Lectures
The offered lectures revolve around wellbeing-related matters commonly encountered by both individuals and organizations. The purpose of these lectures is to highlight the neuroscience behind these topics and propose practical and accessible solutions that are based on a thorough understanding of the physiology of our brain and body.
The nature of habits
From an evolutionary perspective, success means effectively adapting to changes. However, adaptation means learning, unlearning, and re-learning, which can be difficult to achieve. By understanding how our brain learns, and not less importantly, how it forgets, we can better create sustainable habits that support our ability to adapt and develop. In this lecture, I will describe what happens in our brain when we learn new information, and how understanding this can help us acquire and change habits.
The neurophysiology of emotions
Our emotions are inseparable from every aspect of our lives. Moreover, at times it seems that it is our emotions that control us, and we are only responding to them. In this lecture, I discuss what emotions are and how are they different from feelings. We will go through how emotions are produced in our brain and what we can do to feel more in control over them.
The neuroscience of social interactions
From birth to death, we interact with countless individuals who shape our lives, each in a unique way that reflects their connection to us. With some, we have life-long relationships, while others come and go. In all cases, there are fundamental physiological processes that create these connections, maintain them, or end it. In this lecture, I go into how our brain perceives and processes social information and how it tunes our behavior accordingly. Given its fundamental role in the emotional aspect of social behaviors, the lecture highlights the sense of smell as an example of how our environment affects behavior in both conscious and unconscious ways.
The physiology of mind-body practices
We know that meditation, Yoga, physical activity, and other mind-body activities can support our mental well-being. In this lecture, I will dive into how these practices change the physiology of our body and brain, and by that change our behavior. By understanding the biological mechanisms of these interventions we can better tune them to our lives, making them more accessible and practical.