Neuroscientist, author and Lavin speaker Jonah Lehrer, speaking at the University of California Santa Barbara’s “Innovation Matters” Series.

David Eagleman, Lavin speaker and author of Incognito, will unveil an exciting new talk, entitled “The Science of Hatred and Dehumanization”, at Intelligence Squared in London on May 24th. Here’s the official talk description:

Which side were you on? The Jets or the Sharks? The Capulets or the Montagues? The Greeks or the Trojans? Antony or Caesar? William or Harold? And so the list goes on…Indeed, maybe the whole of human history is the story of group-making and group-breaking. The passions of loyalty and love for the in-group are matched by the de-humanising indignation and hatred for the out-group.

But what’s actually going on in the chemical soup of the brain when Agamemnon gathers his heros-to-be and sets sail after Helen? Will peering into that soup – as neuroscientist David Eagleman is now doing – actually give peace a chance? Maybe utopia can come out of the lab. Will a scientific understanding of love and hate deliver social programmes that undermine the nastiness without sacrificing the good?

Photo courtesy of Christine ™

Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, in a recent essay for The Wall Street Journal.

Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman, in recent interview with Lifehacker.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman, talking to New Scientist, about the year he spent as a stand-up comedian.

Here’s Jonah Lehrer, neuroscience speaker and author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, performing some “Brain Games” on The Ellen Degeneres Show. His experiments show how easily the brain can be tricked, and just how oblivious of our surroundings we can be on a daily basis.

Steven Pinker, quoted in the New York Times article “Pinkerisms: Selections from Steven Pinker’s writings on language, evolution and the mind.”

Jonah Lehrer’s latest from his Wired blog “The Frontal Cortex” looks at why creativity seems to benefit from constraints. An example? In a psychological test on university students, half were forced to listen to an audible obstacle (a voice repeating unrelated words) while being presented with a series of challenges while the other half were given the challenges in peaceful silence. When shown the picture above:

The students were more likely to automatically respond that the pictures contained (in clockwise order, from the top left corner) an E, S, H and A…(In contrast, those subjects not first exposed to an obstacle insisted that the picture contained an A, H, S and E. They were entirely tuned to the particular.) The psychologists refer to this shift as an expansion of “perceptual scope,” suggesting that the obstacle had literally increased what the subjects were able to notice. The struggle allowed them to see the whole.

“Vision is a grand illusion,” neuroscience speaker David Eagleman told an audience last week. Even though vision seems effortless, it’s not. It’s a construction of your brain. Your vision does not work like a camera, objectively taking in everything in front of you; vision is an internal model of what you think is happening out there. (Audience reaction at 1:55 is priceless!)

Neuroscience speaker David Eagleman tests the way humans perceive time in his lab at Baylor college. Very cool!