Keeping it simple – the top, anthro and mind.

Top of the List

Dana Foundation, Cerebrum 2009: Emerging Ideas in Brain Science
Get a wealth of online articles from some of the top names in the field

David DiSalvo, I Must Be Guilty – the Video Says So
Like the Stanford Prison, except we make ourselves guilty through indirect manipulations by others (in this case, researchers). Sounds like the world we live in: the media says so…

Gillian Tett, Eliminate Financial Double Think
Tett has a PhD in social anth and writes for the Financial Times – a heady combination! Check out this line: “But if regulators and politicians are to have any hope of building a more effective financial system in future, it is crucial that they start thinking more about power structures, vested interests and social silence.”

Stephen Casper, Book Review: Wilson and Cory, The Evolutionary Epidemiology of Mania and Depression: A Theoretical and Empirical Interpretation of Mood Disorders
Praising the good and dissecting the bad in a new effort to explain the high prevalence of mania and depression in the modern world

Fail Blog
Always something amusing here

Ed Yong, Robots Evolve to Deceive One Another
Absolutely amazing research and absolutely amazing outcome. Match artificial neural networks with robots that can move and communicate with one another, let evolution happen, and you get a variety of adaptive behavior. Including patterns of deception.

Eugenia Tsao, The Drug Barons’ Campaign to Make Us All Crazy
“the extent to which our lives and livelihoods have been colonized by the reductive logic of pharmaceutical intervention remains breathtaking.” For more, see Antropologi’s Why anthropologists should politicize mental illness, which links to a longer Tsao article and provides more background

Malcolm Dando, Biologists Napping While Work Militarized
Nature editorial on how mind-altering agents need to be included in our definitions of chemical warfare. The work is being done – will we stand up against it?

Anthropology

Nicholas Kristof & Sherul WuDunn, The Women’s Crusade
Our paramount moral challenge – the brutality and oppression inflicted on women worldwide – and ways to address it. For more, check out their book Half the Sky

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #78”

Favorites, addiction, anthropology, memes, and mind this week. Enjoy.

Top of the List

Greg Laden, The Falsehoods
Greg lays out common mistakes and bad assumptions about biology, culture and evolution – a fantastic summary

ScienceDaily, Facial Expressions Show Language Barriers, Too
The title doesn’t quite get it; the point is that Ekman’s universal expressions of emotion has just taken a serious data-driven critique: “FACS-coded [Facial Action Coding System] facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion.”

Melvin Konner, Obesity 2
“Obesity is an evolutionary legacy, which is why it’s so hard to control.” The esteemed anthropologist reflects on our modern obesity epidemic.

Robert Wright, Jerry Coyne and The Evolution of God
The author of The Evolution of God responds vigorously to Coyne’s critique in The New Republic, which I featured a couple round-ups ago.

Dan Myers, Get a Theory – Part II
Some great reflections on what makes for a good conference paper

Christophe Heintz, How Cultural Is Cultural Epidemiology? The Case of Enculturation
An argument for a more robust cultural epidemiology through generative entrenchment and the cultural determination of cognitive tracks

Addiction

Robin Young, Homeless Heroin Addicts
Here and Now NPR interview with Phillippe Bourgois about his new book Righteous Dopefiend. Also has a nice selection of Schonberg’s photos.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #77”

This week it’s the good stuff, then mind and anthro, and finally gaming.

Top of the List

Fresh Air, Journalist Reports On ‘Life, Death And The Taliban’
Really impressive interview with Charles Sennott, the executive editor of GlobalPost, which is running a series on the complex history and present role of the Taliban in Afghanistan. A lot of things he says sound grounded in anthropology. Here’s the link to GlobalPost’s Taliban series, which includes video and reporting.

Lorenz Khazaleh, Five Years Antropologi.Info
A great summary of what five years have meant for that blog, as well as how anthropology blogging has grown over that time.

Charukesi, Who Is a Foodie? Not Me…
No indeed. But a food voyeur. Most certainly. Some scrumptious photographs!

Michael Dove, Dreams from His Mother
The Yale anthropologist reflects on the work done by Obama’s mother, the anthropologist Ann Dunham Soetoro. For more on Ann Dunham and how Obama is actually a neuroanthropologist in disguise, see our long round up just after Obama’s inauguration.

The Economist, Amartya Sen on Justice: How to Do It Better
A review of Sen’s important new book The Idea of Justice. “In his study on how to create justice in a globalised world, Amartya Sen expounds on human aspiration and deprivation—and takes a swipe at John Rawls”

The Neurocritic
Just a lot of great material recently – from the clitoral homunculus to psychoanalytic explorations, serial killer movies, and zombie cupcakes

Mind & Brain

Kraeplin’s Grandchild, The Biopsychosocial Model Is Dead! Long Live to… to What?
Un analisis muy interesante, y si, en español

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #76”

Back from vacation – so better late than never. Had a great time camping, by the way.

Top of the List

Vaughan Bell, How Long Is a Severed Head Conscious For?
One of those morbid questions we often ask – well, here’s the answer.

Jerry Coyne, Creationism for Liberals
The dismantling of Robert Wright’s new book The Evolution of God over at The New Republic. Wright responds to Coyne here.

Clarence Gravlee, New TAPS Paper in Current Anthropology
Godoy et al. paper on changes in well-being over time in the Bolivian Amazon. Data come from the Tsimane’ Amazonian Panel Study (TAPS), which uses a longitudinal approach not often seen in anthropology. Plus get Lance’s forthcoming paper, Methods for collecting panel data.

Christopher Kuzawa & Elizabeth Sweet, Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race: Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Health
Pdf of a 2009 article – “The model outlined here builds upon social constructivist perspectives to highlight an important set of mechanisms by which social influences can become embodied, having durable and even transgenerational influences.”

Ed Yong, Confirming Aesop – Rooks Use Stones to Raise the Level of Water in a Pitcher
And see the video too!

Anthropology

Mark Flinn, Why Words Can Hurt Us: Social Relationships, Stress and Health
Pdf of the very accessible chapter on stress in the recent volume Evolutionary Medicine and Health

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #75”

So this week it’s the food crisis, then neuroscience and anthropology, and finally language. Enjoy.

I will be on vacation next week, so won’t post the Wed round up until Saturday August 8th. So you’ll just have to wait a couple days while we’re camping.

Top of the List

Vaughan Bell, A War of Algorithms
Mind Hacks provides overview and commentary on the latest in artificial intelligence and the potential to wreak war and the need for limitations

Adam Henne, Whale Relations
Looks like a good new blog by an anthropology, Nature/Culture, with a focus on the environment and anthropology. I had wanted to discuss this recent NY Times magazine piece on whales. Adam did it for me.

Peter Deeley, The Religious Brain: Turning Ideas into Convictions
Scribd article looking at how cultural beliefs actually work their impact on specific people

Kay Redfield Jamison, The Importance of Restlessness and Jagged Edges
The psychologist and author of An Unquiet Mind shares her This I Believe: “I believe that curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do.”

Ed Yong, Your Brain on Oprah and Saddam (and what that says about Halle Berry and your grandmother)
Or even the researcher himself – he found a neuron that responded specifically to him during the research, despite having never met the volunteer previously. But really, the change is from the idea of a single neuron encoding singular info to groups of neurons encoding info through patterns of activity

The Food Crisis

-Many thanks to Craig Hadley for highlighting these selections-

Grain, The Other “Pandemic”
It’s not just the financial crisis and swine flu sweeping the world – the food crisis is killing a lot more people

Bapu Vaitla et al., Seasonal Hunger: A Neglected Problem with Proven Solutions
PLoS Medicine article about what we can do about the main cause of acute hunger and undernutrition, seasonal shortages due to dwindling stocks, high prices, or scarce jobs

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #74”

This week we’ve got synesthesia and drug categories, alongside the top selections and the anthro and neuro placeholders.

Top of the List

Aaron Traister, It’s Hot! It’s Sexy! It’s … Marriage!“Am I the only person who actually enjoys being hitched these days?”
A funny read with a substantive point, well, at least for this married guy.

Petra Boynton, The New Scientist, Female Ejaculation, and Six Things Science Has Taught Us about Sex
“The problem with the New Scientist piece and scientific research that focuses purely on the physiological is it taps into the women-are-mysterious narrative that unhelpfully underpins so much media coverage. “

Lindsey Tanner, Kids’ Lower IQ Scores Linked to Prenatal Pollution
Not good news. And of course pollution is unequally distributed in the environment.

Lauran Neergaard, Unraveling How Children Become Bilingual So Easily
Good summary of language learning by an AP journalist

Natalie Angier, When ‘What Animals Do’ Doesn’t Seem to Cover It
An informed discussion of what the term “behavior” actually means

Ed Yong, Why Information Is Its Own Reward – Same Neurons Signal Thirst for Water, Knowledge
I’m thirsty just thinking about it!

Cathryn Delude, Adult Brain Can Change within Seconds
“The brain is constantly recalibrating the connections through short-term plasticity mechanisms.” Or more provocatively, where already established connections meet with already established sociocultural phenomena?

Synethesia

David Eagleman, Synesthesia
Actually the lab page of the Baylor neuroscientist – but what I want to highlight is the video on synesthesia about half way down the page.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #73”