Explore every episode of the podcast The Helix Center

This roundtable explores the power of words across brain development, medicine, and community, while highlighting the importance of critical thinking in the age of AI and screens.

This roundtable examines how AI is transforming medicine, from genomic modeling to clinical tools used in healthcare systems. It focuses on challenges of trust, evidence, and equity, including how to evaluate AI, ensure fairness, and responsibly integrate data-driven decisions into patient care.

This roundtable explores how traditional intellectual movements and paradigms have fragmented in the postmodern era, challenging the idea of coherent disciplinary progress. It considers how the internet, social fragmentation, and AI are reshaping how knowledge is organized, produced, and understood.

This roundtable explores the motivations and purposes behind writing, challenging the idea that words simply convey facts. It examines how writing can express ambiguity, emotion, intention, and persuasion, shaping both meaning and experience.

This roundtable explores the meaning and value of failure, examining whether persistence leads to growth, success, or its own kind of reward. It considers how cultural, psychological, and philosophical perspectives frame failure as an essential part of the human experience.

This roundtable explores how memory, neuroscience, and storytelling intersect, highlighting memory as a dynamic process that shapes identity, healing, and self-understanding. It examines how art and science together can help us reinterpret and reshape our personal narratives.

This roundtable explores the resurgence of psychoanalysis, examining its enduring appeal despite scientific criticism and changing therapeutic practices. It considers how Freudian ideas continue to influence therapy, the humanities, and contemporary debates in the age of AI.

This roundtable explores the concept of neurodiversity – recognizing variations in neurological function – challenging conventional notions of deficit and considering empathetic approaches to support individuals with diverse cognitive experiences.

This roundtable critically examines the widespread practice of mindfulness meditation, exploring both its potential benefits and emerging concerns regarding commodification, efficacy, and possible adverse effects on mental wellbeing.

This roundtable explores the profound connection between music and human experience, investigating its mathematical foundations, neurological impact, cultural significance, and ability to evoke emotion and community.

This roundtable delves into the complex roots of warfare, examining psychological, sociological, and political factors – from innate aggression to social oppression and nationalism – in pursuit of understanding how to mitigate conflict.

This roundtable discusses the concept of Otherness, its origins, significance, and its role in current political polarization, with insights from philosophers, psychoanalysts, social theorists, and historians.

This roundtable brings together poets, psychoanalysts, critics and a translator to discuss the relationship between dementia and language, the impact of aging on reading and writing poetry, the distinction between lived experience and the lyrical, and the role of poetry in aging.

This roundtable discusses various philosophical and scientific perspectives on consciousness, focusing on the theories of Eliminativism and 4E Cognition.

The roundtable discusses the evolution and impact of sound and vibration, particularly in relation to speech and music, and how it influences our emotions and perception of space.

This roundtable explores the evolution and role of taste and discernment in human life, from basic survival to refined pleasure and art, and discusses its implications in aesthetics and practical reason.

The roundtable discusses the concept of touch as the core of sensation and sentience, exploring its scientific, philosophical, and poetic aspects.

This roundtable explores the complex role of olfaction in our lives, from its influence on our emotions and memories to its impact on cultural history and personal interactions.

This roundtable explores the intricate relationship between vision and attention, the role of vision in our perception of truth and falsehood, and the implications of these concepts on our understanding of animal consciousness, sensory perception, and cultural evolution.

This roundtable discusses the impact of media, particularly social media and AI, on society and how it shapes our understanding of reality, based on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan.

This roundtable focuses on the literature that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, with panelists discussing their attempts to make sense of the situation through their works.

This roundtable explores how fundamental mathematical concepts, like numbers, have evolved over time, challenging the idea of mathematics as fixed and absolute. It examines how revolutions in mathematical thinking reshape our understanding of truth, abstraction, and reality.

This roundtable explores the nature of emotion as a fundamental yet paradoxical aspect of human life, examining its roles in the brain, behavior, and evolution. It considers whether emotions can be understood, controlled, or even replicated in AI, and what they reveal about consciousness and human experience.

This roundtable celebrates Shakespeare’s enduring influence, marking key historical milestones while exploring the continued reinterpretation of his works across cultures and contexts. It considers why Shakespeare remains relevant today and how his plays are newly understood through modern perspectives.

This roundtable explores the search for life beyond Earth, examining methods for detecting biosignatures on exoplanets and within the Solar System. It considers the scientific strategies, challenges, and implications of discovering extraterrestrial life.

This roundtable explores memory as a dynamic process that shapes identity, perception of time, and our understanding of the future, both within and beyond the brain. It examines how personal, collective, and digitally extended memories influence experience in an age of technology and evolving mnemonic tools.

This roundtable explores 4E Cognition—how thought is shaped by the body, environment, social interaction, and extended tools—and what this means for consciousness and shared reality. It examines these ideas through philosophy, psychology, and cases like psychosis, considering how our experience of the world is constructed and maintained.

This roundtable explores how individuals and society can respond to today’s intersecting crises—ranging from public health and climate change to political polarization and global conflict. It considers how different fields and communities can work together to confront shared challenges and foster resilience in an uncertain world.

This roundtable considers the hypothesis that reality itself may be fundamentally computational or information-based. It explores philosophical and scientific perspectives on whether the universe can be understood as a form of simulation or algorithmic process.

This roundtable investigates the implications of AI systems capable of generating human-like language and behavior. It asks how these systems challenge our understanding of intelligence, agency, realism, and ethical responsibility.

This roundtable explores how fiction and ideas are encoded, transmitted, and transformed within culture. It considers the role of narratives, memes, and metafiction in shaping meaning and distinguishing fact from fiction.

This roundtable examines how truth and authenticity are defined in a digital age shaped by misinformation, decentralized systems, and algorithmic control. It considers the opportunities and risks of technologies that can both verify and fabricate perceived reality.

This roundtable explores how meaning is encoded and reconstructed across fields such as archaeology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. It examines how memory and interpretation allow us to recover and understand lost or hidden information.

This roundtable examines the evolving relationship between physics, metaphysics, and human knowledge of nature, from classical assumptions to modern challenges posed by quantum theory, language, and cognition. It considers how contemporary science and philosophy are reviving metaphysical inquiry by integrating empirical findings with questions about reality, perception, and consciousness.

This roundtable explores psychedelics and neuroplasticity, examining how mind-altering substances can influence perception, consciousness, and emotional states. It considers their historical, cultural, and emerging clinical roles in treating mental health conditions and expanding our understanding of the mind.

This roundtable examines how economics is evolving to address complex global challenges, from behavioral insights to large-scale disruptions like climate change, migration, and pandemics. It considers the field’s expanding role in analyzing social systems, policy, and human behavior in the 21st century.

This roundtable explores the ethical, cultural, and technological implications of modern reproductive science, including genetic screening and selection. It considers how advances in conception technologies raise questions about choice, identity, and the boundaries between nature, science, and tradition.

This roundtable explores the pervasive nature of stress in individual and collective life, examining its biological, psychological, and social effects. It considers how stress impacts the brain, behavior, and society, along with strategies for understanding, managing, and alleviating it.

This roundtable explores the placebo and nocebo effects, examining how beliefs and expectations can influence physical health and medical outcomes. It considers the underlying mechanisms, ethical questions, and what these effects reveal about the relationship between mind and body in medicine.

This roundtable examines the causes and dynamics of populist movements, focusing on tensions between “the people” and political elites. It considers how social, economic, and technological factors—including social media—contribute to the rise of populism and its various forms across political contexts.

This roundtable explores memory as a dynamic, evolving process that shapes identity, consciousness, and our relationship to the past, present, and future. It considers how individual and collective memories are formed, transformed, and experienced, and their significance in understanding the self.

This roundtable examines justice in the age of artificial intelligence, exploring questions of fairness, privacy, and decision-making when algorithms have unprecedented access to personal data. It considers how AI may reshape social equality, legal systems, and ethical frameworks in a world where anonymity is increasingly diminished.

This roundtable explores the evolutionary and biological roots of consciousness and emotion, drawing on Joseph LeDoux’s work to reconsider how emotions arise from fundamental survival processes rather than pre-formed states. It brings together perspectives from biology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy to examine how the brain constructs emotional experience and meaning.

This roundtable examines competing views of reality beyond physicalism, focusing on mathematical Platonism and tiered ontologies. It considers how these perspectives challenge the idea that particles and fields form the sole fundamental basis of existence.

This roundtable explores empathy as a psychological and imaginative process through which individuals “feel into” others and learn from both real and fictional experiences. It considers how empathy shapes identity, emotional understanding, and our ability to navigate relationships and internal conflicts.

This roundtable explores the nature of mathematical proof and the growing role of computers and AI in verifying and potentially producing proofs. It considers whether mathematics is a human practice with intrinsic value or a process that can ultimately be automated and entrusted to machines.

This roundtable explores the nature of truth and lying, examining how statements can be true, misleading, or shaped by omission, belief, and context. It considers psychological and philosophical perspectives on deception, including how and why individuals construct and believe falsehoods.

This roundtable explores status anxiety—what status means, why it matters, and why it drives human behavior. It examines the pursuit of status from historical, psychological, sociological, and biological perspectives to better understand its role in shaping our desires and social lives.

This roundtable explores shame as a social mechanism, examining how it is produced, used, and amplified across interpersonal, political, and technological contexts. It considers the consequences of shame for individuals and society, particularly in the age of social media and data-driven systems.

This roundtable explores the conceptual foundations of our current planetary era and how emerging perspectives challenge traditional distinctions between humans and the non-human world, nature and artifice, and agency and objectivity. It brings together interdisciplinary viewpoints to consider how these shifts inform our understanding of human action and responsibility in times of ongoing global crisis.