Paul Zak – Four Way Interview

Paul J. Zak has PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and postgraduate training in neuroscience from Harvard. He is now Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management (3 for the price of one!) at Claremont and Clinical Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. He has recently written The Moral Molecule on his work and adventures with oxytocin.

Why science?

Early in my life I rejected the “thou shall” and “thou shall not” top-down view of morality, and then being conned as a teenager led to an interest in human behavior. Could there be a scientific reason why people are good or evil? I spent 10 years in the laboratory and doing field studies to figure this out and discovered the key role for little-studied neurochemical called oxytocin as a key governor of moral behavior.

Why this book?

I have had so many inquiries about my work from the general public, from patients and their families, and from lawyers and judges that I thought it would be useful (and fun!) to lay out the role of oxytocin across these various realms, and how moral behaviors support greater societal prosperity that then stimulates greater morality. Plus, I’ve done some really crazy experiments to put my findings to the test that are fun to discuss, like taking blood samples at a wedding.

What’s next?

My lab is now actively applying this work to help organizations function more effectively. For example, working with companies to design oxytocin-rich environments where people are highly engaged and happy at work. And, with the US military to help them optimize the training of soliders to keep them safe.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

So many things! First, that this research has spawned a number of clinical trials that are seeking to use oxytocin to help patients. Second, that the neuroscience I’ve done is actionable–it is being used by organizations, cities, and individuals to foster empathy and connection in order to improve the quality of life. Third, recognizing and celebrating the often amazing things that human beings do for each other–including strangers–as part of our human moral nature. We are a much kinder and caring a species than I think we give ourselves credit for, and I show evidence that our kindness is actually increasing in the world. That’s exciting!

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Vector - Robyn Arianrhod ****

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog