update

jeffrey

a couple updates. first,not as easy as one would think to recruit the "team." Damasio is on the A team, but is swamped for a couple ofmonths. he is key, and i know that you know each other. two others, both in england, are tied up as well, but are going to get back to me. one, mel slater, is a computer guy, and does the VR work. the second, essi viding, does behavioral genetics, imaging, and clinical populations, aimed at identifying genetic markers that are predictive of psychopathy.

second, have an idea that i think you might like, and hopefully might support. We now have the platform to do the VR. The software is built for running moral dilemmas. But here is the very exciting potential: if we bad a second set up of the hardware, we could use it to travel around the world to test different, and unique clinical populations, such as the patients in South Africa that have bilateral damage to the amygdala; Damasio's frontal lobe patients; Viding's kids who have been genotyped for psychopathy; to Germany with a collaborator who has genotyped kids with a gene that either expresses a low or high level of serotonin/dopamine; autistics in England and Italy; psychopaths in Holland and in USA. By testing these diffemt populations with the same tool, we will nail the underlying mechanisms that support moral decision making, and that fall down due to deficits. Price tag: — $80k.

Damasio is keen to talk if you want to bring him into the conversation.

best

marc

Marc Hauser,
Harvard College Professor
Departments ofPsychology and Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University
33 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA, 02138
office tel/fax: 617-496-7077
URL: www.wjh.harvard.cdu/—mnkylab

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