Last Monday (August 8, 2011), two stories from two sources converged. The topic? How food can shape the offspring. Or, the power of bodily memory...?
First, NPR reported on how the flavors a mother eats while pregnant can influence the child's reactions to foods later in life.
Baby's Palate And Food Memories Shaped Before Birth
by Gretchen Cuda-Kroen.
While not fool-proof, greater exposure in utero can increase acceptance of a greater variety of foods while growing up. The story reports some other interesting findings.
Then CBS's the Early Show had a segment by Marysol Castro about Marje Vongerichten's examination of her adopted past called "The Kimchi Chronicles." The point for us here is Vongerichten's account of having a 'flood of memories' return to her once she ate the food that her biological mother had cooked for her. Below is the video of the interview:
The website for "The Kimchi Chronicles" click here.
Two stories on the same day about the how food can shape someone converge.
So, yes, in a way, we are what we eat... and the body has memory...
No wonder I can crave grits, huh?
Monday, August 15, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Museum Boxes -- This is SO cool!
One of the benefits of working with teachers is that I get to learn, too.
Most recently, I learned about an interactive website called Museum Boxes.
This virtual box is basically a portable cabinet of curiosities which allows the creator to display representations of key objects and ideas. It is based on an actual portable box of representative items which an abolitionist speaker used in the course of his lecture tour.
Inside the box are "drawers" into which one can play virtual "cubes" which have sides on which these representations may be places. These representations could be images, video, weblinks, Word documents, or other items that are digitally attachable. The six sides of the cubes will be displayed as the visitor clicks on them. It is possible to have up to three layers of cubes in the box.
The display of the cubes is somewhat kinetic. It doesn't replace actually turning over the cube while gazing in wonder, but it's a start.
The box, like most museum exhibits, seems to be more focused on maker-centered display rather than visitor use, however.
It would be great if the cubes could be rearranged by the user/viewer into an order that makes sense to them. This would be a way to have the cubes be building blocks of an argument/synthesize of the information presented on the cubes. This also raises the question of whether multiple sides of a cube should be duplicated or if each cube should be assigned a major concept so that the user would have to make a forced choice when arranging the cubes for herself.
When I taught United States History I did something similar to the Museum Boxes but with brown paper bags and note cards. Students had to select cards, put them into the bags (grouping), and then take out the cards to synthesize further when writing an essay. They liked the process of physically sorting, and there was audience participation. For another activity, I used a brown paper bag into which I have placed representative items, had students withdraw the items, and puzzle over the significance of each and connection between all.
Museum Boxes is intriguing in that is digital -- this makes for new and additional media possibilities, and for portability. I wish it had more kinesethetic functionality, but it's a great start!
Most recently, I learned about an interactive website called Museum Boxes.
This virtual box is basically a portable cabinet of curiosities which allows the creator to display representations of key objects and ideas. It is based on an actual portable box of representative items which an abolitionist speaker used in the course of his lecture tour.
Inside the box are "drawers" into which one can play virtual "cubes" which have sides on which these representations may be places. These representations could be images, video, weblinks, Word documents, or other items that are digitally attachable. The six sides of the cubes will be displayed as the visitor clicks on them. It is possible to have up to three layers of cubes in the box.
The display of the cubes is somewhat kinetic. It doesn't replace actually turning over the cube while gazing in wonder, but it's a start.
The box, like most museum exhibits, seems to be more focused on maker-centered display rather than visitor use, however.
It would be great if the cubes could be rearranged by the user/viewer into an order that makes sense to them. This would be a way to have the cubes be building blocks of an argument/synthesize of the information presented on the cubes. This also raises the question of whether multiple sides of a cube should be duplicated or if each cube should be assigned a major concept so that the user would have to make a forced choice when arranging the cubes for herself.
When I taught United States History I did something similar to the Museum Boxes but with brown paper bags and note cards. Students had to select cards, put them into the bags (grouping), and then take out the cards to synthesize further when writing an essay. They liked the process of physically sorting, and there was audience participation. For another activity, I used a brown paper bag into which I have placed representative items, had students withdraw the items, and puzzle over the significance of each and connection between all.
Museum Boxes is intriguing in that is digital -- this makes for new and additional media possibilities, and for portability. I wish it had more kinesethetic functionality, but it's a great start!
Monday, July 25, 2011
Antiques ARE Material Culture, Too!
Imagine my surprise...
I'm looking up the citation for Igor Kopytoff's germinal article on object biographies, and this pops up:
Antiques Roadshow --!
Apparently, someone at PBS, bless 'em, decided to provide a teacher's guide to material culture as well as a definition of material culture.
The Teacher's Guide has a block quote from Kopytoff, expressing the essence of Kopytoff.
My experience with Kopytoff comes from a 2008 course on Museum Anthropology I took with fabulous, fabulous anthropologist and human being David Odo. The concept of "object biography" -- telling the life story of the object in all its relationships -- was the cornerstone of our research work in that course.
In the past, when I taught anthropology to high schoolers [yep, you read that right -- one of the few in the country doing that and lovin' every minute of it], we watched "The Gods Must Be Crazy." In many ways with that film, we did a post-modern deconstruction of the messages implied in that film and then proceeded to learn about much-improved methods of portraying peoples and cultures.... but if one thinks about the thinks about the life of the Coke bottle, then one has got the essence of Kopytoff's object biography.
But I hadn't read of or heard of Kopytoff at that point (c. 1989-2000).
To think, all I would have had to do was go to Antiques Roadshow.... oh, wait, websites with teachers guides were rare then, too.
Anyway, awesome useful theory crops up in all sorts of places!
Here's the full cite:
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 64-91.
I'm looking up the citation for Igor Kopytoff's germinal article on object biographies, and this pops up:
Antiques Roadshow --!
Apparently, someone at PBS, bless 'em, decided to provide a teacher's guide to material culture as well as a definition of material culture.
The Teacher's Guide has a block quote from Kopytoff, expressing the essence of Kopytoff.
My experience with Kopytoff comes from a 2008 course on Museum Anthropology I took with fabulous, fabulous anthropologist and human being David Odo. The concept of "object biography" -- telling the life story of the object in all its relationships -- was the cornerstone of our research work in that course.
In the past, when I taught anthropology to high schoolers [yep, you read that right -- one of the few in the country doing that and lovin' every minute of it], we watched "The Gods Must Be Crazy." In many ways with that film, we did a post-modern deconstruction of the messages implied in that film and then proceeded to learn about much-improved methods of portraying peoples and cultures.... but if one thinks about the thinks about the life of the Coke bottle, then one has got the essence of Kopytoff's object biography.
But I hadn't read of or heard of Kopytoff at that point (c. 1989-2000).
To think, all I would have had to do was go to Antiques Roadshow.... oh, wait, websites with teachers guides were rare then, too.
Anyway, awesome useful theory crops up in all sorts of places!
Here's the full cite:
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 64-91.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Internet Changing Memory?
In an article posted yesterday (July 15, 2011) in Boston.com, the Boston Globe's Internet newspaper, reports from the recent issue of Science that the Internet is changing how people think and remember.
The headline says it all: "Memory slips caught in the Net: Web changing how people recall facts, study says." The author is Carolyn Y. Johnson.
To quote from one of the scientists interviewed for the Boston.com piece:
“Our memories are changing,’’ said Daniel Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard and the senior author of the study. “So we remember fewer facts and we remember more sources, which website you saw it on or whose e-mail to look in to find that. . . . It’s like having information at our fingertips makes us always go to our fingertips.’’
Well, the fingertips do have grey matter!
Ok, obvious puns about kinesthetic memory aside, the articles does make the point that people are using Internet searches a lot and that this experience is shaping 1) how they look for information and 2) how they store (or forget) information. It seems that people remember the information that is either unusual or is not "stored" somewhere on the computer. Also, they remember how they looked for and found this information.
Frankly, this isn't surprising. Studies have shown that people "off-load cognition" into objects as a way to decrease short-term memory load and as a way to improve memory. If the stone you picked up on the beach on vacation is a memory-marker, you don't have to think about your vacation all the time.... but each time you pick up that stone you probably will access those memories.
Also, given the way that neural networks are constructed, the more we perform an action, the more connections and speed that action will have in the neural network. Given the number of times in a day most of us perform Internet searches, it is no surprise to me that we don't remember what we've searched for and found especially after we've "bookmarked" that item, but we do recall the steps that got us to this information.
Just last weekend, I did the same thing in Reno, Nevada when I took a girlfriend to the bakery I had been to the day before: I drove, got lost, and corrected in exactly the same way as before -- only the second time I laughed at myself the entire time!
(By the way, it was Josef's Bakery and Cafe -- excellent breakfast.)
The other charming thing about the Sparrow, Liu and Wegner study is that it provides hope for our interaction with the Internet and learning.... having a memory aid is no bad thing. One of their points, however, is that while information may be saved to "the Cloud" and its social network, important information may need to be personally retained.
Like all tools, the use is what's important!
Study: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner,
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745,
Published Online 14 July 2011,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745
The headline says it all: "Memory slips caught in the Net: Web changing how people recall facts, study says." The author is Carolyn Y. Johnson.
To quote from one of the scientists interviewed for the Boston.com piece:
“Our memories are changing,’’ said Daniel Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard and the senior author of the study. “So we remember fewer facts and we remember more sources, which website you saw it on or whose e-mail to look in to find that. . . . It’s like having information at our fingertips makes us always go to our fingertips.’’
Well, the fingertips do have grey matter!
Ok, obvious puns about kinesthetic memory aside, the articles does make the point that people are using Internet searches a lot and that this experience is shaping 1) how they look for information and 2) how they store (or forget) information. It seems that people remember the information that is either unusual or is not "stored" somewhere on the computer. Also, they remember how they looked for and found this information.
Frankly, this isn't surprising. Studies have shown that people "off-load cognition" into objects as a way to decrease short-term memory load and as a way to improve memory. If the stone you picked up on the beach on vacation is a memory-marker, you don't have to think about your vacation all the time.... but each time you pick up that stone you probably will access those memories.
Also, given the way that neural networks are constructed, the more we perform an action, the more connections and speed that action will have in the neural network. Given the number of times in a day most of us perform Internet searches, it is no surprise to me that we don't remember what we've searched for and found especially after we've "bookmarked" that item, but we do recall the steps that got us to this information.
Just last weekend, I did the same thing in Reno, Nevada when I took a girlfriend to the bakery I had been to the day before: I drove, got lost, and corrected in exactly the same way as before -- only the second time I laughed at myself the entire time!
(By the way, it was Josef's Bakery and Cafe -- excellent breakfast.)
The other charming thing about the Sparrow, Liu and Wegner study is that it provides hope for our interaction with the Internet and learning.... having a memory aid is no bad thing. One of their points, however, is that while information may be saved to "the Cloud" and its social network, important information may need to be personally retained.
Like all tools, the use is what's important!
Study: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner,
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745,
Published Online 14 July 2011,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Strange Fate of Objects
Welcome back!
So, to inaugurate a new year of blogging (hint: my birthday and the "return of the light" always seems like a fresh start and a new year), this blog will resume with its posts on objects, learning with and about objects, the strange interactions of cognition (and the brain) with objects and movement, and how to incorporate material culture and kinesthetic learning into classrooms and museums...
What better way to do this than with an icon of pop culture??
To wit: Jackie Kennedy's dress from Dallas.
In a recent (January 28, 2011) Yahoo News, "Jackie Kennedy artifacts missing from JFK inauguration anniversary exhibit" Brett Michael Dykes reports on the archival fate of Jackie's pink suit and accessories from the November 22, 1963 Dallas motorcade....
Spoiler alert!
...NARA has it.
NARA is the National Archives and Records Administration. They're better known for archiving paper documents (actual, representational, or digital). But they have the complete outfit (minus the pillbox hat) in deep storage until 2103.
The outfit itself is an iconic object. Unlike many objects its specific history and significance are well-known. The path of its arrival is a mystery -- like many objects. Its storage and care are phenomenal -- unlike many objects.
But the outfit is incomplete -- like many objects: the pillbox hat is missing.
Like many things about Jackie O. -- and about working with objects -- there is some mystery remaining....
So, to inaugurate a new year of blogging (hint: my birthday and the "return of the light" always seems like a fresh start and a new year), this blog will resume with its posts on objects, learning with and about objects, the strange interactions of cognition (and the brain) with objects and movement, and how to incorporate material culture and kinesthetic learning into classrooms and museums...
What better way to do this than with an icon of pop culture??
To wit: Jackie Kennedy's dress from Dallas.
In a recent (January 28, 2011) Yahoo News, "Jackie Kennedy artifacts missing from JFK inauguration anniversary exhibit" Brett Michael Dykes reports on the archival fate of Jackie's pink suit and accessories from the November 22, 1963 Dallas motorcade....
Spoiler alert!
...NARA has it.
NARA is the National Archives and Records Administration. They're better known for archiving paper documents (actual, representational, or digital). But they have the complete outfit (minus the pillbox hat) in deep storage until 2103.
The outfit itself is an iconic object. Unlike many objects its specific history and significance are well-known. The path of its arrival is a mystery -- like many objects. Its storage and care are phenomenal -- unlike many objects.
But the outfit is incomplete -- like many objects: the pillbox hat is missing.
Like many things about Jackie O. -- and about working with objects -- there is some mystery remaining....
Monday, November 1, 2010
Seeing with the Tongue
Today I'm watching a "Wired Science" episode about sensory "reorganization" for the blind and other sensory-impaired folks. It's a repeat from it's original 12/19/2007 airing, but still fascinating....
The theories and research of Paul Baca-y-Rita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Tactile Communication & Neuromodulation Lab (TCNL) have become applications.
In particular, the application is the "Brain Port." It has 625 sensors to deliver from the tongue to the brain. The user puts the device in her/his mouth and "sees" with the tongue. As the announcer on the episode argues, all input to the brain is essentially the same set of impulses, so shifting the brain area that receives the impulses could lead to interpretation of the data by that alternate area. For example, "seeing" as the back feels the shape of an object projected through pressure points. Commercial versions of "Brain Port" have been underway.
Paul Bach-y-Rita said that the sense of touch has been neglected when designing computer and neurological interaction. (In a clip of an earlier (1976?) interview.)
Another group built a helmet with an accelerometer to aid in regaining balance sensation. This "sensory substitution" was extremely effective in retraining the subject user's body -- the "residual" effect grew with use over time.
More information can be found at PBS.org's Wired Science site on "Mixed Feelings."
A "crazy concept" about rewiring information in the brain, and the importance of other senses especially touch, proves to be true.
So, thoughts about the significance of movement to thinking have a future, too....
The theories and research of Paul Baca-y-Rita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Tactile Communication & Neuromodulation Lab (TCNL) have become applications.
In particular, the application is the "Brain Port." It has 625 sensors to deliver from the tongue to the brain. The user puts the device in her/his mouth and "sees" with the tongue. As the announcer on the episode argues, all input to the brain is essentially the same set of impulses, so shifting the brain area that receives the impulses could lead to interpretation of the data by that alternate area. For example, "seeing" as the back feels the shape of an object projected through pressure points. Commercial versions of "Brain Port" have been underway.
Paul Bach-y-Rita said that the sense of touch has been neglected when designing computer and neurological interaction. (In a clip of an earlier (1976?) interview.)
Another group built a helmet with an accelerometer to aid in regaining balance sensation. This "sensory substitution" was extremely effective in retraining the subject user's body -- the "residual" effect grew with use over time.
More information can be found at PBS.org's Wired Science site on "Mixed Feelings."
A "crazy concept" about rewiring information in the brain, and the importance of other senses especially touch, proves to be true.
So, thoughts about the significance of movement to thinking have a future, too....
Monday, December 21, 2009
Up and Running
Hey All--
Ok, I'm back.
This here is a test of the Blogger system...
to see what it can link to the Wiki...
By the way, Joyous Solistice!
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