The Science Studio Interview with A.C. Grayling

The Science Studio Interview with Sam Harris

Welcome - Roger Bingham, Director, The Science Network

Human Flourishing/Eudaimonics
with A.C. Grayling, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Owen Flanagan, Güven Güzeldere, & George Koob

This is Your Brain on Politics
with Naomi Oreskes, Chis Mooney/Sheril Kirshenbaum, & Tony Haymet

Human Flourishing, continued
with Peter Turchin, Sally Satel, & V.S. Ramachandran

This is Your Brain on Morality
with Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Jonathan Glover, Marco Iacoboni, & Patricia Churchland

This is Your Brain on Money
with Brian Knutson, Paul Zak, Philip Zimbardo, & Terrence Sejnowski

This is Your Brain on Law
with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Erin O'Hara, Amanda Pustilnik, Adam Kolber, & Nita Farahany

This is Your Brain on Politics, continued
with Lawrence Krauss, Sir Harold Kroto, Sheril Kirshenbaum/Chris Mooney,
Leon Lederman, Beatrice Golomb, & Michael Shermer

Open Discussion

Pride & Prejudice
Peter Atkins

Peter Atkins was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford from 1965 until his retirement in 2007. He is the author of over 60 books including Four Laws That Drive the Universe; Galileo's Fingers: The Ten Great Ideas of Science; and the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry. He is involved in a variety of international activities including chairing the Committee on Chemistry Education of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and organizing the Malta series of conferences.

Patricia Smith Churchland, UC President's Professor of Philosophy, UC San Diego, focuses on neuroethics and attempts to understand choice, responsibility and the basis of moral norms in terms of brain function, evolution and brain-culture interactions. Her books include Brain-Wise, Neurophilosophy: Towrds a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland.

• Human Dignity From a Neurophilosophical Perspective
• Inference to the Best Decision

Nita Farahany researches and writes about the intersection of criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. She does so with an interdisciplinary background in Genetics from Dartmouth College, a master's degree concentrating in biology, from Harvard University, and a J.D., M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy of biology and philosophy of law from Duke University. She is the editor of forthcoming volume Genes and Justice: The Impact of Behavioral Genetics and Neuroscience on Criminal Law.

• Bad Nature, Bad Nurture, and Testimony regarding MAOA and SLC6A4 Genotyping at Murder Trials
• Behavioral Genetics in Criminal Cases: Past, Present and Future
• Genetics and Responsibility: To Know the Criminal from the Crime

Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He also holds appointments in Psychology and Neurobiology and is a Faculty Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience. In 1998, he was recipient of the Romanell National Phi Beta Kappa award, given annually to one American philosopher for distinguished contributions to philosophy and the public understanding of philosophy. He has written several books; the most recent is The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World.

• One Enchanted Being: Neuro-existentialism & Meaning
• Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff

Jonathan Haidt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He studies the emotional and intuitive foundations of morality. His current work is based on the idea that morality is a team sport and that political liberals don't understand the game the other side is playing. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and is currently writing The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

• Moral Psychology and the Misunderstandings of Religion

Sam Harris is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Letter to a Christian Nation. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience. He is also a Co-Founder and Chairman of The Reason Project.

• Articles by Sam Harris

Tony Haymet is the tenth director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Haymet also serves as UC San Diego's Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences and Dean of the Graduate School of Marine Sciences, and is a Professor of Oceanography at Scripps and Chemistry at UC San Diego. Tony is a founder and currently Vice-Chair of CleanTech San Diego, a business development organization dedicated to the practical response to climate change issues.

• Tony Haymet In the News

Marco Iacoboni is Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. He is also a member of the Brain Research Institute and of the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. Iacoboni studies the neural mechanisms of imitation and social cognition in humans, and he is author of the recent book on mirror neurons entitled Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others.

• Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons
• The Marginal Role of Science
• Us Versus Them: Political Attitudes and Party Affiliation Influence Neural Responses to Faces of Presidential Candidates

Sheril Kirshenbaum is co-author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future with Chris Mooney describing the growing disconnect between science and society. She has worked in the Senate on energy, climate, and ocean policy and helped found ScienceDebate2008. A former pop radio disc jockey and musician, Sheril is now a science writer and Seed blogger based at Duke University.

• The Intersection blog
• Science and the Candidates

Brian Knutson is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University. His laboratory uses multiple methods (e.g., psychometrics, psychophysiology, brain imaging, and pharmacology) to investigate neural mechanisms that support emotional experience, and explores implications for clinical disorders of affect and addiction, as well as for economic decision-making. He has received Young Investigator Awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research.

• Neural Predictors of Purchases
• The Neural Basis of Financial Risk Taking

Adam Kolber is a law professor at the University of San Diego who recently completed a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. He writes about legal and ethical implications of emerging neurotechnologies. Most recently, he has written about methods of measuring pain and punishment. He runs the "Neuroethics & Law Blog" and is an associate editor of the journal Neuroethics.

• Neuroethics & Law Blog
• The Ethics of Eternal Sunshine

Sir Harold Kroto is Francis Eppes Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State University. In 1996, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of C60 Buckminsterfullerene. In 1995, he inaugurated the Vega Science Trust, and in 2007, he started the Global Education Outreach in Science, Engineering and Technology (GEOSET) at FSU. He has received many scientific awards including the Royal Society's prestigious Michael Faraday Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.

• Letter to the Miami Herald - There Are Two Types of Theories

Sonja Lyubomirsky is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Her honors include a Faculty of the Year Award, Faculty Mentor of the Year Award, a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize, and a million-dollar grant from NIMH to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness. Her book, The How of Happiness, was released in January 2008 by Penguin Press and translated into 15 languages.

• Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change
• The Science of Lasting Happiness

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress, senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine and author of two books - The New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He also writes “The Intersection” blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

• The Intersection blog
• Science and the Candidates

Erin O'Hara is Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Director of the Law and Human Behavior Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. One of Erin’s primary research interests involves conciliation: the effort to integrate theoretical and empirical insights from multiple academic fields, including economics, positive political theory, cognitive psychology, behavioral biology, and neuroscience, to more effectively formulate legal policies that regulate human behavior.

• Brain Plasticity and Spanish Moss in Biolegal Analysis
• How Neuroscience Might Advance the Law

Amanda Pustilnik conducts research and teaches in the area of law and neuroscience at Harvard Law School. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, practiced litigation at Sullivan & Cromwell and Covington & Burling, and has served as a visiting scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in History of Science. She is also counsel to the Board of Network 20/20, a foreign policy not-for-profit organization.

• Violence on the Brain: A Critique of Neuroscience in Criminal Law

Sally Satel is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in The New York Times, New Republic, Commentary, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and Wall Street Journal. Dr. Satel is the author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine; Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion; and coauthor of One Nation Under Therapy.

• The God Committee - Should Criminals Have Equal Access to Scarce Medical Treatments?
• In Praise of Stigma
• Science and Sorrow

Peter Turchin is Professor of Ecology and Mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of more than 100 articles including ten in Nature and Science. He has written five books, the latest of which is War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations, Pi Press. Much of his work concerns a new field known as cliodynamics, which attempts to discover general principles that explain the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.

• A Theory for the Formation of Large Agrarian Empires
• Arise 'cliodynamics'

Paul J. Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Zak also serves as Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and is a Senior Researcher at UCLA. Zak is credited with the first published use of the term “neuroeconomics” and has been a vanguard in this new discipline. He organized and administers the first doctoral program in neuroeconomics in the world.

• Center for Neuroeconomic Studies
• The Neuroeconomics of Trust
• Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans

Roger Bingham is Co-founder and Director of The Science Network. He is also a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series The Human Quest.

• Edge Question 2007: "What are you optimistic about?"
• Edge Question 2008: "What have you changed your mind about?"