Culture and Compulsion: Student Posts 2009

Compulsion III by Sandra Doore
Compulsion III by Sandra Doore

Here are all the student posts from this year in the order I put them up. As a group they’ve already proven popular, getting attention from a range of high-power sites and social networks. That’s great, and well-deserved!

Below I also outline how I approached this project with my students. If you want to incorporate something similar into your teaching or comparable work, feel free to use and/or adapt these guidelines. Of course any suggestions or alternative approaches are always appreciated. Leave a comment below or email me at dlende at nd dot edu

The List

Why Do They Do It? Portrayals of Alcohol on Facebook and MySpace

Gambling and Compulsion: Neurobiology Meets Casinos

What’s the Dope on Music and Drugs?

Tobacco Worse Than Cocaine?

Caught in the Net – The Internet & Compulsion

Lights, Camera… Alcohol?

Confessions of a Shopaholic

Can Videogames Actually Be Good For You?

The New Performance Enhancing Drugs

These nine posts join the eight from last year, which went from understanding brain imaging to the differences between men and women drinking on campus – those were rounded up in Why A Final Essay When We Can Do This?

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The New Performance Enhancing Drugs

Enhanced Brain
By Andrew Hessert, Andrew Medvecz, Jimmy Miller, Jacquelyn Richard

Barry Bonds elevated his game to the next level with “the clear” and “the cream”, shattering legendary records in the process. Are scientists, students, and other academics about to do the same?

While stars such as Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi continue to defend themselves against their alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs, a new debate over the use of a different kind of performance-enhancing drug has begun to rage in the scientific world.
Barry Bonds Pumped Up
Cognitive enhancers like Adderall and Ritalin have commonly been used as a treatment for behavioral disorders such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. However, these drugs are now becoming popular “performance enhancing” substances for healthy individuals trying to gain a competitive edge by boosting their overall cognitive function.

Henry Greely, a Stanford Law Professor, advocates for unrestricted availability of these drugs, claiming the enhancers will level the “cognitive playing field” and spark a new era of increased innovation. But Greely and other advocates fail to recognize the severe personal and societal consequences that such availability would generate, looking instead to a pharmaceutical solution that would, in the end, cause more problems than it would solve.

How They Work

Ritalin and Adderall have been on the market since the 1960s to treat conditions like ADD and ADHD (Center for Substance Abuse Research, 2005). While the specific mechanisms of these disorders have yet to be fully elucidated, cognitive enhancers have been successful in controlling or mitigating symptoms in patients. Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Adderall (dextroamphetamine) both inhibit dopamine reuptake, allowing dopamine signals to remain active for longer periods of time (Jones, Joseph, Barak, Caron, & Wightman, 1999). Provigil (modafinil), an alternative to the potentially addictive dopaminergic drugs, operates in similar fashion, but instead blocks reuptake of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.

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Smokin’ Hearth

Weavers' Hearth
remote central is hosting Four Stone Hearth – Smokers’ Delight edition, rounding up the best anthropology blogging of the past two weeks.

This time we’ve got scintillating zigzags and surrealism, the bearded lady syndrome, language as a technology?, miocene apes (don’t you love them too?), the open anthropology collective, and more!

Also, for those of you interested, I found that smokin’ hearth at this site on the Knapdale Hearth Tax of 1694.

Now set a smoke trail on over to the latest edition of Four Stone Hearth.

Wednesday Round Up #66

Route 66
This week I’ve got two lists – the good blogging/online stuff from around the Web, and then a collection from the NY Times this past week, which had plenty of interesting and relevant stories. Enjoy!

The List

Open-Access to the journal Neuroethics
Neuroethics is now open-access for a temporary field, so feel free to download articles like this one, Neuroethics as a Brain-Based Philosophy of Life: The Case of Michael S. Gazzaniga – quite a neuroanthropological piece actually.

Claudine Beaumont, Is Microsoft’s Natal the Future of Gaming?
I stuck this in the students’ post yesterday on videogames, but also wanted to highlight it here. Natal looks very cool! Besides the video below, here’s the E3 Microsoft comprehensive presentation showing how Natal works live, another promo featuring some fascinating interactive painting, and Milo the interactive boy. Kotaku’s Brian Crecente gives us a hands-on review here.

Russell Poldrack, Neuroimaging: Separating the Promise from the Pipe Dreams
Dana Foundation on core issues for both science and application involving brain imaging

Tracy Alloway, 10% Students May Have Working Memory Problems: Why Does It Matter?
SharpBrains gives us the latest on this emerging area of research and education intervention

Ben Goldacre, Dodgy Academic PR
A study of academic press releases on research shows the limitations of journalism/press coverage even coming from leading institutions

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Can Videogames Actually Be Good For You?

By Ryan Hoff, Kasey Kendall, Harrison Smith, and Gabriela Moriel
Games and Learning
We’ve all heard people say that video games are increasingly violent and have a negative impact on kids’ behavior. But video games can actually be beneficial to a child’s development!

Video games are used in almost every classroom setting in the United States. Many games, like Math Blaster and Star Fall, focus on promoting students’ cognitive development and strengthening problem-solving skills.

Even seemingly non-educational games such as Sonic the Hedgehog have found their way into the classroom where students play the game in order to better understand Odysseus’ journey home. Playing an adventure game like Sonic the Hedgehog where the player must complete a series of missions or tasks and overcome various obstacles, students can learn not only by simply reading the Odyssey but also by interactively participating in their own quest.

Professors are even proposing the idea of developing a new public school with a game-centered curriculum, as this Christian Science Monitor article Video Games Start to Shape Classroom Curriculum states. Katie Salen, an associate professor of design and technology at the Parsons School of Design, describes this new approach:

“Kids are challenged to step into identities—mathematicians, scientists. They are immersed in and interdisciplinary setting, and instead of completing units, they go on a series of missions or quests, each of which has a goal.”

The Development of Interactive Video Games

The progression of interactivity throughout the history of video games plays a central role in current research of the potential benefits of video games. As video games have become more interactive over time (especially in the last decade), they have increasingly become a medium for the development of cognitive and problem-solving skills.

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Confessions of a Shopaholic

Shop I Am
By Jackie Dolan, Maria Brooks, Diana Harintho, and Jackie Doherty

Do you feel a thrill when you swipe your card at the register? Come home from the store with things you didn’t plan on buying? Buy things you never use? Run your credits cards up to the limit? If your answers to these questions are yes, you may be a shopaholic.

Shopping and Other Addictions

Newsflash: Shopping addictions are not as glamorous and humorous as the media often portrays them to be. In fact, shopping compulsions are similar to other serious drug addictions that our culture faces today. Donald Black, MD, professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa, College of Medicine states:

“Like other addictions, it basically has to do with impulsiveness and lack of control over one’s impulses. In America, shopping is embedded in our culture; so often, the impulsiveness comes out as excessive shopping.”

As is seen with all other addictions, compulsive shopping can destroy a person’s life, family, and finances. Take a look at this clip from the show Intervention, which starts with Heidi on a shopping spree.

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