Plenty of mind/brain posts in this week’s Encephalon: Big Night, so the top list is focused on social issues. After that, I just take care of business – brain, animals and anthropology.
Top
Susan Blum, Should China Copy the West on Academic Integrity?
Researcher of truth in China and plagiarism in the US examines cultural notions of originality and due credit and their effect on academic practice and policy: “an academic system where people were hired and rewarded on the basis of contacts, seniority, and cooperation rather than publication and competition.”
Adrian Ivakhiv, Lakoff’s Environmental Frames vs. Connolly’s Resonance Machines
Cognition meets the environmental movement – neuropolitics results. Lakoff over-simplifies, and Ivakhiv brings in William Connolly to examine actual interactions, not just embodied frames.
I really liked this line, “communicating this idea of a social nature in a culture that still sees nature as “out there” somewhere and culture as “in here” among us humans, is not easy, as it goes against the grain even of what a large part of the American conservationist community has traditionally said (and celebrated), i.e., that nature is in our national parks, not in our homes or schoolyards.”
For more from the Immanence blog, see the post Robert Brulle’s Response to Lakoff.
EcoTone, Citizens First, Scientists second: The Argument for Advocacy
A new paper argues that scientists can be activists too through advocacy – in other words, questioning not the scientific method but the stand-off ethos that is often cultivated
Tamler Sommers, On Debunking
Considering love beyond evolutionary theory and brain function. Sommers follows up with Selective debunking in metaethics. Also see Ars Psychiatrica for more on love in All in your head?
Julia Douthwaite, Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model
Our images of the “wild man” – a savage, an innocent archetype, and defining what it meant to be human in the 18th century
Norman Holland, Has Psychology Become One of the Humanities?
Endless publications and not much advances in understanding – narrow efforts and the unscientific nature of the mind itself don’t add up to cumulative, generalizable knowledge.
Ars Psychiatrica takes on Holland, offering more a view from the humanities – “consciousness is inherently a dynamic entity, and one engaged in essential value discrimination, on its own and in relation to other minds. The latter is the humanistic endeavor, and when it comes to the mind regarding itself, the stakes are highest of all.”
David Dobbs, Pharma Objects to Empiricism
The latest in how Big Pharma aims to control both basic research and policy to our own detriment – very good piece over at Neuron Culture
Brain
Vaughan Bell, All Smoke and Mirror Neurons?
Love the title! And it’s a perfect fit, as Mind Hacks discusses a coming article that takes on the hype and the actual research around mirror neurons
Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #65”
Neuroanthropology 