For Harmony and Strength? Thoughts on Joint Action in Japan.

Wa, meaning ‘harmony’, is fundamental to Japan’s national self-image. Over the course of the twentieth century, Japan has been portrayed again and again as a particularly harmonious and ordered society. The Japanese are often said to have an elevated tendency towards group identification, willingness to self-sacrifice for group interests, and conformity – indeed, these are repeatedly emphasised as being central to the national character in Japan’s endlessly proliferating Nihonjinron literature (Nihonjinron refers to the body of ideologically motivated academic literature on the uniqueness of Japan’s society and culture. This literature generally features a homogenised picture of Japanese society set up in binary opposition to an individualistic West). Two classic formulations of these ideas were the social anthropologist Nakane Chie’s Japanese Society (1970), in which she proposed that Japanese society was vertically stratified according to company affiliation and loyalty to one’s immediate in-group as opposed to horizontally stratified according to socio-economic class, and psychologist Takeo Doi’s Anatomy of Dependence (1971), wherein he suggested that amae, a kind of paternalistic exchange of protection and indulgence in return for loyalty, constituted the glue that bound Japanese society together. 

Mind Maps

I was reading the other day about a mind map software that facilitates the user to create a mind map, and then about some guidelines to make mind maps, and I remembered one of my ex-colleagues at the university who always used mind maps for studying, but they appeared to me as these complex maps where nothing can be understood from an outsider view. And of course! That's what they seem like. Maybe because all of us picture/organize things/thoughts differently. So the question is are these mind maps transferable? Or are they an efficient study method?

Division of the brain

During this course, we have avoided using the term 'brain', and the past convention that our mind controls our actions. With my first post, I challenge this term, with the following talk that I find extremely interesting. It is about brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor who suffers a stroke, and is able to study the effect of the stroke on her brain, using the gained knowledge from her research.

This talk is focused on the division of the brain in the left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere and tries to make sense about what happens when one of them stops, and to define what is the role of the left-hemisphere, and right-hemisphere respectively.

Embodiment and 'The Hard Problem'

First off, I apologise for the corny picture. I could not resist. Consciousness is a good topic for these things. It’s mysterious still, an undiscovered country, theoretically up for grabs and thus ripe for colonisation by idiosyncratic, metaphysically consoling worldviews lending themselves to expression in gauche pictures. Why not celebrate that a little? Now, on to the post.

On the shoulders of Ants...

I have always been fascinated by ants since my childhood in Canberra spent poking about at giant anthills, cruelly pouring water in one hole just to see the ants evacuating from another. Even small children are impressed at the level of coordinated effort of ants en masse, and the immense strength of the individual ant, which makes one think that they are truly a super-evolved species. A popular primary school classroom project in Australia was to allow an ant colony to develop in a sand-filled fish tank so the kids could witness the intricate tunnels and caves at close quarters. And my brother must have had ants in his pants too, as his degree show in interactive design was based on close-up video footage of an ant colony which he had started himself - I've asked him to resurrect this site so I can share. He subsequently donated the ant colony to the zoo, and I think he was quite upset to part with it!

Science Blogs is a great source of weird and wonderful nuggets of discovery and it had a great feature on myrmecology (the study of ants) last weekend "Down the Ant Hole" which describes how a social biologist called Walter Tschinkel poured molten metal into subterranean ant-holes, incinerating the poor ants, in order to make metal casts of their interior...

Intergalactic Cognitive Science

There is a call for papers out from the newly founded Intergalactic Journal of Science.  The special issue will address "New Perspectives in Intergalactic Cognitive Science".

Cognitive Science is expanding at an exponential rate. However, the field is in need of unification. A unification of the how and why of the great diversity of cognitive architectures. A unification of the experiental contents now believed to be so diverse. A unification of scientific method, now varying per stellar community.

 And you thought the Topics module was pushing the envelope?

The Shaman in the cave: a sham?

Cave art: a stage for Shamanic performances?

Hamatsa Cannibal Shaman (Edward S. Curtis, 1914)

The 'Ice Age Art' exhibition at the British Museum (February - May 2013) brought together over 250 objects created between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, "from the age of the painted caves" (Cook, 2013).

The exhibition's Catalogue presents a selection of cave paintings alongside the portable artworks to enrich the viewer's appreciation of the context within which the small pieces were made.

 Archaeologists versus Evolutionary Psychologists 

 

The purpose of the cave paintings is an enigma that has yet to be resolved. The commonly held view among archaeologists is that these paintings were a 'stage set',  a backdrop to shamanic performances (Lewis-Williams, 2002). The (more conservative) evolutionary psychologists view 'shamanic' behaviour as 'aberrant' "exceptions to the normal rule of early religion" - from Amazon's description of 'Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief'  (David S. Whitley, 2009. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books), here.