Marc Hauser
ok, summer plans:
i am working on a book about the nature of evil, and what the sciences have to say. title: Evilicious: how we evolved a taste for being bad (Viking/Penguin).
we are testing a unique set of patients in south africa who have a genetic disorder that results in calcification of an area known as the amygdala. by the time they are adults, they have no amygdala, bilaterally. we have tested several of these patients on a series of moral dilemmas and they are completely rule based, ignoring the utilitarian outcomes. this paper is being written up for Nature
we are testing a huge sample of children who have been frmi scanned and genotyped, and are clinically diagnosed as pre-psychopathic, looking for the genetic and neurobiological signatures of the disorder.
we are testing an extremely remote amazonian indian tribe, the mundurucu (brazil), to explore the potential universality of several moral principles uncovered in more traditional western populations.
we have two ongoing projects using immersive virtual reality to explore the nature of moral judgment and behavior, and with the hope of bringing this technology into the clinical arena, to test psychopaths, among others.
we have developed a battery of tasks to test for canine IQ! the hope is that with the genome mapped, we can map genes to cognitive/affective capacities, and their breakdown; the latter is particularly interesting given that many human disorders (anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder) are seen in dogs and treated with the same drugs.
and i am working on some conceptual pieces that align with work by stephen wolfram (of mathematica fame), exploring some computational primitives that may allow for the explosive generative capacities we see in different biological systems, but not others.
-marc
-----Original Message-----
From: marc hauser
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:19 PM
To: Lesley Groff
Subject: Re: Jeffrey Epstein
ok, summer plans:
i am working on a book about the nature of evil, and what the sciences have to say. title: Evilicious: how we evolved a taste for being bad (Viking/Penguin).
we are testing a unique set of patients in south africa who have a genetic disorder that results in calcification of an area known as the amygdala. by the time they are adults, they have no amygdala, bilaterally. we have tested several of these patients on a series of moral dilemmas and they are completely rule based, ignoring the utilitarian outcomes. this paper is being written up for Nature
we are testing a huge sample of children who have been frmi scanned and genotyped, and are clinically diagnosed as pre-psychopathic, looking for the genetic and neurobiological signatures of the disorder.
we are testing an extremely remote amazonian indian tribe, the mundurucu (brazil), to explore the potential universality of several moral principles uncovered in more traditional western populations.
we have two ongoing projects using immersive virtual reality to explore the nature of moral judgment and behavior, and with the hope of bringing this technology into the clinical arena, to test psychopaths, among others.
we have developed a battery of tasks to test for canine IQ! the hope is that with the genome mapped, we can map genes to cognitive/affective capacities, and their breakdown; the latter is particularly interesting given that many human disorders (anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder) are seen in dogs and treated with the same drugs.
and i am working on some conceptual pieces that align with work by stephen wolfram (of mathematica fame), exploring some computational primitives that may allow for the explosive generative capacities we see in different biological systems, but not others.
-marc