Anthro of the Body | Appunti sparsi di Antropologia del Corpo

Tissue engineers have succeeded in making artificial organs that use a patient’s cells to become a living part of the body. Some hope to eventually prod the body to regenerate organs itself.

Exactly what is depression? Do we under- or over-diagnose it? Do treatments on offer really work?

Depression is an experience known to millions. But arguments rage on aspects of its definition and its impact on societies present and past: do drugs work, or are they merely placebos? Is the depression we have today merely a construct of the pharmaceutical industry? Is depression under- or over-diagnosed? Should we be paying for expensive 'talking cure' treatments like psychoanalysis or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

Here, Clark Lawlor argues that understanding the history of depression is important to understanding its present conflicted status and definition. While it is true that our modern understanding of the word 'depression' was formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the condition was originally known as melancholia, and characterised by core symptoms of chronic causeless sadness and fear. Beginning in the Classical period, and moving on to the present, Lawlor shows both continuities and discontinuities in the understanding of what we now call depression, and in the way it has been represented in literature and art. Different cultures defined and constructed melancholy and depression in ways sometimes so different as to be almost unrecognisable.

Even the present is still a dynamic history, in the sense that the 'new' form of depression, defined in the 1980s and treated by drugs like Prozac, is under attack by many theories that reject the biomedical model and demand a more humanistic idea of depression - one that perhaps returns us to a form of melancholy.

Da alcuni anni i teorici del postumanesimo predicano l’imminente avvento di una “singolarità”, un salto tecnologico che trasformerà la razza umana regalandoci, tra le altre cose, l’immortalità. Ma a quale prezzo?

"... Internet e i computer rappresentano solo delle protesi, degli strumenti di cui ci serviamo, una semplice evoluzione degli utensili in bronzo che impiegavano i nostri antenati. La vera singolarità emerge quando la tecnologia diventa capace di trasformare non lo strumento, ma il suo utilizzatore: l’uomo.

La civiltà postumana (o trans-umana) sarebbe allora capace di memorizzare enormi terabyte di dati in un hard disk virtuale all’interno del cervello, di connettersi alla Rete attraverso il battito delle ciglia (o magari sarebbe sempre connesso…), di usufruire di metodi per fare a meno del sonno per giorni interi, di impiegare tecniche genetiche per potenziare il proprio corpo.

L’ambito di ricerca più promettente che potrebbe realizzare questi obiettivi è quello della nanotecnologia. La crescente miniaturizzazione permetterà di innestare nel nostro organismo sistemi cibernetici quasi invisibili, che faranno di noi dei cyborg: non come quelli dipinti da certa ormai vecchia fantascienza, in cui protesti di metallo sostituiscono rozzamente parti organiche del nostro corpo.

Da fuori saremo identici a come siamo oggi, ma dentro saremo una perfetta fusione tra naturale e artificiale..."
continua su: http://scienze.fanpage.it/la-singolarita-e-davvero-cosi-vicina/#ixzz1xMwK4kbH
http://scienze.fanpage.it

"Of course it is natural to augment reality, we do it with our eyes and brains ever since perception got, in a poetic sense, highjacked by our imagination.

A plethora of new apps are here to help us keep track of everything. Sharing and benchmarking are becoming the casual reality applications of our lives, making the quantified-self, the game changer that the concept claims to be. Designing the life you love and architecting your reality seen as a design problem and not a psychological or philosophical quest is where the crux of our times lay silently.
The sweet spot of interaction between people and technology resides in a very special place, maybe the new aesthetic but probably a self-aware map of tools and humans, making reality a new kind of platform. Does it make the story of our life an extraordinary experience or will it make us instruments of our own demise?..."

Whenever I have had a spare moment for the past three months, I've been sneaking peaks at Charles Laughlin's new book Communing with the gods: Consciousness, culture and the dreaming brain. It’s a tome, over 500 pages long, and because of its girth I have approached the volume each time with some hesitancy… and a little fear. But each time I’ve dived in, I’ve come away with big ideas, and also some unusual clarity. This book is may be heavy, but it’s really approachable for an academic text...

ON ALTERTED STATES

‘Hallucinations’ by Oliver Sacks. 320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.

The neurologist peels back the poetry and terror of hallucinations.

‘Hallucinations’ by Oliver Sacks. 320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.

“Bliss can coincide with terror,” Oliver Sacks observes in one of his patient’s sleep-paralysis induced hallucinations. It’s an observation that seems to apply broadly to hallucinatory experience, which Sacks calls an essential part of the human condition. From the baroque visions of patients with Charles Bonnet Syndrome (they see handsome gentlemen, overly ornate floating rows of sheet music, battlements and bridges, or fanciful strangers in “Eastern dress”) to the kaleidoscopic patterns that visit migraine sufferers, no style or manner of hallucination is too fanciful or obscure for Sacks’ attention. Whether describing unwelcomed hallucinations (the “prisoners cinema” of sensory deprivation and the hallucinations of the bereaved) or deliberately-sought drug-induced altered states, Sacks writes, as usual, with a sharp mix of clinical precision, curiosity and compassion. His real talent lies in combining literary and historical medical accounts with his own experiences as a doctor and, at times, as a patient. There’s no better example of this than Sacks’s account of the amphetamine-fueled weekend he spent as a young man reading the 1873 volume On Megrim, Sick-Headache, and Some Allied Disorders: A Contribution to the Pathology of Nerve Storms in a state of “catatonic concentration” in a New York medical library. “At the height of this ecstasy, I saw migraine shining like an archipelago of stars in the neurological heavens,” Sacks writes. The experience convinced him to write his own book—and to never take amphetamines again. It’s an understated lesson in the powers of hallucinations: to illuminate the mysterious circuitry of the human mind, one must be willing to get lost inside it first.

(Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/07/this-week-s-hot-reads-november-6-2012.html)

The future of the Middle East looks like a race between the mullahs and the iPad—and despite recent setbacks, social networks are rewiring our brains to topple traditional barriers, says Deepak Chopra, author of God: A Story of Revelation.

[...] societies of the Western past were apt to recognize depression as a kind of fellow traveler—unpleasant but familiar, at times even possessing its own stubborn points of value...

In Renaissance Italy, philosopher and depressive Marsilio Ficino theorized that melancholy signified a capacity for profound thought and feeling. He believed that there was a trace of melancholy in everyone, and identified it as a deep yearning for higher things, a “nostalgia for the celestial fatherland.”

The English Romantics continued the tradition. To them, melancholy was an aesthetic stance. Receptiveness to it signified sensitivity and insight, an association that will seem familiar to any contemporary fan of goth rock or classic Hollywood movies. What was sad was beautiful; what was beautiful possessed an ineffable rind of sadness. John Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy” speaks to a sublime fusion of the sad, the lovely, and the sacred:...