social neuroscience

"Primates on Facebook" -- "Even online, the neocortex is the limit" to how many people we can really have as friends. People who use more textual shortcuts (lk whn they txt in skl) when texting have higher reading skills. The coverage seems to assume this is causal, but it's almost surely just an association -- people with good reading skills more quickly come up with or absorb textual shortcuts. Does "pay for performance" work in learning? For a bit, then not. "A number of the kids who received tokens didn't even return to reading at all," Dr. Marinak said. From the Times. Babies can…

I drove up to Montreal yesterday, and amid visits with anthropologist and Somatosphere founder Eugene Raikhel, anthropologist Allan Young, and Suparna Choudhury, talked about (among other things) the emerging new area of study they're calling "critical neuroscience." What the heck is critical neuroscience? Well, one definition calls it the attempt to assess and inform neuroscientific practice from a rich interdisciplinary perspective, and to categorize, evaluate and (begin to) manage the various risks resulting from neuroscience and its results and applications . Daniel Lende, one of the…

As a graduate student, I observed the nascent field of functional magnetic resonance imaging and thought to myself with some amusement "modern phrenology! Now with big, fancy, expensive equipment!" Count me among those who have never been terribly impressed with fMRI, and certainly not with its applications in what is known as social neuroscience. Now we have this: Late last year, Ed Vul, a graduate student at MIT working with neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher and UCSD psychologist Hal Pashler, prereleased "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience" on his website. The journal Perspectives…