Updated Blogroll

A lot of great sites have linked to us over the past months; we’ve also found plenty of new sites that we like. So finally today I updated our blogroll with 23 new places covering the gamut of anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. Dedicated readers, and purveyors of both Four Stone Hearth and Encephalon, will surely recognize most of them. But in case you don’t, here’s the list below. No particular order, just matching what I started writing on a piece of paper one night and added to over the weeks. And if there are other sites out there that you think we should know about and link to, please leave us a comment!

Neurocritic

Neuroscientifically Challenged

Open Anthropology

Erkan’s Field Diary

Pure Pedantry

Greg Laden’s Blog

Channel N

Mixing Memory

PodBlack Cat

My Mind on Books

Material World

Experientia

The Restless Mind

Purposive Drift

Bioephemera

Not Exactly Rocket Science

remote central

Linguistic Anthropology

Language Log

Brainlogs [mostly in German]

Somatosphere

Life of Wiley

Three-Toed Sloth

Encephalon Hits 50!

Sharp Brains is hosting the 50th edition of Encephalon, the brain and mind carnival. Like compulsive collecting and Dungeons and Dragons? Then check Encephalon out for those and much more at its mid-century.

Wednesday Round Up #20

Brain Health and Illness

Ed Yong, Is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Caused by a Serotonin Imbalance?
Mice with SIDS, extra serotonin, and environmental stress—a deadly package. Good take from Ed. To see the media’s coverage, here’s a short piece from Yahoo.

John Grohol, Surprise! Mental Health Parity Is Inexpensive
Results in from Massachusetts. Matching the coverage of physical health is very affordable

Alvaro at Sharp Brains, A Multi-Pronged Approach to Brain Health
Interview with Dr. Larry McClearly. Not McDreamy, but he does know his “brain health public education” and what you need to do to keep that brain running smoothly

Alvaro at Sharp Brains, Brain Evolution and Why It Is Meaningful Today to Improve Our Brain Health
The evolutionary rationale for why McDreamy, I mean McClearly, is right

Jonah Lehrer, How Prozac Really Works
“Prozac is simply a bottled version of other activities that have a similar effect, such as physical exercise. They aren’t happy pills, but healing pills.”

Anne Harding, Study Uncovers How Ritalin Works in the Brain
“when groups of neurons in the prefrontal cortex were working in well-organized networks, the small doses of Ritalin enhanced this activity, but suppressed the activity of less organized networks”

Vaughan Bell, Mental Illness: In with the Intron Crowd
The genetics of mental illness from a big, new Nature paper

Shrink Rap, Sunday Morning Coffee Links
One psychiatrist’s round up of the blogosphere—plenty of cool stuff

Tara Parker-Pope, Dance Even If Nobody Is Watching
Dancing helps with depression, anxiety and Parkinson’s—plus the Matt Harding worldwide dance video

Culture and Cognition Workshop in Bristol, UK

Francesco Varela (1946-2001)

Fred Cummins of University College Dublin contacted me to give me a head’s up on a workshop that looks pretty good, covering some of the same topics that we look at here at Neuroanthropology.

The workshop is ‘Cognition and Culture: an enactive view,’ and will especially explore the legacy of Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela. The meeting organizers explain that they seek to ‘develop a robust vocabulary and set of concepts that are capable of sustaining dialogue between researchers in cognitive systems, cognitive science, arts, media, and culture by using the insights and approaches of the enactive approach to cognition.’

Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela wrote a couple of books together, but they are probably best known for the concept of autopoeisis and the book, Tree of Knowledge. Varela also did work on the embodied mind and directly contributed to some of the current neurosciences research on Buddhist monks (such as the Mind and Life Institute, which Varela helped to found); he passed away in 2001, leaving a very rich legacy (see his ‘focus file’ here). Varela, and his mentor Maturana, were both biologists with philosophical inclinations, doing quite a bit to encourage the study of phenomenology in biology and the embodied nature of the brain. Varela did some early brain imaging research, linking observed changes to perceptions. Although there are some parts of his thinking that we at Neuroanthropology might seek to expand and transform, Varela was a giant in the move to create a synthetic brain science that bridged the gap between biological and sociocultural or psychological research.

If Lists Are Your Thing

All right, here are some different rankings out there in the blogosphere.

First up, Online University Reviews gives us the Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs. They’ve split it up by topic, going from Art to Theology. (Yes, starting with art means that anthropology didn’t make it… grrr.) And it’s rather English heavy. But it’s a list!

Wikio: News in Your Way provides lots of ways to rank things, so to complement the liberal arts side, here is their ranking of the Top Science Blogs. Some familiar friends there, some blogs I didn’t know. Just one note, it looks like you have to submit your blog to even make it onto the list.

Technorati just gives us the Top 100 Blogs, and since they spend their time trying to track all blogs, it’s a powerhouse list. So these are the big players, covering the full gamut of topics out there—politics, technology, gossip. Didn’t I just say that we need to cultivate cultural and emotional ways of being? Here’s the ethnographic data on our present interests. It’s so depressing maybe I’ll go have a behavioral health problem to give me something to do. Wait, I already do. Excessive surfing and blogging. Damn, technology already got me.

And one more. The Nature Blog Network covers the “very best nature blogs on the net.”

More Videos and Podcasts for Your Neuroanth Pleasure

Shrink Rap offers My Three Shrinks podcasts, where three psychiatrists with differing views sit down to discuss present issues in mental health, society and more. On a recent entry, the three discussed PTSD, the possibilities of memory erasure, and more.

The American Journal of Psychiatry offers “audio downloads” (can’t they just say podcasts?) dating back to April 2006, where discussion centers on highlights from that month’s journal issue. For June, they covered a clinical case of deep brain stimulation, the economic impact of mental disorders, a large study linking memory impairment to previous depression, and more.

Harvard Medical Labcast is just getting started, and has three podcasts now: the art of perception, the secrets of aging, and the science of social networks.

NeuroScene provides monthly podcasts going back to November 2007. A couple recent ones cover mirror neurons and the psychology of overspending.

ScienceHack provides online videos covering the range of science topics, from physics to green energy. For this blog, the most relevant are the biology and psychology categories. Sorry, anthropology didn’t make it as a ScienceHack… But you can get “Schizophrenia explored through virtual reality.”

The Nobel Laureate Meetings at Lindau lets us watch the superstars give their lectures online. Here’s one by Erwin Neher on “Neurotransmitter and Hormone Release by Calcium and Camp”

Tangled Bank 109

The Tangled Bank is an Evolutionary Biology carnival, often with science and society writing and the occasional critique of creationism thrown in. Anthropologist Greg Laden is hosting #109 this week, so mosey on over. You’ll find plenty to get you entangled.

Wednesday Round Up #19

Education

Howard Gardner, Multiple Lenses on the Mind
The famed psychologist and educator presents his own intellectual history in a long conference presentation in Bogotá

Howard Gardner, How Education Changes: Considerations of History, Science and Values
Formal schools as a social institution, and how that shapes human sociality, intelligence and the cultural transmission of knowledge and skills

Nicholas Kristof, The Luckiest Girl
The heroine from Beatrice’s Goat makes it from Uganda to graduating from college in the US

Patricia Cohen, On Campus, the ‘60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire
Demographic shifts and ideological shifts on college campuses nationwide

Jake Young, Get ‘Em While They’re Young: The Benefits of Preschooling
Preschool pays off, particularly for kids in disadvantaged circumstances

Mark Oehlert, Visual Thinking, Imagery and the Brain
Individual learning differences, brain imaging, and the activation of motor and perceptual representations. Short but interesting reflection.

Health

Darshak Sanghavi, Old Drugs, New Tricks: Why Big Health Advances Rarely Involve New Medicines
Small, incremental improvements—using what we already know and the importance of trail-and-error

Abigail Zuger, Achieving Wellness, Whatever That Is
Two books tell us two completely different things about how to manage our health, or the obsessive and the relaxed model

Donald McNeil, Noninfectious Illnesses Are Expected to Become Top Killers
Smoking, obesity, driving and violence as the new killers—the diseases of civilization shaping cancer, heart disease and other health problems

Joint National Academies Statement on Global Health
Life-style linked diseases, social capital, and community health systems—the new way forward to better health

Video Game Round Up

On Games

Tom Chatfield, Rage Against the Machines
Do games stunt minds and create addictions? Good overview of what people really do when they sit down to play. “Games are human products, and lie within our control.” See readers’ comments here.

Eric Sofge, Video Games (Finally) Grow Up
Esquire article covers how video games have matured—storytelling, moral complexity, artistry and more

Rob Fahey, It’s Inevitable: Soon We Will All Be Gamers
Video games out of teenagers’ rooms and into everyday life

Louis Bedigian, Professor James Paul Gee Shows the World the Importance of Video Games
Learning doesn’t just happen in school, and that’s a good thing. Or, trying to understand why people put so much effort into mastering a game

Vaio at VG Chartz, Why We Game
Worth it for the starting photo alone. Illuminating discussion by gamers about why they do it

Criticisms

Susan Greenfield, Modern Technology Is Changing The Way Our Brains Work
Neuroscientist presents a critical take—games and pharmaceuticals are changing brain function and creating unhealthy dependencies. For more on Greenfield and her views, click here.

Etelmik, Self-Abuse in Game Play
“We talk about games being therapeutic, educational, beautiful, aesthetic, or enlightening. We also talk of them as being cheap, derivative, or boring. But it occurred to me in the last two weeks that sometimes they can be devastating, depressing, destructive and discouraging.”

Stephen Totilo, Are Games Our Fantasies?
“Let’s talk, finally, about what that means.” Racial imagery, murderous violence, and the debate between “it shouldn’t matter” and “it does matter”

Mike Smith, New Startup Tackles Stereotypes
Gaming just for boys? Here’s a company run by women! “Worldwide Biggies spans the gender gap”

Darwin Does Encephalon

In honor of the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s presentation of the theory of natural selection before the Linnean Society, and the 4th of July, Neuroscientifically Challenged has given us Encephalon #49 Celebrates Indepedence (from Lamarckism).

Given the evolution theme, we have Brain Stimulant discusses gene therapy in psychiatry, Cognitive Daily on attractive voices, Neurophilosophy on the brain’s adaptability (in this case, re-organizing after a stroke), Sharp Brains on something Darwin would have loved–walking book clubs, and the Winding Path on the co-evolution of brain and culture with some complex social interaction added.

And even more than that, so check it out! It might even help you evolve.