Podcast: The Helix Center

What counts as true and how we might know the truth in the age of coding. A discussion about misinformation, the decentralization of knowledge, and the struggle to establish what is real. Encoded algorithms help to provide security but also risk an encroachment on privacy.… read more »

How we discover codes, bearers of meaning, and how we reconstruct that meaning in archeology & paleoanthropology, in psychoanalysis, and in neuroscience research on memory.… read more »

Physics being the study of the fundamental properties of Nature, as the name implies, metaphysics investigates the nature of Nature, the what-must-therefore-be-the-case of those discoverable physical properties. For centuries, either explicitly or implicitly, metaphysics created the background and organizing principles for scientific research.… read more »

Neuroplasticity: it’s what our brains do. We alter our minds when we engage with the world and with the people in it. But, of course, when we think of “mind altering drugs” we refer to something else. That there might be a shortcut, a wormhole, a portal to some new and improved state of mind has long held our fascination.… read more »

The Dismal Science seems to analyze and involve most aspects of our lives.  While traditional macroeconomics continues to concern itself with  natural rates of inflation and unemployment, with tariffs and taxes, with supply and demand, at both the meso- and micro-levels, economics has productively linked with sociology, social history, anthropology, and psychology.… read more »

Supernatural and other circumventions of the natural process of conception have been an abundant wellspring for magical, mythological, and religious narratives. It was held that the widowed queen of an Egyptian pharaoh could pull his posthumous sperm into her womb to create a child.… read more »

A testament to its ubiquity, STRESS is woven into our very words, our thoughts and our emotions. We stress words to give them emphasis. We stress wood to make it stronger rather than splinter. And we feel distress, both when overwhelmed with dread, but also sometimes in joyous anticipation. … read more »

Placebos “work” for quite a few medical problems. But how? And what is the work they do?

What one thinks a medicine is capable of, one’s idea of that medicine, may affect us in the way “proper” medicines do. This implies that, in observing the work of a placebo we are watching an idea affect biology, the mind moving the body.… read more »

“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

– James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10

Populism refers to the political mobilization of “the people” against a perceived elite caste of professional politicians. And whereas a corps of elected representatives was Madison’s and Hamilton’s buffer against the tyranny of factions, from time to time the political class may come to be viewed as insufficiently attentive to the needs of their constituents and then become the target and nidus that creates a populist movement.… read more »

Justice is blind, the saying goes, which means that a person’s particulars – their social status, race, gender, etc. – should have no bearing on fair judgement in any legal dispute. By this standard, we are all considered equal before the law.… read more »