The present landscape of biological science raises many issues touching the meaning and challenges of ‘being human’, from AI to biological sex, consciousness, and free will. The new Being Human lectures will provide a focused exploration of these issues from leading experts in the philosophy of science, humanities, and other fields, offering a forum for broadening scientific thinking.

The series is co-organised by James DiFrisco and Güneş Taylor from the Crick with Professor Barry Smith from the University of London's Institute of Philosophy.

The format will be a talk in the Crick Auditorium, followed by a facilitated panel discussion.The lectures will be non-technical and accessible to a multidisciplinary audience. There will be a short reception and an opportunity to meet the speaker after the talk.

Our speaker : Lisa Feldman Barrett PhD is among the top 0.1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.

Lisa also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.

In addition to the books Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made, Dr. Barrett has published over 275 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press. She writes regularly about science in the popular press, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Scientific American, BBC Science Focus, Popular Science, Nautilus, BigThink, Cosmopolitan, Time magazine, MIT Technology Review, and more. Her popular TED talk has been viewed over 6.5 million times.

*This lecture series is a collaboration between the Francis Crick Institute and the School of Advanced Study’

Being Human: Three Lessons About the Brain from the Neuroscience of Emotion