Vice, Virtue, and the Brain's Pleasure Circuits

Understanding the biological basis of pleasure leads us to fundamentally rethink the moral and legal aspects of addiction to drugs, food, sex, and gambling and the industries that manipulate these pleasures. Merging an evolutionary perspective with cutting-edge research in neuroscience, David Linden addresses provocative questions about the relationship between pleasure and addiction while exploring broader implications at the nexux.

Speaker: David J. Linden, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of the new book "The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good". His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage in the brain (recent scientific papers here). He has a longstanding interest in scientific communication, serving as Chief Editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology and author of The Accidental Mind (Harvard/Belknap, 2007). Dr. Linden's conversational style, his abundant use of anecdotes, and his successful coupling of wit with insight makes this a talk not to be missed…