What are we referring to when we use the word “culture” ?
What does it mean to call a society “modern” ?
What is the difference between a brain and a mind?
What effect does modern culture have on the formation of identity?
What are the potential cultural causes for mental illness?
In this blog, I hope to explore these and other related questions, taking sociologist Liah Greenfeld’s work as a starting point for our investigation. In a day when science has been given precedence over other disciplines, we hope to establish the empirical reality of culture and affirm its status as a valid subject of study.
At the University of California, San Diego, Neuroscientists begin work on the brain of HenryMolaison, world’s most famous amnesic. The Brain Observatory’s website has streaming video of the project’s first phase- a 30 hour procedure of sectioning the brain into thousands of hair-thin slices.
In this essay published in Southern Rural Sociology, Phyllis Puffer argues that most introductory sociology textbooks incorrectly define Durkheim’s concept of anomie and anomic suicide.
There should be no doubt that mental illness represents one of the greatest burdens on the American health care system. A recent report published by HCUP (Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project) tells us that 12.5% of ER visits in 2007 (12 million out of 95 million) were related to mental illness or substance abuse. While [...]
In an op-ed piece published last week in the New York Times, Steven Pinker weighs in on the question of whether technology is dumbing down society. Pinker likens this concern to instances of “moral panic” over new forms of media throughout history, and believes that “far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only [...]
The day after Dr. Rand Paul, son of congressman Ron Paul and darling of the Tea Party movement, won the republican nomination for senate in Kentucky, he got himself into some trouble on the Rachel Maddow show discussing the piece of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which banned discrimination by private businesses.
part 2 of the [...]
Exploring modern culture and its effects on the mind