BIG NEWS: First Neuroanthropology Conference!

We’ve hinted at this, but now it’s confirmed: the first Neuroanthropology Conference will be held 8 October 2009 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Daniel and I are very pleased to be able to announce, ‘The Encultured Brain: Neuroanthropological Explorations.’ We’ll have lots of news and information, including how to register and get involved, coming soon, but we wanted to post notice of the upcoming conference as soon as possible so that you can have a chance to pencil it into your calendars.

Update: You can now go to our official announcement, including details on submitting abstracts and registering.

Due to generous support from the Lemelson/Society for Psychological Anthropology Conference Fund as well as the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Graduate School, and the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame, this will be a bargain of a conference, registration fees basically coming back to you immediately in the form of eats and drinks.

Graphic from NYTimes, by Yarek Waszul
Graphic from NYTimes, by Yarek Waszul
One main part of the schedule will facilitate a kind of collective brain-storming, make connections (both mental and practical) meeting, rather than the standard anthropology panel set-up, where just a few people present 15 minute versions of their research.

We will have two keynote presentations, as well as a lot of ‘speed presentations’ in which participants will be able to briefly (about five minutes) talk to the whole assembled conference about what they are working on or would like to work on. We will have pre-printed message pads to allow the whole conference to share thoughts, as well as ample chances during breaks to grab the person you just heard share a great idea. Think of it as intellectual speed dating, in which a larger percentage of conference participants get to talk to the whole conference, rather than just to the small group that choose to attend your session.

There will also be an ongoing poster session for presenters so that we really get an opportunity to network in this emerging area of research. So much of what we hope to do is to create conversations over the fences that separate our respective disciplinary backyards, so we’re going to do our best to get people in touch. There will also be a roundtable on research methods for breaking new ground in neuroanthropology.

In addition, we’ll have keynote lectures by — drum roll, please — Prof. Patricia Greenfield of UCLA and Prof. Harvey Whitehouse of Oxford University. [Fixed that link…] We’re going to have profiles posted on both keynote speakers in the near future, but suffice to say that Prof. Greenfield is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA, heavily involved in (and former Director of) the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development as well as the current Director of the Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles (CDMCLA). I won’t even try to summarize her long record of interesting research on the brain, psychology, cross-cultural variation, child development, education, and media (I’ll try that in a later post, unless I can talk Daniel into it), but if you want a jump start, her academia.edu website has 16 of her papers available.

Prof. Harvey Whitehouse of the University of Oxford is also Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford, Head of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), Director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind (CAM), and a Fellow of Magdalen College. Although he has written widely on religion, evolution, and his ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea, of late he has been one of the leaders in integrating cognitive, evolutionary, and anthropological research in Europe, especially on the subject of religion. Again, if you want to get the jump on our profiles, there’s a substantial list of his books and other publications available at the ISCA website.

We will also be having a number of invited guests, whom we’ll introduce as we get confirmations. This is just the first announcement, and we’ll be posting more soon, including registration information.

Is Your Brain Green?

green-lantern
Why Isn’t the Brain Green? asks Jon Gertner in the feature article of the “Green Issue” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. The issue is worth a visit alone for the striking photos, where the Momix Dance Troupe form vivid images of the head and the brain. But Green Lantern is going to come in handy.

So who wants to know why the brain isn’t green? CRED – Center for Research on Environmental Decisions – where they use behavioral research and decision science to understand “the green mind” (or lack thereof). As seems de rigeur today, any topic where we don’t act on the information available and seem to make irrational decisions is the target of this new decision science.

CRED has the primary objective of studying how perceptions of risk and uncertainty shape our responses to climate change and other weather phenomena like hurricanes and droughts. The goal… is to finance laboratory and field experiments in North America, South America, Europe and Africa and then place the findings within an environmental context.

So what are the problems? We’re bad at long-term decision making; we see environmental problems as far away from our everyday lives; we seem to have a “finite pool of worry” and make an occasional decision to help the environment while continuing on with our overall lifestyle.

Continue reading “Is Your Brain Green?”

Who you callin’ a ‘neuroconstructivist’?!

brain_construction1Intellectual labels are always a tricky business, necessary for talking about ideas and suggesting that a theorist is in a particular ideological neighborhood. Yet, they can drag along so much baggage that they become self-defeating, evoking instant resistance or inevitable misinterpretation if poorly used. In the best of cases, they can help to create a clear identity for innovative work in an academic field, speeding the effort to carve out a space for ideas in a cluttered terrain of thought. Deployed well, they can help to clarify and orient us; applied clumsily, they become intellectual invective, prematurely close off discussion or debate, and substitute labeling for thinking.

Today, I want to write briefly about ‘neuroanthropology’ as a badge, but spend more time on ‘neuroconstructivism,’ as it’s a term that sometimes gets associated with the sort of research and thinking that we are advocating here at Neuroanthropology.net. In a sense, this piece is written for non-anthropologists, to help them understand why they might get a really strange reaction from an anthropologist colleague if they start talking excitedly about new ‘neuroconstructivist’ perspectives.

We’ve obviously decided that ‘neuroanthropology’ is one of the labels that we find helpful. We stand by the neologism, even though some of our readers have described our choice of terms ‘deplorable,’ and we’ve sometimes had to struggle against the term’s use elsewhere. For example, Oliver Sachs, the wonderful chronicler of the lived worlds of people with severe brain lesions, often calls himself a ‘neuroanthropologist,’ as Jovan Maud at Culture Matters pointed out to me and Daniel highlights in a recent, more thorough post on the relation of what we’re doing to what Sachs has done (see also Neuroanthropology).

Continue reading “Who you callin’ a ‘neuroconstructivist’?!”

Raising IQ: Nicholas Kristof Meets Richard Nisbett

intelligence-and-how-to-get-it
Nicholas Kristof has an op-ed today, How to Raise Our I.Q. He opens with a standard version of the individual meritocracy argument, that IQ is largely inherited:

Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics. After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong.

Kristof cites Richard Nisbett’s new book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. I covered some of Nisbett’s work in the post IQ, Environment and Anthropology, and Jim Holt gave a strong review of the book recently in the NY Times. The publisher’s home page simply says that this book is a “bold refutation of the belief that genes determine intelligence.”

Continue reading “Raising IQ: Nicholas Kristof Meets Richard Nisbett”

Wednesday Round Up #59

Top

Tom Rees, The Problem with Studies on the Social Effects of Religion
Religion is often associated with positive effects – but correlation is not cause, what people say and do differ, and problems in defining “religion.” Nicely done.

Ritual Blogging, Week Five Recap
Great site providing summaries, powerpoints, links and discussion for an anthro class on Ritual in the Modern World. This week they covered political rituals, including some good YouTube clips.

Judith Harris & Jonah Lehrer, Do Parents Matter?
An interview at Sci Amer with the author of The Nurture Assumption, which argues that peers are more important than parents in shaping developmental outcomes. I’ve often wondered why anthropologists haven’t paid more attention to Harris’ work, it really is an argument for culture in one sense. Still, though Harris questions the role of parenting in good outcomes, she does seem to avoid the role that bad parenting can play in producing bad outcomes (e.g., family trauma).

SlowTV, The Brain: How It Can Change, Develop and Improve. Featuring Dr Norman Doidge
A video lecture by the author of The Brain That Changes Itself in Melbourne

Atul Gawande, Hellhole
“The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?” The short answer is yes. A powerful piece from The New Yorker.

Anthro

Filip Spagnoli, Human Rights Facts (59): The Vicious Cycle of Poverty and Ill Health
Poverty traps, with the effects of poverty on health as one main engine – quite a good overview

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #59”