The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
Speaker: Dr. Susan Pinker
Tickets: First come, first served at the door. Seating is limited. $10 for Skeptics Society members and the JPL/Caltech community, $15 for nonmembers. Your admission fee is a donation that pays for the lecture expenses.
Credit: Susie Lowe
IN THIS ENTERTAINING AND PERSUASIVE LECTURE based on her new book, psychologist Susan Pinker shows how face-to-face contact is crucial for learning, happiness, resilience, and longevity. From birth to death, human beings are hardwired to connect to other human beings. Face-to-face contact matters: tight bonds of friendship and love heal us, help children learn, extend our lives, and make us happy. Looser in-person bonds matter, too, combining with our close relationships to form a personal “village” around us. Not just any social networks will do: we need the real, in-the-flesh encounters that tie human families, groups of friends, and communities together. Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience with gripping human stories, Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Creating our own “village effect” makes us happier. It can also save our lives.
A book signing will follow the lecture. We will have copies of the book, The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter , available for purchase. Can’t attend the lecture? Order The Village Effect online.
NOTE: We should meet at the hall entrance by 1:30pm. This leaves time to assemble, pay for tickets and then we can go in to get seats together. Call or text me if you're running a little late.