Podcast: The Helix Center

The Amygdaloids are a New York band made up of scientists who shed their scientific garb at night and take to the stage with songs about love and life peppered with insights drawn from research about mind and brain and mental disorders.… read more »

Is selflessness a necessary illusion? Are we condemned to weigh the costs (whether consciously or not) of the welfare of others against the benefits to ourselves ? We develop a “theory of mind” around age three, concurrently building our capacity to recognize emotions experienced by others.… read more »

A night of mind, brain, and magic. The Amygdaloids will play several suites of our original songs on mind/brain topics: the mind-body problem, memory, emotion, unconscious processes, and mental disorders. Each suite will be preceded by a short (3 min) lecture on the scientific or philosophical foundations of the topic by Neuroscientist and Amygdaloid, Joseph LeDoux.… read more »

Synthetic biology, and its sister field systems biology, offers the means to reengineer DNA in ways (and at a pace) that Nature, in her evolutionary wisdom, never envisioned. Standing at the unique crossroads of biology, engineering, computer science and neuroscience, these emerging fields are working toward the development of novel drugs and energy sources, the cure of disease and prolongation of life, and even the creation of new forms of life.… read more »

Physics Nobel laureate David Gross claims that the most important product of science is ignorance. Science is the quest not just for knowledge, but for better questions, and we’re generally more engaged by questions than by answers. Thus, ignorance drives science and curiosity is its engine.… read more »

A foundational work on emotion and music, Leonard Meyer’s 1956 treatise,Emotion and Meaning in Music, describes competing philosophical positions regarding musical meaning. It might rest exclusively within the context of the work itself; or refer to the extra-musical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character; or stem from an intellectual perception of the formalist qualities of the work; or find its foundations in an emotional response to musical relationships.… read more »

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the great masters of American poetry of the 20th Century. Her remarkable gifts have been described in a variety of ways, but one gift repeatedly recognized by readers is her skill at recounting the results of her capacity for observation.… read more »

How do emotions color and shape our actions? How do we decide to take action in the midst of fear for our own lives–go to war, fight an intruder, save a person falling on subway tracks–or to ward off catastrophes such as global climate change and the irreversible loss of species that could lead to the extinction of our own species?… read more »

In one of his novels, Milan Kundera suggested that “love is a continual interrogation.” What is this thing called love? Is it, as Shakespeare might have it, “the star to every wandering bark”? Or, in Bronzino’s words, “always a fountain and a vase of tears”?… read more »

“Plaintiffs in Paper Robes: The First Ghazal of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib” Frances Pritchett and Mustafa Menai will discuss the poetry of Ghalib and the ghazal form by looking at the first verse of the first ghazal of his divan. In Pritchett’s words, “An Urdu ghazal consists of a series of miniature poems, each two lines long.… read more »