We are joined today by Igor Grossmann, who is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Wisdom and Research Lab based at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. His main research interest is the complex processes that enable individuals to think and act wisely. He has also done pioneering work on the development of wisdom in different cultures and was named one of the 2015 Rising Stars in the field of Psychological Science. He recently co-wrote a paper with Alex C. Huyn...
Aug 26, 2016•32 min
We are joined today by Matt Robert. Matt runs multiple "recovery“ oriented groups in the greater Boston area in the US. Some are open to the public, some are in detoxes, psychiatric units, shelters, etc.. He uses the platform of SMART Recovery (Self-Management And Recovery Training), and the thrust of his groups is about helping people examine their intention and motivation to change. The groups include people with substance use issues, as well as any behaviour with undesired negative consequenc...
Aug 17, 2016•43 min
We are joined today by Tom Gash. Tom is an advisor, researcher and writer on crime policy and government effectiveness, who helps people to think differently about the big challenges facing governments worldwide. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, and an expert adviser for the Boston Consulting Group. He’s going to talk to us today about his book Criminal: The Truth about Why People do Bad Things which challenges man...
Aug 06, 2016•49 min
In this latest member profile, Jim Champion talks to us about his background, how he became interested in science and his career as a physics teacher. He also talks about why he joined the society and his understanding of the Middle Way.
Jul 28, 2016•24 min
We are joined today by the religious historian and best-selling author Karen Armstrong who has been described as "arguably the most lucid, wide-ranging and consistently interesting religion writer today" (Wikipedia). She is perhaps best known for her books on comparative religion, including A History of God, A Short History of Myth and The Spiral Staircase. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule and her latest book Field...
Jul 11, 2016•29 min
We are joined today by British author and journalist, Tobias Jones. Tobias was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and then worked at the London Review of Books and the Independent on Sunday. He’s a best-selling author and his books include The dark heart of Italy, Utopian dreams and Blood on the Altar. He moved to Parma in Italy in 1999, returning to the UK in 2004. Jones and his wife now manage a ten acre woodland shelter near Shepton Mallet, Somerset called Windsor Hill Wood. The sanctuary is ...
Jun 28, 2016•33 min
We are joined today by the Welsh Journalist, documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and bestselling author Jon Ronson. He’s written nine books including Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Psychopath Test as well his most recent work So you’ve been publicly shamed , an exploration of shame in particular via social media outlets such as Twitter an this is going to be the topic of our discussion. The book is full of humour but I also found it very compassionate and wise and as you’ll see as the con...
Jun 19, 2016•35 min
We are joined today by Glyn Blackett who is a Mind – Body health coach from York in the UK. He specializes in stress management skills training, in particular using biofeedback in conjunction with the practice of mindfulness. He’s the author of the book Mind-Body Intelligence: How to manage your mind using biofeedback and mindfulness and this will be the topic of our discussion today.
Jun 07, 2016•44 min
My guest today is Robert Epstein, who is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology in California. He is the author of 15 books, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. His books include Teen 2.0: Saving our children and families from the torment of adolescence and Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and methodological issues in the quest for the thinking computer. He’s going to talk to us today about why the brain is not a com...
May 26, 2016•29 min
We are joined today by Charles Kenny, who is an English/American economist and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He’s the author of several books including Overselling the Web: Development and the internet, The upside of Down: Why the rise of the rest is good for the West and we are going to talk about his book Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More. In the book he argues that despite the claims that global development h...
May 23, 2016•39 min
We are joined today by Nigel Ohlson, a counsellor /psychotherapist & professional youth worker practising in South Devon in the UK. He’s also experienced in delivering Adventure Therapy based programmes and this will be the topic of our discussion.
May 14, 2016•44 min
We are joined today by Mike Rose who is a research professor in the department of education of UCLA, California. He’s the author of several books including Why School, Back to School and Possible Lives. We’re going to be talking about education and some of the themes explored in these books but we’ll be focusing in particular on his book The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker which challenges the long-held notion that people who work with their hands make up a less int...
Apr 23, 2016•42 min
This week’s guest is Sharon Begley. Sharon is an American journalist who is the senior science writer for Stat, the publication from The Boston Globe that covers stories related to the life sciences. Previously she was the senior health & science correspondent at Reuters, the science columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and previous to that the science editor at Newsweek. Her interests include the neuroplasticity of the brain, issues affecting science journalism and education She’s the co-a...
Mar 09, 2016•48 min
Our guest today is Peter Block who is a consultant and speaker in the areas of organization development, community building, and civic engagement. He’s the author of several books including Another Kingdom: Departing the consumer culture, The Community: the structure of belonging and perhaps his most well-known work The Abundant community which he co-wrote with John McNight and which has now become a fully grown project in itself beyond the book. The broad themes discussed in these books will fo...
Feb 29, 2016•33 min
My guest today is Adam Briggle, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. He is the author of A Rich Bioethics, co-author of Ethics and Science: An Introduction, and author of A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking. He recently had a joint article with the philosopher Robert Frodeman published in the New York Times entitled “When Philosophy Lost its Way’ and this will be the topic of our discussion.
Feb 19, 2016•39 min
My guest today is Stephen Farah who is the senior lecturer at the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa. He became passionate about Jungian psychology after experiencing it as radically life changing when he first encountered it in the late nineties. Stephen’s interest are consciousness, meaning and the individuation project. He has a BA Honours degree in philosophy from The University of the Witwatersrand and a Masters degree in Jungian and Post Jungian studies from T...
Feb 12, 2016•44 min
This week’s guest is the social psychologist and social activist Dr. Melanie Joy. Melanie is perhaps most well known for coining the term Carnism, which she popularized in her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows. She’s the founder and president of Beyond Carnism, a charitable organisation which she founded in 2010 and Carnism will be the topic of our discussion today.
Feb 12, 2016•44 min
The Buddhist scholar and author Stephen Batchelor talks to Susan Averbach about his new book After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age. They then move on to discussing whether the Middle Way can or should be promoted beyond the Buddhist tradition and Stephen also outlines a new initiative he has become involved in, The Bodhi College , an ethical and philosophical framework for those practising meditation and the Dharma in today’s world by drawing on the early teachings of the Buddh...
Feb 12, 2016•50 min
A discussion hosted by Barry Daniel, with Susan Averbach, Robert M Ellis and Willie Grieve. If we are going to avoid using ‘faith’ as a cover word for dogmatic belief, what does it mean? What can we have faith in, and how does faith relate to the Middle Way?
Feb 11, 2016•42 min
Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has focused mainly on the theory of perception and consciousness with which he straddles in particular the fields of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. He’s also interested in phenomenology, the philosophy of John Dewey and the theory of art. His books include Action in Perception, Out of our Heads, Varieties of presence as well as his latest book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature which will be t...
Nov 20, 2015•54 min
Our guest today is Mark Williams who is a professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester. He’s the co-author, along with Jan Zalasiewicz of The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 billion year story of Earth's Climate and has published several peer reviewed papers on paleobiology, paleoenvironments and paleoclimates in conjunction with other researchers including his latest ‘The Anthropocene Biosphere’ which explores the impact of humans from a geological perspective on the biosphere. It also loo...
Nov 19, 2015•44 min
Our guest today is Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. Her studies include the illusion of control, decision-making, aging and mindfulness theory and she has often been described as the mother of mindfulness. She has written many books including the best selling, Mindfulness, The Powerof Mindful Learning, On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity; Counterclockwise and the Wiley...
Nov 09, 2015•36 min
Our guest today is Peter Sheath, a mental health nurse, counsellor, consultant, trainer and person in long term recovery who has been involved in the field of health and social care for many years. He has worked in a variety of mental health settings including managing acute psychiatry units, community psychiatric nursing, day centre management and nurse teaching. Peter is extremely passionate about addiction and its relationship with mental health. As a result, he has worked extensively in the ...
Oct 31, 2015•43 min
Our guest today is Steven Heine, a Canadian professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and a leader in the field of cultural psychology. In 2010, he, along with his colleagues Joseph Henrich and Ava Norenzayan wrote the ground-breaking paper ‘The WEIRDest’ people in the world?’ with WEIRD meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. The paper suggests that the view we have of the mind derived from the research of behavioural scientists is distorted due to th...
Oct 16, 2015•39 min
In this round table discussion, Susan Averbach, Tim Kaine and Shana Averbach discuss what they understand by feminism, how it has evolved, the progress it has made and the challenges it faces. Reversing gender roles in fiction and professional documentation is also discussed as well looking at gender equality in the work place to what degree feminism is a phenomenon of the developed world. (In the initial exchanges the Skype audio quality is a little bit choppy, but it clears up after that)
Oct 10, 2015•43 min
Our guest today is Dr Marc Lewis, a developmental neuroscientist and currently a professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. For many years his work centred on dynamic systems approaches to understanding the development of emotions and personality but recently he has perhaps become most well known for his account of his own personal experience of drug addiction Memoirs of Addicted Brain and merging that with the neuroscience of addiction. In his latest book The Biology of...
Oct 03, 2015•1 hr 2 min
This week the historian Christopher Beckwith talks about his latest book Greek Buddha with the chair of the society Robert M Ellis
Sep 27, 2015•47 min
We are joined today by David Mcraney, an internationally bestselling author, journalist, and lecturer who created the You Are Not So Smart blog, books, and podcast. David, who lives in Mississippi, cut his teeth covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and across the Deep South. Since then, he has been a beat reporter, editor, photographer, voiceover artist and television host. Before that, he had a varied working life, waiting tables, working construction, selling leather coats, building an...
Sep 17, 2015•1 hr
We are joined today by Monica Dare who is a Pilates and Alexander Technique instructor. Monica trained in London with Body Control Pilates in 1998; from there she moved to Brighton where she worked at one of the UK's leading studios for 18 months. She continued her studies in Kendal in the Lake District where she completed a three year full time training course qualifying in The Alexander Technique. She’s going to talk to us about Pilates as an integrative practice .
Sep 12, 2015•37 min
Joining us today is Arno Michaelis. Arno is now a peace activist, but spent the late 1980s and early 1990s deeply involved with racist skinhead organizations, and was lead singer of the hate-metal band Centurion, which sold 20,000 CDs by the mid-nineties and is still popular with racists today. Single parenthood, love for his daughter, and the forgiveness shown by people he once hated all helped to turn his life around, bringing me to embrace diversity and practice gratitude for all life. Today ...
Sep 02, 2015•1 hr 1 min
