MIT World » : The Changing Brain

MIT World » : The Changing Brain
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
How do our right and left eyes take in two separate streams of visual information and end up with a single view of the world? This question has come under intense scrutiny from neuroscientists for decades, and Mark Bear brings us up to date in his lecture. Single neurons in the visual cortex respond to particular stimuli (such as direction or color) and then the brain does some fancy filtering to process only the stimuli that match up in both eyes. Bear describes breakthrough experiments where researchers closed the eye of a kitten for just a day or so, and found that it was effectively “blind” after it opened. Correlating visual information to produce binocular images depends on neural connections that are forged during a “critical period” of visual cortex development. Bear’s work with visual system neurotransmitters has turned up intriguing connections to conditions like Fragile X syndrome. This form of mental retardation may result from a similar loss of neural connections during a parallel critical period after birth.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Before his arrival at MIT, Dr. Bear was on the faculty of Brown University School of Medicine for seventeen years. After receiving his B.S. degree from Duke University, he earned his Ph.D. degree in neurobiology at Brown. He took postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and from Leon Cooper at Brown. His honors include young investigator awards from the Office of Naval Research and the Society for Neuroscience. He is a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and the Neuroscience Research Program at the Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
There are serious audio problems until around 4:15, at which time the audio is dramatically improved.

Final Q&A happens at 47:51.

MIT World » : Architecture of the Brain

MIT World » : Architecture of the Brain
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
In this lecture Elly Nedivi provides an overview on the basics of brain anatomy, working her way up the spinal column to the deepest recesses of the cerebral cortex. Using vivid slides, we learn that physically distinguishable areas of the brain are responsible for specific functions, and that you can, for instance, build maps of the cortical areas dealing with each of the senses. Nedivi explains precisely why there is a safety zone in the spine for an epidural, and also show images of the earliest stages of embryonic brain development. While there are still deep mysteries hidden inside the human brain, Nedivi sheds light on the fascinating things that are known about this very complex human organ.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Elly Nedivi’s research focuses on the genetic basis for the brain’s plasticity—its capacity to adapt to change. She received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University Medical School and completed her postdoctoral training at The Weitzmann Institute in Israel. In 1998, after completing research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she joined the faculty of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Center for Learning and Memory at MIT. Dr. Nedivi is the recipient of the Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:03:27

MIT World » : The Ceaseless Society: What Happens to Our Mind, Body, and Spirit When we Just Never Stop?

SPEAKERS:
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Founding Director, Stress Reduction Clinic, University of Massachusetts Medical Center
Tenzin LS Priyadarshi: Buddhist Chaplain and Visiting Scholar, MIT
The Ven Priyadarshi's MIT site

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Throw aside that coarse caricature of a humming, pretzel-legged creature in flowing robes, suggests Jon Kabat-Zinn. Embrace instead the real meaning of meditation: “an effortless mindfulness” that involves paying purposeful attention to the present moment, in a nonjudgmental way. While many religious traditions incorporate this kind of practiced awareness, Kabat-Zinn makes the case for enriching all of our lives through meditation.
The problem with most of us, he says, is that “we can get entrained into the rhythms of society as if we’re guinea pigs in an uncontrolled experiment run wild. No one’s minding the store.” The demands of daily life and an increasingly digital age leave us living for the future, and “if the present moment is only a clever way to get someplace else, then we’re never where we actually are.” So we’re perpetually dissatisfied.
This leaves us open to stress, which exacerbates many kinds of illness. Kabat-Zinn describes research showing that the parents of chronically ill children, under chronic stress, experience accelerated shortening of telomeres (units on the ends of chromosomes), a process associated with aging. But parents with healthy kids who also report stress in their lives have a similarly high rate of telomere shortening. While you can’t change the actual stress in many cases, says Kabat-Zinn, you can relate to it differently. “How am I going to be in relation to the actuality of moments as they unfold – the good ones, bad ones and ugly ones?” When the brain gets going, it can be very creative, says Kabat-Zinn, and the body suffers.
Twenty five years of scientific study have begun to link the practice of mindfulness to medical benefits. Psoriasis patients practicing meditation while receiving UV light treatments healed at a rate four times faster than those just receiving light. If human beings fulfill their potential to become “wise and compassionate in relationship to pain and fear,” they may achieve “a degree of understanding in the human condition and life on this planet,” says Kabat-Zinn. “I consider that to be not only a human birthright but a human inheritance. If we squander it, we have nobody else to blame,” he concludes.
Tenzin LS Priyadarshi addresses the need to cultivate a mind that can truly live in the present, no longer regretting the past or worrying about the future.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:52:58.

MIT World » : The Ceaseless Society: What Happens to Our Mind, Body, and Spirit When we Just Never Stop?

MIT World » : Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate

SPEAKERS:
Raymond Kurzweil: Chairman and CEO, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.
David Gelernter: Professor of Computer Science, Yale University
Rodney A. Brooks: Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)
Ray Kurzweil confidently states that artificial intelligence will, in the not distant future, “master human intelligence.” He cites the “exponential power of growth in technology” that will enable both a minute, detailed understanding of the human brain, and the capacity for building a machine that can at least simulate original thought. The “frontier” such a machine must cross is emotional intelligence—“being funny, expressing loving sentiment…” And when this occurs, says Kurzweil, it’s not entirely clear that the entity will have achieved consciousness, since we have no “consciousness detector” to determine if it is capable of subjective experiences.
Acknowledging that his position will prove unpopular, David Gelernter launches his attack: “We won’t even be able to build super-intelligent zombies unless we approach the problem right.” This means admitting that a continuum of cognitive styles exists among humans. As for building a conscious machine, he sees no possibility of one emerging from even the most sophisticated software. “Consciousness means the presence of mental states strictly private with no visible functions or consequences. A conscious entity can call on a thought or memory merely to feel happy, be inspired, soothed, feel anger…” Software programs, by definition, can be separated out, peeled away and run in a logically identical way on any computing platform. How could such a program spontaneously give rise to “a new node of consciousness?”
Kurzweil concedes the difficulty of defining consciousness, but does not want to wish away the concept, since it serves as the basis for our moral and ethical systems. He maintains his argument that reverse engineering of the human brain will enable machines that can act with a level of complexity, from which somehow consciousness will emerge.
Gelernter replies that believing this “seems a completely arbitrary claim. Anything might be true, but I don’t see what makes the claim plausible.” Ultimately, he says, Kurzweil must explain objectively and scientifically what consciousness is -- “how it’s created and got there.” Kurzweil stakes his claim on our future capacity to model digitally the actions of billions of neurons and neurotransmitters, which in humans somehow give rise to consciousness. Gelernter believes such a machine might simulate mental states, but not actually pass muster as a conscious entity. Ultimately, he questions the desirability of building such computers: “We might reach the state some day when we prefer the company of a robot from Walmart to our next-door neighbor or roommates.”

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 0:59:10.


MIT World » : Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate

MIT World » : Emerging Technologies: The Innovators’ View

ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION:
Innovators are like jazz musicians... or like permanent teenagers. These and other analogies flowed, as top-flight tech inventors tried to put their fingers on the precise nature of innovation and how it can best be coaxed into existence.
Yair Goldfinger draws on his Israeli background to back up his notion that everyone has a creative bent, which awaits some catalyst to emerge. The Israeli Army, he says, is very small, “and they teach you from day one how to improvise.” If the rope is too short, you find the alternative. The culture of this small country, “surrounded by enemies” and short of investment money, forces collaboration among groups from different disciplines, with one innovation leading to the next. “Innovation is tied to time and place,” he says.
Like pornography, innovation is hard to define, says Philip Sharp, but when we see it, we recognize it. Not only is it part of the fabric of our culture, so much so that we in the West “take it for granted like air in the room,” but innovation is “the defining mode of the future.” Fifteen years from now, all we perceive as ordinary today “will be completely different.” And opportunities are greater now than at any other time in human history, Sharp believes. MIT, where “innovation is part of the drinking water,” can teach students how to master certain problems and “increase the probability enormously that they will be involved in innovation.” Sharp, reflecting on the complex, seven-plus year process involved in bringing pharmaceuticals to market, sees innovation as the product of an individual mind, but harnessed within teams.
When Jay Walker looks in the mirror, he sees a “serial innovator.” While serendipity sometimes operates, the “vast majority of innovation occurs where opportunity meets preparation….The harder innovators work, the luckier they get.” Innovation is “the unexpected effective solution to a problem,” not “an artistic dimension or personality trait.” Walker embraces innovation in politics and the arts, where profitability may be besides the point. But he sees among all innovators unhappiness with the status quo. Innovators especially require mentoring. “If you’re young, you need someone who gives you comfort that rule-breaking won’t take you to a dead end.” The biggest challenge for inventors involves storytelling -- communicating to others why their product solves a problem better. Good innovations require effective “propagation mechanisms.”
One recipe for innovation, says Iqbal Quadir, involves blending two different things that come together to create a third thing. Qadir “didn’t invent cellphones, and someone else invented microcredit,” yet he brought these elements together ingeniously in Bangladesh to create low-cost phone access for a hundred million people. So for him, “innovation is the difference that makes a difference.” Don’t mistake his work for social entrepreneurism, though: “If you solve a problem…society is happy to pay you for the difference that you’ve made.” In many countries, entrenched powers resent bold thinking, and try to quash it. “You see a bird pecking grains. Put a glass in between and after a while, the bird stops pecking. Human beings in difficult countries give up.” Such countries “need disruption, to get things moving again.” Newcomers bring fresh blood, and “once an innovation succeeds, they may have more resources to take bigger risks and try something more crazy.”

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:28:14.

MIT World » : Emerging Technologies: The Innovators’ View

MIT World » : The Dignity of Difference

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
In a talk that interweaves philosophy, history, religion and some classic rabbinic banter, Sir Jonathan Sacks calls for a “paradigm shift in understanding of religion” in the face of globalization, which threatens to pull the world apart in tribal and religious strife. The “three great institutions of modernity -- science, economics and politics” have failed us, and cannot answer the key questions of the 21st century, which are “Who am I” and “Why am I here,” says Sacks. With great difficulty, people increasingly confront others from different places, and develop a “politics of identity.” There is “no overarching neutral power,” says Sack, that will “make and hold peace between warring groups.”
The answer is to find a new mode of existence “that will allow fervent religious believers to live in the conscious presence of difference without violence and war.” Sacks’ travels back to the roots of culture and identity found in the Torah. We must “read the Bible again with new ears to hear a message simple and profound:” The human story begins with the world sharing one language and common speech. Inverting the order of Plato, the Bible sets the universal as a starting point. What is revolutionary about Genesis, says Sacks, is not that human beings can be in the image of God, but “that it applies to every single one of us, rich, poor, young or old,” and that after the Flood, God makes a covenant with all of humanity. These are the same sentiments that “lie behind the great foundational sentence of American political life: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Plato would have thought that sentence stark, raving mad.”
God sends Abraham and Sarah out of their land to be holy (“which means in the Bible distinctive and set apart”) -- to teach all humanity the dignity of difference.” Each culture is different yet “each in its way echoes and reaches out to God.” Sacks offers a non-religious version of this concept to his MIT audience. The “real miracle of nature is ordered complexity,” biodiversity, made possible by the unity of a single genetic language, DNA.
“What we face in the 21st century is a battle of religious ideas,” concludes Sacks. He aims his “message of hope for a dangerous world” not at the world’s extremists, “who will not be persuaded by secular words like freedom and democracy,” but rather, at those willing to “envisage a different and more gracious future.”

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Sir Jonathan Sacks has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth since September 1, 1991. Prior to becoming Chief Rabbi, Sacks had been Principal of Jews' College, London, the world's oldest rabbinical seminary, as well as rabbi of the Golders Green and Marble Arch synagogues in London. He gained rabbinic ordination from Jews' College as well as from London's Yeshiva Etz Chaim.
Educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained first class honours in Philosophy, he pursued postgraduate studies at New College, Oxford, and King’s College, London. Sacks has been Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, Sherman Lecturer at Manchester University, Riddell Lecturer at Newcastle University, Cook Lecturer at the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and St. Andrews and Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is currently Visiting Professor of Theology at Kings’ College London. He holds honorary doctorates from many universities. In September 2001, the Archbishop of Canterbury conferred on him a doctorate of Divinity in recognition of his first 10 years in the Chief Rabbinate.
In 1995, he received the Jerusalem Prize for his contribution to diaspora Jewish life. He was awarded a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in June 2005.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:31:03.

MIT World » : The Dignity of Difference

MIT World » : Religion and Political Violence

PANELISTS:
Mark Gobin: Associate Professor of International Diplomacy and Senior Research Associate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
Heather S. Gregg: PhD candidate at MIT in the Political Science Department
David Little: T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict at Harvard Divinity School Harvard Divinity School
Louise Richardson: Executive Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Roger Petersen: Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT

MIT World » : Religion and Political Violence

MIT World » : Expand Your Mind: Getting a Grasp on Consciousness

SPEAKERS:
Alexander Shulgin: Pharmacologist and Chemist
Christof Koch: Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, California Institute of Technology
Patricia Churchland: Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
Ira Flatow, MODERATOR: Host/Executive Producer, Talk of the Nation: Science Friday

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
At some point, these panelists suggest, the issue of defining consciousness may just disappear. Suggests Christof Koch: “Let’s treat consciousness as an empirical problem to be tackled by the biological sciences.”
Koch makes distinctions between different kinds of consciousness: sleep and its varied stages; awareness of sounds, sights and smells; levels of arousal. All these different states are properties “of complex adaptive networks with massive feedback shaped by natural selection.” And there are many behaviors that occur without consciousness. “When we talk, we don’t know what we’re going to say,” says Koch. His research has focused on finding “neural correlates of consciousness.” In one experiment with patients whose brains were implanted with 100 electrodes, he flashed pictures of Jennifer Aniston and the Sydney Opera House. While the patients could not remember what they’d seen, neurons responded selectively to these images. Studies like this, with even more sensitive tools, may some day help develop an information-based theory of consciousness, Koch says.
Mental phenomena are nothing but phenomena of the physical brain, says Patricia Churchland. It’s “an illusion of the brain” to think that we have a “nonphysical soul that does our feeling.” But how the brain creates constructs of itself and things in the world remains a major puzzle. For instance, how does a brain “habitually represent goals, plans and projects -- things that don’t yet exist?” And what about the huge amount of spontaneous activity in the brain that occurs while we’re resting? We don’t understand how the “organization of a motor response is achieved,” nor how these responses are integrated across sensory systems together with memory. Churchland anticipates a fundamental shift in looking at the brain that will merge philosophical and neurobiological issues.
In his day, Alexander Shulgin explored consciousness through “the art of chemistry.” He synthesized a version of mescaline and invented other psychedelic drugs, experimenting on himself, before the era of government and university regulations. “Each material had to be learned, as a new meeting…. The beauty of the final results, finding out what the effects were, was that you couldn’t be wrong.” If he reported visual enhancements, and recall of memories, his data was “always a winner,” because it was mostly a matter of subjective experience. Shulgin rues the laws and propaganda against psychedelic drugs, because he believes these drugs would serve as a useful “probe to look at the function of mind.”

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:44:28.

MIT World » : Expand Your Mind: Getting a Grasp on Consciousness

MIT World » : Change Your Mind: Memory and Disease

SPEAKERS:
Thomas Insel: Director, National Institute of Mental Health

Li-Huei Tsai: Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School

Kerry Ressler: Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, Emory University School of Medicine

Ira Flatow, MODERATOR: Host/Executive Producer, Talk of the Nation: Science Friday

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
How do we distinguish our friends from foes? How does dementia destroy memory? And how can past experience invade the present with destructive force? Scientists are closing in on the biochemical roots of these neurological puzzles.
Thomas Insel describes the profound impact of a small group of neuropeptides on social behavior in animals, from worms to humans. Oxytocin, the hormone which turns on maternal behavior and cognition, turns out to play a large role in determining social memories. Mice whose genes for producing oxytocin are knocked out can’t seem to remember animals they’ve met 30 minutes earlier – what Insel describes as “dense social amnesia.” An area of the brain’s amygdala is particularly rich in oxytocin receptors, and when the peptide is injected into a nearby ventricle, the animals’ social interactions revert more closely to normal behavior. Oxytocin is a useful tool for interrogating the circuitry that enables humans to determine “who’s important to me, who I’d die for, who I’m pair-bonded with, who will take care of me,” says Insel.
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), which afflicts 20 million people worldwide, begins by literally clogging and tangling the hippocampus, the part of the brain essential for learning and memory. Li-Huei Tsai and other researchers have found “compelling evidence” that a small protein may be critically important in activating AD’s awful atrophy of memory. By manipulating specific enzymes, Tsai has managed to model in animals “all the pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s Disease,” and zero in on the source of the plaques and tangles seen in human Alzheimer’s patients. Tsai foresees drug interventions that inhibit these enzymes. But, she says, a big task remains “even after we’re successful in halting a deleterious process--how can we restore learning and retrieve lost memory in AD patients?”
Why is it that only some people exposed to a shocking event develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Kerry Ressler’s research posits that some kind of learning must take place in the brain’s amygdala -- its fear response center—that cannot readily be extinguished. Researchers have tracked down a molecular factor that increases “after learning of fear or extinction of fear.” He believes that if this molecule is somehow blocked from doing its job, then someone suffering from PTSD cannot extinguish fear. In a fortuitous medical convergence, the drug D-cycloserine, which has been approved for years to treat tuberculosis, proves very effective in enhancing the effects of the molecule, and reducing fear of all kinds. One example: When people with fear of heights were given D-cycloserine as they took rides in elevators, they reported a significant, long-lasting reduction in their phobias.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:25:36.

MIT World » : Change Your Mind: Memory and Disease

MIT World » : The Brain and Mind

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
In his kickoff lecture for this series on neuroscience, Sur provides both a current overview of brain models and function, and a peek at his own research. From the moment of conception, a developing animal begins to grow cortical pathways and networks that will eventually allow it to respond to the world outside. These increasingly sophisticated networks—for hearing, vision, touch—provide feedback to the evolving brain. For humans, at least half the brain is devoted directly or indirectly to processing vision, says Sur. Yet there is a single model for understanding how vision works: orientation selectivity. Regions of neural cells react only to specific stimuli, such as vertical or horizontal stripes, obliques or diagonals. Images of these activated cell networks from Sur’s lab resemble pinwheels. In Sur’s research on newborn ferrets, he rewired visual inputs to the animals’ hearing center, and found the same patterned responses to specific shapes among cells—more pinwheels. In essence, Sur enabled ferrets to “see” through their hearing cortex. This dramatic experiment demonstrates the plasticity of brain networks, and suggests there might be ways to repair human brains after stroke or other traumas.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Mriganka Sur has received numerous awards and honors, including the Charles Judson Herrick Award from the American Association of Anatomists (1983), the A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1985), the McKnight Neuroscience Development Award (1988), the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award (1989), and the School of Science Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2000).

Sur graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur in 1974 with a Bachelor of Technology degree. He received an M.S. (1975) and Ph.D. (1978) from Vanderbilt University. After doing postdoctoral research at SUNY Stony Brook and a faculty appointment at Yale University School of Medicine, Sur joined the faculty of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in 1986. He was named full Professor in 1993, associate department head in 1994, and head in 1997.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 42:19

MIT World » : The Brain and Mind

MIT World » : A Beautiful Mind: Genius, Madness, Reawakening

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Dr. Sylvia Nasar, the author of "A Beautiful Mind" tells the extraordinary story of mathematician John Nash a drama about the mystery of the human mind and shares some of her experiences in writing her prize-winning biography.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Sylvia Nasar, journalist, economist and author of the award-winning "A Beautiful Mind" is the first to hold the Knight Chair in Journalism, with an emphasis on business and economics reporting, at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
Prior to her appointment at Columbia, Dr. Nasar was an economics reporter at The New York Times, and has been a writer at Fortune and a columnist at U.S. News & World Report. She is currently a By-Fellow in Churchill College at Cambridge University in England, where she is working on a book about 20th century economic thinkers.
Nasar's first book, "A Beautiful Mind" won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Helen Bernstein Journalism Award, and the Rhone Poulenc Prize for Science Writing and, most recently, was honored by the three leading American mathematics societies. Translated into more than a half dozen foreign languages, "A Beautiful Mind" was adapted for the screen and released as feature film in 2001, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.
A native of Germany, Nasar grew up in New York, Washington, DC and Ankara, Turkey. She studied literature at Antioch College and completed a master's degree in economics at New York University, where she subsequently conducted research with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief at the Institute for Economic Analysis.

MIT World » : A Beautiful Mind: Genius, Madness, Reawakening

MIT World » : Cognitive Control: Understanding the Brain's Executive

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
We often take it for granted that we know the difference between a cat and a dog. Where and how do we store the visual information that categorizes “catness” in our minds, so that the next time we see a cat, we know that it is not a dog?
Earl Miller has studied this process of categorization with monkeys to better understand the human brain’s processes. Miller’s research is focused on the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher level intellectual or “executive activities”. A monkey’s brain is monitored to see how its “cat- recognition” neurons fire electric signals that enable this process to work. He has determined that the prefrontal cortex is extremely active when the monkey learns a task, and then goes “offline” when the task becomes automatic. Like humans learning to drive a car, at first we focus mental effort on each act of steering or braking, but eventually driving becomes somewhat routine. Mapping neural and chemical pathways for these executive brain functions may ultimately lead to therapies for dysfunctions such at attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Earl K. Miller’s work focuses on the region of the brain that guides complex thought and action. He has received numerous scientific awards, including the Pew Scholar Award, McKnight Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, John Merck Scholar Award, the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award, and the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award. After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton University, Miller trained at the National Institute of Mental Health and came to MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1995.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video Length is 1:01:09

MIT World » : Cognitive Control: Understanding the Brain's Executive

MIT World » : Invention and Innovation: Emerging Technologies that Will Change the World The Inventor View

Invention and Innovation: Emerging Technologies that Will Change the World
The Inventor View
MODERATOR:
Spencer Reiss
Contributing Editor, Technology Review
MODERATOR: Spencer Reiss

PANELISTS:
Kari Stefansson: CEO, deCODE genetics, Inc.
deCODE genetics site
Edward Jung: Co-Founder and Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures
Intellectual Ventures site
Craig Venter: President, The Venter Institute
Venter Institute site
Sorcerer 2 Expedition site
Steve Wozniak: Co-Founder, Apple Computer
Woz Home

ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION:
When Steve Wozniak was young, he found his first transistor radio inspiring. He has channeled his passion for useful, convenient machines into a new company that makes global positioning satellite (GPS) locators for everyday purposes. He imagines tagging a child or dog with a GPS device, so you can “find out if it gets to where it shouldn’t.” Another goal for his portable GPS: as an aide to emergency first responders, who often must find people trapped in buildings.
Kari Stefannson has archived the genealogy of Icelanders going back 1100 years, in order to track down common inherited diseases and potentially cure them. There are “genes that predispose and genes that protect,” and Stefannson hopes to manipulate the function of disease genes so as to prevent the onset of such illnesses as myocardial infarction.
“The golden age of invention is right now,” claims Edward Jung, because of recent discoveries in science, and fundamental technological change. He points to materials that can “bend light backwards, or optically resolve things at sub-wavelengths,” which will lead to powerful new inventions such as diagnostics that can see into the body at any depth. With the help of efficient capital movement, and a rise in global education levels, we’ll see a rise in the “the ability to manufacture ideas” rapidly.
Avid sailor Craig Venter has trawled for microbes in the Sargasso Sea and discovered more than a million new genes and 1,800 new species. Among them are organisms that thrive on carbon dioxide. Venter hopes to re-engineer some of these unique microbes genetically, into “designed species” that may reduce environmental CO2 levels, as well as provide new foods and energy sources. “Biology can do much more sophisticated chemistry than the best chemists,” says Venter.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:30:07.
MIT World » : Invention and Innovation: Emerging Technologies that Will Change the World<br> The Inventor View

MIT World » : Technology for the 21st Century

Technology for the 21st Century
SPEAKER:
Scott C. Donnelly
Senior Vice President General Electric Global Research
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Scott C. Donnelly is the General Electric Company's Senior Vice President for research and development and a member of the company's Corporate Executive Council. He directs GE Global Research, one of the world's largest and most diversified industrial research organizations. At this corporate-level division, some 2,300 people - including approximately 1,700 scientists, engineers, and technicians from virtually every major scientific and engineering discipline - concentrate their efforts on the company's longer-range technology needs. The organization has facilities in the United States, India, and China working in collaboration with GE businesses around the world.

Donnelly serves on the Industrial Advisory Committee of several engineering colleges, the Research Foundation of the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Center for Innovation in Minimally Invasive Therapy at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also serves as a director of GE Capital Corporation and GE Capital Services Inc.

MIT World » : Technology for the 21st Century

MIT World » : Energy in a Global Context

Energy in a Global Context
SPEAKER:
Susan Hockfield
MIT President
Professor of Neuroscience
SPEAKERS:
Susan Hockfield: MIT President
Hockfield's MIT biography

Nazli Choucri: Professor of Political Science MIT
Choucri's website

ABOUT THE LECTURE:
As Susan Hockfield recounts, MIT presentations on disruptive energy research at the most recent World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, provided the single glimmer of optimism for a Time Magazine correspondent. Paraphrasing him, she says, “What MIT is good for: a dose of reality-based hope that we can address in a real way the most serious of the world’s great challenges.”
MIT has committed body and soul to helping solve the problem of sustainable energy. Hockfield describes an “overwhelming call” from staff, students and alumni to pursue this issue in the coming decades. Reaching across all schools, demanding new forms of collaboration and interdisciplinary effort, MIT has launched an Energy Initiative to address three main themes: new technology for a cleaner future; improving today’s energy systems for changes in the near term; and addressing challenges posed by emerging economies.
Hockfield says researchers seek no silver bullet but that MIT is committed to a “portfolio of solutions.” She sees this vast academic enterprise providing the “same kind of catalytic inspirational effect that the Apollo program had on my generation” and triggering a cycle of innovation that will help strengthen the nation’s economy.

Nazli Choucri situates the current energy crisis in global reality. She describes how the legacies of the 20th century frame expectations and politics in the 21st century around energy supply, demand and distribution.
A rising world population (in general) and mass migration create pressure, as does a rapidly rising quality of life in developing nations. World trade has led to a “shifting structure of economies and societies,” including the somewhat hopeful evolution of economies involving knowledge creation and internet based interactions.
Choucri sees as well the emergence of a “dark side” in the 20th century: unstable or hostile nations controlling energy resources; more countries in conflict or under threat due to climate issues, as dependence on fossil fuels expands; and environmental dangers (such as big storms) multiplying. Also, new players sit at the table -- more multinational corporations, more sovereign states, NGOs -- with unpredictable or competing agendas.
Choucri believes we also gained some useful advantages during the last century, including a better understanding of the connections among energy, environment and the economy. But the world has yet to figure out a new politics for managing these issues. She says that global volatility means greater difficulty achieving “a politics of consensus” around global energy strategies, and we “now must push the envelope on collaboration,” finding “new strategies for negotiation,” assuming we can first find a national consensus.

NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:30:56.

MIT World » : Energy in a Global Context

MIT World » : Where Morals Come From-And Why it Matters

Where Morals Come From-And Why it Matters
MODERATOR:
Christopher Moore
Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Mitsui CD Chair, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
PANELISTS:
Beatriz Luna: Associate Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh
Luna's Univeristy of Pittsburgh website
John Mikhail: Associate Professor, Law Center and Philosophy Department, Georgetown University
Mikhail's Georgetown website
Patrick Byrne: Professor of Philosophy, Boston College
Byrne's Boston College website

ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION:
A neuroscientist, lawyer and philosopher together manage to wrap their arms around the centuries’ old question of the origins of human morality.
Beatriz Luna’s behavioral and imaging studies of the human brain provide evidence of an innate circuitry supporting moral cognition, and of distinct phases of development that directly relate to a person’s ability to make a moral judgment. While the “cognitive control of behavior matures in adolescence,” there are limitations in executive processes in the brain “that may limit an adolescent’s ability to consistently determine and apply moral judgment.” Luna says she “doesn’t like people thinking adolescence is a disease.” Instead, she sees it “as the last stop we have to influence what the brain is going to look like,” and if we are interested in promoting responsible and ethical behavior, “maybe we need to sculpt the brain.” She notes that her research has implications for an often unforgiving juvenile justice system.
John Mikhail is working on a framework for a universal moral grammar that in some ways parallels the universal linguistic grammar of his mentor, Noam Chomsky. There’s plenty of psychological evidence that children appear biologically prepared to act morally. Mikhail cites studies showing three-year–old children able to distinguish moral rules from social conventions, and to distinguish lies from innocent or negligent mistakes. He points to other signs of universal morality, such as prohibitions against murder and rape, commonalities in criminal law worldwide. Mikhail is methodically constructing “an experimental version of Socratic methods,” in some sense testing the hypothesis that children are intuitive lawyers. The “scientific project here is to … flesh out in a comprehensive way what’s going on in our processing” that lies behind our moral principles.
There are four wellsprings of human morality, believes Patrick Byrne. Reason -- “the deep desire to know and do what is right” -- guides humans toward principles. Byrne sees an innate need in humans to solve problems and to conduct “critical conversations” with themelves on the best ways to act and live. Simultaneously, we selectively gather moral precepts from society, from what others say is right or wrong. The brain is yet another source of morality. Byrne invokes the work of animal behaviorists, who have traced the evolution of sympathy and empathy in socially organized animals. Here as well, humans apply reason “in deciding who to help, why and when.” Byrne cites the laws of God as another basis for moral conduct. God, says Byrne, “gives us the capacity to reason toward creative, critical and selective determination of what’s the best way to live our lives and act, in concert and in collaboration with others.”

MIT World » : Where Morals Come From-And Why it Matters

MIT World » : Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence
MODERATOR:
David Thorburn
MIT Professor of Literature
MacVicar Faculty Fellow
Director, MIT Communications Forum

PANELISTS:
Thomas W. Malone: Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
Sloan Faculty Profile page
Malone's page on the Center for Coordination Science site
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Alex (Sandy) Pentland: Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Director of Human Dynamics Research, MIT Media Lab
Pentland's Media Lab site
Karim R. Lakhani: Assistant Professor, Technology and Operations Management Unit, Harvard Business School
Lakhani's HBS website
ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION:
Can human beings, with the help of smart machines, not merely avoid “collective idiocy” (in Sandy Pentland’s words), but actually achieve a degree of intelligence previously unattainable by either humans or machines alone? These three panelists study the possibilities from different angles.

MIT World » : Collective Intelligence: "Collective Intelligence"