Templeton Positive Neuroscience Awards

Apparently, I’m an “honorary distinguished senior advisor” to this project, where I assume that “honorary” means “unpaid”, “distinguished” is a typo, “dis” for “ex”, and “senior” means “old”.  The complete information on the award recipient projects may be of interest to some readers of the blog. Congratulations to Laurie Santos especially for her grant on the origins of altruism!

Positive Neuroscience / Psychology

Award-winning researchers to explore human flourishing
from neural networks to social networks

The Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the John Templeton Foundation (www.templeton.org) have announced the recipients of the Templeton Positive Neuroscience Awards. The project will grant $2.9 million in award funding to 15 new research projects at the intersection of Neuroscience and Positive Psychology.

The winning projects will help us understand how the brain enables human flourishing. They explore a range of topics, from the biological bases of altruism to the effects of positive interventions on the brain.

The Positive Neuroscience Project (www.posneuroscience.org) was established in 2008 by Professor Martin E.P. Seligman, Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center, with a $5.8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In 2009, the project announced the Templeton Positive Neuroscience Awards competition to bring the tools of neuroscience to bear on advances in Positive Psychology. Seligman founded the quickly-growing field of Positive Psychology in 1998 based on the simple yet radical notion that what is good in life is as worthy of scientific study as what is disabling in life.  Read the full press release from the PNP website.

Positively Autistic

Autism Awareness icon

CBC News has just run a special, Postively Autistic, that many will find of interest–the link to the site is beneath the fold below as well as a transcript. The video runs 19 minutes, and features Amanda Baggs, Ari Ne’eman, and Michelle Dawson, amongst others. The site for the special also contains a lot of other information. General drift: representation of autism as a positive human variation that stands in need of social acceptance, and links this view to the disability rights movement and the idea of neurodiversity. It’s a bit more choppy than I would have liked, and has very articulate autistics (like Baggs and Ne’eman) speaking for auties as a whole. Maybe this is a good way to start with introducing the idea of autism as a form of natural human variation, but we might push further and represent more of this variation, some of which folks will find more disturbing. (Here having Dawson in here is a bonus, since while she’s incredibly articulate, she also conveys a few more clues about the kind of variation one might find on the spectrum. Sadly, there’s not an extra piece on her, only on Laurent Mottron, whom she works with in Montreal, on the CBC website. I suspect that was a personal choice of Dawson’s.)

To be sure, this is not a way of saying

CFP: Special Issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on Autism

Submission deadline: Jan. 1 2009
Projected publication date: Summer 2010

Co-editors: Emily Thornton Savarese, University of Iowa, and Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College

We are looking for completed articles, from a disability studies perspective, on what the medical community refers to as ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). We are especially interested in pieces that engage the so-called “low-functioning” end of the spectrum, where increasingly those presumed retarded and lacking social awareness are writing back to the empire of science. As the field of disability studies has theorized cognitive difference, it has had to refine its cherished social-constructionist approach, making sure to account for physiological distinctiveness in the organ of sensibility, a distinctiveness that has been interpreted in a myriad of ways, most quite prejudicial. We are interested in the burgeoning neurodiversity movement, which has self-consciously resisted such prejudicial interpretations, often revealing the “science” of autism to be anything but reliable and objective. How to talk about autistic difference? How to represent it? How to convey its gifts and challenges? Who can talk about it? What role should parents play in this representational arena? What role should teachers, doctors, researchers, therapists, media entities, and academics play? What kind of interdisciplinary approaches are needed to understand, respect, and even cherish autism?

The New Autism Rights Movement

Over the last decade, New York Magazine has run some excellent articles on mental health, Big Pharma, and now disability. They recently published this piece on The New Autism Rights Movement and you can get an overview of the article at the The Huffington Post. For those interested in the topic, I also recommend Richard Grinker’s new book Unstrange Minds, which examines the dual life of autism as a disease and cultural phenomena (among many other topics).

update: a comment below alerted me to this blog entry by Stanley Fish on the question of normalcy and difference, sparked, in part, by the debate over autism.