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neuroscience

The UK’s national academy for the Humanities and Social Science, the British Academy, elects 42 Fellows annually; in 2013, 9 of these were at the University of Cambridge. Join Hans van de Ven, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Christopher Page, Professor of Medieval Music and Literature, and Usha Goswami, Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience, who will introduce us to their ground-breaking work. - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/cambridge-stars-big-ideas-2#sthash.S5KOB9hT.dpuf

Cambridge stars:Usha Goswami, Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience

Do our brains get in the way of solving complex social challenges? We build our view of the world on relatively simple interactions, but from this emerges extremely complex net behaviour. Our brains are like plastic, able to be moulded and shaped. Humans can and should learn how to navigate this behavioural system to create the world we want. Using key examples and a view into stunning, state of the art technologies, leading neuroscientists will share how behaviour is linked to emotional stimulus and how to establish principles of conflict resolution that have a "grounded truth" in neuroscience principles.

Wired For Change: The Neuroscience Of Social Progress

Speaker(s): Professor Roger Brownsword, Professor Neil Levy, Professor Sir Michael Rutter | Editor's note: Unfortunately the beginning of the chairperson’s introduction is missing from the podcast. Will developments in the neurosciences change our moral and legal notions of criminality and responsibility – and if so, how? Roger Brownsword is professor of law at King's College London. Neil Levy is deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and the Florey Neuroscience Institute, University of Melbourne. Michael Rutter is professor of developmental psychopathology in the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:30:00 GMT

Neuroscience, Responsibility and the Law [Audio]

Cognitive Neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott puts on a comedy show with a difference to show how laughter really is infectious. Part gig, part experiment, part discussion, this is an exploration into what lies behind our laughter.  Featuring Stu Goldsmith and Mark Olver.

BBC EdFest 2012: The Neuroscience of Comedy - Do Rats Laugh?

Dr. Joop de Jong's lecture of December 11th, 2012, organized by the Institute of Anthropology at Universität Heidelberg. Title: "The Perennial Debate on Culture and Psychopathology: from Inferior Frontal Lobes to Cultural Neuroscience"

In this talk four perspectives on psychopathology that prevailed over the past 150 years will be discussed. The first perspective is the "dichotomous perspective" that focused on either biology or culture as an explanatory model. This perspective was dominant during colonial times and was partially substituted by and overlapped with the second "continuum-perspective" that attributed a "disorder" to the biological, socio-cultural, cognitive, emotional and linguistic aspects of behaviour. The third perspective is the "spectrum-perspective" that filters psychopathology through a prism into divergent behavioural patterns that can be studied. The fourth, which is also the latest and overlaps with the other ones, is the "cultural neuroscientific perspective". Cultural neuroscience tries to answer two main questions: 1) how do cultural traits (e.g., values, beliefs, practices) shape neurobiology (e.g., genetic and neural processes)and behaviour; and 2) how do neurobiological mechanisms (e. g., genetic and neural processes) facilitate the emergence and transmission of cultural traits? This article concludes with an example of traumatic stress disorder showing how cultural neuroscience may help to transcend the dichotomy between universalism and relativism, between nature and nurture, and between genotype and phenotype.

The Perennial Debate on Culture and Psychopathology: Inferior Frontal Lobes to Cultural Neuroscience

Writer Jess Zimmerman discovers the dangers of dating a philosopher of neuroscience who thinks he knows what's really happening in her head.

The Perennial Debate on Culture and Psychopathology: Inferior Frontal Lobes to Cultural Neuroscience

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