Have we passed the peak of pop neuroscience?

I’ll even name the year when the public turned its back on neuro-hype: The woo commenced its quick decline in 2008. That was its inflection point, its production peak, the moment when pictures of the brain were tapped for all the easy headlines, strip-mined for credulous investors, and otherwise sucked dry of whatever dopey data they could provide. Five years ago the pop-neuroscience project began to wither.

(via Slate)

First issue of the Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics

Jami Anderson (Department of Philosophy UM-Flint, Co-director of Center for Cognition and Neuroethics) writes:

We are please to announce the publication of the first issue of The Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics (JCN), at http://www.cognethic.org/jcn.html. Please give consideration to sending your work and/or passing this information on to anyone who may be interested. 

JCN is a new twice-yearly, peer-reviewed, open access journal published online (ISSN 2166-5087), aimed at the promotion of scholarship across disciplines, as well as expanding the reach and understanding of the neurosciences and implications in the legal, social and ethical realms. It is our policy to never charge readers to access the journal or authors to publish scholarship in it. 

JCN is committed to presenting wide ranging discussions. We publish works that explore ideas, concepts, theories and their implications across multiple disciplines and professions, including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, education, social work, law, the neuro-, bio-, medical and pharmaceutical sciences. We are interested in works that offer critical analyses of relevant issues as well as those that explore the political, social, moral and legal implications of recent work in these fields.

Two new books of interest

Cognitive Biology: Evolutionary and Developmental Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and Behavior, edited by Luca Tommasi, Mary A. Peterson, and Lynn Nadel (MIT Press, 342 pp, $50). Research on such topics as the role of social selection in the evolution of hippocampal specialization.

Cognition and Perception: How Do Psychology and Neural Science Inform Philosophy?, by Athanassios Raftopoulos (MIT Press, 419 pp, $45). Argues that there is an aspect of visual process that creates representational states with non-conceptual content; considers this notion's implications for problem in epistemology and the philosophies of mind and science.