This week we have more from John Hawks’ students, food, psychology, evolution, the brain, and anthropology.

Biology of Mind

I love encouraging students, and find that blogging raises the bar for them. Suddenly it’s not just the professor who’s reading a paper, but their fellow classmates and in the case of this new blog, Biology of Mind, the whole world! So here are students’ reflections and critiques on papers they have found fascinating:

Effects of Meditation Seen through Long-Term Buddhist Practitioners
Brain Damage from Stress
Looking Further into Semiotics…
The Anatomy of Humor
Is There Something about How We Live Today That Is Bad for Our Mental Health?
Behavioral Evidence for Theory of Mind in Monkeys
Culture Codes
Which Came First : Large Brains or Complex Social Groups?

Food

Eric Nagourney, Nutrition: Soda Ban in Schools Has Little Impact
Banning soda? “Only about 4 percent fewer children from the no-soda schools said they did not drink it.”

Elisabeth Rosenthal, Fast Food Hits Mediterranean; a Diet Succumbs
Fast food invades Greece, and childhood obesity and diabetes become problems. Plus this tidbit, “Greece, Italy, Spain and Morocco have even asked Unesco to designate the diet as an ‘intangible piece of cultural heritage’.”

Tara Parker-Pope, Instead of Eating to Diet, They’re Eating to Enjoy
Is this the better way to be healthy and to avoid the yo-yo effect?

Associated Press, Mexico Pushes National Campaign to Lose Weight
Increasing disease burden due to obesity leads to a new government initiative

Psychology

Eric Schwitzgebel, Six Ways to Know Your Mind
Getting to know yourself – a good guide to how to think about subjectivity and research focused on our experience (or phenomenology). A good follow up is Eric’s End of (Philosophical) Innocence, about how to effectively deal with the intuitions and assumptions at the core of our ideas and our research

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #31”

This week it’s gaming, mental health, academia, technology, the brain, and anthropology.

Video Games

Heather Chaplin, Xbox’s ‘Braid’ Is a Surprise Hit, for Surprising Reasons
NPR on Braid, a “game grownups can play” and a “meditation on the meaning of life”

Clive Thompson, How Video Games Blind Us with Science
Do kids practice science when they play? Professor and gamer Constance Steinkuehler argues yes

Maggie Greene, UC Irvine Gets Grant to Study WoW
World of Warcraft in US and the China – will culture matter?

The Brainy Gamer, Brilliant
Engagement, obsession, immesion? How about open worlds and the ability to express yourself!

The Game Anthropologist, Games’ Influencing of Players
“The long and short of it? The game makes the player.”

Cognitive Daily, The Bloodier the Game, The More Hostile the Gamer
Mortal Kombat settings and a one-game study – the bloodier the game play, the more violent the resulting thoughts. So, are players after that arousal gap? And with the sword, are they looking for that bloody spray? And here context (in game only) helps shape resulting experience.
So, interesting results but various ways to interpret what players are doing and experiencing

Mental Health

Sarah Kershaw, Girl Talk Has Its Limits
Teenage girls and co-rumination – or wallowing in sorrows and anxieties together

Serendip, Mental Health and the Brain
A discussion over at Bryn Mawr college this fall

Richard Perez-Pena, The Sports Whisperer, Probing Psychic Wounds
Gary Smith and the wounds and obsessions and stories of athletes

Clara Moskowitz, Social Isolation Makes People Cold, Literally
Rejected people feel colder. Is it all metaphor and embodied reactions? Benedict Carey at the NY Times also covers the same research in A Cold Stare Can Make You Crave Some Heat

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #30”