Past Programs
Identity - 2008
Cafe Scientific: can our thoughts change the structure and function of our brains?
28/12/2008
US/Canadian guest speaker Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, researcher, author, essayist and poet. When he set out to investigate neuroplasticity he met the brilliant scientists championing it and the people whose lives they've transformed, resulting in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself.
ABC TV's Dr Paul Willis hosts this public forum on brain plasticity featuring Norman Doidge and two local scientists who specialise in the study of the brain.
This Cafe Scientific event was recorded at the Brisbane Writers' Festival earlier in 2008
The freedom paradox - Clive Hamilton
24/08/2008
We have never been so rich, healthy and free. But discontent is all around. Has something gone awry? Clive Hamilton calls it the freedom paradox. We are certainly liberated, but to what end? The civil and sexual revolution, Hamilton postulates, has been hijacked. Is there any turning back? An unflinching assessment of postmodern times from the man who brought us Growth Fetish and Affluenza. Recorded at Sydney Ideas, at the University of Sydney.
Massey Lectures 2007: The City of Words, Lecture 3, The Bricks of Babel
13/04/2008
In the biblical account, the people of Babel suffered a terrible curse: to be scattered throughout the world and be given different languages. This, it was written, was why friction and misunderstanding began to develop between people as there was no longer a common form of communication. But is there another reading to this tale? Why is it that a diversity of languages and culture are in some places celebrated and yet the tensions remain? In his third talk, Alberto Manguel searches the story of Babel for clues to mending a wounded world.
For copyright reasons this series is not available as a podcast
The Logic of Life
02/03/2008
The age of the pop economist has dawned. Since Freakonomics was published in 2005 a new breed of media savvy expert has come forth. It turns out that life can be understood through a prism of daily cost-benefit analyses. In the age of homo economus this makes perfect sense. Today we meet one of the leading practitioners of low brow economics. Tim Harford works for the Financial times (UK) where he runs a blog called The Undercover Economist. His raw material comprises the everyday - from relationships and marriage to crime and overpaid bosses. In his reckoning it all makes sense in an economic sort of way. Join Tim Harford for an entertaining look at the logic of life.
