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

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

The Random Universe - Andrew Jaffe *****

This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence. The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...

Search This Blog