EDGE CONVERSATION 

CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION 
Dean Ornish

Founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute

Even if your mother and your father and your sister and brother and aunts and uncles all died from heart disease, it doesn't mean that you need to. If you are willing to make big enough changes, there is no reason you need ever develop heart disease, except in relatively rare cases.

EDGE CONVERSATION

LIFE IS THE WAY THE ANIMAL IS IN THE WORLD 
A Talk with Alva Noe

Professor of Philosophy at the University of California; Author, Out of Our Heads

The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness.

EDGE CONVERSATION

A RULE OF THE GAME
A Talk with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now

These are exhibitions which are not material, but which are more virtual, virtual in the sense of them always being able to be reactualized. They can be revisited and reactualized and updated, and they are also not related to a place. The exhibition can go to where the viewer is. Anybody in the world can download these formulas and pin them on the wall, or they can do their own and trigger their own formulas. We are in the very early days of understanding how the Internet can be used for exhibitions.

EDGE MASTER CLASS 2008

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

IMPROVING CHOICES WITH MACHINE READABLE DISCLOSURE (CLASS 2) 
A Talk By Richard H. Thaler,  Sendhil Mullainathan

THALER: Father of Behavioral Economics; Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Co-Author, Nudge

At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCARCITY (CLASS 3)
A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan

Professor of Economics at Harvard

Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, France LeClerc, Danny Hillis, Paul Romer, George Dyson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker

Let's put aside poverty alleviation for a second, and let's ask, "Is there something intrinsic to poverty that has value and that is worth studying in and of itself?" One of the reasons that is the case is that, purely aside from magic bullets, we need to understand are there unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It's an important and old question.

TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (CLASS 4)
A Talk By Daniel Kahneman

Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology; Author, Thinking Fast and Slow

Danny Hillis,Richard Thaler,Nathan Myhrvold,Elon Musk, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, Anne Treisman, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jeff Bezos,Sean Parker

There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!

THE REALITY CLUB

W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler on "Two Big Things Happening In Psychology Today"

THE IRONY OF POVERTY (CLASS 5)
A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan

Professor of Economics at Harvard

I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they