The theme of this paper is that people in Northeast Brazil refuse to let a good person who helped them during his (or her) lifetime die. They do this through several of the religious traditions practiced in the region. Beings, human and other, now in another plane of reality established in modern thinking, cross the conceptual divide and return through mediums or other intermediaries to heal the living. We examine two religious traditions, “folk” or “popular” Catholicism and Kardecist‐Spiritism, focusing on (...) the spirit of Argeu Hebster, a medical doctor who lived in the municipality of Marangaupe in the state of Ceará until his death in 1977. The return of the doctor is told in stories told to the authors while doing ethnography that provide the data used in analyzing the enchanted worlds of the two religions. (shrink)

Victor Turner's view of pilgrimage is reexamined and questioned using data collected at the shrine to Saint Francis of Assisi in Canindi, a small town in northeast Brazil. Turner's view of pilgrimage as a liminal state in which the pilgrim is out of structure is summarized in terms of his major theoretical assumptions and objectives. The shrine in Canindé and the pilgrimage there are described. Pilgrimage is examined in terms of the symbolic assumptions of Brazilian "Popular" Catholicism and culture. The (...) author shows it to be a product of a relationship between the pilgrim and the saint in which the pilgrimage is made in fulfillment of a promise made. The pilgrim to Canindi, and other shrines in Brazil, is shown to be fulfilling the obligations of a patron‐client type of exchange with the saint and consequently not out of structure. The author concludes that the patron‐client exchange imagery is better suited to the analysis of pilgrimage in Brazil and Latin America than Turner's view of liminality. (shrink)

Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality: Religion in. Pluralistic World by Felicitas D. Goodman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana.University Press, 1988. Pp. 193. ISBN 0‐253‐31899‐8.

This article examines whether a group of Brazilian Kardecist-Spiritists are using the symbols of medicine and science to gain respectability and to better promote their beliefs and ritual activities or whether they are using the view of the world proposed by their founder to forge a new paradigm to replace science, as we know it. Their therapeutic practices, which range from the performance of surgeries without anesthesia and antisepsis to "teleporting" the astral bodies of patients to the spirit world where (...) they are treated for illnesses acquired during previous lifetimes are described and analyzed in terms of their worldview which postulates reincarnation. Data indicating positive results from a sample of patients treated for illnesses they claim to be caused by experiences in previous lives are presented. (shrink)

Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen. eds. The Religious Imagination in New Guinea. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1989. ISBN 0‐8135‐ 1458‐4. Hardcover $48.00. Paperback $16.00. Pp. 262.

The modern presidency emerged not from an effort to escape constitutional propriety, as Tulis argues, but, rather, to emancipate presidents from the localized political parties of the nineteenth century, which had come to be viewed as sites of provincial and corrupt forms of popular rule. As the troubled tenure of George W. Bush suggests, contemporary presidents are torn between the public expectation that they stand apart from party politics and act as the chief executive of the administrative state; and their (...) role as party leaders, which links them to political allies in Congress and loyalists in the electorate. In its contribution to the development of a “new” national programmatic party system, the Bush administration reveals the potential for a novel, disturbing meld of party and administration, in which presidents seek to exploit the powers of the modern executive office for partisan gain. (shrink)

Although it has been shown that immersive virtual reality can be used to induce illusions of ownership over a virtual body , information on whether this changes implicit interpersonal attitudes is meager. Here we demonstrate that embodiment of light-skinned participants in a dark-skinned VB significantly reduced implicit racial bias against dark-skinned people, in contrast to embodiment in light-skinned, purple-skinned or with no VB. 60 females participated in this between-groups experiment, with a VB substituting their own, with full-body visuomotor synchrony, reflected (...) also in a virtual mirror. A racial Implicit Association Test was administered at least three days prior to the experiment, and immediately after the IVR exposure. The change from pre- to post-experience IAT scores suggests that the dark-skinned embodied condition decreased implicit racial bias more than the other conditions. Thus, embodiment may change negative interpersonal attitudes and thus represent a powerful tool for exploring such fundamental psychological and societal phenomena. (shrink)

While there are many issues to be raised in using lethal autonomous robotic weapons (beyond those of remotely operated drones), we argue that the most important question is: should the decision to take a human life be relinquished to a machine? This question is often overlooked in favor of technical questions of sensor capability, operational questions of chain of command, or legal questions of sovereign borders. We further argue that the answer must be ?no? and offer several reasons for banning (...) autonomous robots. (1) Such a robot treats a human as an object, instead of as a person with inherent dignity. (2) A machine can only mimic moral actions, it cannot be moral. (3) A machine run by a program has no human emotions, no feelings about the seriousness of killing a human. (4) Using such a robot would be a violation of military honor. We therefore conclude that the use of an autonomous robot in lethal operations should be banned. (shrink)

In this introduction to the fourth part of an ongoing symposium on quietism, Perl, the editor of the sponsoring journal Common Knowledge, remarks on a new question raised in this latest grouping of articles. Can there be such a thing as a “mezza voce quietism”? Can there be activist quietists or quietist activists or active teachers of quietism without self-contradiction? Perl takes Gandhi and “passive resistance” as his own test case, concluding that Gandhi was a teacher of quietism and that (...) satyagraha was a type of moral education directed at those (first the South Africans, then, more momentously, the British in India) whose spirits were imperiled by their self-confident certainty and whose manners were spoiled by their indelicacy and intrusiveness. (shrink)

Recurrent, unvarying, and seemingly purposeless patterns of action and cognition are part of normal development, but also feature prominently in several neuropsychiatric conditions. Repetitive stereotyped behaviors can be viewed as exaggerated forms of learned habits and frequently correlate with alterations in motor, limbic, and associative basal ganglia circuits. However, it is still unclear how altered basal ganglia feedback signals actually relate to the phenomenological variability of RSBs. Why do behaviorally overlapping phenomena sometimes require different treatment approaches−for example, sensory shielding strategies (...) versus exposure therapy for autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder, respectively? Certain clues may be found in recent models of basal ganglia function that extend well beyond action selection and motivational control, and have implications for sensorimotor integration, prediction, learning under uncertainty, as well as aesthetic learning. In this paper, we systematically compare three exemplary conditions with basal ganglia involvement, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and autism spectrum conditions, to gain a new understanding of RSBs. We integrate clinical observations and neuroanatomical and neurophysiological alterations with accounts employing the predictive processing framework. Based on this review, we suggest that basal ganglia feedback plays a central role in preconditioning cortical networks to anticipate self-generated, movement-related perception. In this way, basal ganglia feedback appears ideally situated to adjust the salience of sensory signals through precision weighting of new sensory information, relative to the precision of predictions based on prior generated models. Accordingly, behavioral policies may preferentially rely on new data versus existing knowledge, in a spectrum spanning between novelty and stability. RSBs may then represent compensatory or reactive responses, respectively, at the opposite ends of this spectrum. This view places an important role of aesthetic learning on basal ganglia feedback, may account for observed changes in creativity and aesthetic experience in basal ganglia disorders, is empirically testable, and may inform creative art therapies in conditions characterized by stereotyped behaviors. (shrink)

A complex brain network, centered on the hippocampus, supports episodic memories throughout their lifetimes. Classically, upon memory encoding during active behavior, hippocampal activity is dominated by theta oscillations (6-10Hz). During inactivity, hippocampal neurons burst synchronously, constituting sharp waves, which can propagate to other structures, theoretically supporting memory consolidation. This 'two-stage' model has been updated by new data from high-density electrophysiological recordings in animals that shed light on how information is encoded and exchanged between hippocampus, neocortex and subcortical structures such as (...) the striatum. Cell assemblies (tightly related groups of cells) discharge together and synchronize across brain structures orchestrated by theta, sharp waves and slow oscillations, to encode information. This evolving dynamical schema is key to extending our understanding of memory processes. (shrink)

The neural representation of a repeated stimulus is the standard against which a deviant stimulus is measured in the brain, giving rise to the well-known mismatch response. It has been suggested that individuals with dyslexia have poor implicit memory for recently repeated stimuli, such as the train of standards in an oddball paradigm. Here, we examined how the neural representation of a standard emerges over repetitions, asking whether there is less sensitivity to repetition and/or less accrual of “standardness” over successive (...) repetitions in dyslexia. We recorded magnetoencephalography as adults with and without dyslexia were passively exposed to speech syllables in a roving-oddball design. We performed time-resolved multivariate decoding of the MEG sensor data to identify the neural signature of standard vs. deviant trials, independent of stimulus differences. This “multivariate mismatch” was equally robust and had a similar time course in the two groups. In both groups, standards generated by as few as two repetitions were distinct from deviants, indicating normal sensitivity to repetition in dyslexia. However, only in the control group did standards become increasingly different from deviants with repetition. These results suggest that many of the mechanisms that give rise to neural adaptation as well as mismatch responses are intact in dyslexia, with the possible exception of a putatively predictive mechanism that successively integrates recent sensory information into feedforward processing. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists. All rights reserved.Cell walls of grasses, including cereal crops and biofuel grasses, comprise the majority of plant biomass and intimately influence plant growth, development and physiology. However, the functions of many cell wall synthesis genes, and the relationships among and the functions of cell wall components remain obscure. To better understand the patterns of cell wall accumulation and identify genes that act in grass (...) cell wall biosynthesis, we characterized 30 samples from aerial organs of rice at 10 developmental time points, 3-100 d post-germination. Within these samples, we measured 15 cell wall chemical components, enzymatic digestibility and 18 cell wall polysaccharide epitopes/ligands. We also used quantitative reverse transcription-PCR to measure expression of 50 glycosyltransferases, 15 acyltransferases and eight phenylpropanoid genes, many of which had previously been identified as being highly expressed in rice. Most cell wall components vary significantly during development, and correlations among them support current understanding of cell walls. We identified 92 significant correlations between cell wall components and gene expression and establish nine strong hypotheses for genes that synthesize xylans, mixed linkage glucan and pectin components. This work provides an extensive analysis of cell wall composition throughout rice development, identifies genes likely to synthesize grass cell walls, and provides a framework for development of genetically improved grasses for use in lignocellulosic biofuel production and agriculture. (shrink)

Using the quasi-experimental setting of the Michael Vick dogfighting case, the researchers employed rich interview content to explore the question, “When a critical event occurs in the animal advocacy field, what motivates advocacy groups to respond?” The investigation reveals that what was thought to be one critical event was in actuality three unique yet interrelated critical events— the revelation of the transgressions; the punishment of the perpetrator; and the decision about whether to ally with the perpetrator in advocacy. The study (...) shows that legitimacy concerns, occasionally paired with reflections on organizational identity, influenced the decision-making of advocacy organizations across all three critical events, as each held the potential either to legitimize or to delegitimize the advocacy organizations and/or the perpetrator. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Philosophy in Medicine: Conceptual and Ethical Problems in Medicine and Psychiatry. By Charles M. Culver and Bernard Gert. Psychiatric Ethics. Edited by Sidney Block and Paul Chodoff. Man, Mind, and Morality: The Ethics of Behavior Control. By Ruth Macklin.

The nature and aim of science, by E. Nagel.--Truth and provability, by L. Henkin.--Completeness, by L. Henkin.--Computability, by S. C. Kleene.--Necessary truth, by W. V. Quine.--What is a scientific theory? By P. Suppes.--Science and simplicity, by N. Goodman.--Scientific explanation, by C. G. Hempel.--Observation and interpretation, by N. R. Hanson.--Probability and confirmation, by H. Putnam.--Utility and acceptance of hypotheses, by I. Levi.--Space and time, by A. Grünbaum.--Problems of microphysics, by P. Feyerabend.--Aspects of explanation in biological theory, by M. Beckner.--Psychologism and methodological (...) individualism, by S. Morgenbesser.--Science, fact, and value, by M. Scriven.--The justification of induction, by M. Black. (shrink)