This event will feature a performance combining music, neuroscience, and magic, with The Amygdaloids presenting songs about the mind and brain alongside brief talks by Joseph LeDoux, and interludes of magic by Mark Mitton.

This roundtable will examine the promises and risks of synthetic and systems biology, including their potential to transform medicine, energy, and the creation of life, as well as their ethical and societal implications.

This roundtable will examine the role of curiosity and ignorance in driving scientific inquiry, including how we identify unknowns, generate questions, and apply these processes to education, research, and policy.

This roundtable will examine how music conveys meaning and evokes emotion, considering whether its effects are rooted in the work itself, formal structure, extra-musical associations, or listeners’ emotional responses, and whether these experiences are individual or universal.

This roundtable will feature a discussion and readings of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry by Bonnie Costello, Alice Quinn, Lloyd Schwartz, and Jean Valentine, focusing on what makes her work distinctive and enduring.

This roundtable will examine how fear shapes decision-making under extreme risk and consider how insights from economics, neuroscience, psychology, and topology can expand our understanding of rational choice in complex and uncertain situations.

This roundtable will examine the nature of love across different forms and perspectives, considering insights from history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, poetry, and other disciplines.

This roundtable will examine the poetry of Ghalib and the ghazal form by focusing on a single two-line verse as a way to understand the genre as a whole.

This roundtable will examine animal communication through its sonic and phonetic dimensions, exploring how different species transmit and interpret information and what this reveals about communication more broadly.

This roundtable will examine Darwin’s concept of male-male competition and its modern interpretations, including its relevance to human behavior and evolutionary biology.