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Neuron Culture

David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.

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dobbspic I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find clips here.) I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years. Oliver Sacks found Reef Madness "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant." Check it out.

If you'd like, you can subscribe to Neuron Culture by email. You might also want to see more of my work at my main website or check out my Tumblr log.
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Reading:

On the reading table lately

Category: Brains and minds

Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco , a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear: The surge was not about more soldiers, but soldiers doing different things -- protecting the populace rather than hunting the enemy. ... First-rate history of science here, and a fascinating look at Harry Harlow, a monkey researcher whose powerful but sometimes disturbing experiments in the middle decades of last century helped replace a cold behavioralist view of infancy and childhood with the theories of attachment and bonding that still rule today.

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Caleb Crain sums up the MSMer's Media 2.0 anxiety

Category: Digital culture

In the intro to his self-published (on Lulu.com) collection of blog posts, The Wreck of the Henry Clay, New Yorker contributor Caleb Crain sums up nicely the anxieties shared by at least one other writer-with-blogging-addon about blogging, and, by extension about self-publishing books.

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Morning dip: reading, writing, merit pay, musical spouses, swine flu, and fire towers

Category: Brains and minds

On citing papers you haven't read; writing better cuz U write more; the merits of merit pay; placebo effect versus placebo effect; and for fun, fire towers.

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Quick dip: Free firefight; digital dumbness; scijourno conference; doctors that don't talk

Category: Healthcare policy

What's been distracting me lately from the big story I need to finish writing ...

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Real immersion versus digital -- plus fishing, Twitter, digital overload, and PTSD

Category: Brains and minds

I often find it awkward to switch between blogging or twittering and engaging deeply immersive physical activities. This hiatus, for instance, started when I went fishing last Tuesday on Lake Champlain for salmon.

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Emotional Cartography

Category: Culture of science

Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance monitor that measures arousal, and a GPS machine, to allow stress to be mapped to particular places. He then gets people to walk round and creates maps detailing high arousal areas of cities.

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Morning Dip: Facebook (not) friends, paid learning, lip-reading babies, more on EHRs

Category: Healthcare policy

Among others: "Primates on Facebook" -- "Even online, the neocortex is the limit" to how many people we can really have as friends.

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We live in a unique age of distraction? Hmm, maybe not

Category: Brains and minds

In a wonderful post at Mind Hacks, Vaughn, writing on "The myth of the concentration oasis" makes an argument that rather challenges my resistance to it:

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Self-Branding on the web as a path to book success

Category: Journalism

It strikes me that this generalist requirement for developing a 'brand' conflicts with what's an individual writer needs to do to establish a large presence on the web. I've not done a scientific survey, but it seems to me that most of the heavily linked individual writers on the web establish their presence by specializing. Consider the individual authors among most-linked 100 blogs listed at TechCrunch: TechCrunch does tech; Kos, Drudge, Malkin, Ben Smith do politics; Chris Brogan does social media. A few generalists jump out: Sullivan, Kottke, BoingBoing. But Sullivan and BoingBoing, it seems to me, got established mainly by having the great majority of their posts address a distinct area.

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TV and infants, the (overdue) review study

Category: Brains and minds

Someone finally did a review study on TV -- including "educational DVDs" -- and infants. Among results that should not...

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