Empathy

In case you missed our rats’ cameo on NOVA SCIENCENOW, you can catch it on PBS’s website, or just wait for a re-run. The rats’ star turn occurs from about 11:40 to 15:25.

It was so much fun to be on WTTW, Channel 11’s Chicago Tonight with the delightful Phil Poncé. This segment was my first experience with live TV. Wow, does time fly by when talking rats!!

Brandon Keim came back for more. After his first article on our initial helping study, Brandon wrote this piece which more fully explores all things rat.

Many thanks to the Dana Foundation for the opportunity to write this piece which allowed me to really step through classic papers that form the foundation for today’s work on pro-social behavior in humans.

Journalist Meeri Kim did a great job in covering our work showing that helping is socially selective and environmentally, but not genetically, determined.

Check out this podcast from eLife’s Peter Rodgers. The whole episode is interesting but if you want to zero in on us, our segment is from 6:15 to 11:38. 

Journalist Naheed Rajwani really captured the Mowgli aspect of rats’ “identity” formation: rats grow up to help the type of rats that they see around them.

I really enjoyed taking part in this discussion on empathy that was associated with the Retrospective show of Rineke Dijkstra’s emotionally raw photographs at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and I had fun talking with journalist Brooke O’Neill about our empathy work.

MOOC

Talking to Jason Kelly, NeuroMOOCer and journalist, was so much fun and I think that his article really captures the feeling of Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life.

This article captures our nervousness and excitement as we prepared and waited anxiously for NeuroMOOC to start. Note that the results are in, tabulated and are now described in a blog post.

Miscellaneous

Dr Marie McNeely encouraged me to talk about parts of my life I had not thought about in a loooong time. Take a listen.

It was an honor to be asked to be write a guest blog on locked-in syndrome for a website aiming to make the inspiring story of Patrick Stein into a movie.