KEYNOTE LECTURE
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Subjective well-being is something we can measure. For example, we can ask people how happy they are in terms of the various aspects of their lives, whether concerning work, family, friends or society. The majority of data support a general conclusion that the things that make people most happy are not actually things, but connections. Once our basic needs for food, shelter and warmth are met, it is feelings of being connected that are the deep sources of our well-being. This applies not only to the important connections with family, friends and colleagues, but also connections that we have to our environment and, indeed, ourselves. But what provides connection?
In this presentation Dr. Tse will argue that paying attention is the most important avenue to forming a connection, because paying attention is what brings about awareness of what is really happening or really being said. And without attention, we operate in a mode of automaticities that is not open to growth and change. On the other hand, if attention is at the heart of connection, how does one foster attentiveness?
In an age of mass distraction and pseudo-connection (social media relationships, for example), what kind of life choices afford paying attention? What practices stimulate and promote one's ability to pay attention more deeply? And what things work against and prevent our natural ability to pay attention and form connections, not from the world, but inside ourselves? I will describe various approaches to fostering deep connections, and hopefully give the listener tools to make his or her life richer in both attention and connections, and therefore also well-being.
“The Science of Well-Being”
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Peter Ulric Tse
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
Dartmouth College
About the Keynote Speaker
The focus of Tse's work in Cognitive Neuroscience is the bottom-up and top-down processes that go into the construction of human consciousness or subjective experience. His group has focused on two main directions: the influence of top-down volitional operations on visual experience, and the nature of volitional mental operations that go into the construction of internal virtual experience or imagination. In his work on the neural basis of the human imagination, he has emphasized the importance of volitional and non-volitional verb-like mental operations over noun-like representations, such as imagined visual objects. He maintains that the brain might not be as modular as previously thought, and that certain types of brain processing may happen in a fundamentally distributed manner. In particular, he has argued that humans are different from other animals, including our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, because our brains have undergone a breakdown of mental modularity that has allowed operators from one previously encapsulated domain to operate on operands from another previously encapsulated domain. This breakdown of mental modularity has many consequences for human styles of cognition, not available to the mind of other animals, including, for example, an appreciation of music, art, metaphor and symbols. In his classic book “The Neural Basis of Free Will”, Tse presents a neuroscientific perspective on the mind–body problem that focuses on how the brain actually accomplishes mental causation.
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For more details, please check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ulric_Tse
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