid selective pruning and perhaps (perhaps!) promote neuro-genesis.  And stay involved socially–as social creatures, our relationships have a generous impact on our brain, from stress to protection to fun to hope. That’s about the best I can say, but a lot of it is opinion–the research is still fairly new and tentative, as the article admits, so I am channeling my inner anthro Dr. Phil.

I also touched on this topic earlier in “Keeping Brains Agile,” so check that out if you’re interested.