Dartblog
Special Feature: In Pursuit of a New President
The College is on the hunt for its seventeenth president after James Wright announced his June 2009 resignation. A search committee has been formed; its antecedental task is the resolution of this question: is this a time for steady-as-she-goes, or is there a mandate for fresh leadership? Updates here.
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R.I.P. H.M.
I would be remiss as a Psychological and Brain Sciences major if I failed to post even this little something about the death of perhaps the most famous patient in the field: H.M.
H.M. is the starting point in any introduction of cognitive psychology, a patient who suffered serious head trauma and as a result developed anterograde amnesia. H.M. could remember facts and experiences from his child but he had an inability to lay down new memories of people, places, etc. He could, subconscious thought it might have been, learn how to do things like playing the piano—implicit memories.
This case made clear the distinction between explicit and implicit memory, facts versus procedural knowledge and demonstrated the critical role of the hippocampus in laying down new memory traces. A fascinating and critical case study.
Featured posts
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May 31, 2009
Kangaroo Court, Indeed
In an interview with The Dartmouth, alumni-elected trustee T.J. Rodgers ‘70 explained his reasons for declining to participate in future evaluations of trustees up for “re-election,” namely the “kangaroo court” nature of such discussion in… -
March 23, 2009
Post Prop 8 Optimism
An interesting piece in the Washington Post today about the future direction of gay marriage in California vis-a-vis Prop 8. Dartblog has offered contrasting perspectives on the subject, see here and here, but agreed that… -
March 20, 2009
Faculty Politics in the Classroom
An article from Inside Higher Ed looks at a new study by Neil Gross, a researcher at the University of British Columbia on faculty politics, available here. This study and article raise a number of… -
March 5, 2009
Professors, Politics, and Purpose
An interesting article in Inside HigherEd reporting on survey data that shed interesting light on what university professors believe and how they conceptualize their role. Among some of the more interesting findings, there have been… -
March 2, 2009
A Template for College Governance
With the announcement of Dr. Jim Kim this afternoon, I thought that I would present a template for College governance. The humble points that follow are value-neutral; they do not mandate any specific course of… -
November 17, 2008
Reconsidering Prop 8
Dartblog has been covering and opining on the gay marriage debate, particular in reference to “Prop 8” California’s recent constitutional amendment to ban the practice. Some past thoughts here. I have been mulling the issue…