Neuroskeptic is hosting the 76th edition of the mind/brain carnival Encephalon. From blindness and vision science all the way to the chaos of the brain, it’s a rich edition. In between you can sample violin prodigies, a critique of the “neurolaw” movement, drastic addiction treatments, and more.
Link to the 76th edition of Encephalon.
I was recently interviewed for a Special Report on Postgraduate study that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 20th. The journalist did a wonderful job of pulling out meaningful quotes and constructing a generously positive article. I thought that I would post the full interview here…
Afarensis is hosting the 76th edition of Four Stone Hearth, rounding up the best anthropology blogging of the past fortnight.
This is an excellent edition – neuroarchaeology, Catalhoyuk, an anthropologist in District 9, gene regulation, gender and athletics, and more. Great stuff.
Link to the 76th edition of Four Stone Hearth.
So favs, anthro and mind this week. Thanks to my new assistant Casey with help putting together the list!
Top of the List
John Sutton, Batting, Habit and Memory: The Embodied Mind and the Nature of Skill
Pdf of this 2007 paper: “This essay focuses on the distinction between explicit autobiographical remembering and the kind of habitual or ‘procedural’ memory involved in complex embodied skills like batting.”
Stanley J. Ulijaszek et al., Multidisciplinary Obesity Research: A Local Strategy for Breaking New Ground
The authors of this article talk about the different causes of obesity and how new research on this topic must be produced to get to the root of this problem and help fight it.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, How Humans Became Such Other-Regarding Apes
Humans feel, question, critique, problem-solve, and form communities. Apes ape. The evolution of our humanity.
The Neuroskeptic, fMRI Gets Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish
Do a lot of statistical tests, get some remarkable results! Like fish brains lighting up when the results smell as bad as dead fish! For more, see Mind Hacks’ Scientists Find Area Responsible for Emotion in Dead Fish
William Lu, Observation of Tool Use Activates Specific Brain Area Only in Humans
Explores the tool-use of species other than humans.
Dr. X, Last Words
Last words from prisoners executed in Texas since 1982. Haunting.
The Neurocritic, Tortured Brains Tell Tall Tales
“Neuroscience shows why torture doesn’t work”
Anthropology
Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon
The first chapter to Lara’s book, “AL-DAHIYYA: SIGHT, SOUND, SEASON,” which brings to life this suburb of Beirut
In the spirit of stirring the pot though, I recently gave a presentation ‘Sympathy for Creationists, and Other Thoughts from a Sceptical Anthropologist,’ and thought that I might do an online version. I want to suggest that many ‘believers’ in evolutionary theory share some of the intellectual errors evidenced by Creationists. You know the general principle: try to irritate everyone in your audience so that you at least know they have a pulse.
Many thanks to the Macquarie University Sceptics’ Society for their kind invitation. The Sceptics were a great audience, and I only regret that there was no way to audiotape the lecture — well, actually, I’m probably not half as funny as I like to remember myself being, so maybe it’s a good thing. In addition, I can’t post all the slides because they are, as usual in my lectures, filled with the flotsam and jetsam of the Interwebs, including unlicensed cartoons, pilfered photographs, swiped graphics and other materials. Although it’s one thing to use these sorts of images in a non-commercial presentation, I don’t feel comfortable pinning them up on Neuroanthropology.net.
So although this post will not follow my lecture point-for-point, nor will it have the excellent questions that the audience presented (which my failing memory is already turning into my ‘own’ thoughts in an act of cerebral self-aggrandizement), this should be fun, and it will allow me to link to evolution-related stuff all over the place.
Jake was fond of saying that even though he had become dumber, he wasn’t quite dumb enough. He knew that the improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq had mangled his body, brain and self.
Jake (a pseudonym) lost 30 IQ points due to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) from that IED blast. According to the military, he was still smart enough to function and hold down a job, so they didn’t plan to include TBI in his disability rating.
He fought them on this, just as he fought them on the decision not to amputate his leg. After countless surgeries and rehabilitation techniques, his leg was almost useless, allowing him maybe 30 minutes of use before it started rebelling against its reconstructed form. The pain that caused was excruciating; he simply couldn’t use it more.
Eventually Jake won his battle to lose his leg. It was the best thing that happened to him during the year I got to know him while doing my dissertation fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. (yes, that Walter Reed).
Dealing with, or writing about, TBI is rarely as clear as an amputation. The same is true of TBI’s nearly constant companion, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). TBI and PTSD are not injuries that you can see, unlike a lost leg. Despite the high numbers of TBI and PTSD cases from Iraq and Afghanistan, the relationship of these conditions to more obvious forms of combat trauma remains a fraught one: Witness the debate about PTSD and the Purple Heart.
Most people think that the Purple Heart, that most iconic of military honors, is awarded to American military members injured in combat. As with most issues military, it is not quite that simple.
In 2008, after months of consultation, the decision was made not to award the Purple Heart to those suffering from PTSD because, in part, the medal “recognizes those individuals wounded to a degree that requires treatment by a medical officer, in action with the enemy or as the result of enemy action where the intended effect of a specific enemy action is to kill or injure the service member.” PTSD doesn’t count.
Though the decision was officially framed in rather bureaucratic terms, the debate which surrounded it raises much deeper issues about the nature of trauma. Thinking through these issues has led me to think about the Cartesian split between the (internal) mind and the (external) body and the nature of trauma inside and out.
Continue reading “PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury: Trauma Inside Out”
Neuroanthropology 