Politics & the Brain

Some interesting news / articles lately about the political brain. Here are some tidbits, in the order in which I heard them:

• This week's All in the Mind covered the political brain: "As Australians stand in front of the cardboard voting booth next week what's going on in our minds? In choosing the future direction of the nation -- do we weigh up policies and promises with a rational mind, or are we emoting with our pencils? And new research has sent the left and right of the scientific community on a political bender with the idea that we're neurologically wired to support our team. All in the Mind probes your political brain." All in the Mind also provides a nice set of citations to articles by scientists featured in the show, including Drew Weston's recent book: The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.
• This week's Science Friday also covered the political brain: "What happens in your brain when you think about politics? We'll talk with a researcher using brain imaging techniques to map out voters' innermost feelings about the current crop of candidates. The researchers used fMRI imaging to examine brain activity in 20 'likely voters' as they looked at pictures of the candidates and watched clips from speeches. But can maps of activity in the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, or insula really translate into action in the polling booth?"
• The Science Friday article was influenced by a New York Times op-ed piece last week entitled This Is Your Brain on Politics in which Marco Iacoboni, Joshua Freedman, Jonas Kaplan, and others report on their fMRI work on political decision making by swing voters.

All of the studies reported here have their supporters & their critics.
For More Info

• The Political Brain, All in the Mind, November 17, 2007.
• Politics & the Brain, Science Friday, November 16, 2007.
  
• Iacoboni, Marco, Joshua Freedman, Jonas Kaplan, et al. This Is Your Brain on Politics :[Op-Ed]. New York Times, November 11, 2007. p. 14.
  
• Politics & the Brain, a response: Letter to the Editor, New York Times, November 14, 2007.
  
• Kaplan, J., Freedman, J., & Iacoboni, M. (2007). "Us versus Them: Political Attitudes and Party Affiliation Influence Neural Response to Faces of Presidential Candidates." Neuropsychologia, 45(1), 55-64. (available @ your library)
  
• Weston, Drew (2007) The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: PublicAffairs.

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Brain Plasticity and Psychotherapy

Australia's terrific cognitive science radio show All in the Mind just had a two-part series called The Power of Plasticity in which host Natasha Mitchell interviewed psychiatrist Norman Doidge (Columbia University and the University of Toronto) and Jeffrey Schwartz (UCLA) about "neuroplasticians" (Doidge's term).

As Mitchell notes on the episode page, "the adult brain was a rigid, unchangeable organ, but that pessimistic perspective is now being radically revised;" she talks with Schwartz and Doidge about the many ways they know that the brain is, in fact, changeable and adaptable.

Schwartz discusses how people with obsessive compulsive disorder can take advantage of the brain's plasticity to actually change the wiring and minimize the disorder. He says that the part of the brain involved with OCD (the cordate nucleus) functions somewhat like the transmission in a car:

... what happens in obsessive compulsive disorder is you literally do get a stuck transmission and you get this error detection circuit coming in from another part of the brain in the front called the orbital frontal cortex locking, and you can't shift out of it and because you're locked in to an error detection circuit, you are bombarded with feelings that something is wrong, even though the rest of your brain and mind adequately can tell most of the time that even though this feels terrible it really doesn't make sense.

And apparently, according to Schwartz, "people could direct their own inner environment through this enhanced understanding. So I said [to myself] this is self-directed neuroplasticity."

Doidge talks about how psychotherapy can also change some of the brain's wiring; his analogy is to skiing:

plasticity is like snow on a hill in winter, if we're going to ski down that hill because the snow is plastic and pliable we can take many different paths down that hill, not an infinite number, there are rocks here and trees over there. And if we had a good pass down the first time, being human we will tend to favour a path close to that the second and third times and then because the snow is pliable and plastic we'll develop tracks which become ruts and we can get stuck in them, brain lock.

He adds that "many of the neuroplastic treatments basically find ways of setting up road blocks, so that you can get out of those ruts and learn about new pathways and grow new pathways etc."

Both Schwartz and Doidge tell some fascinating stories. The two episodes are well worth a listen, and you can read the transcript online if you prefer.

For More Information

• The Power of Plasticity, Part 1 of 2. All in the Mind, September 13, 2008.
• The Power of Plasticity, Part 2 of 2. All in the Mind, September 20, 2008.
• See also: Norman Doidge Discusses Neuroplasticity Brain Science Podcast, December 14, 2007.
  

#NewToCogSci: Resources for the Curious

Interested in cognitive science? Lots of us are, and I get questions from readers (thanks!!) asking for resources to this interdisciplinary field, which comprises the "...study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

I'm including three sets of resources, and omitting two. This is due to my own professional and learning biases. I'm a text-based learner and like to read my cognitive science in short bursts (reference material, Twitter, or blogs) or listen to interviews with cognitive scientists. So these biases give me great familiarity with:

• Twitter & Blogs
• Podcasts
• Books & Magazines

I'm not including popular or scholarly non-fiction, partly because there is so much out there and partly because I don't typically read non-fiction (shhh, that's a secret!), so I can't list my favorite cognitive science books here. I'm also not including videos, because I don't have the patience to sit through a video.

Twitter & Blogs
These are in addition to the Twitter feeds mentioned elsewhere in this post (like @SciAmMind and @AllintheMind).

• @mocost (Mo Costandi) writes the Neurophilosophy blog for the Guardian and describes himself as a "Neuroscientist turned writer."
• @neuroconscience (Micah Allen) is a PhD in cognitive neuroscience; meta/social cognition, neural plasticity, connectivity, & mental training. Solid news about all of the above.
• @TheNeuroScience (Stanford) tweets lots of news about neuro- and cognitive science.
• @PsychScience (Association for Psychological Science) tweets news and scholarly articles about all aspects of psychology.
• @TheSocialBrain (Dr. SunWolf) tweets about "neuroscience, social behaviors, and the science of happiness."
• @VaughanBell tweets news & articles about all aspects of cognitive science and science more broadly. He also blogs at MindHacks (which is also on Twitter @mindhacksblog).

Podcasts (oh my!) 

• All in the Mind is a weekly 30-minute radio show from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National. Host Lynne Malcolm covers one brain / cognitive science / mind issue per show. Recent episodes have covered The Science of Compassion, The Psychology of Cults, and How language shapes thought.
  
  They say that it's "a program about the mind, brain and behaviour, and the endlessly fascinating interactions between them;" I say it's a must-listen. See also @AllintheMind on Twitter.
  
• Brain Science Podcast is a monthly hour-long interview with leading scientists in all areas of brain science from independent podcaster and emergency physician Ginger Campell.  This year's shows have featured, among others, neurophilospher Patricia Churchland, Christof Koch, and a detailed review of Antonio Damasio's Self Comes To Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.
  
  Check out all 92 episodes, which include detailed show notes and the podcast. If you're new to cognitive science, the first few episodes are a great introduction to various concepts.
  
• On Being. American Public Media's weekly hour-long show features Krista Tippett talking about a variety of spiritual and scientific topics. The most recent episode is about language (Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life); other episodes include Opening to Our Lives: Jon Kabat-Zinn's Science of Mindfulness, The Science of Healing Places with Esther Sternberg, and Investigating Healthy Minds with Richard Davidson.

Books & Magazines

As a librarian, I'm very familiar with reference resources such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, and there are some wonderful reference sources for cognitive science -- and if you're new to cognitive science as a whole,

Books are linked to WorldCat, so you can see if a nearby library owns the title. You can also easily get from WorldCat to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to order the title for your collection.

• Scientific American Mind is a wonderful magazine with articles written for a scientifically knowledgeable lay audience; topics cover all areas of cognitive science and neuroscience. Recent articles include "How Video Games Change the Brain", "Schools Add Workouts for Attention, Grit and Emotional Control," and Christof Koch usually has a column on Consciousness in each issue.
  
  The website offers a few paragraphs of each article for free, but to read the full article, you need a subscription (through your library or on your own). Each major article offers citations for more reading on the article's topic. Check out @SciAmMind on Twitter, too.
  
  They have a section of Reviews and Recommendations (2012; 2013) which is a good way to find popular non-fiction in cognitive science.
  
• The open access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes several entries containing the word "cognitive" which include cognitive science, embodied cognition, and evolutionary psychology. They also cover topics like emotion and consciousness as well as biographical entries on folks ranging from Socrates to Descartes to Sartre.
  
  The SEP's goal is to provide "the philosophical profession and the general public alike with high-quality scholarship on a variety of topics relevant to the human condition," writes Edward Zalta ("The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A university/library partnership in support of scholarly communication and open access," College & Research Library News, Sept. 2006 (pdf))
  
• A great dictionary for understanding psychology terms is Raymond Corsini's 1999 Dictionary of Psychology. The images are terrific (my favorite is the one for pilomotor response) and the definitions are clear and concise. Citation: Corsini, R. J. (1999). The dictionary of psychology. Philadelphia, PA: Brunner/Mazel.

• A great encyclopedia is Michael Gazzaniga's The Cognitive Neurosciences, the fourth edition of which came out in 2009. The academic library review magazine Choice calls it a "benchmark resource for the cognitive neurosciences" (May 2010); sections include Development and Evolution; Plasticity; Attention; Sensation and Perception; Memory; Language; The Emotional and Social Brain; Consciousness and several more. Citation: Gazzaniga, M. S. (2009). The cognitive neurosciences. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

all icons from Iconfinder (from the 'Nuvola' icon set)

What's your favorite Cognitive Science resource? Feel free to add yours in the comments!

Michael Gazzaniga Now

I've just seen / heard about a couple of interviews with Michael Gazzaniga, the father of cognitive neuroscience:

He was on the Australian radio show All in the Mind in June, and they introduce him as follows:

One of the big names of the brain is Michael Gazzaniga, whose career was forged in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry. His striking experiments continue to uncover the differences between your left and right hemispheres. Today he's on the US President's Bioethics Council, heads up a major project on neuroscience and the law, and is a prolific writer of popular neuroscience. He joins Natasha Mitchell to reflect on the brain's left and right, and the mysterious nature of free will.

He was in Australia for the International Human Brain Mapping Conference, and Natasha Mitchell's 30-minute interview covered split brains, the discovery of "blind sight," and free will. You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript; you can also subscribe to All in the Mind via iTunes.

Ross Buck, professor in the University of Connecticut's department of Communication, points me to an upcoming interview in Seed magazine. While the published interview won't appear until the August issue of Seed, you can read the full transcript of the conversation between Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga. You can also watch a video of the interview at the Seed Salon. About the interview and video, they say:

Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

Wolfe, who calls himself “the social secretary of neuroscience,” often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Note that UConn has several of Gazzaniga's books, and I will shortly order his latest, Human : The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

For More Information

• Gazzaniga, Human : The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York : Ecco Press, 2008.
• Interview: All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, June 21, 2008.
• Interview: Seed, August 2008. Interview transcript online July 1, 2008.
  

Podcast / Interviews I've Enjoyed

I've heard some very interesting podcasts / interviews lately & instead of blogging about each one, I thought I'd just list them with a very brief note about what was relevant for cog sci.

• WNYC's Radio Lab is a fun 50-minute show covering various aspects of science very loosely defined. I just listened to the show on Time from 2005, and it was a fascinating look into various aspects of people's perception of time. Hosts Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich speak with Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Jay Griffith, and physicist Brian Greene.


• ETA I found it ... There was a great interview recently on WHYY's Radio Times, with Marty Moss-Coane, about bonobos. "How do baboons relate to each other and understand their place in the world and what can we learn from them about human behavior? Penn researchers Dorothy Cheney and ROBERT SEYFARTH, who joins us in the studio today, have been studying baboons and monkeys in their natural habitat for over 20 years. Their work is documented in a new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Radio Times, June 7, 2007. Archive no longer available.


• Dr. Ginger Campbell, of the the Brain Science Podcast, recently interviewed Elkhonon Goldberg, author of The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford, 2001). Interesting discussion of the pre-frontal lobes, and how they relate to the other structures of the brain. Campbell also discuss some ideas about why the left and right sides of the brain differ, as well as several important ways in which the cortex, and especially the pre-frontal lobes differ from some of the older parts of the brain.
  


• The SETI Institute has a terrific radio show called Are We Alone; the SETI's mission is "to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe." They seem to like cognitive science, at least enough to have had a recent episode on consciousness called That Thinking Feeling (mp3). Show hosts Seth and Molly interviewed a bevy (?) of neuro* & *philo* folks, including Marvin Minsky, author of The Emotion Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2007); Nicholas Strausfeld, Neurobiologist at the University of Arizona at Tucson, who talks about how smart cockroaches are, and how he knows; and Susan Clancy, author of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Harvard, 2005) (because of "sleep paralysis"?!



• ETA ... Australia's All In The Mind offers another great episode, this time entitled Nature? Nurture? What makes us human? It's a podcast of the start of the 2007 Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture series, and it features bits of Matt Ridley's lecture, in which he speaks about his book Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (HarperCollins, 2003). Following his lecture, Natasha Mitchell speaks with Professor Robert Williamson A.O. and Rhonda Galbally A.O, for a fascinating discussion of the "nature vs. nurture" debate. note to former reference students: Dunedin features prominently. A print transcript of Ridley's lecture is available, as is a podcast, in addition to the All in the Mind podcast.

All shows are highly recommended!

Let There Be Light

All in the Mind has done it again, this time providing a two-part series on the Blind Brain. I've only listened to part one, but I could barely concentrate on driving because the story was so fascinating.

Natasha Mitchell spoke with three scientists deeply involved in the areas of vision, the brain, and plasticity:
- Australian psychologist Zoltan Torey, whom New Yorker readers will remember from the 2003 Oliver Sacks story "The Mind's Eye; What the blind see" as a blind man who replaced his own roof. Torey speaks in detail about how he 'sees' after having been blinded over 50 years ago.
- MIT's Pawan Sinha, who runs Project Prakash, whose goal is to "...help curably blind children, especially in India, access the surgery they need to see, and study how their progress in the effort to gain insights into how the brain learns to see." Fascinating insight into how people can regain sight (mostly those born with curable vision problems), and what happens in the brain when they do.
- Harvard's Amir Amedi, who is studying "brain stimulation techniques to study the brains of blind people" along with Alvaro Pascual-Leone (who's written / studied a lot about brain plasticity).

Absolutely *fascinating* research all around. The All in the Mind site includes the audio version of the show (streaming & a downloadable mp3), a print transcript, brief info. about the show, and links to research by all three of the episode's guests.

If I were a grading kind of girl, I'd give this show an A.

Fiction / Science / Philosophy

I like when more than one of my interests combine, as they did in a 1983 book I recently read by Rebecca Goldstein.

In The Mind-body Problem, Goldstein's heroine is a philosopher / graduate student at Princeton married to a math genuius. She jokingly tells her future husband that she is interested in the "body" of the mind-body problem, and then defends her joke (because he doesn't get it):

" 'Well, if there's a philosophy of mind, why shouldn't there be a philosophy of body? After all, the main question in philosophy is the mind-body problem. Why assume only the mind makes the relationship between them problematic? Why assume only mind needs analysis?' " Kind of a joke, but the story is set in 1976, and in 2007 ... it's closer to truth than it was 30 years ago (see Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee's "The Body has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better" (2007) ... about which more soon).

Anyway, the book is a nice blend of philosophy of mind and mid-list women's fiction.

I discovered it by reading Goldstein's recent essay in New Scientist entitled "Science in Fiction" in which she describes her own struggle between reading fiction and "good for you" stuff as a child:

"Every time I visited the library I allowed myself to take out one work of fiction. To balance it, I had to take out a book that was good for me, something I could learn from. I forbade myself from reading the storybook before completing the good-for-me book." Goldstein eventually became a philosopher of science and a novelist.

She's writing a new novel about science and religion.

For More Information
* Goldstein, Rebecca. The Mind-body Problem. New York : Random House, ©1983.
* --- List of works in WorldCat.
* --- “Science in Fiction.“ New Scientist, 8/25/2007, Vol. 195 Issue 2618, p43. Available in EBSCO, LexisNexis and more.

Neuroethics

Natasha Mitchell of Australia's All in the Mind radio show / podcast hosted a great panel discussion at last month's World Conference of Science Journalists [click on "program"], held in Melbourne.

Here's the official description of Mitchell's panel:
"The Brain. It's been called the final frontier of science. Colourful fMRI scans light up our TV screens and newspapers promising to reveal the secrets of the psyche. From the search for the brain's God Spot, to the rapid rise of neuroeconomics, neuromarketing and neuroethics - makes for sexy headlines - but have journalists become blinded by the lights and allure of the brain scan? Are we telling too simplistic a story about the human self?"

Panelists included award-winning science journalists Deborah Blum (University of Wisconsin / Madison Professor of Journalism) and Jonica Newby (Producer, reporter and science journalist at Australian ABC TV's flagship science program, Catalyst), and Professor Fred Mendelsohn (Director of the Howard Florey Institute at the University of Melbourne).

It was a great overview of lots of interesting neuroscience topics, including gender differences in the brain, fMRIs, and twin studies.

What I liked most, however, were the discussions of neuroethical dilemmas. Deborah Blum mentioned a study which used fMRI technology to distinguish between the brains of those who are psychopathic and those who are not; participants were shown several words like "table", "house", "suicide", "murder", and "funeral." fMRIs of those who were psychopaths didn't distinguish between hearing the word "table" and hearing the word "murder", unlike "normal" participants. Blum then referred to Robert Hare, who reportedly can diagnose psychopaths at the age of less than ten. She asks several interesting questions, especially in light of what just happened in Virginia:

"Suppose you said, okay, you're eight, you are a potential psychopath...and what are you going to do with that information? ... [D]o you want to know that as a parent? ... [W]hat would you do – lock him away at the age of ten? I mean it raises – alter his brain chemistry in some way, figure out a way to light up those areas that don't light up at the word murder? Would you want to manipulate people like that?"

Hmmm. I don't know. Read the transcript, or listen to the show to hear more intriguing questions like that.

Lots of information about the show at the All in the Mind web site, including a transcript. The show lasted 45 minutes, and I'd have gladly listened for at least another 45!

the Future of Reference

A colleague (hi Terry!) asked me to speak on a panel in his class about the future of reference. I'm a poor prognosticator (tho' I like to say the word), but I have a few thoughts. Here's a bit of what I said in class:

Even before I talk about the future of reference, I have to comment on how I define "reference." When I think of "reference", I think of "reference SERVICE." I initially focused my thoughts only on service, but finally realized I should probably talk about other elements like search and resources. Always good to know one's own biases.

So, the four things I believe will affect the future of reference are:
- Service
- Search technologies
- the Reference Book
- Money

1. In terms of service, we need to be where the patrons are. This could mean more roving reference (even in a big library) where we go & find them and ask if they are finding what they need. This could (should) mean more technology such as IM, facebook, Skype, and text-messaging -- at least for those tech-savvy patrons. Probably we should work on getting more people to be tech-savvy, in terms of using online resources and communication technology, for those "connected but hassled" patrons.

This implies that reference librarians are still necessary -- and they DEFINITELY are. I taught a class last week in which one student said "I wish I'd known this before I graduated." Breaks my heart when they say that, because I know we can save them time AND help them be smarter about searching. Finding good material will not get easier anytime soon (despite my thoughts about #2), so we will continue to need reference librarians.

2. In terms of search, we MUST make it easier. Roy Tennant famously said "librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find." He also said "2 clicks 2 stuff" (see my blog entry). Two potential ways of making this easier for the non-tech savvy users:

2a. Federated search. This means searching more than one database / library resource at the same time. We can do this already with our EBSCO products, which is applicable if we need to search Communications & Mass Media Complete + PsycINFO at the same time. However, if we were researching the philosophy of mind, for instance, and wanted to search PsycINFO + Philosopher's Index together, we couldn't do that in my library, because we get those resouces from different vendors.

There are several companies which offer federated search products, but, imho, none is ready for prime time. Many technical, legal, and standards problems prevent aggregation of ALL databases into one search engine. And if they're not ALL going to be there, my feeling is we shouldn't do it. Here's why: if a major newspaper vendor is missing, for example, and we point students to our MegaOneSearch resource for newspapers which is all newspaper database sources EXCEPT the big one, then to do a comprehensive search patrons would have to search two sources anyway, and that defeats the purpose.

There's a philosophical question as well: does federated search "dumb" things down to such an extent that we are doing our patrons a disservice by teaching them to use a simple search for all databases rather than pointing them to the best database for their topic?

Finally, the federated search interface must be intuitive to use. I have seen products that confuse me -- and if I don't know what to do, a college freshperson, soccer mom, or the "Inexperienced Experimenter" will not, and will go back to Google.



2b. A different approach to the federated search problem is the "data silo + search + presentation" method adopted by such vendors as Ex Libris' Primo. Currently, if a patron wants to find books, articles, and archival material on his topic, he must search at least three different places, with varying interfaces, quirks, and search rules: the library's catalog (which I've taken to calling "Google for books"), a library database such as Academic Search Premier, and the library's digital archive or finding aids collection. This is so confusing for patrons that they'd rather search Google because it's "good enough."

The premise of Primo is that all data elements (catalog data, digital archives, aggregated data in a federated search product like MetaLib) can be "harvested" and stored in different "silos." Once harvested and "normalized" so that the disparate information has metadata in consistent fields, it can be searched simultaneously (see the Feb. 15, 2007 Library Journal article (Meta)search Like Google for more about this concept).

Finally, there is a dedicated public interface just for this application. The value to patrons is that the presentation layer is consistent for ALL resources within the library. AND the presentation layer is especially designed to be easy to use and highlight the metadata that we have all worked so hard to add to various records.

Two examples of beautiful, patron-oriented public interfaces are North Carolina State University's catalog (see results of a search for synesethesia -- note how smoothly it handled the typo) which is "fronted" by Endeca, and the Queens Public Library (see results of a search for visual perception), which is TLC's AquaBrowser. You can see how much easier this OPAC would be for "connected but hassled" users!

3. The reference book, one of my long-time library companions, is going by the wayside. It's heartbreaking but true. Fewer patrons come to the reference desk, fewer of them are willing to look at a book, and the majority of them are online wanting online resources. Given that, most of us must put our money in online resources. This is completely understandable, but it means that the intuitive-to-use reference book will go by the wayside and patrons will have to learn not only about their topic in an online reference work, they will also have to learn how to use the interface. There is some great reference content online, and while some interfaces are better than others, none is as intuitive as a book.

4. A huge element in the future of reference is money. Money for staff, money for cool products like federated search and Primo, and money for materials. Which sends me to my recent rant on marketing -- if we don't get people into the library, the folks who pay for our services (town hall, university presidents, school departments) will think that their constituents can use Google for everything & don't need libraries. We need to at least keep the $$ we have, or better yet, increase what we're pulling in and use it wisely.

So, in conclusion, here's the future of reference:
1. We still need reference librarians, but they should be where the patrons are, either physically or virtually.
2. We need to make search easier for patrons. Federated search & Primo (theoretically) will enable people to find stuff more quickly and easily.
3. Fewer reference books, more online reference materials. Hopefully easier to use (see #2).
4. Less money, fewer cool librarians, less cool stuff. Money properly allocated means good librarians & *useful* relevant resources for patrons.

It was a great discussion in class. Hopefully others will chime in?!

Engaging Teaching Ideas

Engaging Ideas, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways....

Been reading John Bean's book Engaging Ideas, which is designed to help teachers create writing assignments which will better help students learn. It's CHOCK full of great ideas that I plan to incorporate into both of my Simmons GSLIS classes. It's so, well, engaging, that it's taken me months to read it, and the book is stuffed with notes and papers sticking out with scribbles and pages are turned down and there's highlighting throughout ... you get the picture. In order to help me synthesize what I've read, I'm going to group my ideas together here. (potential study for the cognitive psychologists: does blogging help learn? ... but I digress).

Funny to be writing this and trying to figure out how to organize it, as Bean talks a lot about how to organize writing and how teachers can help students organize their own thoughts & writing. For one thing, traditional outlines often don't work because they are too linear, have bad connotations, AND people often don't think that linearly when writing. Plus, he suggests that many folks don't know what they're going to write about until they write it. Finally ... he suggests that teachers explain to their students how THEY write to give students confidence in what can seem like a shaky business, at least in the early stages. So here I am at the start, modeling one of Bean's major points. Ha!

For the record, I'm going to write out all the ideas I have scribbled down in margins & yellow scrap paper, and then I'm going to organize them in some fashion. Probably -- hopefully! -- by class (407 = basic reference; 454 = advanced reference), and then by assignment / date. I'm going to break this into several posts over the next few weeks, all of which will be tagged with "engaging ideas" if you want to follow along.

Today, we'll start with 407, which is the introductory reference class. If you teach, you can probably relate these ideas to whatever you teach -- library instruction classes, philosophy, cognitive science. At least, I hope so.

* For the source evaluation, have students write a brief summary in the form of an exam question (i.e., "Largest one-volume encyclopedia in English.")
* Offer more sample exam questions; offer some kind of quick review of topics covered in each class. Solution? Provide 3 quick sample exam questions at the end of each class. Good for source review, good for exam prep -- and, most important, good for learning sources, which is the point of the class. (one of them, anyway).

* Study group suggestion: have them compare lecture notes: what sources I mentioned in class, what people said about sources we reviewed, tips I gave about assignments, etc. Especially useful in preparing to work on homework (questions & papers).

* For teaching the reference interview, think about a time when they had to ask a question that was hard to articulate. For me, this is asking for wine I like in a liquor store. How can I explain what I like in a wine? I don't have the words, I feel stupid for not knowing what I like, and so I often don't ask but buy the same old wine all the time. Good way for students to put themselves in the patron's shoes.
* After teaching a service, like instruction or reference interview, ask them to write "minute paper": what is the most significant thing you learned about service today? what question is uppermost in your mind about this service? what do you agree / disagree with & why? And either submit to me at end of class or post to blog / WebCT.

Ideas to better incorporate Readings into class / assignments
* Ask them to write a paragraph about the Bradford reading for the 2d class. Consider ... what is confusing? what surprised you? what do you want to know more about? what do you disagree with? What would you like to ask author? And then have them reread for the final class & discuss.
* Tell them how I read articles -- sometimes carefully, with lots of notes (Engaging Ideas, for example) + when reading articles I will blog here; sometimes skimming quickly (LJ articles that are mildly interesting but not related to work or class). If reading for class, I ask myself these kind of questions: "how will this contribute to their knowledge of topic? How is it different from what I've already assigned? Is it better than (more current, clearer, different perspective) something I've already assigned? Does it focus on something I don't have experience with (i.e., school libraries, public libraries)?
* Note that reading for 407 is different than reading articles for Evaluation of Information Services (fka "Role of Research"). In 407 & 454, they're reading for ideas -- focus on introduction, literature review, and "discussion." If they've taken 403, of course, they can address some of the research problems if they've found any, but focus here is on content as it applies to reference.
* Tell them why I'm having them read articles / textbook.
---- Expose them to ideas not discussed in class.
---- Expose them to journals / magazines / blogs / podcasts they should know about as library professionals.
---- Start them early in the habit of reading professional literature.
---- Expose them to libraries besides where they think they want to work (i.e., all kinds of libraries -- school, academic, public, special).

Until next time ...

For More Information
* Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas : The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. Jossey Bass, 1996.
* Bradford, Jane T., Barbara Costello, et al. Reference Service in the Digital Age: An Analysis of Sources Used to Answer Reference Questions. Journal of Academic Librarianship. 31, no. 3 (2005): 263-272 (full-text available in Wilson Library Literature)

Emotions are All in the Mind

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind just ran a 4 part series on emotion. They covered Sexual Desire (arguably not an emotion), Anger, Jealousy, and Joy.

They feature comments from real people who experience the emotion in question, interspersed with interviews with scientists in the field. Tidbits that I liked:

From Jealousy:
David DeSteno (Associate Professor, Psychology Department, Northeastern University):
“Engaging in satisfying relationships is associated with all kinds of wonderful things: lower cardiovascular threat, greater immune system response, greater wellbeing. And so what jealousy does is it alerts you and impels you to the threat that your relationship is going to be lost.”
DeSteno categorizes jealousy as a “social emotion” rather than a more basic emotion like anger and fear, adding that social emotions “help us navigate our social landscape, much as more basic emotions help us navigate the physical one.”

From Joy:
Lea Williams (Associate Professor, Brain Dynamics Centre, Westmead Hospital and University of Sydney) and Susan Turk Charles (Assistant Professor, School of Social Ecology, University of Southern California) suggest that as we age we get happier. Well, they can’t prove it in so many words, but Williams has found “the part of that that regulates negative emotion actually becomes better able to do that with older age, and, in a sense, takes the brakes off the positive emotions.”

Charmin Härtel (Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Department of Management, Monash University):
“There’s an old saying that if you took three people and you put them in a room and two of them were positive and one of them was negative that they’d all come out depressed. And there’s a little bit of truth in that, it’s a lot easier for the emotional tone of a place to go negative than it is for it to go in a positive way or create a positive environment.”

Transcripts, citations to articles for more information, as well as podcasts & RealAudio of the show are available for all stories.

Favorite Podcasts

I've had two conversations recently in which I was discussing favorite science podcasts. Since this blog serves as a long-term memory aid, I'm listing, in alphabetical order, some of the sci-tech podcasts I like right now. (read about earlier favorites)

• All in the Mind Terrific 30-minute discussion of all things psychology from Australia's ABC Radio National. Host and science journalist Natasha Mitchell is very knowledgeable and has interviewed folks like Steven Pinker, Dan Dennett, and others in psychology, neuroscience, and even philosophy. I've blogged about many episodes. (note: their web site was down as I wrote this, but it should be back soon)
  
• Brain Science Podcast Host Ginger Campbell (an ER "doc" in Alabama) conducts terrific interviews and book talks about many cognitive science topics. She's interviewed Christof Koch, linguist Alice Gaby, and Brain Rules author John Medina. She asks good, knowledgeable questions and her conversations have inspired me to buy many books for myself and for my library. You can follow Ginger on Twitter, and read what I've blogged about prior Brain Science podcasts.
  
• Free Library of Philadelphia "Author Event" lectures, feature many types of authors including several scientists. I just listened to physicist Paul Davies' talk entitled Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life and was riveted by Simon Winchester talking about The Man Who Loved China: Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece. There are also lectures by Steven Pinker on his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Eric Kandel talking about In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. Looks like mathematician and physicist Brian Greene will be speaking this fall! These hour-long talks usually contain a 30-minute lecture then ~30 minutes of Q&A with the audience.
  
• Future Tense 3-4 minute radio program subtitled "Public radio's daily journal of the digital age." Host (and Twitterer) Jon Gordon covers many aspects of technology, such as podcasting (not mainstream yet, apparently), PowerPoint, as well as many Mac and PC issues. I've blogged many Future Tense episodes.
  
• GSLIScast Audio recordings from many speaker presentations at Simmons Graduate School of Library & Information Science. They usually run 60-90 minutes.
• Radio Times with WHYY's Marty Moss-Coane. The majority of these 50-minute podcast are NOT about science, but the ones that are are terrific (and the others are, too). Moss-Coane has interviewed Avery Gilbert, psychologist and smell expert; Gary Marcus, Hampshire alum and director of NYU's Infant Language Learning Center; and Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. Unfortunately, the mp3 links have a short shelf-live at WHYY's site, so it's best to subscribe to the show via iTunes.
  
• SirsiDynix Institute Free, hour-long workshops with library leaders about various aspects of library science, including David Lee King's primer on video on the web and the awesome Maximizing the Power of the Web: Pew Internet & American Life Project's 2007 Findings with Lee Rainie.
  
• TED Talks 20-minute talks by prominent thinkers in many disciplines, including science, technology, arts, and more. Topics include Sugata Mitra showing how kids teach themselves; Patricia Burchat shedding light on dark matter; and Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web. I've blogged about several TED Talks.
  
• TVBarn Not science-related, but thoughtful conversations about TV between (Twitterer) Aaron Barnhart and a few radio talk show hosts across the country. My favorites are when he speaks with Paul Harris. They are usually 5-15 minutes but sometimes last longer.

Please add your favorite science podcast(s) in the comments!

Difference Between the Future & the Past?

New Scientist reports on several studies which suggest that there may not be such a difference between the future and the past, at least in our brains. From the free abstract on the New Scientist web site, author Jessica Marshall writes:

"IMAGINE your next vacation. You are relaxing on a beach, waves lapping at the shore, a cool breeze wafting through the trees and the sun caressing your skin. Fill in the details. What else do you see? Now, remember yesterday's commute. Again, a picture emerges. You are on the train or in your car, or maybe just wandering from your kitchen to your desk. Can you remember what you were wearing? Perhaps you have forgotten that part already.

"Without breaking sweat, you can hurtle yourself backwards or forwards in time in your mind's eye - what is known as 'mental time travel'. One of these visions really happened and the other was fantasy, yet the act of conjuring them up probably felt very similar. It's as if, embedded somewhere in your brain, there is a time machine that can take you forwards and backwards at will."

Turns out that fMRI's show very little difference in the brain when people are thinking of something in the past or imagining something in the future.

From an evolutionary perspective, this might make sense, according to University of Toronto neuroscientist Endel Tulving: "It is hard to imagine how personal recall alone might be evolutionarily useful, but if remembering how cold and hungry you were last winter helps you realise the benefits of putting food away for the next one, or convinces you to plant a few of your grains instead of eating them all, you stand a much better chance of surviving than someone who cannot project themselves backwards and forward in time. 'I cannot imagine how civilisation could emerge from brains that cannot imagine the future,' Tulving says."

Fascinating in its own right, but this has implications for reference librarians faced with patrons who mis-remember dates, names, and other essential components of their reference question. Marshall paraphrases Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter: "False memories are not memory deficits at all but by-products of a normal, healthy memory." Not only are our patrons not intentionally misleading us, perhaps their mis-remembering is actually normal -- and even evolutionarily based.

At a minimum, it might make me more sympathetic as I try to help people who swear the article was published in 1990 or 1991 -- when it turns out to have been published in 1988.

Future recall: your mind can slip through time - being-human by Jessica Marshall in the March 24 2007 issue of New Scientist. Available through LexisNexis in your library, or for a fee on their web site.

Dan Dennett on All in the Mind

Natasha Mitchell did a great interview with Dan Dennett which aired a few weeks ago on All In The Mind. He discussed his new book Breaking the spell : religion as a natural phenomenon, and pleasantly asked the tough questions she asked him. They had a nice rapport, and it was a fun interview.

You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript. When All In The Mind is hot, it's a terrific cog sci listen!

A Moral Grammar?

Interesting podcast from Australia’s All in the Mind about the evolution of morality. See their description below:

“Moral Minds: The Evolution of Human Morality
“Incest, infanticide, honour killings - different cultures have different rules of justice. But are we all born with a moral instinct - an innate ability to judge what is right and wrong? Could morality be like language - a universal, unconscious grammar common to all human cultures? Eminent evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser and philosopher Richard Joyce take on these controversial questions in impressive new tomes, and to critical acclaim. But could their evolutionary arguments undermine the social authority of morality? Is biology the new 'religion'? “

I’ve seen Marc Hauser speak (thanks, Hampshire!) and he’s very interesting. He’s got an online Moral Sense Test where he and his team at Harvard’s Cognitive Evolution Lab “study … the nature of human moral judgment.” I won’t tell you about the moral dilemmas presented in the test, but they are challenging! See for yourself.

You can download the podcast or read the transcript from All in the Mind.

Interesting CogSci Folks

Two quick notes:

• Ginger Campbell, of the Brain Science Podcast recently interviewed Patricia Churchland on Neurophilosophy and other topics.  Read Ginger's show summary & download the show if you want to hear the whole thing:

Churchland is the author of Brain-wise : studies in neurophilosophy [WorldCat.org] (c2002) and Neurophilosophy : toward a unified science of the mind-brain [WorldCat.org] (c1986). She is currently on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego and she was a featured speaker at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2008.

In this interview we talked about neurophilosophy, which is an approach to philosophy of mind that gives high priority to incorporating the empiric findings of neuroscience. We also talk about the evolving relationship between philosophy and neuroscience. Churchland shares her enthusiasm for how the discoveries of neuroscience are changing the way we see ourselves as human beings. We also talked a little about the issues of reductionism

• Longtime readers of this blog may remember I wrote about Pat & Paul Churchland 2 years ago, summarizing an extensive New Yorker article about both of them.
  

• If you'll be anywhere near Storrs, CT on Thursday, March 19, you might want to stop by the Dodd Center's Konover Auditorium to hear Marc Hauser (Professor of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Anthropology, Harvard University) speak at 4:00 p.m. His talk is entitled:  

 The Evolution of a Moral Grammar.  Marc Hauser is an expert on the evolution of animal communication, behavioral ecology, and the evolution of mind.  His work integrates animal behavior, cognitive neurosciences, anthropology, and philosophy.  He is the author of a number of influential books, including The Evolution of Communication [WorldCat.org] (c1996) and Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong [WorldCat.org] (c2006).  

• Hauser was interviewed on Australia's radio programme All in the Mind in late 2006, which I summarized on this blog.
  
  

More about Synesthesia

I was so excited about my possible synesthetic experience last week (aural synesthesia?) that I didn't explain what synesthesia actually is. It just so happened that on last week's episode of Australia's terrific radio program All in the Mind, host Natasha Mitchell interviewed neuroscientist David Eagleman. The two talked about his new novel Sum: 40 tales from the Afterlives, and Mitchell notes that Eagleman is "also a leading researcher in synesthesia, studying people who taste sounds, hear colours, and live in a remarkable world of sensory cross-talk."

The interview is quite interesting -- for this topic, that's especially true of the second half, where Mitchell and Eagleman talk about his research into synesthesia and what we still don't know about the brain. Mitchell's blog post summarizes more of the interview and has been left open for comments from synesthetes and others.

For More Information

• Cytowic, Richard E. and David Eagleman. Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain on Synesthesia. MIT Press, 2009
• David Eagleman's lab
  
• Mitchell, Natasha, interview: David Eagleman: The afterlife, synesthesia and other tales of the senses. All in the Mind, June 20, 2009. mp3 ... print transcript available shortly.

David Eagleman on Time and Synesthesia

Burkhard Bilger had a great piece in the April 25, 2011 New Yorker entitled David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain. In it, Bilger discusses Eagleman's fascinating work trying to figure out how we think about time. Eagleman goes to a Zero Gravity "ride" to see if he can measure how our sense of time slows down when we are afraid (he can); he also goes to London to see if drummers' brains are more precise about time than "normal" brains (they are).

Our general perception of time seems to be influenced by emotion:

When something threatens your life, [the amygdala] seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

For more on this story, read the transcript of Bilger and Eagleman's chat session, Ask the Author Live: Burkhard Bilger on Time and the Brain. It's all fascinating!

Shortly after I read the New Yorker article, I was going through itunes, pruning some of my podcasts. I found a January 2010 episode of Australia's terrific All In The Mind in which Natasha Mitchell interviewed David Eagleman, in a show entitled: The afterlife, synesthesia and other tales of the senses. Eagleman talks very little about time, but quite a bit about synesthesia. If you want to know more about numbers having colors, or names having taste, give this show a listen.

Finding CogSci Podcasts

In case you're wondering ... here are some ways to find nifty cognitive science & other podcasts.

Here's a Google search trick I use to find podcasts of interviews with folks whom I'd like to hear: inurl:podcast + "name of person" (in quotes). The command inurl:podcast means that the word "podcast" has to be in the URL, which gives you a good chance that the link will actually lead to a podcast. This does result in some false positives, but it's a pretty reliable search.

A search for this: inurl:podcast "david sloan wilson" yields 6 results, including an interview with Wilson on the site of publisher's of his recent book.

A search for this inurl:podcast "positive psychology" brings up over 200 results, many of which are interviews with scholars working with positive psychology.

Lists of psychology & cogsci podcasts:

• The British Psychological Society has a Research Digest Blog with some nifty posts. One feature of this blog is a section called "Elsewhere (for when you've had enough of journal articles" (heh) which lists some mainstream (frequently the Manchester Guardian) coverage of psychology & cognitive science, including podcasts.
  
• The BPS also has a blog post called Psychology Podcasts: a Clickable List which is a nice list of podcasts about psychology. Christian Jarrett maintains the list and is happy to post new links to the site.
• This Week in Science features some cognitive science / cognitive psychology; see their list of posts in cognitive science.
• University of California San Diego faculty member Rafael Nunez has posted entire 80-minute lectures for his Introduction to Cognitive Sci class.
  

Regular readers of the CogSci Librarian will know that these are among my favorites:

• Ginger Campbell at the Brain Science Podcast covers lots of interesting cognitive science topics, including consciousness, memory, body maps, and more.
• Natasha Mitchell's All in the Mind podcast covers all kinds of topics, such as intuition, music, and vision, as well as interviews with Daniel Dennett & Steven Pinker.
  
• The New York Times "Science Times" podcast often features psych / neuroscience stuff. See New York Times & scroll down to Science Times, or subscribe in iTunes.

Blogged with Flock

Chemo Brain

Jane Gross writes in Sunday's New York Times about chemo brain, in which folks who have received chemotherapy also exhibit signs of severe cognitive impairment. Mostly this is women who’ve received aggressive treatment for breast cancer -- one woman found 4 gallons of milk in her fridge after buying a fifth, with no recollection of having purchased the other four gallons.

Gross writes, "There is now widespread acknowledgment that patients with cognitive symptoms are not imagining things, and a growing number of oncologists are rushing to offer remedies, including stimulants commonly used for attention-deficit disorder and acupuncture."

Health: Chemotherapy Fog Is No Longer Ignored as Illusion
By Jane Gross ... Sunday, April 29, 2007
Research is leading to new attitudes about the cognitive side effects of life-saving treatment.

Natasha Mitchell, of Australia's All in the Mind radio programme, reported on chemo brain a few months ago. "[S]hort-term memory loss, foggy thoughts, fatigue - lingering sometimes years after chemotherapy. Could chemo be doing more than killing off cancer cells? New research suggests it may be more toxic to your nerve cells than cancer itself."

Our neurotoxic world (part one): Chemotherapy and the brain, from All In The Mind - 10 February 2007

Interesting stuff.