A few days ago a friend mentioned to me that I should take a peek at a certain video that had been published on the University of California’s website. I found it quite fascinating and appropriate to our theme of biopsychosocial science. The video chronicles an event titled “The Launching of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind” and was recorded in November of 2005. It presents a sophisticated and increasingly popular theory supporting the merging of psychology, social science, neurobiology and neuroimaging as an approach for studying human behavior.

The first speaker, Marcus E. Raichle, a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis, for instance, teaches in the departments of neurobiology, radiology, neurobiology and psychology. He competently reviews two millennia of brain imaging history from the first-century B.C.E Galen to twenty-first century Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Next, Patricia Smith Churchland comments on neurophilosophy and neuroethics and how a deeper understanding might change our views on what determines self-control and which actions we consider failures of character. Professor Mahzarin Rustum Banaji, a Head Tutor in the Psychology department of Harvard University and a disarming speaker, talks on how our mental process are affected by everything beneath and “everything that lies on the sunny-side of the epidermis.”

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