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 Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog