A Day on Human Nature

Dr Music will examine how early experiences, secure attachments, and safe environments can lead to more altruistic, prosocial, and empathic ways of acting while stress, trauma, and neglect can lead to more aggression, callousness, and antisocial behaviour. He will examine what current research and clinical understandings can teach us about living a Good Life. Why might we, and the children or adults, act selfishly and antisocially? Are we born selfish or cooperative and what might sway us in either direction? How do both stress-inducing family contexts and competitive social and economic environments undermine our capacity to feel safe, experience well-being, or care much for ourselves or others? How does a consumerist, materialist ethos, as well as the challenges posed by the cyber-age and increasingly speeded up lives have an impact? This talk will draw on lessons from developmental science, neurobiology, psychoanalysis, and mindfulness to examine the links between feeling good and being good, and generally ponder the Good Life.

So many of us believe that we are free to shape our own destiny. But what if free will doesn’t exist? What if our lives are largely predetermined, hardwired in our brains – and our choices over what we eat, whom we fall in love with, even what we believe are not real choices at all?   

Neuroscience is challenging everything we think we know about ourselves, revealing how we make decisions and form our own reality, unaware of the role of our unconscious minds. Did you know, for example, that: 

— Anxieties and phobias can be carried across generations in a family? 

— Your genes and pleasure and reward receptors in your brain will shape how much you eat? 

— We can sniff out ideal partners with genes that give our offspring the best chance of survival?  

In this talk, leading neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow will draw vividly from everyday life and other experts in their field to show the extraordinary potential as well as dangers which come with being able to predict our likely futures – and looking at how we can alter what’s in store for us.  

Lucid, illuminating, awe-inspiring, this talk will revolutionise your understanding of who you are – and empower you to help shape a better future both for yourself and the wider world.

The comparative study of identical and fraternal twins is a powerful method for identifying the relative contributions of genes and environments to individual differences in behavioral, physical, and health-related characteristics. Studies of reared-apart twins provide even more compelling ways to approach this same class of questions, given that the co-twins were raised in different homes, communities and/or countries, so were unable to influence one another.

This talk first reviews the different types of twins and the logic behind twin designs before presenting findings from past, recent and current studies of twins who grew up separately. Here, the focus will be on the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the Fullerton Study of Chinese Twins; however, research using reared together twins, virtual twins (same-age-unrelated individuals reared together who replicated twinship but without a genetic link) and unrelated look-alikes will also be described with reference to family relations, tacit coordination, personality similarity, and bereavement.

The vast body of evidence indicates that genetic influence is pervasive, affecting virtually every measured human trait, but environmental factors also play a role. The occasional abuse of twin studies must be recalled to prevent their future occurrence.