Conference blogging

I have not been very good at blogging the conferences I’m attending. But I will try rectify this grave mistake in the future. Next weekend I am flying to Australia to attend the annual Human Brain Mapping conference, and I promise to write about it extensively. This year, the organizers have scheduled a session on “The relevance of Functional Neuroimaging to Psychology” so that, at least, promises to be engaging!

In the meantime check out this newspaper article about the neuroeconomics conference held in Copenhagen two weeks ago. (Sorry, the article is in Danish only!) I found the conference, with its unusual mix of marketing experts and neuroscientists, rather interesting. Among the highlights were a number of presentations of new fMRI studies from labs around the world, and a presentation by Graham Page, the director of Millward Brown’s innovation centre, who gave a highly informative talk about how much neuroscience techniques is actually employed by marketing agencies pendling their dark arts. The answer is: both more and less than you would imagine!

The picture shows Thomas lecturing at the conference on imaging genetics as a possible new methodological avenue for neuroeconomics research. Yes, he really looks that way!

-Martin

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On the radio

My new book, Følelser og kognition (see below), is starting to garner some attention in the Danish press. Tuesday I appeared on the Danish National Radio’s premiere current affairs show, Orientering, to talk about the role of emotions in politics. If you speak Danish you can hear the programme here. First there is an interview with American psychologist Drew Westen who is famous for having conducted an fMRI experiment where, during the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, republican and democratic voters were presented with contradicting statements about the two candidates, Bush and Kerry. In essence, the results showed that, whereas the subjects had no problem accepting that the opposing candidate would issue conflicting statements, they were loath to accept their own candidate’s statements as contradictory. And this defensive behavior correlated with enhanced neural activity in a number of areas usually thought to subserve emotion processing. Westen recently published a book called The Political Brain, and most of the interview with him is about this book. Afterwards, the host and I talk more generally about the relation between emotion and cognition in human behavior.

-Martin

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Radio interviews in Denmark

And while we’re in the talk of media coverage, I should mention to those who understand Danish that the Danish Broadcast Company, or DR, has a documentary series on their primary radio channels, P1. The series is called “Hjernerejsen” (loosely translated to “The brain travel”) and it covers topics such as emotions and bonding, brain maturation, transhumanism and neuroethics.In the program called “the soul is in the brain”, I starred in an interview about the new ideas that neuroscience brings to our traditional thoughts about personality and self. My co-interviewees were Jesper Mogensen and Albert Gjedde, both well-renowned neuroscientists both within and outside Scandinavia.

In a coming topic on the senses (tomorrow, April 19.), I speak about how neuroscience can be used in marketing, aka neuromarketing.

The series can be found here, and DR does a nice podcast: http://podcast.dr.dk/p1/rssfeed/tema_torsdag.xml (copy and paste into your preferred podcasting program)

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