culture of science
ddobbs | June 28, 2010Research Digest has posted an q&a interview with me as part of their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits. Do read the rest there, as well as the other interviews already run and to come.
On why I write about psychology, psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences:
Science constitutes our most serious and rigorous attempt to understand the world -- and psychiatry, psychology, and now neuroscience make great material partly because they so often and starkly show science's power and pitfalls. These disciplines are hard. The people who work in them, whether…
jdupuis | June 24, 2010First of all, the conference program is here. All the paper versions of the presentations will eventually be deposited in Queen's IR, QSpace, but don't seem to be there yet. I posted about my presentation here: Using a Blog to Engage Students in Literature Search Skills Sessions.
Now, If there can be said to be a theme to a conference which has no official theme, then the CEEA conference's theme was nicely summed up by a question from the audience during one of the sessions:
"How do you teach humbleness?"
Again and again it came up -- the challenge of teaching young, confident and…
ddobbs | June 23, 2010I'm 'posed to be writing, really writing (insert argument over what's really writing in comments), but hit so many juicy bits in my morning read today I wanted to share. Here's my eclectic mix for the day:
A great rompy scary post from @susanorlean on how her book bounced around many publishers and editors.
Keith Kloor at Collide-a-scape has a round-up of stories on the "credibility of climate experts" report
"memory performance boosted while walking"  Beautiful. Perhaps why walking oft solves writing probs.  via @mariapage:
"Theory Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" From @kerin at…
ddobbs | June 22, 2010Research Digest blog, the highly useful and content-rich site that tracks all things psych, just opened its "The Bloggers Behind the Blogs," series, which will run ten interviews with bloggers of mind and brain. It's with a nice interview of Jesse Bering, of Bering in Mind.
It's a dandy line-up (of which I'm happy to be part), and I look forward to reading them as they come out, about one a day, over the next couple weeks. Here's who's coming, in alphabetical order.
Jesse Bering of Bering in Mind -- already posted Anthony Risser of Brain blog. (coming soon) David DiSalvo of Brain spin and…
ddobbs | June 18, 2010
At the age of 21, as a Moeid, I believed that behind every universal phenomenon there must be beauty and simplicity in its description
via nobelprize.org
Ahmed Zewail, who won a 1999 Nobel for his work chemistry, wrote a quite charming memoir for the Nobel site.
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
ddobbs | June 17, 2010
Â
Â
Fungis Danicis, a lovely collection at the beautiful Bibliodyysey
Mind Hacks offers a reminder (we can't get too many) that expressions of distress vary across culture and history. Separately he considers an interesting study showing that Tylenol reduces the pain of social rejection.
Neurophilosophy has a post listing several fine New Neuroblogs
NeuroDojo ponders the upgrade from helicopter parents:Â Armored car parents
A quite interesting post from BlogHer considers The iPad: a Near-Miracle for My Son With Autism. Among other charms, it lists what sound like some pretty cool apps.…
ddobbs | June 17, 2010
Last week's spat between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker generated a lot of attention â and, happily, delivered a couple of the more lucid framings yet of the debate over whether digital culture makes us shallow, as Carr argues in his new book, or simply represents yet another sometimes-distracting element that we can learn to deal with, as Pinker countered in a Times Op-Ed last Thursday.
Â
I sympathize with both arguments; I see Carr's point but feel he overplays it. I find digital culture immensely distracting. I regularly dive down rabbit holes in my computer, iPhone, and iPad,…
ddobbs | June 16, 2010
Ozzy Osbourne, preparing to grasp the meaning of his genome.
There's been much attention lately to the failure of genomics advances to create many medical advances. From rock'n'roll comes  hope.
THE mystery of why Ozzy Osbourne is still alive after decades of drug and alcohol abuse may finally be solved.
The 61-year-old former Black Sabbath lead singer â who this week begins his health advice column in The Sunday Times Magazine â is to become one of only a few people in the world to have his full genome sequenced.
In addition to giving Osbourne information that could help prevent…
jdupuis | June 13, 2010And that's Nature as in Nature Publishing Group rather than the narrative strategy.
I missed the story when it broke earlier this week in The Chronicle -- I was attending the absolutely fantastic Canadian Engineering Education Association conference in Kingston from Monday to Wednesday. And when I got back, Thursday and Friday weren't the types of days that were conducive to blogging. I'm still feeling a bit behind on the whole issue so doing this post is helping to feel a bit more up-to-speed.
The story, from the Chronicle article that more-or-less started it all, U. of California Tries…
ddobbs | June 11, 2010Â
Â
Unbelieveble! Department, via SciencePunk: Â Giant mayfly swarm caught on radar
NYRB reviews what sounds like an especially moving memoir from Andre Agassi.
Whatever It Takes Department, via Ed Yong:Â Superstitions can improve performance by boosting confidence.
The climate-change doubt industry and its roots - http://bit.ly/an4cAr, via @stevesilberman
RitaRubin: Study: Have bad habits? U r more likely 2 blame health problms on your genes. 'Cause u can't do anything 2 change them http://bit.ly/ad6iRy. Damned interesting if true.
techreview: Genetic Testing Can Change Behavior http…
ddobbs | June 9, 2010
Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org
Â
Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do!
Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question.
It seems that everywhere I look nowadays, Iâm seeing images of, or reading descriptions of, the brain in some shape or form.
Buchman links (at the post's bottom, as is now the practice at NCore) to several good reads and sites, including Neuroculture.org, which has some lovely stuff, and â curse those…
ddobbs | June 1, 2010
In reverse order:
5. Â David Sloan Wilson, pissing off the angry atheists.
"I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist." This sparked some lively action in the comments.
4. Lively or not, Wilson and Dawkins lost fourth place to snail jokes.
A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails. 
3. A walking tour that lets you See exactly where Phineas Gage lost his mind
Â
2. "Push" science journalism, or how diversity matters more than size
We're constantly told -- we writers are, anyway -- that people won't read long stories. They're hard to sell to editors,…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010
Â
A press release about Snails on methamphetamines works for me.  The story is about memory. The jokes are about snails:
Â
Snail Joke #1
A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails. Cop is interviewing the turtle afterwards, still at the scene. Turtle still flustered. Cop asks, "Just start at the beginning."
"I don't know," says the turtle. "It all happened so fast."
Â
Snail Joke #2
Guy opens his front door and grabs the paper off the porch. There's a snail on it. He gives a flick of the wrist, and the snail sails off the porch into the garden.
Three weeks later there's a knock at the…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Danny Carlat reports a stimulating time at the recent American Psychiatric Association meeting in New Orleans:
She took a look at my name tag, and said, "Oh, I've heard about you."Since her expression was somewhere between stern and outright hostile, I queried, "In a good way or a bad way?""In a bad way, to tell you the truth." And then she was off on a high volume rant that went something (if memory serves) like this:"How DARE you write an article in the New York Times saying that your therapy training at Mass General was terrible, and then later having this GREAT AWAKENING that"--she…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010
Â
When Jessica Palmer gave a talk at the "Unruly Democracy" conference last month, she gave what appears, from her after-the-fact blog post excerpted here, to have been a semi-contrarian take on blogospheric civiility:
What I did endeavor to convey in my brief talk was the difficulty of blogging on interdisciplinary borders, where science meets art and the humanities. My big concern? While individual blogs often have communities who are internally civil and share norms and history, when you move from blog to blog, those norms and history break down. There are no universal norms in the…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home.
Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo.
New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but an interesting look at one direction in vaccine development. I covered another approach in an Technology Review article last year, when I also looked at the weird history of adjuvants. (If you want, check out my complete vaccine coverage. You can find also some other good ones at the Technology…
ddobbs | May 27, 2010
At Biophemera, Jessica Palmer takes a look at Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny. Actually a couple look to me a bit like cans. 
Like most junk science that just won't die, the polygraph stays with us. Even Aldrich Ames could see the polygraph was junk. NB, those who don't shy from no-lie fMRI. From the wonderful Letters of Note.
Ben Carey Notes that Enemies Can Be Good for a Childâs Growth. This should not surprise.
And in one of those science stories that's so fun I almost don't care whether it's true, the Times examines A Pattern of Sibling Risk-Taking in the Major Leagues. I should…
ddobbs | May 26, 2010Selling a work fiction is difficult; publishing in Nature is a long-shot; yet somehow writer and genomeboy Misha Angrist managed to publish fiction in Nature.
The only way I was ever going to get a first-author publication in Nature [Angrist explains] was if I just made it all up. So thatâs what I did. Hat tip to David Dobbs for providing the scientific inspiration.
The short story/fantasy Angrist publishes actually pulls little, it seems to me, from my story about the orchid/plasticity/differential susceptibility hypothesis, though it does work ground seeded by both genetics and…
ddobbs | May 20, 2010
Â
Phineas Gage enjoys an unfortunate fame in neuroscience circles: After a 5-foot iron tamping rod blew through his head one September afternoon in 1848, the once amiable and capable railroad foreman became a uncouth ne-er-do-well â and Exhibit A in how particular brain areas tended to specialize in particular tasks. (In his case, the prefrontal cortical areas that went skyward with the tamping rod proved, in retrospect, to be vital to his powers of foresight and self-control.)
I've always taken an extra level of interest in Gage because his horrific accident happened in my adopted home…
Gleanings from empathetic ravens, lying brains, dying converence, fading vocabularies, and new books
ddobbs | May 18, 2010
Ravens via PDPhoto
Ravens show that consoling one another is also for the birds, Yet another finding that other species have qualities previously thought uniquely human. Our greatest distinction is that we're highly social. Yet in that we've got a lot of company.  
Human brains excel at detecting cheaters. FMRI's, not so much, says Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks-- though in yet another court case, the fMRI lie detection industry pushes another story.
Bell also has a nice write-up of of scintillating RadioLab program on how early dementia shows up in use of language. A stellar program,…