This piece was created through a flash fiction workshop in Writing 125, Spring 2014. I have revised it based on feedback from my peers. It is also part of a larger piece that I am developing into a novel.

The human self is a cultural object. It never exists outside of culture or in the form of a phenomenon which is unshaped by culture. Anthropologists have variously taken up culture itself or the self-in-culture as their object of study, theorizing the manner in which the two phenomena articulate one another. I argue that the two objects, these two phenomena which we call culture and self, are incorrectly imagined as separate objects; they are in fact substantially one and the same phenomenon; culture exists only vaguely in forms other than human selves. This argument returns us to being as the centerpiece of being, and thus the argument has an innately existential feel. Secondly, I assert that we can see in the ritual lives of both !Kung and Charismatic Christians a "technology of the self," here used in a modified sense which diverges from Foucault's meaning, in which the self utilizes cultural material in an attempt to transform toward a greater mastery of itself. This would seem to indicate that the imagined "causal" deterministic relationship between culture and self - a relationship where culture is seen as the predominant shaping force between the two phenomena, and which has long stood at the center of anthropological assumptions - is incorrect in two senses. The first is that the two phenomena are hardly distinct; the second is that the self can be seen to utilize culture like a tool, acting as the author of culture in just the same way that it has been seen as its subject

When making life and death decisions about when to hospitalize an individual who may be at risk for suicide, a clinicians' choice often relies more on 'best guesses' than on solid, evidence based knowledge. While there is extensive evidence about long term risk factors that predict lifetime risk but not necessarily immediate danger to self, far less is known about sub-acute risk factors, predictors of serious suicidal behaviors within weeks to months. Even less is known about acute risk factors, predictors of serious suicidal behaviors within hours to days. We examined the prevalence of acute risk factors (suicide warning signs) in a high-risk population of veterans. We also examined agreement between self-report (a self-administered survey), and psychiatrist report, of the suicide warning signs of suicidal ideation (SI) and behaviors. We then looked at whether any single or cluster of suicide warning signs differentiated veterans who were hospitalized for a suicide attempt (SA) or severe SI the day of the survey, from all other veterans in the study. We also looked at whether suicide warning signs or other characteristics were associated with an SA or hospitalization for severe SI in the following 12 months. Participants were 430 men and 52 women who presented to the walk-in Psychiatric Emergency Clinic at the Veterans Administration Health Care System in San Diego, California between January and May 2010. In the prevalence portion of the study we found that more than half (52%) of participants reported SI or suicidal behaviors in the past week. Other suicide warning signs were also highly prevalent with the lowest prevalence, 19%, for 'hurt self' or 'reckless behavior'. Prevalences of suicide warning signs were significantly higher for veterans with a major depressive episode (MDE by PHQ-9 score), positive screening for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or both, compared to none. Agreement between self-report and psychiatrists' report of SI and behavior was generally low with veterans rating SI and suicidal behaviors as significantly more severe than psychiatrists. Veteran ratings were consistently more severe than psychiatrists ratings even when veterans with characteristics that may have led to over-reporting (e.g. homelessness) were removed from the analysis. In univariate analysis, many of the individual suicide warning signs and the two clusters of warning signs formed from factor analysis, were strongly associated with immediate hospitalization for a suicidal crisis (SA or severe SI). In addition, a smaller number of warning signs and clusters were also associated with a suicidal crisis in the following 12 months albeit at a much lower magnitude in both univariate and multivariate analysis. In multivariate analysis, veterans who were hospitalized immediately had 13 fold higher odds of self-reporting feeling out of control compared to veterans not hospitalized immediately. The clinical utility of warning signs is attenuated by the high prevalence of all of the warning signs in veterans who were not hospitalized immediately or in the 12 month follow-up study. Moreover, only 3.1% of veterans (n = 15) did not endorse any warning signs and the mean number of signs endorsed was 7.6. When history of SA was included with the suicide warning signs, only 2.3% (n = 11) did not make any endorsements. Overall the frequency of the suicide warning signs was highest in veterans hospitalized for SI or SA the day of the survey, intermediate for veterans hospitalized during the 12 month follow-up and lowest for veterans with no SA or hospitalization during the study period

The ability to learn to recognize new sensory signals such as voices or faces is an important cognitive function in many species. This ability is thought to involve the plasticity of neural representations in high-level sensory cortical areas, but this plasticity is poorly understood. Using European starlings (a species of songbird) trained to recognize natural conspecific song segments, I investigated the emergence of neural representations for learned signals across two auditory forebrain regions : the caudolateral mesopallium (CLM) and the caudomedial mesopallium (CMM). In both CLM and CMM, neurons encoded more information about the motifs (short, stereotyped segments of song) that make up songs paired with reward during training than the motifs that make up novel songs. This shows that behavioral experience is an important modulator of neural encoding in the songbird auditory forebrain. In the natural world, individuals learn which signals convey relevant information for particular behaviors. However, it is unknown how this behavioral information influences neural encoding in the brain. I explored this by training starlings on a paired-motif recognition task where one motif was informative about the behavior required to obtain reward and the other motif was not informative. Following training, single neurons in CLM responded more strongly to informative motifs than to uninformative or novel motifs, whereas single neurons in CMM responded strongly to both informative and uninformative motifs. This suggests that encoding in CLM may serve to emphasize those signals that are particularly behaviorally relevant. Sensory encoding in cortical areas is distributed across many neurons. But how learning alters these neural population representations remains unexplored. To explore this question, I analyzed the correlated activity of simultaneously recorded neurons within CLM. When processing informative motifs, the correlations led to enhanced population discriminability, relative to the correlations when processing uninformative or novel motifs. Thus, the information that a sensory signal conveys about behavior modulates neural encoding in both single neurons and in neural populations. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that behavioral relevance substantially influences neural processing by both single neurons and larger populations in cortical brain regions