Entangled Minds

Entangled Minds in Portuguese.

Here are a few pictures from the Bial Foundation conference, Behind and Beyond the Brain , which took place during the last few days of March in Porto, Portugal. This picture is during a panel discussion held after the second day's main session, on the theme of emotions and psi. From the left it's me, Roger Nelson, Dick Bierman, Daryl Bem and Stefan Schmidt. Here I am on the final panel discussion at the end of the conference, with moderator Fernando Lopes da Silva, Ralph Adolphs and Paul Ekman. One thing that struck me during this conference, which was about two-thirds on the cognitive and social neurosciences and one-third on psi, was how similar the practice of today's neurosciences are to what I used to do when I was an electrical engineer (EE): reverse engineer black boxes. As an EE I would figure out how electronic devices worked by tracing circuits, injecting signals, studying the operation of components both in and out of the circuit, and in general see how change...

I just spent a week in Porto, Portugal, at the 7th biannual symposium of the Bial Foundation. This unique Foundation is supporting perhaps 80% of the world's experimental psi research, and it also supports mainstream studies in psychophysiology and the neurosciences. The symposium brings together researchers from all these domains, and the three-day conference is unusually eclectic and interesting. This one was no different -- the theme was emotion, and there were some very interesting presentations about the neuroscience, cognitive and social science of emotions, as well as a half day of talks on psi and emotion. I discovered at the meeting that the Portuguese translation of Entangled Minds was published last year, so I bought a copy. I'll post more about this meeting, perhaps including some pictures and videos I took in Portugal, when I return home. (I'm writing this from Dulles airport near Washington DC, waiting for a flight.)