Understanding and Overcoming Hate
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  • Understanding Hate
    • Introduction
    • What is Hate? >
      • Hate as an Emotion >
        • Papers: Hate as an Emotion
      • Hate as a Belief >
        • Papers: Hate as Belief
      • Hate as an Act >
        • Papers: Hate as an Act
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        • Papers: Hate as Policy
    • The Roots of Hate >
      • Early Imprints >
        • When Needs are Not Met
        • Papers; Not Meeting Needs
      • What Are We Doing To Our Children? >
        • Children in Dire Circumstances
      • Effects of Trauma and Abuse >
        • Papers: Stress Effects
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      • Causes and Effects of Bullying
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      • Authoritarian Upbringings >
        • Papers: Authoritarian Roots
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        • Papers: Absolutism
      • Papers: Early Roots of Prejudice
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        • Papers: Impaired Cognition
      • The Violent Brain >
        • Papers: Violent Brain
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        • Chart: Powderkeg Formula
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        • Papers: Social Rejection
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        • Papers: Stereotyping
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        • Views about the outsider
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        • Papers: Search for Belonging
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        • Papers: System Justification
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        • Papers: Denial
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      • Persuasion: Blog Posts and Articles
    • How We Fool Ourselves >
      • Mechanisms: Cognitive Biases and Heuristics >
        • Papers: Brain Tricks
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        • Biases organized
      • On Being Wrong
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        • Papers: Perceptual Illusions
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    • Brain and Belief >
      • What is a Belief? >
        • Papers: Belief Formation
        • Papers: Automaticity
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        • Papers: Perception
      • Salience and Tagging >
        • Papers: Salience
        • Papers: Essentialism
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        • Papers: Categorizing
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        • Papers: Story Creation
      • Investing in Cherished Beliefs >
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        • Papers: Meaning
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      • Dogmatic Beliefs
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      • Papers: Feeling of Knowing
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    • Index: All Biases, Distortions and Influences
  • Overcoming Hate
    • Overview of Topics
    • Introduction
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      • Meeting Formative Needs of Children >
        • Papers: Child and Brain Development
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Research on brain and belief formation
How we can over-identify with mental concepts or beliefs

Key Researchers

  • Chris D and Uta Frith, Ph.D.
  • Antonia Damasio, M.D.
  • Hannah Damasio, M.D.
  • Daniel Schacter, M.D.
  • Robert Burton, M.D.
  • Mahzarin R Banaji, Ph.D.
  • Daniel M. Wegner, Ph.D.
  • Scott Atran, Ph.D.
  •  V. S. Ramachandra, Ph.D.
  • John T. Cacioppo, M.D.
  • Mark D'Esposito M.D.
  • A D (Bud) Craig, PhD
  • Bruce Hood, PhD
  • John Allman
  • Hugo Critchley 
  • Richard E Cytowic, MD
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Neuroscience research related to:
Interoception
Qualia
Salience
Categorizing
Meaning systems
Belief formation
Volition
Decision-making


Note: Bios are excerpted from the websites and professional resumes of the researchers. 
Click on names to connect to more info.

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Mahzarin R Banaji, Ph.D.
Banaji studies human thinking and feeling as it unfolds in social contexts. Her focus is primarily on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. In particular, she is interested in the unconscious nature of assessments of self and other humans that reflect feelings and knowledge (often unintended) about their social group membership (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, gender, class) that underlie the us/them distinction. From such study of attitudes and beliefs of adults and children, she asks about the social consequences of unconscious thought and feeling. Banaji’s work relies on cognitive/affective behavioral measures and neuroimaging (fMRI) with which she explores the implications of her work for questions of individual responsibility and social justice in democratic societies.

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Antonia Damasio, M.D.
Hannah Damasio, M.D.

Dornsife Neuroscience Imaging Center 
Brain and Creativity Institute
Antonio R. Damasio:
  • David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience
  • Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California; 
  • Adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. 
Damasio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how the brain processes memory, language, emotions, and decisions and has described his discoveries in books (Self Comes to Mind, Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and Looking for Spinoza) translated into over 30 languages and taught in universities worldwide. He is the recipient of numerous awards (including, most recently, the Honda Prize in 2010; Asturias Prize in Science and Technology, 2005; and the Signoret Prize, 2004, which he shared with his wife Hanna Damasio). Damasio is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has been named “Highly Cited Researcher” by the Institute for Scientific Information. His current work is aimed at illuminating the brain basis of social behaviors (ranging from moral judgments and communication to economic decisions), and understanding mechanisms of creativity in art, science, and technology. 

Damasio’s work has focused on elucidating critical problems in the fundamental neuroscience of mind and behavior, at the level of large-scale systems in humans, although his investigations have also encompassed parkinsonism, and Alzheimer’s disease. His contributions have had a major influence on our understanding of the neural basis of decision-making, emotion, language, and memory.

In collaboration with Hanna Damasio, a distinguished neurologist who is independently recognized for her achievements in neuroimaging and neuroanatomy, Damasio moved lesion studies away from clinical descriptions and placed them at the service of hypothesis-driven researching. The laboratories that he and Hanna Damasio created at the University of Iowa are a leading center for the investigation of cognition using both the lesion method and functional imaging.

Damasio was born in Portugal. He received both his MD and his doctorate from the University of Lisbon, and began his research in cognitive neuroscience with the late Norman Geschwind.


Hanna Damasio M.D. is University Professor, Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of Southern California. She is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Until 2005 she was a Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, where she directed the Human Neuroanatomy and Neuroimaging Laboratory. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance scanning, she developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory and emotion, using both the lesion method and functional neuroimaging. Besides her numerous scientific articles she is the author of the award-winning Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychology (Oxford University Press), which has been used worldwide in brain-imaging work, and of Human Brain Anatomy in Computerized Images (also Oxford University Press), the first brain atlas based on computerized imaging data, now in its second edition. Her research has received continuous Federal support for over two decades. 

Damasio is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Neurological Association. She recently shared the Signoret Prize in cognitive neuroscience with Antonio Damasio for their pioneering work in social cognition. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Lisbon and Aachen. The Dornsife Imaging Center is dedicated to elucidating the neurobiology of mind and behavior, in health and disease, using state-of-the-art brain imaging technology. The Center works closely with the Brain and Creativity Institute whose activity is aimed at illuminating the brain basis of social behaviors (ranging from moral judgments and communication to economic decisions), normal and pathological cognitive development in children, consciousness, and the processes of creativity in art, science and technology. 


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Robert Burton, M.D.
Neurologist UCSF
Burton graduated from Yale University and the University of California at San Francisco medical school, where he also completed his neurology residency. At age thirty-three, he was appointed chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, where he subsequently became Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. His non-neurology writing career includes three critically acclaimed novels and a neuroscience and culture column at Salon.com.

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Daniel M. Wegner, Ph.D.
Wegner studies the role of thought in self-control and in social life.  He has investigated thought suppression, finding that people become preoccupied with a white bear when they are asked not to think about it, and has researchedmental control of other kinds as well.  He has studied transactive memory--how people in groups and relationships remember things cooperatively--and action identification--what people think they're doing. He has also explored the experience conscious will, and is currently focusing on mind perception--how people perceive human and nonhuman minds.  His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and by the National Institute of Mental Health. A 1996-1997 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. He also occasionally writes about himself in the third person.

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Richard E Cytowic, MD
Cytowic trained in neurology, neuropsychology, and ophthalmology at Duke University, Wake Forest, London’s National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, and George Washington University before founding Capitol Neurology, a private clinic in Washington DC.

Dr. Cytowic is best known for bringing synesthesia back into mainstream science in 1980. It is now recognized as an important issue to how all brains perceive. For many years colleagues refused to accept synesthesia as real and warned that pursuing it would ruin Dr. Cytowic’s career because it was too weird and New Age. They had the typical reaction of orthodoxy to something it can’t understand. Today, researchers in 15 countries are writing Ph.D. theses, books, and scholarly papers on this fascinating trait.

We currently have a top-to-bottom science of synesthesia, from DNA and synapses, to child development, brain imaging, and psychology up to overt behavior that includes art and creativity—all described in the book with David Eagleman, “Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia.”

The New Jersey native is the son of a physician and an artist, and has been a scholar at the Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Southampton Writers Conferences. Dr. Cytowic’s work is the subject of numerous documentaries ranging from the BBC and PBS to National Geographic. Over fifty media appearances include Good Morning America, All Things Considered, and Voice of America.


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Scott Atran, Ph.D.
University of Michigan
Culture and Cognition
His research and teaching interests are centered in the following areas: cognitive and linguistic anthropology, ethnobiology, environmental decision making, categorization and reasoning, evolutionary psychology, anthropology of science (history and philosophy of natural history and natural philosophy); Middle East ethnography and political economy; natural history of Lowland Maya, cognitive and commitment theories of religion.
 
Atran also serves as Adjunct Research Scientist at the Research Center for Group Dynamics; Adjunct Professor for the School of Natural Resources & Environment; Associate Research Scientist for the Anthropology Department; and Directeur de Recherche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.
The anthropology of terrorism makes for compelling fieldwork. In his quest to understand what makes people kill and die for a cause, Scott Atran - an astute analyst of social, psychological and cultural issues - has met with the Hamas high command in Damascus, Syria, interviewed the plotters behind the 2002 Bali bombing, unpacked the web of connections behind the 9/11 and 2004 Madrid train attacks and been forced to flee for his life from militants in Indonesia and Pakistan unsettled by his probings....

His books include 
  • Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists
  • In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series)
  • The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)
  • Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science
  • Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human
  • Values, Empathy, and Fairness across Social Barriers (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences). 
Scott’s papers include 
  • Constraints on a Theory of Hominid Tool Making
  • Covert Fragmenta and the Origins of the Botanical Family
  • Ordinary Constraints on the Semantics of Living Kinds: A Commonsense Alternative to Recent Treatments of Natural-Object Terms
  • A Question of Honor: Why the Taliban Fight and What to Do About It
  • The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions 
  • Interview with Ramadan Shallah, Secretary General, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

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Chris D Frith, Ph.D.
Uta Frith, Ph.D.

Chris Frith was born in Cross-in-Hand, Sussex in 1942. He grew up in London and Yorkshire and studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University. He trained in clinical psychology at the University of London's Institute of Psychiatry and completed his PhD in experimental psychology, supervised by Hans Eysenck, in 1969. Chris married Uta Aurnhammer in 1966. Their sons Martin and Alex were born in 1975 and 1978.

Chris Frith was a staff scientist of the Medical Research Council from 1975 to 1994. While with the MRC he worked on the biological basis of schizophrenia in Tim Crow's unit at Northwick Park Hospital and then on Brain Imaging in the Cyclotron Unit at the Hammersmith Hospital.  In 1994 he helped to found the Functional Imaging Laboratory at the Institute of Neurology in Queen Square (subsequently the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL) and was awarded a Wellcome Principal Research Fellowship. From 2007 he has been Emeritus Professor in  Neuropsychology at UCL and  Niels Bohr Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus.


Uta Frith has made a major contribution to our understanding of developmental disorders, especially autism and dyslexia. She has studied the cognitive and neurobiological bases of both disorders and demonstrated distinctive impairments in social cognition and central coherence in autism, and in phonological processing in dyslexia. In this enterprise she has encouraged psychologists to work in a theoretical framework that distinguishes between observed behaviour and the underlying cognitive and neurobiological processes that mediate that behaviour.

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Bruce Hood, Ph.D.
Bristol Cognitive Development Centre
Research interests
  • Cognitive development from a neuroscience perspective.
  •  Face and gaze processing.
  • Inhibitory control of thoughts and actions.
  • Spatial representation and action.
  • Naïve theories.
  • The origin of adult magical reasoning from children’s natural intuitions.

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Daniel Schacter, M.D.
Daniel Schacter is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research has focused on psychological and biological aspects of human memory and amnesia, with a particular emphasis on the distinction between conscious and nonconscious forms of memory and, more recently, on brain mechanisms of memory distortion.

He has also studied the effects of aging on memory. His research uses both cognitive testing and brain imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Schacter has written three books, edited seven volumes, and published over 200 scientific articles and chapters. His books include: Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (1996); Forgotten ideas, neglected pioneers: Richard Semon and the story of memory. (2001); The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (2001).


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 V. S. Ramachandra, Ph.D.
  • Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition
  • Professor: Psychology and Neurosciences, UC San Diego
Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is a neuroscientist known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics. 

V. S. Ramachandran has published over 120 peer reviewed articles, and has authored two general reader science books as an introduction to his work and research. He writes regularly for Scientific American, and has appeared in both BBC and PBS documentaries.  In 1997 Newsweek named him a member of "The Century Club", one of the "hundred most prominent people to watch" in the 21st century. In 2011 Time listed him as one of "the most influential people in the world" on the "Time 100" list.

Ramachandran is noted for his use of experimental methods that rely relatively little on complex technologies such as neuroimaging. According to Ramachandran, "too much of the Victorian sense of adventure [in science] has been lost." Despite the apparent simplicity of his approach, Ramachandran has generated many new ideas about the brain. He has been called "The Marco Polo of neuroscience" by Richard Dawkins and "the modern Paul Broca" by Eric Kandel.

Video
FORA.tv - Being Human: Perception & Sensations► 73:40► 
Mar 24, 2012 - 74 min