Cajal's Brief Experimentation with Hypnotic Suggestion

Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the most notable figures in Neuroscience, and winner, along with Camillo Golgi, of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries on the structure of the nervous system, did not escape experimenting with some of the psychiatric techniques available at the time, mainly hypnotic suggestion, albeit briefly. While a physician in his thirties, Cajal published a short article under the title, “Pains of labour considerably attenuated by hypnotic suggestion” in Gaceta Médica Catalana. That study may be Cajal's only documented case in the field of experimental psychology. We here provide an English translation of the original Spanish text, placing it historically within Cajal's involvement with some of the key scientific and philosophical issues at the time.     

An empirical test of the relative frequency of bipolar reduction in Beds VI,V, and III at Mumba Rockshelter,Tanzania: implications for the East African Middle to Late Stone Age transition

Mumba Rockshelter, Tanzania, is the only East African site spanning a continuous record of more than 100,000 years, including the Middle Stone Age (MSA) to Late Stone Age (LSA) Transition. Rather than examine the presence or absence of traditional markers of “behavioral modernity”, we have endeavored here to respond to the calls of Shea (2011) and Basell (2008) by examining the proportional similarity of a trait present throughout the MSA–LSA sequence at Mumba Rockshelter: the bipolar technique of lithic reduction. We use a quantified, experimentally derived proxy to track the relative amount of bipolar percussion among Mumba's Beds VI, V, and III, namely, waste shatter. Our examination of Mehlman's previously unanalyzed collections from Mumba demonstrates that in terms of bipolar production Bed V is statistically indistinguishable from the Late Stone Age (LSA) Bed III, but significantly different from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) Bed VI. Given that Bed V dates to 56.9 ± 4.8 − 49.1 ± 4.3 ka cal BP, this result is consistent with other evidence that the origins of the LSA in East Africa began well before 40 kya, and that Mumba Bed V represents one of the earliest manifestations of the LSA in East Africa. We conclude with a discussion of factors that may have influenced the increased dependence of bipolar production at the site.     

Dating the Trollesgave site and the Bromme culture – chronological fix-points for the Lateglacial settlement of Southern Scandinavia

The Bromme culture belongs to the Lateglacial, the period when people settled in the recently deglaciated Southern Scandinavia. Until now there have been only a few imprecise fix-points relating to the chronological position of this archaeological culture. This situation can now be improved with the aid of research results from a Bromme culture settlement at Trollesgave in SE Denmark. Using pollen and plant macrofossil data, Lateglacial lacustrine deposits containing waste material from the settlement can be assigned to the end of the climatically mild Allerød period. A series of ¹⁴C dates establishes the age of the settlement as c. 10 826 ± 49 ¹⁴C years BP (12 871–12 590 cal yr BP). By correlation with climate data from the Greenland ice cores, the occupation can be assigned to the early part of the cold climatic zone GS-1, thus demonstrating that the global ice-core climate zones are not absolutely synchronous with the regional division into biozones.     

A cautionary note on the use of captive carnivores to model wild predator behavior: a comparison of bone modification patterns on long bones by captive and wild lions

A study with wild lions in Tarangire National Park (Tanzania) and with captive lions in Cabárceno Reserve (Spain) has yielded two different bone modification patterns, probably as a result of the differences in environmental contexts. Captive lions have modified bones more intensively, both in the form of total number of tooth-marked bones and number of tooth marks per tooth-marked bone, probably because of stereotypic behaviors. This emphasizes the importance of environmental contexts to understand carnivore behavior and their resulting bone modification patterns. It also shows that analogical models based on experiments carried out with captive carnivores may be biased and inadequate as proxies for wild carnivore bone modification behaviors.     

Toward Self-Sufficiency: Evaluating a Transitional Housing Program for Homeless Families

Homeless families face the economic and personal challenges of sparse employment opportunities and child care and nutrition needs, compounded by the loss of adequate housing. The Family Development Center (FDC) is a transitional housing program in Atlanta, Georgia, designed to provide young homeless mothers an opportunity to emerge from what may well be desperate circumstances and begin the journey to economic self-sufficiency. This paper describes the research on programs for homeless families and presents the results of a comprehensive look at the operation and effectiveness of the FDC program during its first 5 years of existence. The work shows that while many families were able to effect notable positive changes in their lives during and after taking part in the housing program, for some the recovery from homelessness was extremely difficult. For even the most successful formerly homeless families—those that secured employment, housing, and other social supports—the escape from welfare dependence and poverty proved very difficult. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for relevant public policy.     

Theory of Comparative Advantage: Do Transportation Costs Matter?

In this paper we present a formal analysis that incorporates returns to transportation into a Ricardian framework to predict trade patterns. The important point gained from this analysis is that increasing returns to transportation, coupled with appropriate distances between trading partners, can be shown to reverse Ricardian predictions even when there are no international differences in tastes, technology, or factor endowments. Additional gains from trade may emerge from reductions in aggregate delivery costs owing to scale economies.     

Der quantitative Beitrag der nach 1933 emigrierten Naturwissenschaftler zur deutschsprachigen physikalischen Forschung

By scientiometrically analyzing the physics-literature produced between 1925 and 1933 it is shown that the purely quantitative contribution of physicists subsequently emigrating from Germany to the literature produced by the physics community in this country was much lower than hitherto estimated. The actual figure is not in the range of 30%, as is generally assumed, but much nearer to 11%. Control analysis of three leading German physics journals and of memberships in the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft confirms this result. Further investigation of university calendars shows that transferring these results to purely academic physics would amount to committing a “universalistic fallacy”. In academic physics emigré-physicists held a total of 15,5% of all teaching postitions. Differentiating the physics literature into various specialties allows further insights into the cognitive and social structure of the German physics community before 1933. Works of emigré-physicists are not randomly distributed over specialities; instead, the distribution reveals a nearly perfect correlation with what could be called “the specialty's paradigmatic age”. The spectrum begins with quantum theory, where future emigrants produced more than 25% of the literature, and fades away with acoustics, where their contribution amounts to less than 4%. The commonly accepted explanation of this phenomenon, which is based on the assumption that time of institutionalization of a specialty, “prestige” of that specialty, and entrance barriers for Jewish scientists are correlated, is falsified by two cases of non- or zero-correlation: by the very old specialties and by the technical disciplines. A new explanans is proposed which is based on the hypothesis of cognitive and social marginality being correlated and on a certain amount of cognitive marginality enhancing the disposition to innovative behavior and creativity.     

Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21st Century Socialism

This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21^st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21^st century socialism”—a utopian state ideology promising the collective appropriation of natural resources without the dispossession of the peasantry. Drawing on extensive field research, we argue that they are better understood as a simulation of urban modernity that is symptomatic of the predominance of ground rent in South American capitalism, and which conceals the violent repression of an autonomous indigenous project of petroleum‐based modernization. The original accumulation of 21^st century socialism can therefore be interpreted as a “fantasy of origins”, which functions to reproduce the primitive accumulation of capital.     

Unraveling a Neanderthal palimpsest from a zooarcheological and taphonomic perspective

Practically all archeological assemblages are palimpsests. In spite of the high temporal resolution of Abric Romaní site, level O, dated to around 55 ka, is not an exception. This paper focuses on a zooarcheological and taphonomic analysis of this level, paying special attention to spatial and temporal approaches. The main goal is to unravel the palimpsest at the finest possible level by using different methods and techniques, such as archeostratigraphy, anatomical and taxonomical identification, taphonomic analysis, faunal refits and tooth wear analysis. The results obtained are compared to ethnoarcheological data so as to interpret site structure. In addition, activities carried out over different time spans (from individual episodes to long-term behaviors) are detected, and their spatial extent is explored, allowing to do inferences on settlement dynamics. This leads us to discuss the temporal and spatial scales over which Neanderthals carried out different activities within the site, and how they can be studied through the archeological record.     

Urbanization in Iron Age Europe: Trajectories,Patterns, and Social Dynamics

The development of the first urban centers is one of the most fundamental phenomena in the history of temperate Europe. New research demonstrates that the earliest cities developed north of the Alps between the sixth and fifth centuries BC as a consequence of processes of demographic growth, hierarchization, and centralization that have their roots in the immediately preceding period. However, this was an ephemeral urban phenomenon, which was followed by a period of crisis characterized by the abandonment of major centers and the return to more decentralized settlement patterns. A new trend toward urbanization occurred in the third and second centuries BC with the appearance of supra-local sanctuaries, open agglomerations, and finally the fortified oppida. Late Iron Age settlement patterns and urban trajectories were much more complex than traditionally thought and included manifold interrelations between open and fortified sites. Political and religious aspects played a key role in the development of central places, and in many cases the oppida were established on locations that already had a sacred character as places for rituals and assemblies. The Roman conquest largely brought to an end Iron Age urbanization processes, but with heterogeneous results of both abandonment and disruption and also continuity and integration.