I am an evolutionist who studies all aspects of humanity in addition to the biological world. I manage a number of programs designed to expand the influence of evolutionary theory in higher education (EvoS), public policy (The Evolution Institute), community-based research (The Binghamton Neighborhood Project), and religion (Evolutionary Religious Studies). I communicate to the general public through my ScienceBlogs site and my trade books, including Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives and The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve my City, One Block at a Time, which will be published by Little, Brown in July 2011.
Invited Lecture: Ron Anderson
What progress is being made toward conceptualizing and adopting the social values of good, compassionate societies? What cross-national indicators are available for comparing societies and regional units in terms of generosity, social justice, harmonious interaction, and other social characteristics related to compassion? Does ecological compassion align with the degree of suffering? Are those with low or high socio-economic status more likely to be compassionate? To what extent is American generosity, in terms of charity and volunteering, a myth? Is big government, as measured by heavy taxation, correlated with low or high life satisfaction (happiness) and compassion?
Meng-Wu Lecture: Dacher Keltner
Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the university’s Greater Good Science Center, an interdisciplinary center that disseminates the new science of happiness and compassion to educators, parents, mental health workers, and others.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University, Dr. Keltner has devoted his career to studying the roots of compassion, awe, gratitude, and love. He is also a leading expert on social intelligence, the psychology of power, and the emotional bases of morality. Dr. Keltner has authored more than 100 scientific papers and two best-selling textbooks, Social Psychology and Understanding Emotions. More recently, he wrote the best-selling book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. He is also the executive editor of the Greater Good Science Center’s online magazine, Greater Good.
Dr. Keltner is an outstanding speaker who has received several national research and teaching awards. Wired magazine rated the podcasts of his “Human Emotion” course as one of the five best academic podcasts in the country. He has twice presented his research to His Holiness the Dalai Lama as part of a continuing dialogue between the Dalai Lama and scientists. His work has been featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, and on CNN. In 2008, the Utne Reader named him as one of 50 visionaries who are changing our world.
Wisdom 2.0 Youth
Location: Computer History Museum, 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View, CA
Raising or working with children today is no easy task. Technology pervades our (and their) lives. We struggle to find our own balance, and at the same time navigate their use of cellphones, social networks, and computer games.
Our challenge is to harness the power of technology as parents and educators, while supporting wellness and balance that are essential for a healthy child and a sane society.
Join Wisdom 2.0 Youth September 17th in Silicon Valley for the first ever Wisdom 2.0 Youth Conference. Together we will explore living consciously and supporting wellness, wisdom, and mindfulness in young people today.
Read more or Register today
Compassion for a World in Crisis: the Navajo, Tibetan Buddhist and neuroscientists’ perspective
Location: Telluride, Colorado – http://www.tellurideinstitute.org
TEDx Golden Gate
TEDxGoldenGateED will take place on June 11, 2011 from 1pm to 9pm at the soaring and historic Craneway Pavilion. Join us to hear from a incredibly diverse field of speakers about what science tells us about compassion and empathy, and see how compassion improves learning. You will also meet people who teach compassion explicitly, and others whose creative and vital work is deeply informed by it. Who should attend? We are hoping to attract a diverse audience of educators, education leaders, parents, and others who support the important link between compassion and education. To find out how to participate, please click here. Why Teach Compassion? Compassion – the devotion to enhancing the welfare of others – is humanity’s stickiest idea. Compassion is at the heart of the world’s ethical and spiritual traditions. Now, a new science is revealing humans to be a compassionate and caring species – there are DNA and brain structures devoted to the emotion. Compassion may be the natural state of mind. Are we entering into an era of compassion? In today’s schools, the ability to imagine the needs of others, to think compassionately, and to design, innovate, and act in ways that benefit others are true 21st century skills. Compassion is a new science of the brain, of human health, and of sustainability. It is the greatest privilege we are granted, to teach compassion.
Invited Lecture: Kristin Neff on “The Science of Self-Compassion”
Kristin Neff studied communications as an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles (B.A., 1988). She did her graduate work at University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., 1997), studying moral development with Dr. Elliot Turiel. Her dissertation research was conducted in Mysore, India, where she examined children’s moral reasoning. (She also met her husband Rupert Isaacson while there, who was writing a guidebook to South India.) She then spent two years of post-doctoral study with Dr. Susan Harter at Denver University, studying issues of authenticity and self- concept development. Her current position at the University of Texas at Austin started in 1999, and she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006.
During Kristin’s last year of graduate school in 1997 she became interested in Buddhism, and has been practicing meditation in the Insight Meditation tradition ever since. While doing her post-doctoral work she decided to conduct research on self-compassion – a central construct in Buddhist psychology and one that had not yet been examined empirically.
In addition to her pioneering research into self-compassion, she has developed an 8-week program to teach self-compassion skills. The program, co-created with her colleague Chris Germer at Harvard University, is called Mindful Self-Compassion. She has a new book titled “Self-Compassion” that will be published by William Morrow on April 19, 2011.
Kristin lives in the countryside in Elgin, Texas with her husband Rupert Isaacson – an author and human rights activist – and with her young son Rowan. She and her family were recently featured in the documentary and book called The Horse Boy – www.horseboymovie.com
TEDx Hayward
The theme for this year’s TEDxHayward is Peace Innovation where we cast a spotlight on how technology and emerging social behaviors and insights are promoting new paths to global peace. We hope you will join us, the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, CSU East Bay Peace Innovation Lab, and Associated Students Inc. of CSU East Bay @ TEDxHayward. Remember to reserve your space (tickets are free!) by clicking on the Tickets link above! http://tedxhayward.org/
Exclusive Sneak Preview of HAPPY by Roko Belic
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) is sponsoring an exclusive sneak preview of HAPPY, the latest documentary by Academy Award Nominated Director Roko Belic, on May 10, 2011 at 5:30pm in the Clark Center Auditorium. The screening is free and open to the public. HAPPY is a powerful feature-length documentary that takes viewers on a captivating journey across the continents in a quest for the secrets to happiness. From the swamps of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata, deeply personal stories weave together with insights from prominent experts to reveal the way to a happier life. HAPPY includes appearances by well-known experts such as Richard Davidson, Ed Diener, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Daniel Gilbert. Marci Shimoff, best-selling author of Happy for No Reason and Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul, narrates the film. In 2005, Executive Producer Tom Shadyac (Director/Producer Liar Liar, Patch Adams, Bruce Almighty) handed Belic a New York Times article that ranked the United States 23rd on its list of happiest countries. Shadyac, himself dissatisfied with his luxurious Beverly Hills lifestyle, asked Belic to make a documentary investigation into the origins of human happiness and why the U.S. ranks so low. This simple inquiry led to a global exploration of happiness research. Viewer response through in-person feedback, email, and the ever-growing HAPPY Facebook community has been very positive. “HAPPY is more than a movie, it’s a movement”, commented Belic.”My hope is that the film not only helps individuals find peace and contentment, but also that their personal happiness will lead to a more generous, more aware and more compassionate world.”
Meng-Wu Lecture: Jonathan Haidt
Emotion and the development of morality: A neurodevelopmental perspective
Location: Room 360 Clark Center
Abstract: Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. I will provide evidence from a recent series of functional MRI and ERPs studies with typically developing children and adolescents, as well as incarcerated juvenile and adult psychopaths in support of the view that affective arousal plays a fundamental and perhaps necessary role in the development of morality. I will also argue that moral reasoning is underpinned by specific neural circuitry, but these circuits are not unique to morality; rather, they involve regions and systems underlying specific states of feelings, cognitive and motivational processes. These circuits emerge and are interconnected over the course of development to produce adaptive social behavior.
Invited Lecture: Michael W. Kraus
Invited Lecture: Jean Decety , PhD
Abstract: Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. I will provide evidence from a recent series of functional MRI and ERPs studies with typically developing children and adolescents, as well as incarcerated juvenile and adult psychopaths in support of the view that affective arousal plays a fundamental and perhaps necessary role in the development of morality. I will also argue that moral reasoning is underpinned by specific neural circuitry, but these circuits are not unique to morality; rather, they involve regions and systems underlying specific states of feelings, cognitive and motivational processes. These circuits emerge and are interconnected over the course of development to produce adaptive social behavior.
Invited Lecture: Frans De Waal
Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal is a Dutch/American behavioral biologist known for his work on the social intelligence of primates. In this lecture, the acclaimed author of The Age of Empathy (2009) shows how empathy comes naturally to a great variety of animals, including humans. In his work with monkeys and apes, de Waal has found many cases of one individual coming to another’s rescue and he argues that understanding empathy’s survival value in evolution can help to build a more just society based on a more accurate view of human nature. De Waal is C. H. Candler Professor in the Psychology Department of Emory University and Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, Georgia
Meng-Wu Lecture: Paul Ekman
Invited Lecture: Karen Armstrong
Soon after receiving the prestigious TED prize in 2008, Karen Armstrong launched the Charter for Compassion. The Charter is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. In our globalized world, everybody has become our neighbor, and the Golden Rule has become an urgent necessity. Any ideology that breeds hatred or contempt ~ be it religious or secular ~ has failed the test of our time. In her lecture, Karen Armstrong will explore how world religions have historically focused on training compassion, which lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems.
http://dalailama.stanford.edu/armstrong/
The Centrality of Compassion in Human Life and Society
Stanford University has announced a visit by His Holiness the Dalai Lama scheduled for October 14-15, 2010 during which he will give a public lecture titled, The Centrality of Compassion in Human Life and Society. Following the public lecture there will be a scientific symposium on October 15th titled, Scientific Explorations of Compassion and Altruism.
The invitation was extended by dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, Philip Pizzo and James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University.
Interest in the neurosciences by the Dalai Lama has spanned over two decades, says Doty. It is this interest that stimulated his involvement in the research that Doty initially began in an informal way with a number of Stanford scientists and ultimately led His Holiness to make the largest personal contribution he has ever made to scientific research to CCARE.
The scientific symposium will include a dialogue between His Holiness and Stanford researchers and collaborators in which the results of a number of scientific studies sponsored by CCARE focused on compassion and altruism will be presented. This meeting will also present, for the first time, the results from studies utilizing a compassion training protocol developed at Stanford.
His Holiness through his writing and speeches has always maintained that the core of a happy life is compassion and altruism, we hope through the groundbreaking work that we are doing at CCARE that we can provide the science that confirms the truth to these statements, says Doty. Doty has demonstrated his own deep commitment to compassion not only through his work as a neurosurgeon but also through his philanthropic efforts which fund a number of initiatives improving healthcare throughout the world.
CCARE is an initiative within the Stanford Institute of Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences bringing together a multi-disciplinary team that includes psychologists, social scientists, neuroscientists and contemplatives from a number of traditions to rigorously examine the social, moral and neural bases of compassion and altruism and methods to cultivate such behaviors.
Exploring The Language of Mental Life
Location: Telluride, Colorado
Conference on the Language of Mental Life in Telluride, CO, July of 2010.
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University has announced a conference on the Language of Mental Life scheduled for July 7-9, 2010 during which western scientists will meet with Buddhist scholars to create a lexicon for better understanding the key terms of mental life. In the past few decades, improvements in neuro-imaging tools have led to the expansion of the fields of cognitive and affective science. One aspect of this development has been the interface with Buddhist contemplative tradition, which has a long history of systematic enquiry into the nature and functions of the human mind.
Together with this scientific enquiry, the Buddhist contemplative tradition has also developed a series of contemplative practices, a kind of mental training exercises, aimed at development and training of specific qualities of the human mind. CCARE’s conference in Telluride brings together western scientists with eastern scholars to develop the key terms associated with the human mind, which will aid in the development of contemplative practices.
Twelve scientists and scholars of different disciplines will gather in Telluride to brainstorm and discuss the taxonomy of their mental language and its development, along with how the key mental terms are defined and applied. A committee will then assemble a list of key terms to be discussed and refined over the course of the conference. The results will be made available to scholars and the public as an online lexicon.
The conference is being sponsored by the Fetzer Institute, without whom this endeavor would not be possible. The Fetzer Institute is committed to creating and supporting projects to engage with people and spread knowledge about how individuals can be more loving and forgiving in daily life, and showing how to use the power of love and forgiveness to serve as healing forces in a divided world. CCARE is very grateful for the generous support of the Fetzer institute.
CCARE is an initiative within the Stanford Institute of Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences bringing together a multi-disciplinary team that includes psychologists, social scientists, neuroscientists and contemplatives from a number of traditions to rigorously examine the social, moral and neural bases of compassion and altruism and methods to cultivate such behaviors.
Conversations on Compassion with James Doty, MD and Robert V. Taylor
Robert V. Taylor is a nationally recognized leader, author, and sought-after speaker and media commentator. He is absolutely passionate about helping individuals and organizations to realize their full human potential and impact in the world and has invested a lifetime in doing just that.
Born and raised in South Africa, Robert saw firsthand the difference that could be made when oppressed people are given the freedom to discover their voices, trust their imaginations, and find the courage to be who they are. These experiences deeply empowered him, transforming his life.
As a young adult, Robert worked tirelessly to end apartheid. In 1980 his mentor, Archbishop Desmond Tutu sent Robert to the United States to avoid imprisonment for his anti-apartheid activity.
He graduated from Rhodes University, South Africa, and completed graduate work at Union Theological Seminary, New York, eventually becoming the highest-ranking openly gay clergy person in the Episcopal church at the time.
Robert lives by his own belief that goodness and kindness are possible each day as we show up for life. He continues to explore integrating personal spirituality and values-driven strategies with the question of how we each leave a footprint of compassion in the world – both at home, and in the corporate marketplace.
His book, A New Way to Be Human: 7 Spiritual Pathways to Becoming Fully Alive (New Page Books, April 2012) offers a path to an integrated life of purpose.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration required. Register here