When Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, the scientific community was still pondering the question: Do other animals think?  The subsequent prodigious scientific study of animal cognition and behavior has answered this question with an emphatic “yes”!… read more »

What does it mean to be a survivor of the traumatic violence of war and genocide, as victim or perpetrator—or descendant of either? What are the implications for the individual and collective conscience of doing violence to others sanctioned by the state or consecrated—or condemned—by one’s culture or that of other cultures?… read more »

How does a one-year-old understand the world? A three-year-old? A five-year-old? How does the mental functioning of very young children differ from that of older children and of adults? Recognizing the ways in which children conceptualize the world, remember their experiences, and modulate emotions is crucial in providing both normally developing children and children with developmental disorders, like autism, with optimum care throughout their formative years.… read more »

Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s award-winning 2013 documentary (for which Helix Center Executive Committee member Carla Solomon was a producer), tells the remarkable story of the monumental search for the Higgs boson, the elementary force particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.… read more »

Central to Eastern and Western philosophical and theological traditions, the notion of free will, once confined to discussions of human agency, can find application in understanding a broader set of phenomena. How are advances in genetics and neuroscience influencing our concept of voluntary, individual choice, and what are the implications for jurisprudence?… read more »

Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question “Why?” has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different contexts throughout the chapters of human history.… read more »

In our previous roundtable, Music to Whose Ears? Music, Emotion, and Mind (April 13, 2013), our participants explored a multitude of ideas connecting music and emotion. In this follow-up roundtable, artists and scientists will explore together the body’s role in musical experience, its perception and cognition.… read more »

Prior to the eighteenth century, and before Edmund Burke’s foundational treatise, the sublime was understood as beauty and greatness beyond measure. Subsequently, awe, the emotion classically associated with the sublime, was given new psychological depth and even physiological dimensions, bringing fear and the grotesque into aesthetic considerations of the sublime.… read more »

Is science nearing an answer to the question of how and why consciousness and self-consciousness come about? In attempting to resolve the mystery of sentience, what roles do physics, psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience play? How do various philosophical and religious traditions contribute to our inquiries into this obvious and everyday universal experience?… read more »