Podcast: The Helix Center

Generationally and historically, our species has moved through great migrations, across seas, continents, and borders. Some have been journeys infused with hope for the better, or impelled by longing for the unknown, the foreign, the other. Others have been forced.

Today, with more than 65 million refugees and displaced persons around the globe, we are bearing witness to flights of desperation, escaping threats of extinction or submission, environmental disaster, religious and tribal conflict, slavery, and war.… read more »

What is it to feel pain? We sense it in the body, as a non-trivial, unmediated and imperative perceptual event associated with tissue damage, possessing particular spatiotemporal characteristics of a physical object (e.g.,… read more »

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism ….… read more »

The increasing appreciation of the body’s role in cognition—that the brain-mind is embedded in a physical, sensory-motor system interacting with the real world—is shedding the dualistic straitjacket that has characterized “classical” artificial intelligence research. So, as proposed by Grady Booch, let’s imagine unleashing a technology platform using natural language processing and machine learning, such as IBM’s Watson, in the physical world.… read more »

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects more than 1% of the population. For many years, it was thought to be a rare disorder, resulting from a bad relationship of the children with their so-called refrigerator mothers. However, there is clear evidence now that autism results from abnormalities in brain development, and that the behavior observed in children is the consequence of disturbances in brain circuitry.… read more »

Call no man happy until he is dead.

 – Solon of Athens (c. 640 – c. 560 BCE)

“Happiness” may be understood in prosaic and philosophic senses: as referring to a moment of experience or the entirety of a life; as referring to a psychological state of mind, relating to pleasurable emotions, as well as referring to a life regarded as going well, flourishing, for the individual leading it, and as such, a prudential value judgement of ultimate goods.… read more »

Someone is shouting! Ho! Do you hear? Am I howling in vain? For if one is frightened, everything makes a noise!

 – Sophocles, Acrisius [fragment]

…the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.

Name five female geniuses off the top of your head. If you find yourself stumbling after Madame Curie, you are hardly alone. Why should this be when there is no shortage of brilliant, creative women, who are as numerous in history as they are today?… read more »

Developments in computational neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics have opened up new ways of looking at disease. In a relatively short time span, these advances may lead to significant innovations in the understanding of various diseases, as well as in therapeutics designed to treat them.… read more »