Learning and the Brain conference, San Francisco, day 2

[Connie Weber]

Look what's on the docket today, the stuff of dreams:


Emotional Awareness

This talk will describe four emotional skills and provide information on how to acquire them. Those skills include: (1) Recognizing the emotions others are experiencing; (2) using that information constructively; (3) Recognizing your own emotional state and what is triggering emotional episodes you regret afterwards; and (4) exploring your own unique way of experiencing emotions -- your emotional profile.
Paul Ekman, PhD, Social Psychologist; Director, Paul Ekman Group LLC; Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, University of California Medical School, San Francisco; co-author with the Dalai Lama of Emotional Awareness: Overcoming Obstacles to Psychological Compassion (2008); author, Emotions Revealed (2007, 2nd edition); considered one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century by the American Psychological Association

Mirror People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others

This talk will describe the recent discovery of mirror neurons and their role in empathy and social relations.
Marco Iacoboni, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Neuropsychiatric Institute; Director, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab., Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles; author of the new book, Mirror People: The Science of How We Connect with Others (2008)


The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Developing Social Brains

Although we experience ourselves as individual, we are socially, emotionally, and biologically interwoven with those around us. This talk will explore the social brain from the perspective of interpersonal neurobiology, how we communicate across "the social synapse" and how our social brains allow us to interweave our hearts and minds. We will focus on the various ways in which evolution has shaped our complex communication and how we use these mechanisms to connect with and educate our students. Participants will understand how the brain evolved into a social organ, will gain deeper insight into the broad bandwidth of unconscious communication between "individuals," and will come to have a better understanding of some of the specialized brain mechanisms which weave individuals into the "superorganism" we call the human species.

Louis J. Cozolino, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Graduate School of Education and Psychology, Pepperdine University; author of The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain (2006), The Healthy Aging Brain: Sustaining Attachment, Attaining Wisdom (2008), and Neuroscience of Psychotherapy (2002)


I've got to do some hand aerobics here, to get all warmed up for the exercise of taking notes. Yesterday I got about 20 pages. Yes, I choose to take notes by hand in events like this. Helps me to get the information into my head. I like a particular kind of pen (Pilot, Zebra F301), and like varying colors. I LOVE developing coding systems for my notes. Ok, got to get ready. What a day it'll be. What I listed above is only the morning!