The Year in Ideas

The New York Times has put up their 8th Annual Year in Ideas as part of their Sunday magazine. You can browse A to Z (well, W) and find short pieces on some of the outstanding developments across a breadth of arenas and disciplines. Definitely one of my favorite magazine issues of the year.

Here is one I found on Women in Power Are Set Up To Fail, or the “glass cliff” based on experimental research by Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam:

83 businesspeople — roughly half of them women — [had] described to them two companies, one that was steadily improving in profitability and an-other that was steadily declining. The subjects were told to pick a new financial director for the firm and were presented with three candidates: a man and a woman who were identical in experience and a lesser-qualified male. The subjects were slightly more likely to pick a man to lead the successful firm but were far more likely to pick the woman to lead the failing one. Two other experiments with similar designs yielded the same result: When presented with men and women to lead a company that’s going down the tubes, people pick the woman.

The same issue also features a fun interview with Jonah Lehrer, who runs The Frontal Cortex blog and has a forthcoming book on How We Decide. Gotta love this quote, “I wrote the book because I would spend 10 minutes in the cereal aisle choosing between Honey Nut Cheerios and Apple Cinnamon Cheerios.”

It’s neuroscience bootcamp – YES, Drill Sergeant!

Picture has nothing to do with posting...
Picture has nothing to do with posting...
Oh, man, this looks great. Slogging through mud, doing pushups, pealing potatoes, and doing neuroscience… well, maybe not so much. The kind folks at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Penn have sent this along, and I’m happy to post it. Sounds like a great time, even if they make you run through the rain with all your gear…

The University of Pennsylvania announces their Neuroscience Boot Camp
August 2-12, 2009.

Why Neuroscience Boot Camp? [Greg: I say, why the hell not?!]

Neuroscience is increasingly relevant to a number of professions and academic disciplines beyond its traditional medical applications. Lawyers, educators, economists and businesspeople, as well as scholars of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, applied ethics and policy, are incorporating the concepts and methods of neuroscience into their work. Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role. The Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp is designed to give participants a basic foundation in cognitive and affective neuroscience and to equip them to be informed consumers of neuroscience research.

What happens at Neuroscience Boot Camp?

Continue reading “It’s neuroscience bootcamp – YES, Drill Sergeant!”

Neuroanthropology Turns One!

November 2007. Washington DC. The annual American Anthropology Association meetings. Greg Downey and Daniel Lende sit down to talk about creating the Neuroanthropology blog. A few weeks later, on December 11th 2007 Greg sticks up the first posts.

They were The Goals of Neuroanthropology, an initial attempt at describing The Term ‘Neuroanthropology’, and the Prehistory of ‘Neuroanthropology’: Charles Laughlin. (Yes, it’s safe to say that’s the only time Greg has done three posts in one day!)

Daniel follows suit on December 17th, sticking up a post on Keeping Brains Agile. The blogging game is afoot.

Greg provides an introduction, Daniel does his own intro. And then things really start flowing. In the month of December we got 1267 on-site visits!

It did seem like a lot to us then! How things have grown. Last month in November we had a total of 22,744 onsite visits, plus another 16,000 or so reads through subscription feeds.

In the last year, we have delivered 580 total posts. Daniel (alias dlende) has written 389 of those posts, plus posted another 9 with students. Greg (gregdowney) has given us 137 posts.

Paul Mason has delivered 40 posts, including two that Greg got out for him while Paul was doing his field research. Erin Finley gave us two posts, and Marcela, a student of Greg’s, also published two. Agustin Fuentes provided one post early on.

Out of those our Top Ten goes:

(1) Cultural Aspects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Thinking on Meaning and Risk
(2) Synesthesia & Metaphor – I’m Not Feeling It
(3) Poverty Poisons the Brain
(4) Girls Gone Guilty: Evolutionary Psych on Sex #2
(5) About Neuroanthropology (doesn’t really count! so I’m doing the Spinal Tap 11 – our blog is just one louder)
(6) Identical Twins Not… Err… Identical?
(7) Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City
(8) Brain vs. Philosophy? Howard Gardner Gets Us Across!
(9) Brain Doping Poll Results In
(10) Understanding Brain Imaging
(11) Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct

For our top referrers and search terms, you guessed it, after the fold. Continue reading “Neuroanthropology Turns One!”

60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

December 10th marks the 60th anniversay of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN is celebrating, with an entire website dedicated to the anniversary and the declaration itself.

My Notre Dame colleague Deb Rotman sent me the “Simplified Version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” So here it is:

Summary of Preamble
The General Assembly recognizes that the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, human rights should be protected by the rule of law, friendly relations between nations must be fostered, the peoples of the UN have affirmed their faith in human rights, the dignity and the worth of the human person, the equal rights of men and women and are determined to promote social progress, better standards of life and larger freedom and have promised to promote human rights and a common understanding of these rights.

A summary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

1. Everyone is free and we should all be treated in the same way.
2. Everyone is equal despite differences in skin colour, sex, religion, language for example.
3. Everyone has the right to life and to live in freedom and safety.
4. No one has the right to treat you as a slave nor should you make anyone your slave.
5. No one has the right to hurt you or to torture you.
6. Everyone has the right to be treated equally by the law.
7. The law is the same for everyone, it should be applied in the same way to all.
8. Everyone has the right to ask for legal help when their rights are not respected.
9. No one has the right to imprison you unjustly or expel you from your own country.
10. Everyone has the right to a fair and public trial.
11. Everyone should be considered innocent until guilt is proved.
12. Every one has the right to ask for help if someone tries to harm you, but no-one can enter your home, open your letters or bother you or your family without a good reason.
13. Everyone has the right to travel as they wish.
14. Everyone has the right to go to another country and ask for protection if they are being persecuted or are in danger of being persecuted.
15. Everyone has the right to belong to a country. No one has the right to prevent you from belonging to another country if you wish to.
16. Everyone has the right to marry and have a family.
17. Everyone has the right to own property and possessions.
18. Everyone has the right to practise and observe all aspects of their own religion and change their religion if they want to.
19. Everyone has the right to say what they think and to give and receive information.
20. Everyone has the right to take part in meetings and to join associations in a peaceful way.
21. Everyone has the right to help choose and take part in the government of their country.
22. Everyone has the right to social security and to opportunities to develop their skills.
23. Everyone has the right to work for a fair wage in a safe environment and to join a trade union.
24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure.
25. Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living and medical help if they are ill.
26. Everyone has the right to go to school.
27. Everyone has the right to share in their community’s cultural life.
28. Everyone must respect the ‘social order’ that is necessary for all these rights to be available.
29. Everyone must respect the rights of others, the community and public property.
30. No one has the right to take away any of the rights in this declaration.

You can more about the universal declaration here, at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Wednesday Round Up #41

This week it’s simple – top picks, the brain, and anthropology.

Top of the List

Mo Constandi, Brain’s Response to Fear Is Culture-Specific
Neurophilosophy covers research by Joan Chiao on the differing fear reactions of Americans and Japanese—facial expressions and amygdala reactions unite! Or rather, you fear what you know…

Women in Science, Open Laboratory 2008 Submissions
The best of 2008 science blogging either written by women or relevant to women.

Sean Malin, Itsy Bitsy Auctions
You too can bid on bats! Well, bat names. And check out more from this ND student’s blog, Open Economics. I did, and found this post on David Harvey, an author whose work I admire, as well as entire lecture by Harvey on The Enigma of Capital

Neuronarrative & Ars Psychiatrica
My two new favorite blogs. Just recently Neuronarrative has an interview with Jonah Lehrer on art, neuroscience and decision making; the post Brains Run Better Unleaded on lead poisoning and IQ loss, and the joy of doubt with the writer Jennifer Michael Hecht

At Ars Psychiatrica we find On Psychiatric Overdiagnosis, on psychiatry’s losing its way through its “war on mental illness” approach; an eclectic year in music; Joni Mitchell, Wallace Stevens, and theories of the early earth; and Lugubrious Lucubrations on intriguing parallels between psychiatrists and pain specialists.

Brain

Sean Mackey, The Science of Pain
Podcast over at Scientific American from the Stanford expert

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #41”

Chimps with Photographic Memories

Chimpanzees can routinely beat the best humans at instant memory recall. Here’s the blurb:

Ben Pridmore ranks in the number two spot for worldwide memory competitions, can memorize the order of a full deck of cards in only 30 seconds, and regularly memorizes numbers up to 400 digits long. But in a test performed by the British television program “Extraordinary Animals,” Pridmore’s performance fell far short of that of a seven-year-old male chimpanzee named Ayumu.

Imitating the format of a scientific study in which Ayumu had formerly participated, both human and chimpanzee watched a screen on which five numbers were displayed briefly before being replaced by white boxes. They then had to touch the blank boxes in the order of the numbers they had formerly displayed.

When the numbers were shown for only a fifth of a second, Ayumu still scored 90 percent correct; Pridmore’s score, on the other hand, was only 33 percent.

But in this video, you can see that the chimps take it up to 9! (No, not 11, that only happens in Spinal Tap.)

There is an entire YouTube bio on Ayumu, where you can also see more of the memory training. You can even try the memory game yourself! It’s freakin’ hard!

Here’s the reference for the 2007 article on chimp working memory by the Japanese researchers Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa. Or you can cheat, I’m sorry, help yourself to opened access and get the whole pdf.

For more on their and other Japanese scientists’ work, check out their home institution, the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University.