The Helix Center

This roundtable examines the concept of embodied cognition and its implications for artificial intelligence systems that integrate perception, action, and interaction with the physical world. It considers how technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing, when combined with sensory and motor capabilities, can move beyond abstract computation to engage with real-world enviro...

This roundtable explores the concept of happiness from philosophical, psychological, and ethical perspectives, examining how it is defined, measured, and understood across both individual experience and the span of a life. It considers questions about the relationship between pleasure and well-being, the role of happiness in relation to others’ welfare, and how contemporary approaches such as posi...

This roundtable explores fear and anxiety as multi-layered phenomena involving neurobiological, physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and unconscious processes. It examines how these states are generated and experienced, compares human expressions of fear with those observed in other animals, and considers how perspectives from neuroscience, psychology, and psychoanalysis contribute to understandi...

This roundtable will explore why women’s genius is often less readily recognized than men’s, using that disparity as a starting point to examine how historical definitions of genius, along with gender norms, institutions, and cultural beliefs, have shaped whose contributions are visible and valued.

This roundtable will examine meditation as a deliberately cultivated mental state that, despite being difficult to define, has well-documented benefits for mental and physical health, focusing on the interplay between conscious intention and unconscious processes that sustain it.

These roundtables will explore how advances in computational neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics are transforming understandings of disease, shifting perceptions of illness toward more mechanistic, data-driven, and personalized frameworks, and enabling earlier detection, refined diagnosis, and targeted therapies.

This colloquium, organized by the Helix Center and ADAPes Freud Committee, brings together psychoanalysts, scholars, and cultural and political figures to engage in roundtable discussions on identity formation, education and the pursuit of knowledge, and the role of knowledge in addressing religious and nationalist extremism. Drawing on Freudian thought, the event examines how modern crises of ide...

Part 5: Conclusion A Colloquium of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation and L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud December 5th and 6th, 2015 at the Helix Center Participants: Marilia Aisenstein Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) Ian Buckingham Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Soci...

Part 4: Culture A Colloquium of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation and L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud December 5th and 6th, 2015 at the Helix Center Participants: Marilia Aisenstein Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) Ian Buckingham Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society...

Part 3: Identity A Colloquium of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation and L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud December 5th and 6th, 2015 at the Helix Center Participants: Marilia Aisenstein Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) Ian Buckingham Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Societ...

Part 2: Education and Civilizational Crisis A Colloquium of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation and L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud December 5th and 6th, 2015 at the Helix Center Participants: Marilia Aisenstein Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) Ian Buckingham Psychoanalyst; President, New...

This roundtable will explore translation as a fundamental cultural, psychic, and aesthetic process that extends beyond its traditional role as a technical linguistic practice, shaping how meaning is displaced, exchanged, and renewed across contexts.

This roundtable will examine how advances in memory research can deepen our understanding of the role memory plays in normal development and in shaping lived experience, while also informing efforts to address memory impairment in an aging population. It will further consider how dialogue between scientific researchers and practitioners of memory can foster mutual insights into the mechanisms, lim...

This roundtable will examine the philosophical problem of knowledge and ignorance, considering how we come to recognize the limits of what we know and how “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” can be progressively identified through inquiry, reflection, and dialogue.

This roundtable will examine competing philosophical and historical conceptions of genius, including the relationship between talent and originality, and whether originality is the defining feature of genius.

This roundtable will explore how advances in epigenetics and transgenerational inheritance challenge traditional “nature versus nurture” frameworks by reframing traits, behaviors, and diseases as the products of multifactorial genetic and environmental interactions.

This roundtable will examine how advances in the study of animal cognition and behavior have expanded our understanding from whether animals think to how and to what extent they think, and what their cognitive worlds may consist of.

This roundtable will consider how experiences of war and genocide shape survivors, perpetrators, and descendants, and how violence sanctioned by states or cultures informs individual and collective conscience.

This roundtable will examine how advances in genetics and neuroscience, along with ideas from quantum mechanics, are reshaping conceptions of free will, individual choice, and their implications for law.

This roundtable will examine how young children understand and experience the world across developmental stages, and what these differences reveal about cognition, memory, and emotion, with implications for supporting both typical development and developmental disorders.

This roundtable will explore curiosity as both a driving force of knowledge and a source of existential and ethical inquiry, examining how lives shaped by curiosity give meaning across disciplines and perspectives.

This roundtable will examine how science approaches the problem of consciousness, and the roles of physics, psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, philosophy, and religion in understanding sentience and self-awareness.

Part 2: Particle Fever Q&A with Mark Levinson Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s award-winning 2013 documentary (for which Helix Center Executive Committee member Carla Solomon was a producer), tells the remarkable story of the monumental search for the Higgs boson, the elementary force particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. Following a morning presentation of... read more!...

This roundtable will consider the mental and personal qualities that drive scientific and intellectual quests for discovery, beyond curiosity and courage, in the face of the known and the unknown.

This roundtable will examine the sublime across visual arts, music, religious experience, and nature, considering how philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience illuminate the experience and its relation to pleasure and awe.