"What is Consciousness -- our inner thoughts,
feelings, personalities -- the hidden 'Stuff'
of our Private Selves? Is there something
special about Consciousness, something of the
mind not in the brain? This is self awareness,
the interior mental experience we call
Consciousness. What is the importance of studying
Consciousness? The panel discusses the concept of
human consciousness."
"Closer to Truth brings together leading
scientists, scholars and artists to debate the
fundamental issues of our times. Instituted in
the sixties, clinical drug trials today have
become a vast and expensive enterprise in which
drug companies can spend over $100 million to
bring a new molecule to market. FDA procedures
are complex and elaborate as they should be, in
order to bring new drugs to market quickly to
help people in need, but to do good science to
protect the public from a drug's potentially
dangerous side effects. Joining Robert Kuhn are Alexander Capron,
Professor of Law and Medicine, USC; Andrea Kovacs, Director, HIV
Family Clinic, USC; and Robert Temple, Associate Director, Medical
Policy, FDA."
"Two fundamental theories -- quantum mechanics and
relativity -- have changed forever our
understanding of reality. Quantum mechanics
describes the very small-scale structure of atoms
and their components. Relativity describes the
very large-scale structure of space and time.
Today's panelists discuss why some physicists
have suddenly become obsessed with using physics
to explain the human mind, consciousness and how
we think. Joining host Robert Kuhn are sci-fi
novelist Gregory Benford; physicist James Trefil;
consciousness expert David Chalmers; philosopher of mind John Searle;
and theoretical physicist Fred Alan Wolf. "
"Closer to Truth brings together leading
scientists, scholars and artists to debate the
fundamental issues of our times. 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. Joining host
Robert Kuhn are Leslie Brothers, Psychiatrist;
Joseph E. Bogen, Neurosurgeon; Stuart Hameroff,
Anesthesiologist; and Christof Koch, Computation
and Neural Systems."
"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.
Joining host Robert Kuhn are Eric Courchesne,
Professor of Neuroscience, UC San Diego; Portia
Iversen of Cure Autism Now; Teacher Soma
Mukhopadhyay; Erin Schuman, Associate Professor
of Biology, Caltech; and Terrence Sejnowski, Director of
Computational Biology, Salk Institute."
"Light-speed technology is accelerating, and even
changing the way we think. So much so that you're
irritated when there is a 10-second delay in
downloading an Internet site even when just a few
years ago you were thrilled to a same-day fax.
Today's expert panelists take on technology to
discuss what it is about technology that is
affecting our modes of thought, how thinking has
changed, and how humans can keep up with the raging
pace of technological change. Joining host Robert
Kuhn are geopolitical economist Francis Fukuyama;
artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky; fuzzy logic expert Bart
Kosko; planetary scientist Bruce Murray and technological innovator
George Kozmetsky."
"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? Nancy C.
Andreasen, Editor-in-Chief, The American
Journal of Psychiatry; Robert Epstein, Editor-in-Chief, Psychology
Today; and Peter Loewenberg, Southern California Psychoanalytic
Institute join host Robert Kuhn to debate the science of mental
health."
"For years we thought that in order to be creative
you had to 'be born with it.' Now, new thinking
on the subject reveals that everyone can learn to
be more imaginative and creative -- all you need
is high energy and strong motivation. Find out
how to tap into this learned skill from today's
expert panelists. Joining host Robert Kuhn are
scientist and sci-fi novelist Gregory Benford;
creativity and happiness authority Mihaly
Csikszentmihaly; corporate creativity expert John
Kao; artist Todd Siler; and poet Rhoda Janzen."
"Closer to Truth brings together leading
scientists, scholars and artists to debate
many of today's fundamental issues. Joining
host Robert Kuhn is consciousness expert David
Chalmers; philosopher of mind John Searle;
anthropologist Marilyn Schlitz; theoretical
physicist Fred Alan Wolf; and neuropsychologist
Barry Beyerstein. The panelists discuss the
connection between the gray matter called a brain,
the thoughts we think, the mind-body connection,
and whether there's something more to the human
mind than what resides in the brain."
