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How Does the Autistic Brain Work?
Crammed into our craniums, the three-pound human brain may be the most complex matter in the universe. And scientists are learning more about how it works by investigating how it doesn't work. A 13 year-old young man named Tito Mukhopadhyay may be the Rosetta stone for autism, revealing what it feels like to be autistic.
Participants
 | | Eric Courchesne, Ph.D.
Prof. Neuroscience, UC San Diego |
| | Portia Iversen
Cure Autism Now Foundation |
| | Tito Mukhopadhyay
Autistic Youth, Author, Poet |
| | Soma Mukhopadhyay
Teacher, Mother |
| | Erin Schuman, Ph.D.
Assoc. Prof. Biology, Caltech |
| | Terrence Sejnowski, Ph.D.
Dir., Computational Biology lab, Salk Institute |
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Why is Music So Significant?
Every known human culture has music, and how the brain recognizes and appreciates music -- a field known as the neurobiology of music -- reveals that there is no one 'music center' in our brain. Although specific parts of the brain are dedicated to the sense of sound, vast areas must work together to generate the complex experience we call music, including areas of working memory, forethought, movement and emotion.
Participants
| | Jeanne Bamberger Ph.D.
Musicologist MIT |
| | Robert Freeman Ph.D.
Dean, College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Austin |
| | Mark Jude Tramo M.D., Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital |
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Does Psychiatry Have a Split Personality?
Mental health is a significant national issue yet psychiatry still remains suspect as a science. In fact, psychiatry is said to have a "split personality," with the traditional psychiatrists and psychologists on one side and the high-tech medical scientists also called the biomedical psychiatrists on the other side. Do these new techniques tip the scale and put psychiatry into the realm of science and take it out of the realm of philosophy?
Participants
| | Nancy C. Andreasen M,D., Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, The American Journal of Psychiatry |
| | Robert Epstein Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Psychology Today |
| | Peter Loewenberg Ph.D.
Dean, Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute |
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Is Consciousness Definable?
One problem is that there are too many definitions! And getting these four guests to agree on what consciousness is and what causes it, is a fun but hopeless task that is revelatory at the same time.
Participants
| | Leslie Brothers M.D.
Psychiatrist |
| | Joseph E. Bogen M.D.
Neurosurgeon |
| | Stuart Hameroff M.D.
Anesthesiologist, Theoretician |
| | Christof Koch Ph.D.
Computation and Neural Systems |
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