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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Posted by David Dobbs at 7:00 AM • 0 Comments •
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 2:23 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:06 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Healthcare policy
What's been distracting me lately from the big story I need to finish writing ...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 1:51 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 7:14 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:47 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 12:19 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 6:58 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:55 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 
