psychantenna

Kelly Dobson - PopTech 2008
An eminent roboticist and Ph.D. at MIT’s Media Lab, Dobson is exploring “machine therapy” – a personal, societal and psychoanalytical study of machine design and its effects on peoples’ everyday lives. Watch as she exhibits Screambody, Blendie and Omo, three fascinating robots that respond to – and influence – their users in provocative ways.

Barry Schwartz - PopTech 2004
What makes us happy? Societies flourish and people are most contentwhen they are faced with fewer choices and more constraints arguespsychologist Barry Schwartz. We are tortured by the idea of having itall – “Impossible!”, he says.

Peter Whybrow - PopTech 2008
Leading neuropsychiatrist Peter Whybrow recently authored “American Mania: When More Is Not Enough,” a neurobiological look at the instinctual and social behaviors that balance a market economy. Pay attention as he explains how America’s reward-driven culture is pushing the physiological limits of our evolutionary inheritance – making us sick in body and mind.

Dr. Rubenstein shares his insights on potential causes of autism. (#17663)

Peter Mundy explores the social behavioral, emotional and learning characteristics of higher functioning children with autism with an emphasis on challenges in school. (#17660)

Dr. Robert Hendren explores the symptoms, co-morbidities and monitoring guidelines to inform decisions regarding benefits/risks associated with use of pharmacological agents to treat behavioral symptoms of autism spectrum disorders. (#17655)

What's your brain doing, right now? Award-winning journalist Judith Horstman writes about health and medicine for doctors as well as the general public. Her work has appeared in hundreds of publications worldwide and on the Internet.

Horstman discusses what your brain is doing as you go through a typical day: sleeping, waking, fighting, loving and making important decisions.

Professor David Sloan Wilson looks at Darwin's theory of evolution vs. theories of creationism and intelligent design. He considers the assault on Darwin's theory by those who advance theories of creationism or intelligent design in this installment of the Darwin Evolving Series from UCLA. (#16922)

Robert Wright uses evolutionary biology and game theory to explain why we appreciate the Golden Rule ("Do unto others..."), why we sometimes ignore it and why there’s hope that, in the near future, we might all have the compassion to follow it.

Swami Dayananda Saraswati unravels the parallel paths of personal development and attaining true compassion. He walks us through each step of self-realization, from helpless infancy to the fearless act of caring for others.

It’s hard to always show compassion -- even to the people we love, but Robert Thurman asks that we develop compassion for our enemies. He prescribes a seven-step meditation exercise to extend compassion beyond our inner circle.

An exemplar of the purpose-driven life in medical science, Ed Scolnick details research milestones from a remarkably varied career, revealing how scientific insight and collaborative effort translate into life-saving solutions for millions.

This physician turned biochemist has held distinguished positions at the National Institutes of Health, Merck, and now at MIT, but common themes unite his pursuits: “I’m always excited by the inherent beauty of molecular and biochemical insights into how biology works. Making scientific discoveries for me is tremendously emotionally satisfying and in fact addicting.”

In his talk, Scolnick touches on such research breakthroughs as identifying virus oncogenes, and developing treatments for cardiovascular disease, Hepatitis B, and osteoporosis, among others. He emphasizes that teasing out the biochemistry of diseases is “the key to success in drug discovery.” In Marfan syndrome, for example, investigators learned that a mutant gene leads to a malfunctioning aorta. Finding a cure flowed from understanding the underlying pathological processes. Scolnick proudly describes research on a gene involved with cholesterol buildup and an elevated risk for cardiovascular disease. This led to the development of statins, which has helped dramatically reduce the death rate in people with heart disease.

Scolnick offers a dramatic chronology of his pioneering work at Merck starting in 1981 to find an effective AIDS treatment, an effort leading to the protease inhibitor Crixivan. His timeline covers more than a decade of scientific collaboration to block the mechanism of HIV, and involves false starts, the death of a key scientist in the Lockerbie bombing, pressure from AIDS activists and corporate overseers, a “miracle” AIDS patient, breakthroughs in measuring viral protein, and more than one “twist of fate.”

In 2004, Scolnick turned in a new direction: toward mental illness, a field stalled for decades due to ignorance “a

UCSF social psychologist Judith Moskowitz examines how positive emotions can be marshaled as adaptive coping tools during stressful times. Moskowitz's research focuses on coping and emotion in the context of health related chronic stress

Dr. Alicia Lieberman of UCSF explores effective therapies for the children of military families who are affected by the deployments and traumas of their parents.

Summary
To understand the human mind it is necessary to understand what we actually see when we open our eyes. Color suggests an answer to this question: we see not the world as it is, but a world that was useful to see in the past.

Beau Lotto performs a series of experiments involving the sky, music and bumblebees that show how quickly the brain can learn to see what is useful, and demonstrate that our perception and conception of the world reflects our past physical, social and cultural interactions.

These optical and color experiments illustrate that none of us is an outside observer of nature defined by our essential properties, but is instead defined by our interactions with nature.

Join RSA to experience how color, vision and "seeing ourselves see" can contribute to a richer, more empathetic view of nature and human nature.

Dan Siegel, executive director of the Mindsight Institute gives a lecture entitled Mindsight: The Power of Connection The Science of Reflection as part of the Chautauqua Institution's 2009 Summer Lecture Series.

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved -- soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.

No votes yetTal Ben-Shahar instructor, psychology, Harvard
Tal Ben-Shahar discusses current research on the science of happiness and introduces ideas and tools that can actually make a difference in one's life.

The study of happiness or of enhancing the quality of our lives, has been dominated by pop-psychology (much charisma, but relatively little substance) and academia (much substance, but isolated from most people's everyday lives). Positive Psychology, the scientific study of optimal human functioning, creates a bridge between the Ivory Tower and Main Street, making rigorous academic ideas accessible to all. Tal Ben-Shahar, instructor of the most popular course at Harvard University, discusses the findings of current research on the science of happiness and introduces ideas and tools that can actually make a difference in one's life.

David Hanson's robot faces look and act like yours: They recognize and respond to emotion, and make expressions of their own. Here, an "emotional" live demo of the Einstein robot offers a peek at a future where robots truly mimic humans.

How does someone move from recreational drug use to addiction? Barry Everitt’s group at the University of Cambridge has been trying to break down the stages and neural circuitry of addiction with great precision.

Everitt’s research attempts to operationalize a progression in animals from the voluntary taking of drugs, to the acquired habit of drug-taking, to the stage of compulsive drug-seeking and consumption, “where individuals have really lost control.” This progression seems rooted in the sequential activation of different learning systems in the brain, which are particularly sensitive to the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Research suggests that drug-taking is initially dependent on the nucleus accumbens (part of the ventral striatum), but its establishment involves the dorsal striatum. Studies show that dopamine in the dorsal striatum is causally involved in establishing drug-seeking behavior in rats. As the animal gets accustomed to taking the cocaine, there’s a “shift in the balance of associative encoding from ventral to dorsal striatum.” Cocaine craving and self-administration seem to change the functioning of the dorsal striatum in monkeys and humans as well.

While this shift from ventral to dorsal striatum depends to some degree on “pharmacology” (cocaine’s impact on dopaminergic systems), Everitt has hypothesized that it may also involve “spiraling circuitry” connecting the ventral striatum, the midbrain -- the brain’s motivational and motor mechanisms -- and the dorsal striatum. Everitt speculates that the compulsive nature of drug seeking may be rooted in part in the prefrontal cortex, home to “top-down executive control mechanisms.” He describes research that attempted to model this type of compulsion. Animals with short-term access to cocaine and most animals with long-term access to cocaine suppressed their drug-seeking responses when punished. But a subgroup of 20% “persisted in seeking cocaine in the face of punish