Molecular Horizons Seminar - Professor George Paxinos (ONLINE EVENT)

Psychology lost its soul in the 1930s. The concept of “soul” is not needed to either understand or modify behaviour. Our brain is the riverbed that holds and channels our stream of consciousness (Koch, 2012). It is molded by family and culture. Experience sculpts our character from the genetic material we are granted as Phidias sculpted Apollo from a block of Parian marble. Alzheimer’s disease will pay an unwelcome visit to many of us at end of life. It will disrupt the internal structure of our neurons and we will be living evidence the mind is the product of the brain and has no influence on it. Which one of us would not like to discard our depression, anxieties, obsessions, compulsions, our unrequited love? It seems the puppet is free only in as much as it loves its strings (Harris, 2012). Paxinos will speak on his journey through the brain and on the neuroscience behind A River Divided, a novel in the environmental genre that may have broken a record in the time it took him to complete––21 years. He will speak of the neuroscience principles on the formation of heroes of the novel, giving a historical account of the origin of ideas of  the mind, the soul, free will and consciousness.