This week the new Four Stone Hearth, the best of anthropology, is out over at Remote Central. Another great edition! A extensive and wide-ranging round up, including some quite relevant brain-related stuff.
And for the medically inclined, go check out Grand Rounds at Unprotected Text! This one is presented in a very accessible fashion, so much appreciated!
Brain Health and Illness
Ed Yong, Is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Caused by a Serotonin Imbalance?
Mice with SIDS, extra serotonin, and environmental stress—a deadly package. Good take from Ed. To see the media’s coverage, here’s a short piece from Yahoo.
John Grohol, Surprise! Mental Health Parity Is Inexpensive
Results in from Massachusetts. Matching the coverage of physical health is very affordable
Alvaro at Sharp Brains, A Multi-Pronged Approach to Brain Health
Interview with Dr. Larry McClearly. Not McDreamy, but he does know his “brain health public education” and what you need to do to keep that brain running smoothly
Alvaro at Sharp Brains, Brain Evolution and Why It Is Meaningful Today to Improve Our Brain Health
The evolutionary rationale for why McDreamy, I mean McClearly, is right
Jonah Lehrer, How Prozac Really Works
“Prozac is simply a bottled version of other activities that have a similar effect, such as physical exercise. They aren’t happy pills, but healing pills.”
Anne Harding, Study Uncovers How Ritalin Works in the Brain
“when groups of neurons in the prefrontal cortex were working in well-organized networks, the small doses of Ritalin enhanced this activity, but suppressed the activity of less organized networks”
Vaughan Bell, Mental Illness: In with the Intron Crowd
The genetics of mental illness from a big, new Nature paper
Shrink Rap, Sunday Morning Coffee Links
One psychiatrist’s round up of the blogosphere—plenty of cool stuff
Tara Parker-Pope, Dance Even If Nobody Is Watching
Dancing helps with depression, anxiety and Parkinson’s—plus the Matt Harding worldwide dance video
Michael Wesch is an anthropologist who focuses on digital ethnography, student learning, and how new media and technology are changing the way we interact with each other and the world. He has a new lecture covering Media Literacy, an hour from a “master teacher” as one review says. So enjoy:
The hattip goes to Savage Minds. For more on Wesch, we featured his two most famous videos back in April in Digital Ethnography. He also has his own YouTube channel now and an academic website Mediated Cultures covering his and his students’ work. Wired even gave him a Rave Award in 2007, supplemented by lots of video snippets from him talking with Wired.
I’m pleased that a piece I put together on coaching and physical education has appeared in the most recent edition of American Anthropologist. Entitled, Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art, it’s behind a subscription wall (sorry about that).
The article is part of my continuing attempt to understand the relation of mirror neurons to actual patterns of imitative cultural learning. The effort is pretty unambitious in comparison to some of the more sweeping declarations about mirror neurons, that they explain all sorts of human capacities. That is, I think some of the discussion of mirror neurons has sped on ahead of both the research and other studies of imitation, including its limitations and odd quirks, to declare that mirror neurons explain all sorts of human abilities. By focusing specifically on a setting where imitation clearly is in play — mimetic learning — I hope to create a model of brain, behaviour, interaction, and even ideology all in interplay to create ability in the individual actor.
Mirror neurons alone do not explain humans’ prodigious abilities in imitative learning; the macaques that first offered evidence of mirror neurons to the University of Parma team do not learn well through imitation. So we can’t just explain enculturation through imitation in humans by reference to mirror neurons. There’s got to be more to the story than mirror neurons. So to think about that, I’m looking specifically at motor learning in capoeira, my original ethnographic study, and am now moving to work on rugby coaching (if I can get some research support).
What I’m thinking is that this careful neuroanthropological modeling of enculturation will likely undermine certain accounts of what culture itself could be. That is, studying how we get encultured will demonstrate limits on what can be learned, how, and under what circumstances.
Continue reading “Mirror neurons: shameless plug redux & publishing regrets”
The workshop is ‘Cognition and Culture: an enactive view,’ and will especially explore the legacy of Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela. The meeting organizers explain that they seek to ‘develop a robust vocabulary and set of concepts that are capable of sustaining dialogue between researchers in cognitive systems, cognitive science, arts, media, and culture by using the insights and approaches of the enactive approach to cognition.’
Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela wrote a couple of books together, but they are probably best known for the concept of autopoeisis and the book, Tree of Knowledge. Varela also did work on the embodied mind and directly contributed to some of the current neurosciences research on Buddhist monks (such as the Mind and Life Institute, which Varela helped to found); he passed away in 2001, leaving a very rich legacy (see his ‘focus file’ here). Varela, and his mentor Maturana, were both biologists with philosophical inclinations, doing quite a bit to encourage the study of phenomenology in biology and the embodied nature of the brain. Varela did some early brain imaging research, linking observed changes to perceptions. Although there are some parts of his thinking that we at Neuroanthropology might seek to expand and transform, Varela was a giant in the move to create a synthetic brain science that bridged the gap between biological and sociocultural or psychological research.
Continue reading “Culture and Cognition Workshop in Bristol, UK”
All right, here are some different rankings out there in the blogosphere.
First up, Online University Reviews gives us the Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs. They’ve split it up by topic, going from Art to Theology. (Yes, starting with art means that anthropology didn’t make it… grrr.) And it’s rather English heavy. But it’s a list!
Wikio: News in Your Way provides lots of ways to rank things, so to complement the liberal arts side, here is their ranking of the Top Science Blogs. Some familiar friends there, some blogs I didn’t know. Just one note, it looks like you have to submit your blog to even make it onto the list.
Technorati just gives us the Top 100 Blogs, and since they spend their time trying to track all blogs, it’s a powerhouse list. So these are the big players, covering the full gamut of topics out there—politics, technology, gossip. Didn’t I just say that we need to cultivate cultural and emotional ways of being? Here’s the ethnographic data on our present interests. It’s so depressing maybe I’ll go have a behavioral health problem to give me something to do. Wait, I already do. Excessive surfing and blogging. Damn, technology already got me.
And one more. The Nature Blog Network covers the “very best nature blogs on the net.”
Neuroanthropology 