Ferris Jabr reports on a press conference where neuroscientists try to come to terms with some of the problems in their discipline that we've covered over the past few years ("Neuroscientists: We Don’t Really Know What We Are Talking About, Either", Scientific American 4/1/2012):
Robert Wright, "The Secret of Jeremy Lin's Success?", The Atlantic 2/14/2012: One of the most intriguing cultural contrasts between eastern and western ways of viewing the world was documented in experiments by the psychologist Richard Nisbett, some of them in collaboration with Takahiko Masuda. The upshot was that East Asians tend to view scenes more […]
Several readers have sent in links to recent media coverage of C. Nathan DeWall et al., "Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics", Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3/21/2011. For example, there's John Tierney, "A Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Lyrics", NYT […]
[Welcome WSJ readers! More here.] Back on February 6, in an interview on CNN with Candy Crowley, Alan K. Simpson (a former Republican senator from Wyoming who was co-chair of President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform) said: Your browser does not support the audio element. If you have a- hear a politician […]
Jonathan Weinberg wrote to suggest that perhaps "explanatory neurophilia" (the fact that people tend to be impressed and persuaded by neuroscientific details even if they provide no explanatory value) is part of a larger phenomenon that also includes "physics envy" (the desire to achieve in other sciences the success of mathematical reasoning from first principles […]
Carl Zimmer, among other readers, has pointed me to the latest outbreak of bio-political punditry. This time it isn't David Brooks, but rather Nicholas Kristof, "Our Politics May Be All in Our Head", 2/13/2010: We all know that liberals and conservatives are far apart on health care. But in the way their brains work? Even […]
It's been a while since we posted on differences between the sexes, so here's a Zippy on the subject: Yes, I know, this isn't really about language, but Language Log stumbled into sex differences a few years ago, mostly thanks to Leonard Sax and Louann Brizendine (via David Brooks).
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David Brooks, starting his conversation with Gail Collins on why "Western Men are Doomed" (NYT, 11/19/2009): China always gets me thinking big. I look at the long history and bright future of that civilization-state and suddenly you’ve got to chase me down with a butterfly net to impose the grip of reality on my grandiose […]
In some alternative history, according to the webcomic Teaching Baby Paranoia: (Click on the image for a larger version. If your screen is too small, this may not work — in that case, try right-click>>view image or your browser/OS equivalent.)
In my role as self-appointed David Brooks watcher, I wearily contemplated his latest masterpiece of misunderstanding, and wondered whether the linguistic angles justified a post. Imagine my relief when I discovered this lovely dissection in cartoon form at chaospet (click on the image for a larger version):
Continuing to follow up on the issues raised by David Brooks' column "Harmony and the Dream", I recommend some interesting reviews by Daphna Oyserman and her colleagues. Among her many publications on culture I found two articles that are especially relevant.
My reactions to David Brooks' August 11 column "Harmony and the Dream" led me to look again at three books by prominent psychologists: Richard E. Nisbett's 2003 The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why; and James R. Flynn's 2007 What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect; and Alexander Luria's 1976 […]
Here's another interview-as-blog-post. This time the interviewer is someone writing a book, who has read some of the Language Log posts linked here and here; and the subject of the interview is "the new fashion for biological determinism in debates about differences between the sexes".