Podcast: The Helix Center

The Dismal Science seems to analyze and involve most aspects of our lives.  While traditional macroeconomics continues to concern itself with  natural rates of inflation and unemployment, with tariffs and taxes, with supply and demand, at both the meso- and micro-levels, economics has productively linked with sociology, social history, anthropology, and psychology.… read more »

Supernatural and other circumventions of the natural process of conception have been an abundant wellspring for magical, mythological, and religious narratives. It was held that the widowed queen of an Egyptian pharaoh could pull his posthumous sperm into her womb to create a child.… read more »

A testament to its ubiquity, STRESS is woven into our very words, our thoughts and our emotions. We stress words to give them emphasis. We stress wood to make it stronger rather than splinter. And we feel distress, both when overwhelmed with dread, but also sometimes in joyous anticipation. … read more »

Placebos “work” for quite a few medical problems. But how? And what is the work they do?

What one thinks a medicine is capable of, one’s idea of that medicine, may affect us in the way “proper” medicines do. This implies that, in observing the work of a placebo we are watching an idea affect biology, the mind moving the body.… read more »

“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

– James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10

Populism refers to the political mobilization of “the people” against a perceived elite caste of professional politicians. And whereas a corps of elected representatives was Madison’s and Hamilton’s buffer against the tyranny of factions, from time to time the political class may come to be viewed as insufficiently attentive to the needs of their constituents and then become the target and nidus that creates a populist movement.… read more »

Justice is blind, the saying goes, which means that a person’s particulars – their social status, race, gender, etc. – should have no bearing on fair judgement in any legal dispute. By this standard, we are all considered equal before the law.… read more »

Memory is not a dusty cellar, open treasure chest, or sealed pandora’s box. It is a dynamic process, a stream of renditions and reflections. It conveys to us not what strictly happened, but embeds us in a retained internal moment, in an external encounter, or an imprint from another’s story. … read more »

The starting point of this roundtable discussion is Joseph LeDoux’s book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. LeDoux’s research on how the brain detects and responds to danger helped jumpstart and define the modern science of emotion.… read more »

The question of what the world in which we live consists of is as old as mankind itself. In philosophical jargon, this is the question of the ontological basis of reality. With the growing success of physics and other sciences, the idea of one fundamental ontology, that of  particles and fields, became dominant as a physicalist version of ontology.… read more »