Wednesday Round Up #11

Being Smarter

Paul Brown, How To Be Smarter
A round-up of recent ideas and recommendations

New York Times, Well: A Guided Tour of Your Body
Get to know yourself: Great graphics and summary pieces

Christopher Null, Brain Game Can Boost IQ—Here’s 5 New Brain Games to Play Now
Univ of Michigan game that boosts IQ, and another five commercial ones that are actually fun

Vaughan Bell, The History of the Brain
Everything you ever wanted to know, wrapped up in one radio program

Roni Caryn Rabin, For A Sharp Brain, Stimulation
Neurogenesis and the aging brain

Children & Being Smarter

Michael Merzenich, Children Left Behind
No Child Left Behind’s reading program leaves children behind…

Michael Merzenich, Poky Young Brains Speed Up
Learning difficulties, temporal processing, and specialized interventions making a difference

Bruce Hood, How Brains Develop
A Nature book review of two recent ones on children’s brain development

Will Dunham, Study Shows Breast-Fed Children Are Smarter
Well-designed study shows strong support for breast feeding as making kids smarter

Stereotypes, Beliefs & Knowledge

Richard Fenyman, Cargo Cult Science
Belief over data… even in science

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David Brooks Bonus

I wrote on David Brooks’ editorial Neural Buddhists earlier today. In his piece Brooks recommends a series of authors, but no titles and no links, to help grasp this new brain science and its implications for our understanding of ourselves. Here’s his list, with Amazon links inserted to relevant books.

Andrew Newberg and Why We Believe What We Believe
Daniel J. Siegel and The Developing Mind and The Mindful Brain
Michael S. Gazzaniga, with his 2005 The Ethical Brain and Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique coming out in June (see this excerpt from Edge)
Jonathan Haidt and The Happiness Hypothesis
Antonio Damasio, with his classis Descartes’ Error (which kicked off a lot of this popular shift)
Marc D. Hauser, a little questionable in my mind, but here’s his Moral Minds.

Greg has described other books, such as Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture (see his excellent critical review here, Why Brain Science Needs Anthropology) and John Medina’s Brain Rules. I might add Liars, Lovers and Heroes by Steven Quartz and Terrence Sejnowski and The Accidental Mind by David Linden

I also ran across another book this morning which looks like a great addition, John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality. Horgan is a journalist (including a former stint at Scientific American), and helps run the Center for Science Writings blog, which looks quite good!

Some other people are already reacting to Brooks editorial. Mary Martin at Animal Person has an interesting take, examining more the athiesm and religion angle. She also recommends the Mind & Life Institute, which does “Collaborative Research among Buddhists and Western Scientists.”

The Neural Buddhists of David Brooks

It definitely appears that the New York Times columnist David Brooks is on a neuroanthropology kick. Today he’s published an editorial called The Neural Buddhists, which complements previous ones on globalization and cognition and demography and cultural identity.

Brooks’ editorial comes down to three things: dispatching soulless science; presenting the new touchy-feely brain; and taking on our culturally hard-wired Protestantism.

Richard Dawkins stands in nicely as the representative of the old science—genetic determinism, lumbering machines, neo-Darwinian atheism. Tom Wolfe, as Brooks points out, described this world view well in his essay Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died. On this site Greg fought the good fight against Dawkins’ memes in February, while I had fun taking on Dawkins’ protégé, Steven Pinker, and his argument about hard-wired morality back in January.

Unfortunately for people like Dawkins and Pinker, but fortunately for the rest of us, the brain plays a different game. Here’s what Brooks says about the new neuroscience:

The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Ah, music to my ears. Indeed, Greg took down the computer metaphor some weeks ago. I wrote on emotion’s role in decisions making (sorry, rational-genetic man). Still, a lot of old brain crap gets out in both scientific journals and the popular press. So Time Magazine’s version of love, the not-quite touchy-feely view, got Hannibal Lecterized at the start of the year.

Continue reading “The Neural Buddhists of David Brooks”

Encephalon Is Black For More!

The New Encephalon is up at PodBlack. As Kylie Sturgess, our host this time, puts it, this is “a selection of the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere.” She does a nice job organizing it by Erik Erickson virtues!

Some notables include Brain Blogger’s Domestic Violence and Executive Dysfunction and Giovanna Di Sauro’s discussion of gender and fruit flies. I say gender because of this quote, “behavioral differences between the sexes might not be necessarily due to differences in neural circuitry, but in the presence or absence of sex-specific regulators of such circuitry.”

Jake Young also has one of his excellent discussions, complete with background, of double dissociation and separate auditory processing of “where” and “what.”

Finally, Neuroscientifically Challenged takes on Gherlin and the Omnipresence of Food, which is a good addition to what we’ve done here on the brain biology of eating and obesity (see our food & eating category for more).

Times Tidbits

Over the last week or so, The New York Times has just had a lot of great material that I wanted to share with you.

First up is a piece on traditional healers and US immigrants entitled “Illegal Farm Workers Get Health Care in Shadows.” Interested in curanderas? Then take a look. Because it includes a video too.

Benedict Carey has a piece “I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really.” Tend to fib? “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” says Dr. Richard Gramzow.

Jennifer Senior’s review Chronicle of a Death Foretold covers the new book Blood Matters by Masha Gessen. Gessen is a “previvor,” and writes about her learning and decisions about what to do about her extremely high genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer

The next one is primarily because I know the person who starts the article off! I used to train with Jenny Higgins at Emory, so it’s great to see her as the lead-in for Gina Kolata’s piece on training for triathalons and the difficulties of peak performance.

Carl Zimmer wrote on Lots of Animals Learn, But Smarter Isn’t Better. “Why have most animals remained dumb?” is a good evolutionary question, and it has to do with the costs involved in being smart. Zimmer also addresses how learning as widespread in the animal kingdom, so bye-bye to notions of animals operating primarily by hardwired instincts.

Janet Rae-Dupree had her short and sweet Can You Become A Creature of New Habits? How about making good habits to overcome old habits, and trying to canalize creativity too.

Hurt Girls: The Uneven Playing Field analyzes the higher rates of injury in women’s sports, asking is there an injury epidemic? A Magazine piece, so it’s comprehensive.

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Mad Pride

“Mad Pride” Fights A Stigma by Gabrielle Glaser reports on the frank talk, public exposure, and anti-stigma efforts of people who experience “extreme mental states.” Books like Kay Redfield Jamison’s autobiography of bipolar disorder An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness and movies like A Beautiful Mind on the mathematician John Nash’s schizophrenia have brought mental illness further into the public light. Now a grass-roots movement is going further: “these advocates proudly call themselves mad; they say their conditions do not preclude them from productive lives.”

It is a diverse movement, centered on anti-stigma efforts, on quality of life, and on treatment options.

Members of the mad pride movement do not always agree on their aims and intentions. For some, the objective is to continue the destigmatization of mental illness. A vocal, controversial wing rejects the need to treat mental afflictions with psychotropic drugs and seeks alternatives to the shifting, often inconsistent care offered by the medical establishment. Many members of the movement say they are publicly discussing their own struggles to help those with similar conditions and to inform the general public.

Themes such as creating “a new language that resonated with our actual experiences,” better public and medical recognition of the nature of their problems, and being given the same sorts of leeway and freedoms that “normal” people enjoy are what drive the “mad pride” movement. They are at once post-conventional due to their extreme mental states, with behaviors and subjective experiences that society would rather not see (social denial), and want to express themselves and have others understand–such a basic human desire.

Liz Spikol, a bipolar writer in Philadelphia, is one of the emerging voices through her blog at the Philadelphia Weekly and YouTube videos (“trouble spikol” is a good search term). Here’s one to watch.