Left to Right: moderator Ahmed Best with memory experts Elizabeth Loftus and Jeffrey Zacks.
Photo credit: Maria Baltazzi
“If it did not happen, do you think that I could make you remember that when you were a child, you were attacked by a vicious animal?”
“Could I make you remember…
The moment you enter the Los Angeles Athletic Club (LAAC) on 7th Street in downtown, you are transported back into history. It feels like you have just stepped into a 1920s noir film, replete with dark velvet curtains, brass, and brown leather. Or as Rick Loverd, Program Director of The…
How do people impact ecosystems? In so many cases we pretty much wreck things in our effort to make seemingly the whole world into a built environment, driving animals away or to extinction. However, there are examples of rapid evolution, when wild creatures adapt to human failings, triumphs, and disasters.…
It sure sounds like the logline for a Hollywood thriller. In late 2016, U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana, Cuba, began to report an unusual, perplexing set of symptoms. Loud noises accompanied by pain, pressure, or vibration. Dizziness, vertigo, and cognitive difficulties. Then personnel in the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China,…
It’s not news that fatty foods, sugary drinks, salty snacks and a sedentary lifestyle are bad for us. But recent trends in life expectancy in the United States are making it pretty clear just how bad all this is. For the first time since the 1800s, things aren’t going in…
If you saw the iconic film Alien, you may remember the alien parasite bursting out of the human host’s chest. That type of thing actually happens in nature with parasitoid wasps and their insect hosts. While they’re vital to our environment, the insect world is often a nearly incomprehensible realm…
Imagine controlling the computers around you with nothing but your thoughts. This idea may seem exclusively sci-fi, but brain-computer interfaces are already helping people with disabilities and enhancing our interactions with our built environment. In the future, warfighters might operate a drone hands-free on the battlefield or patients may regain…
There’s growing evidence that we experience other people’s behavior in deeper ways than we thought. When speaking or listening to someone, your brain activity synchronizes with theirs. When you’re stressed, your changing heart rate synchronizes with those around you, and then they feel the stress too. When someone hurts your…
Most of us have undergone general anesthesia and remember counting back from 10, getting to about 7 before drifting off to … where exactly? What are our brains doing while under the influence of anesthesia? Typically anesthesiologists do not spend a whole lot of time pondering that question, focusing instead…
Socially Assistive Robotics have massive potential to empower people and improve human quality of life. Maja Matarić wants to endow these machines with special qualities so that they can help us in new ways that go far beyond practical use. Ranging in potential applications from childhood development to elder care,…
