Tag Archives: Psychology

Can the laws of physics disprove God?

Monica Grady CBE is a leading British space scientist, primarily known for her work on meteorites. Since 2005, she has been Professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University, and is currently Head of the Department of Physical Sciences.
Prior to 2005, Grady was based at the Natural History Museum in London, where she curated the UK’s national collection of meteorites. She graduated from the University of Durham in 1979, then went on to complete a Ph.D. on carbon in stony meteorites at Darwin College, Cambridge in 1982. Since then, she has built up an international reputation in meteoritics, publishing many papers on the carbon and nitrogen isotope geochemistry of primitive meteorites, on Martian meteorites, and on interstellar components of meteorites. She gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2003, on the subject “A Voyage in Space and Time”. Asteroid (4731) was named Monicagrady in her honour.
Grady was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to space sciences. She is the first UK scientist to be President of the international Meteoritical Society.

Is it time to give up on consciousness as ‘the ghost in the machine’?

Peter Halligan is currently Hon Professor of Neuropsychology at Cardiff University and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Welsh Government .
Following training in psychology and philosophy at University College Dublin, and 14 years in the Departments of Clinical Neurology and Experimental Psychology at Oxford University he moved to Cardiff in 2000
Awarded the British Psychological Society’s Presidents’ Award for outstanding contributions to Psychology in 2005, he is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, Irish Psychological Society, Royal society of Biology and Academy of Medical Sciences . He was co-editor of the Cognitive Neuropsychiatry.

David A Oakley is Emeritus Professor of Psychology, UCL and Honorary Professor, School of Psychology, University of Cardiff.
“My earliest research was into the cortical and subcortical substrates of learning and memory (primarily in the context of Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning). More recently I have been interested in hypnosis and suggestion as topics in their own right, as therapeutic techniques, as a means of exploring pain, consciousness and the voluntary control of action, and in the creation of experimental analogues of clinical conditions, such as conversion disorder and functional pain.”

Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, Editorial Consultant: International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Associate Editor: APA Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Reasearch and Practice.

Alejandro Peralta Soler: Schizophrenia and human nature

This paper analyzes the mental disease schizophrenia from a generic perspective, which includes its manifestations in art. The hypothesis is that schizophrenia is more than a disease and may be a reflection of distinctive features which are unique to the human species. Examination of works of art produced by schizophrenic patients and recent genetic studies support the idea that schizophrenia may represent an extreme manifestation of human nature.

Flesh and the Angels

A meditation on creativity in life, art and psychotherapy, its expression as a phenomenology of bursting, and the challenge of keeping going, with John Coltrane, Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as companions.

Derek Bean is a practising Existential-Phenomenological Psychotherapist and registered member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy.

David Fore: Poems

David Livingstone Fore is a researcher and designer living in Oakland, California. His most recent work explores relationships between climate changes taking place in the world and those taking place in our bodies.

Is humanity doomed because we can’t plan for the long term? Three experts discuss

Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Experimental Psycology, University of Oxford. His research is concerned with trying to understand the behavioural, cognitive and neuroendocrinological mechanisms that underpin social bonding in primates (in general) and humans (in particular).

Chris Zebrowski is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Loughborough University. His research analyses the concept of resilience in the context of the changing rationalities and practices of risk management and security.

Per Olsson is a Researcher, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. He is a transdisciplinary researcher and has worked in the interface of natural and social sciences and humanities. His current research focuses on agency and system entrepreneurship, social-ecological innovations, transformations to sustainability, and how to reverse current trends of crossing critical thresholds and tipping points in the Earth system.

Futurology: how a group of visionaries looked beyond the possible a century ago and predicted today’s world

Max Saunders is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, where he teaches modern literature. From September 2019 he will be Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham.
He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2008-10 to research the To-Day and To-Morrow book series. His resulting book on the series and futurology, ‘Imagined Futures’, is published by Oxford University Press (2019).

It’s not easy to make landscape a place: you have to feel it

Fiona Stafford is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and tutorial fellow at Somerville College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She works on literature of the Romantic period, especially Austen, Burns, Clare, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on their literary influences on modern poetry. Her research interests also include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century culture; Irish and Scottish literature (post 1700); Archipelagic literature and art; Place and Nature Writing (old and new); Trees, Flowers and their cultural history; Environmental Humanities; literature and the visual arts.

Her most recent book is ‘The Brief Life of Flowers’ (2018). Like her acclaimed book, ‘The Long, Long Life of Trees’ (2016), it draws on first hand observation, literature, art, folklore, mythology, cultural history, natural science, botany, history of medicine.