The translations come thick and fast! Ajatus (which means “Thought”, I understand) has now been released by publishers readme.fi in Finland, in hardback no less. Many thanks to Chris Heathcote for picking a copy up for me in Helsinki. He took a photo of the book too, if you’d like to see.
Grab Ajatus at readme’s website if you fancy it, and I’ve put the blurb (in Finnish) below the fold.
I’ll stop with the hard sell now, sorry! I just get excited about these things.
Today’s ‘Start the Week’ on BBC Radio 4 features Steve Rose discussing advances in neuroscience, in drug treatments (for illnesses or mind-enhancement) and the ethical issues that the public will have to increasingly deal with.
Andrew Marr, the presenter, uses this lovely metaphor for brain scanning. It is like, he said (i paraphrase), looking at the outside of a darkened house at night, a house which contains someone moving from room to room turning on and off lights as they do. So when we look at an fMRI scan we might know which neural and/or mental ‘room’ they are in, but we’ve no idea what they’re doing there. Steve Rose agreed: “I don’t believe we’ll ever be able to tell what a person is thinking from a brain scan” (although he added that some of his colleagues would disagree with him).
If you’d like to hear the show, you can listen again here
A conference on the science and culture of LSD was recently held to honour the 100th birthday of discoverer Albert Hoffman (as reported previously on Mind Hacks). Wired magazine sent one of their reporters to the gathering and have published a story discussing the event and its impact.
The article particularly focuses on the number of technologists who have claimed that the drug is beneficial to their creative thought, and the increasing research focus on the use of psychedelics in therapy for psychological trauma.
Link to article ‘LSD: The Geek’s Wonder Drug?’
Mind Hacks has been available in Japanese since December 2005, and according to the reviews on Google’s translation of the Amazon.co.jp page, the book’s been exceptionally well translated. (Also, very well received which is gratifying!) I believe this is the translator’s blog and, if so, thanks very much and well done.
Looking at a few more translated pages, including that blog again and the O’Reilly Japan news page, it seems that Mind Hacks sold out at the end of 2005 and has now been reprinted. That’s testament to what must be a great job in translating and re-working the book–and, since I now have the finished object in my hand, some beautiful book design. The binding and production is really good. Congratulations folks! It really is exciting to see Mind Hacks do this well… and very odd to see photos of Tom and me and all other others in the book floating off around the world.
Any Japanese readers out there who’d like to buy the book: Please see the links here and the O’Reilly Japan book page for some sample hacks. Also please do report back!
I’ve tucked a couple of photos below the fold…
Mente locale: Esperimenti, giochi, consigli per conoscere il proprio cervello e usarlo meglio di Tom Stafford, Matt Webb has been available since November 2005, it turns out. That’s the Italian translation of Mind Hacks, in case you didn’t guess. It has been translated by Anna Airoldi (who spotten an appropriate error in the English translation). Welcome Italian readers!
You can buy Mente Locale here, and I’ve put the Italian blurb for the book below the fold
You spend all day waiting for a bus, then two come along at once… PsyBlog has risen from its slumber to rub its eyes and stare 2006 in the face. A welcome return.
Online boffin brigade Edge have asked a wide range of contemporary thinkers to outline their own ‘dangerous ideas‘.
The list includes a number of cognitive scientists, and an even wider selection of authors commenting on mind, brain and culture. Most of them, although fascinating, don’t strike me as very dangerous. A few did make me particularly prick up my ears though:
Cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Kosslyn offers a set of hypotheses concerning a scientific theory of God, anthropologist Helen Fisher suggests SSRIs affect love and predicts of dire consequences for society as a result and philosopher Barry Smith argues cognitive science may have limited relevancy for everyday life.
…and once you’ve read all the commentaries, dig those photos!
Link to The Edge Annual Question 2006: What is your dangerous idea?
UPDATE: The newly returned Mixing Memory has some interesting comments on some of the cognitive science ideas.
I’ve taken advantage of the holidays to have a big server move and shift mindhacks.com to a different machine… If you see this post, it worked! If you notice any glitches around the site, please do let me know at matt at mind hacks dot com. Thanks!
The lastest edition of BBC All in the Mind is a special on autism, discussing the experience, science and politics of the condition.
The programme talks to scientists and people affected by autism, including Wendy Lawson, a member of the growing Autistic Pride movement – which is trying to reframe autism as a part of normal neurodiversity rather than as a pathology in itself.
It also discusses the latest findings and theories of autistic abilities, disabilities and experience from the cognitive and neurosciences with psychiatrist Anthony Bailey and neuroscientist Helen Tager-Flusberg.
Link to All in the Mind autism special webpage.
Realaudio archive of progamme.
Link to previous post on Autistic Pride.
The Economist reports that in Japan, increasing importance is being placed on robots that look and act like humans. The article further argues that the focus on humanoid robots is driven, at least in part, by a desire to avoid the culture’s strong social conventions.
Karl MacDorman, another researcher at Osaka, sees similar social forces at work. Interacting with other people can be difficult for the Japanese, he says, “because they always have to think about what the other person is feeling, and how what they say will affect the other person.” But it is impossible to embarrass a robot, or be embarrassed, by saying the wrong thing.
Meanwhile, Wired offer their list of the ‘50 Best Robots Ever‘.
Is this robot week or something?
Link to Economist article ‘Better than people’.
Link to Wired article ‘The 50 Best Robots Ever’.
Link to previous post on the ‘Uncanny Valley’ in robot design.
BBC Radio 4’s programme on the history of ideas discussed artificial intelligence recently, with some of the leading researchers in the field.
The programme slipped past my attention when it was first on a couple of weeks ago, but the full audio archive is available online to listen to at your leisure.
“Can machines think?” It was the question posed by the mathematician and Bletchley Park code breaker Alan Turing and it is a question still being asked today. What is the difference between men and machines and what does it mean to be human? And if we can answer that question, is it possible to build a computer that can imitate the human mind?
Interestingly, Turing was quite bullish about the prospect, as shown in an excerpt from the 1950 edition of Whitakers Almanack.
I’ve yet to find out what the ‘300 year old sum’ is, that is mentioned as solved by the ‘mechanical brain’ from the article at the link above. Answers on a postcard please…
Link to In Our Time webpage on AI programme.
Realaudio archive of programme.
Hello Mind Hacks readers. Just a note to say that updates to the site might be a bit sporadic over the Christmas period as we’re likely to be enjoying the time to kick back and read all the neuroscience books that Santa brings.
Hopefully, the updates should be more or less daily, but please excuse the occasional brandy-fuelled omission. Here are some brief Christmas links to tide you over, though…
Christmas gingerbread could lift mood as spices contain amphetamine precursors! – This might need to be taken with a pinch of ginger I fear.
Mental health charity Mind has a guide to beating Christmas stress.
A light-hearted article from Psychology Today on the 12 neuroses of Christmas.
And, as it’s Christmas, indulge yourself in some untestable, unscientific pop-psychology: The psychology of Christmas shopping.
Roll on 2006!
BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind (not to be confused with the Australian radio show of the same name) has returned to the airwaves with a fascinating section on Anarchic Hand syndrome:
The idea of a hand with its own will has been used as a comic device by many movie makers and writers…including in “Dr Strangelove”. But a little known fact is that there is a rare and fascinating neurological phenomena which can cause this Strangelove-type behaviour to happen – called alien, or anarchic, hand syndrome, a condition which means that people cannot control the actions of one of their hands. This month an intriguing new case history of alien hand syndrome has just been reported by a Japanese group in the journal Surgical Neurology, and Raj discusses the syndrome with expert Sergio Della Sala, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh.
Link to website and audio archive of BBC All in the Mind.
BrainBlog has picked up on an upcoming theatre festival based around the unusual consequences of brain injury and neurological disease.
NEUROfest will run from January 6th to the 29th in New York City, and includes:
* Multimedia by real-life neurologist James Jordan in CJD; to
* A family musical with Welcome to Tourettaville! (co-written by a 7 year-old with Tourette’s Syndrome); to
* A short monologue in The Taste of Blue, set in the realm of the senses; to
* A full-length opera/theater piece in Tabula Rasa; to
* An examination of communication in Linguish, when language isn’t an option; to
* A love story about two men, music, and vertigo in Vestibular; to
* A family drama about delusion and doppelgangers in Impostors
* and much more…
Impostors is about Capgras syndrome, the delusional belief that a close relative or spouse has been replaced by an idenical looking impostor.
Interestingly, the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote a short story entitled ‘Impostor’, which has a Capgras-like plot. It eventually got turned into a low budget movie of the same name.
The journal Psychosomatic Medicine has a new free online supplement all about the link between depression and heart disease. There’s evidence that even mild depression can put people at increased risk of heart disease, and depression is three to four times more prevalent among cardiac patients than among the general population.
Link to free online supplement.
Neuropsychologist Paul Broks’ exploration of how brain injury affects selfhood, Into The Silent Land, has been made into a play that is currently showing in the Soho Theatre in London’s West End.
The production is entitled On Ego and asks the question:
“What are we? Skin, bone and a hundred billion brain cells? Or is there something more? How does the conscious “you” clamber from the numb darkness of the brain box out into a world of people and places, pleasure and pain, love and loss?”
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that a book of case studies of brain injured patients has been turned into a theatre production, as Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was turned into an opera.
On Ego finishes on the 7th January.
Link to information on play.
<a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1657096,00.html
“>Link to Observer article about On Ego
Link to American Scientist interview with Broks.
Mind Hacks 