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2008-07-24 02:04:29
by Mark Lapierre in The Winding Path
Philosophy
Some recent research has given me the chance to combine the sort of topic I used to write about with my more recent focus. It’s research headed by Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan, on how writing about your important values affects how you feel about yourself, how you feel about other people, and what influence that has on your acceptance of potentially threatening information. If you’d just like to read about the research itself, Science Daily has a good summary. I’m going to go a bit deeper, so read on if you’re up for some mental exercise. Or if you’re a Psychology s...more
- Mischkowski D. (2008) Why Does Writing About Important Values Reduce Defensiveness? Self-Affirmation and the Role of Positive Other-Directed Feelings. Psychological Science, 19(7), 740-747. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02150.x
2008-07-24 01:03:48
by Mark Lapierre in The Winding Path
Philosophy
Some recent research has given me the chance to combine the sort of topic I used to write about with my more recent focus. It’s research headed by Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan, on how writing about your important values affects how you feel about yourself, how you feel about other people, and what influence that has on your acceptance of potentially threatening information. If you’d just like to read about the research itself, Science Daily has a good summary. I’m going to go a bit deeper, so read on if you’re up for some mental exercise. Or if you’re a Psychology s...more
- Mischkowski D. (2008) Why Does Writing About Important Values Reduce Defensiveness? Self-Affirmation and the Role of Positive Other-Directed Feelings. Psychological Science, 19(7), 740-747. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02150.x
2008-07-12 12:01:58
by Ponder Stibbons in The truth makes me fret.
Philosophy
This paper by Alexandre Korolev arguing that Norton’s Dome isn’t a kosher case of indeterminism in Newtonian physics appeared on my RSS reader recently. I was very curious about Korolev’s paper, but found it to be a letdown. In fact, Norton addresses most of Korolev’s objections in his 2006 update to the manuscript.
After some lengthy ...more
2008-07-04 23:03:53
by Mark Lapierre in The Winding Path
Philosophy
In these last few posts I’ve been writing about Merlin Donald’s paper on the co-evolution of cognition and culture. The first two thirds of his paper, and so the overview in my last two posts, provide background for the main question the paper tries to address, "What is the cognitive element, missing in primates, that has enabled human beings to master so complex a social life?" Donald suggests that what’s missing may be the ability to mentally handle the vast intricacies humans deal with on a daily basis (and we do so mostly without being aware of it)....more
- DONALD M. (2007) The slow process: A hypothetical cognitive adaptation for distributed cognitive networks. Journal of Physiology-Paris, 101(4-6), 214-222. DOI: 10.1016/j.jphysparis.2007.11.006
2008-07-03 15:11:16
by daniel in the brain and the sky
Philosophy
Thanks to Mind Hacks, I found out that my supervisor, Mel Goodale, was featured on ABC Radio National's "All in the Mind" series. In the interview (which you can listen to by clicking here), he talks about a patient named DF, whose unique brain damage (i.e, selective bilateral lesions in the lateral occipital complex due to an episode of hypoxia) resulted in the disruption of her ability to consciously identify objects on the basis of their shape or orientation. In other words, her "vision for perception" was compromised. The fascinating thing is that her "vision for action" was spared. I...more
- James T. (2003) Ventral occipital lesions impair object recognition but not object-directed grasping: an fMRI study. Brain, 126(11), 2463-2475. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awg248
2008-06-24 14:13:49
by daniel in the brain and the sky
Philosophy
One thing I think I'll find eternally interesting is the degree to which my brain is doing things that I think I'm doing. That sounds painfully confused, so I'll put it another way. Dennett gave us the personal/sub-personal distinction (thanks, Dennett!). I'm consistently fascinated by how much what I thought was personal is actually sub-personal. I'm not totally sure why it fascinates me so much. I can't deny that the brain becomes more beautiful to me as I begin to "see" my brain in my behavior, and maybe that has something to do with it. There's also that great conundrum -- weakness of...more
2008-03-15 09:14:10
by Ponder Stibbons in The truth makes me fret.
Philosophy
Ever since I read The Selfish Gene, I’ve been wondering what exactly group selection could bring to the table of theoretical population genetics that kin selection could not. Every case of group selection observed in nature that I read about turned out to involve groups of individuals that have a higher-than-average relatedness within their group ...more
- Carpenter S. R. (2007) Aquatic eutrophication promotes pathogenic infection in amphibians. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(40), 15781-15786. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707763104
- GARDNER A. (2007) Social semantics: altruism, cooperation, mutualism, strong reciprocity and group selection. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20(2), 415-432. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2006.01258.x
2008-02-05 00:05:04
by Mark Lapierre in The Winding Path
Philosophy
World Cancer Day was yesterday, so it's an appropriate time to hear about a recently published review paper which describes a procedure for working out the relative risks posed by different carcinogens. Of course if the researcher, Professor Bernard Stewart of the University of New South Wales, had stopped there he wouldn't have been providing anything new. However, the procedure he described also takes into account the context under which someone might be exposed to a carcinogen, and grades against both if something is a carcinogen, and to what degree, as well as what contribution the contex...more
- STEWART B. (2008) Banding carcinogenic risks in developed countries: A procedural basis for qualitative assessment. Mutation Research/Reviews in Mutation Research, 658(1-2), 124-151. DOI: 10.1016/j.mrrev.2007.11.007
2008-01-21 14:11:21
by Janet D. Stemwedel in Adventures in Ethics and Science
Philosophy
The Neurocritic alerted me, in a comment on an earlier post, to a pair of papers in the 21 December 2007 issue of Science that raise some difficult ethical questions about what sorts of research are permissible. Quoth the Neurocritic:
This may be a little off-topic, but I was wondering if you read this article in Science, beginning of abstract pasted below.
In a randomized controlled trial, we compared abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care. Young children living in institutions were randomly assigned ...more
- Nelson C., Zeanah C. H., Fox N. A., Marshall P. J., Smyke A. T., Guthrie D. (2007) Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project. Science, 318(5858), 1937-1940. DOI: 10.1126/science.1143921
2008-01-21 14:11:16
by Janet D. Stemwedel in Adventures in Ethics and Science
Philosophy
In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined the explanation the researchers gave to argue that their work was not only scientifically sound but also ethical.
In this post, I examine the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, "The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children" [2]. Millum and Emanuel are in the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center...more
- Millum J., Emanuel E. (2007) ETHICS: The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children. Science, 318(5858), 1874-1875. DOI: 10.1126/science.1153822