Bruce Hood on the Domesticated Brain (The RSA)

Bruce Hood is the author of The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (2012). His new book is The Domesticated Brain: A Pelican Introduction, and he was at The RSA in England recently to talk about the new book.

Bruce Hood on the Domesticated Brain

7th May 2014

Listen to the audio  (full recording including audience Q&A)

RSA Replay is now a featured playlist on our Youtube channel, it is the full recording of the event including audience Q&A.

To celebrate the return of Pelican books, Penguin’s groundbreaking and iconic series of intelligent guides to essential topics, we are delighted to announce a new events series bringing together expert minds and curious observers in order to bring vital subjects to life.

Why do we care what others think? What keeps us bound together? How does the brain shape our behaviour?

How did the brain evolve from an organ whose primary function was to help us survive in a threatening world, to an organ which influences our thoughts and behaviour and navigates us through an equally unpredictable social landscape? In the third of these special RSA events, Bruce Hood, award-winning psychologist and director of the Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol will give us a clear and comprehensible insight into the complex mysteries of the brain.

Speaker: Bruce Hood, award-winning psychologist and Director of the Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol.

Chair: Timandra Harkness, writer and performer.



Pelican first appeared in 1937 with the publication of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism’ and continued with thousands of books across a massive range of subjects. Aimed at the everyday reader, Pelicans combined intellectual rigour with simple, clear and accessible prose.

Selling over 250 million copies, Pelican in its heyday was seen as influencing the intellectual culture in Britain by lowering the traditional barriers to knowledge. At the time, this confidence in the tastes of the ordinary reader was unusual, and gave Pelican a democratic, populist bent. The first Pelican books cost the same amount as a packet of cigarettes, a radical price at the time, and became especially popular among a self-educating post-war generation.

Speakers

• Timandra Harkness
• Professor Bruce Hood

Books

The Domesticated Brain: A Pelican Introduction by Bruce Hood (Pelican, 2014)