Art and the Mind - How the Brain processes, creates and understands art.
Religion and the brain - What is happening in the human brain when we have a “spiritual” experience, and what are the implications for traditional religion?
The Future of Psychiatry - “talking “ therapies versus psychopharmaceutical solutions for mental illness and the development of direct brain manipulation technology such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and “pacemaker” implants
Altered States: - Apparitions, out-of-the-body experiences, hallucinations, trance, dissociation, near death experiences and other weird and wonderful states
Communication without words - Mirror neurons, theory of mind, body language – the rains techniques for getting into the minds of others..
Language and Thought – Is language the expression of thought, or is a thought the creation of language? Can we actually think anything without putting words to it?
Consciousness -What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it here? Or is it not here at all……?
Visual experience - why and how we see the world as we do. How image construction can go wrong. And how a gorilla can walk across your path without you noticing…
Dissociation - what is actually happening in the brain when you go into a trance, hallucinate a ghost or peck like a chicken at the behest of a hypnotist.
Personal Identity - so who do you think you are? Are you the same person as you were yesterday and will be tomorrow? Is your identity a matter of memory? Or belief? Can you switch from one “me” to another?
Freewill- Why we don’t have any, and what that awesome recognition means for us!
Illusion and Delusion - how do magicians, con-artists and illusionists do it?
Memory - why a perfect memory is vague, gappy, distorted and unreliable.
Memory disorders - amnesia, false and recovered memories, memory “gaps” and glitches such as déjà vu and jamais vu
Emotions - why they are not what we think they are. Plus emotional disorders such as psychopathy, phobia and oddities like Capgras , Anton and Cotard’s delusions.
Addiction – the biological basis of addiction
Drugs - (see “rants” for my line on these!)
Morality How moral decision-making is “hard-wired into the human brain and thoroughly unfair as a result.
Creativity - What it is, how to maximise it, and, conversely, how to keep it in control!
Science writing - What do readers want? Why should they get it? And How to Give it to them (if you must)
Sleep and Dreaming - What are dreams for and do they have meaning? How to “wake up” in them (lucid dreaming) and take control.
Happiness - Why traditional approaches are doomed to failure and what we should be doing to promote well being instead!
Sex and the Brain – why men prefer porn, the difference between the female and male orgasm, the chemistry of love and attraction, what makes a person sexy?
Arrchitecture and space and the brain: what is about a building that make sit welcoming, what makes it forbidding? How do we “red” buildings, and find out way around them.
Humour -
Education – the neuroscience of learning; how to get through to can inform teaching: what Legal implications
Dementia
Neuromarketing
Attachment