Videos in: 2009

DON'T DISAPPEAR INTO A DREAM

Richard Foreman
[12.9.09]

"I was not writing for an audience. I was writing for myself. I was making something for myself. And then just hoping that maybe somebody else had similar interests. But of course, in the early days, 75 percent of my audience would walk out after 20 minutes. And being a young Turk, I thought that was great, because it proved I was making real stuff. But I still have a very ambivalent attitude towards the audience, which is one of the things I've always hated about the theatre, because I believe that people, en masse, always have a reaction that is lower and less interesting than any individual person that you can confront and have a relationship with."


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TOXO

Robert Sapolsky
[12.2.09]

"The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you're ever pregnant, if you're ever around anyone who's pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It's a disaster."


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Signatures of Consciousness

Stanislas Dehaene
[11.24.09]

"For the past twelve years my research team has been using all the brain research tools at its disposal, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed  light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness."


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WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES?

Sean Carroll
[11.13.09]

"Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now.  That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else. There you get into branes and the cyclic universe. ... I really don't like any of the models that are on the market right now. We really need to think harder about what the universe should look like."


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THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE

Frank Schirrmacher
[10.25.09]

"We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them."


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Darwin and the Evolution of Reasons

Daniel C. Dennett
[9.30.09]

"Some people think today that it is impossible for a mindless process to produce evolution. ... It isn't. ...There may be an intelligent God hidden in the evolution process, but if so, he might as well be asleep, since there is no work for him to do!"


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Language and Human Nature

Steven Pinker
[9.30.09]

"Language is an adaptation to the "cognitive niche". It facilitates exchange of information, negotiating of cooperation. But indirect speech (polite requests, veiled threats & bribes, sexual overtures) are a puzzle for the theory that language is an adaptation for efficient communication. Language is an adaptation to the "cognitive niche". ..."


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Why Sex Differences Matter: The Darwinian Perspective

Helena Cronin
[9.30.09]

"If we want to change the world, we need first to understand it. And when it comes to understanding human nature — male and female — Darwinian science is indispensable."


 

Beauty's Child: Sexual Selection, Nature Worship and the Love of God

Nicholas Humphrey
[9.30.09]

"...I want to engage you in a discussion of the deep history of beauty. By deep I mean as seen from an evolutionary perspective. I am an "evolutionary psychologist".  I believe that to understand and fully appreciate human mental traits, we need to know why they are there — which is to say what biological function they are serving.  Evolutionary psychology has been making pretty good progress. But, as we say, "there are still some  elephants in the living room" — big issues that no one wants to talk about. And human beings worship of the beautiful remains  one of the biggest."


 

Parallels between Economics and Evolution, or What Happens When Ideas Have Sex

A talk by
Matt Ridley
[9.30.09]

Parallels between Economics and Evolution, or What Happens When Ideas Have Sex


 

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