Dave hosts a fun iCephalon 2009 Keynote address (AKA Encephalon 72), a collection of the best brain and mind blog posts of the last couple weeks. Enjoy!
The Neuroanthropology blog team has just published one of the most complete and high-quality editions of Encephalon brain & mind blog carnival in months. Enjoy!:
Encephalon #71: Big Night
Three excellent new editions of these blog carnivals:
- Encephalon at Neuroskeptic: brain and mind topics.
- Grand Rounds at Running a Hospital: overall health and medicine, this week with special theme "when things go awry".
- Change of Shift at EmergiBlog: nursing and related healthcare topics.
A couple of very well curated collections of recent blog posts:
Encephalon #64: hosted by Neurocritic, covering neuroscience and psychology. Please make sure to visit when you have some time to spare...because you will quickly become addicted to the quality content and superb presentation.
It’s Grand Rounds, What Do You Think? GOSH!: hosted by Kim at EmergiBlog, with an interdisciplinary, "Napoleon Dynamite", frame. Doesn't seem to make sense? well, pay a visit.
In 1993, Paramount Pictures released Searching for Bobby Fischer, which depicts Joshua Waitzkin's early chess success as he embarks on a journey to win his first National chess
championship. This movie had the effect of weakening his love for the game as well as the learning process. His passion for learning was rejuvenated, however, after years of meditation, and reading philosophy and psychology. With this rekindling of the learning process, Waitzkin took up the martial art Tai Chi Chuan at the age of 21 and made rapid progress, winning the 2004 push hands world championship at the age of 27.
After reading Joshua's most recent book The Art of Learning, I thought of a million topics 
I wanted to discuss with him--topics such as being labelled a "child prodigy", blooming, creativity, and the learning process. Thankfully, since I was profiling Waitzkin for an article I was fortunate enough to get a chance to have such a conversation with him. I hope you find this discussion just as provocative and illuminating as I did.
The Child Prodigy
S. Why did you leave chess at the top of your game?
J. This is a complicated question that I wrote about very openly in my book. In short, I had lost the love. My relationship to the game had become externalized-by pressures from the film about my life, by losing touch with my natural voice as an artist, by mistakes I made in the growth process. At the very core of my relationship to learning is the idea that we should be as organic as possible. We need to cultivate a deeply refined introspective sense, and build our relationship to learning around our nuance of character. I stopped doing this and fell into crisis from a sense of alienation from an art I had loved so deeply. This is when I left chess behind, started meditating, studying philosophy and psychology, and ultimately moved towards Tai Chi Chuan.
S. Do you think being a child prodigy hurt your chess career in any way?
J. I have never considered myself a prodigy. Others have used that term, but I never bought in to it. From a young age it was always about embracing the battle, loving the game, and overcoming adversity. Growing up as Continue Reading »
Edge's Question of the Year is,
"What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
A couple of scientists respond on areas close to our field:
- Controlling Brain Plasticity (by Leo Chalupa)
- The first major upgrade of the human brain and the mind it generates since the Pleistocene (by Gregory Paul)
You can read those and many other fascinating answers at Edge's Question of the Year.
Welcome to the 61st edition 
of Encephalon, the blog carnival that offers some of the best neuroscience and psychology blog posts every other week.
We do have an excellent set of articles today. covering much ground. Enjoy the reading:
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Neuroscience and Society
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Neuroanthropology, |
The Flynn Effect: Troubles with Intelligence 2 Average IQ test scores had risen about 3 points per decade and in some cases more. Tests of vocabulary, arithmetic, or general knowledge (such as the sorts of facts one learns in school) have showed little increase, but scores have increased markedly on tests thought to measure ‘general intelligence’. |
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MindHacks, |
Medical jargon alters our understanding of disease Understanding how popular ideas influence our personal medical beliefs is an essential part of understanding medicine itself. |
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Cognitive Daily, |
Is it sexist to think men are angrier than women? Are we more likely to perceive a male face as angry and a female face as happy? A recent study sheds light on the issue. |
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Neurocritic |
Crime, Punishment, and Jerry Springer Judges and jurors must put aside their emotionally-driven desire for revenge when coming to an impartial verdict. Does neuroimaging (fMRI) add anything to our understanding of justice? |
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Alzheimer's Disease and Neurocognitive Health Continue Reading »
If you could, you would. You can, but prefer not to know it?
More than any other organ, your brain is up to you. You are what you think, not just what you eat. Here's some food for thought:
Design your Mind
Setting cognitive and behavioral goals raises challenging and worthy questions: What do you want from your brain? Will you know it when you achieve it?
To attain the brain of our choosing, we must understand our selves and current abilities. Introspection and curiosity are helpful if they trigger and sustain the effort to enrich the mind. However, objective information which leads to informed assessment of brain function is often lacking.
Mind your Brain
Honesty. Openness. Self-awareness.
Irrefutable virtues, but in practice most people fall short. Few regularly appraise their brain skills; even so, the ability to accurately judge one's own mental performance is not guaranteed. I believe the first step to minding the brain is shedding hang-ups while offering and soliciting frank feedback from family and close confidants. In the clinical setting, routine cognitive screening and "mental check ups" are not currently practiced, in part due to time constraints and limited utility of traditional paper-and-pencil tests. From a public health perspective, the U.S. Preventative Task Force reviewed Continue Reading »
Thank you to everyone who has written so many fun haikus over the summer (following the post Top 25 Brain and Mind Haikus. Yours?). These are the 10 I have enjoyed the 
most:
(Also, Can you write a haiku describing anything crossing your mind now? Remember the simple rules: write 3 lines, which don't need to rhyme, containing 5,7, and 5 syllables. You can leave your haiku as a comment below for extra points...)
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Top 10 Brainy Haikus - enjoy!
- Amit:
Love, college, career.
A new world of transitions.
Will I survive? Yes.
- Kathy:
My release technique,
Forgive, forget, love all,
Meditate on that!
- Alan:
Through the microscope,
slice of brain stains pink and blue,
the wonder of thought.
- Justin:
Justin the genieus
Must spell check the word genius
to post this Haiku
- Tim: Continue Reading »
Sandeep hosts a very inspired edition of Encephalon. Make sure to visit if you are interested in brain and mind topics!
Which starts with...
25 little gems,
on the mind and the brain-
aren't they one and the same!
- Next »
