Participant Bios:
 

ABEL ALVES is the author of Brutality and Benevolence: Human Ethology, Culture, and the Birth of Mexico (1996) and articles appearing in The Sixteenth Century Journal and other academic periodicals.  He has presented on biohistory to the Dual Congress of the International Association for the Study of Human Palaeontology and the International Association of Human Biologists in 1998.  With Carol Blakney as coauthor, he has just completed a book-length manuscript entitled The Biohistory of Feminism.
 
During the sixteenth-century conquest of the Nahua people known historically as Aztecs, Spaniards exhibited behavioral patterns that crossed human cultures and even primate species.  Displays of disciplinary power and altruism embedded in Spanish religious discourse and institutions had their parallels in the religion of central Mexico's Nahua people and provided for mutual understanding in the midst of linguistic, religious and broad-ranging cultural differences.  By examining these Spanish and Nahua patterns in the light of world history and biology, we can begin to hypothesize the fundamental categories of natural human behavior that underpin the different narratives spun by our diverse cultures.  The quest for an organizing meta-narrative using biology's analysis of our very real animal needs is what historian Robert McElvaine has termed "biohistory."  An exploration of Spanish-Nahua interaction provides an illustrative case study of how humans construct, deconstruct and reconstruct religious "maps of meaning" in order to promote their particular interpretive perspectives on cross-culturally persistent and ingrained questions concerning group affiliation, ranking within a group and sharing within the ranks.

JOHN PERRY BARLOW, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was the first to apply the term cyberspace to the "place" it presently describes. He has written for a diversity of publications, including Mondo 2000, The New York Times, and Time. His piece on the future of copyright, "The Economy of Ideas," is taught in many law schools, and his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is posted on thousands of websites. In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and has been, since 1998, a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School. In 1999, FutureBanker Magazine named him "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services."

SCOTT BARTCHY is Professor of Christian origins and the history of religion and Director, Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. Fields of interest include: History of Religions; Christian Origins; Early Church History.

 

SEANA COULSON is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego. Dr. Colson responds to the question, "Have you ever wondered why people often say one thing and mean another?" Her research uses the way people use language to entertain each other, persuade each other, and interact with each other as a window into the human conceptual system. In the Brain and Cognition Lab, surveys, reaction times, ERPs, and fMRI are used to probe cognitive and neural processes invoked when people understand metaphors, jokes, sarcasm, and lies.

 

JOHN DAGENAIS is Professor and Chair, Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dagenais is an expert on medieval Spain, in perticular the pilgrimages revolving around El Camino de Santiago, the Road of St. James and the Santiago de Compostela cathedral.

 

MARLENE DOBKIN DE RIOS, Ph.D., a medical anthropologist and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCI, has conducted extensive funded field research into indigenous South American spiritual, divinatory, and healing practices.

AMITAI ETZIONI, University Professor at George Washington University and founder of the Communitarian Network. He has authored many books, among them The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society; The Limits of Privacy; and the classic The Active Society . He is editor of the quarterly The Responsive Community. He is a past president of the American Sociological Association and has held the positions of Professor and Chair of Sociology at Columbia University and Professor at Harvard Business School.

DOROTHY FADIMAN has been producing award-winning documentary media with an emphasis on the power of the human spirit since 1976. Subjects range widely from the light of spirit as illumination (RADIANCE: The Experience of Light,) to progressive education that honors children’s natural knowing (WHY DO THESE KIDS LOVE SCHOOL?) to a miraculous healing for a woman with spinal cord injury (MOMENT by MOMENT: The Healing Journey of Molly Hale). Dorothy has taken a special interest in producing films which reflect the emerging power of the feminine through focusing on female health and women’s rights. Among her honors are an Academy Award nomination, an Emmy Award, and the Gold Medal from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She is currently writing a book entitled, Producing with Passion: Making Films that Change the World.

JAMES FADIMAN, Ph.D. is a prominent figure in the field of humanistic psychology and consciousness studies, a longtime student of Sufism, and distinguished author of such books as Essential Sufism, Personality and Personal Growth, and the popular novel, The Other Side of Haight. He is the past president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, past president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and co-founder of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. He recently hosted the inaugural Be The Change event in London which brought together individuals and organizations at the forefront of finance, politics and science to explore the means of achieving true and effective systemic change in the world.

BRETTE FISHMAN is a senior majoring in Political Science at UCLA. She is interested in the policy making process and how to influence people. She served as a health care volunteer in Mexico and Costa Rica. During the Clinton Administration she worked for General Barry McCaffrey as a White House intern for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Part of her job was to assist policy analysts. Her research at UCLA has focussed on how the media influences public decision making processes. She has also made documentaries on social issues. She hopes continue her studies and learn more about polling practices, creating budgets, and life.

AMANDA FOULGER is a shamanic practitioner based in Topanga, CA.  She has trained with a variety of medicine men and women for over 30 years and, since 1998, with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, where she is now a guest faculty member.

DAVID GALIN earned his medical degree in 1961 at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY. He presently holds the position of Associate Professor in Residence at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute and the Department of Psychiatry, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco.  He is founder and director of the Laboratory of Deep Questions. His research background includes four decades of neuro- and psycho-physiology in animals and humans. He has authored widely cited publications on the two halves of the brain, their differences and integration, and he has also conducted research on dyslexia, and on neuropsychological aspects of psychiatry. His current interests include religious experience from a neuropsychological perspective, and theories of consciousness and the self. Recent writings include “Rehabilitating The Concept ‘Spirit’ For The Non-Religious And The Scientifically Minded,” and “The Concepts of Self, Person, and ‘I’ in Western Psychology and in Buddhism.”

 

BRIDGET AGABRA GOLDSTEIN is Co-founder of Goldstein's Bagel Bakeries and President of the Board of the Walden School in Pasadena. By day, Ms. Goldstein runs three her bagel bakeries in Pasadena, California. By night, she puts the kids to bed and unwinds by socializing with friends and playing multi-player online games.

 

WILLIAM (BILLY) GRASSIE is Founder and executive director of the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science. Dr. Grassie has taught at Temple University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Pennsylvania. A few of his publications: “Hermeneutics in Science and Religion” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Science; “Human Creativity in an Evolutionary Context” in Metanexus (August 2000); “Wired for the Future: Kevin Kelly’s Techno-Utopia” in Terra Nova: Nature & Culture, (2:4, Fall 1997); “Postmodernism: What one Needs to Know” in Zygon Journal of Religion and Science (March 1997).

 
ROLAND R. GRIFFITHS, Ph.D., is Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  His principal research focus in both preclinical and clinical laboratories has been on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs.  He is author of over 250 journal articles and book chapters, and has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health and to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs.  He is also currently a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization.

 
MICHAEL HARRINGTON is a political economist, policy analyst and writer. He received his PhD in political science from UCLA in 1998 and has completed policy studies under the auspices of several LA-area policy institutes. He also holds degrees in finance and economics. His research interests include agent-based modeling, social behavior, and the impact of risk and uncertainty on policy outcomes. He is currently working on a manuscript that presents the conflicts between church and state, sacred and secular, during the Savonarolan period in Renaissance Florence.

LARRY HARVEY is the Founder and Executive Director of the Burning Man Project. He serves as chairman of Burning Man's senior staff and Black Rock City LLC. He also co-chairs the organization's Art Department, scripts and co-curates Burning Man's annual art theme, and collaborates with artists in creating the art theme and design of Black Rock City. As spokesperson for Burning Man, he is frequently interviewed, and he has lectured on subjects as diverse as art, religion, civic planning and the rise of cyber-culture in the era of the Internet. Larry is also a political planner. He supervises the organization's lobbying efforts and frequently attends meetings with state, county, and federal agencies.  

 
RALPH HOOD is a past president of the Division of Psychology of Religion of the American Psychological Association and a recipent of its William James Award for research in the psychology of religion. He was involved in the creation of The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and served as co-editor and book review editor. He is a fomer editor of the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion. He is a current board member of the Gesellschaft für Religionpsychologie. His recent works include two edited volumes by Religious Education Press: Handbook of Religious Experience and Measures of Religiosity (with Peter Hill). Dimensions of Religious Experience has just been published by Rodopi. Curently he is completing a third edition of The Psychology of Religious Experience (with Bernie Spilka and Bruce Hunsberger), to be published by Guilford.

 

SCOTT HUTCHINSON, UC Extension
No biography avaliable.

 

MICHAEL D. INTRILIGATOR is Professor Emeritus at UCLA, with Joint appointments with Political Science Department and the Department of Policy Studies, School of Public Policy and Social Research. His fields of interest include: Economic Theory and Mathematical Economics; Econometrics; Strategy and Arms Control; Health Economics; and the Transition from a Socialist to a Market Economy. His research addresses: Mathematical economic theory; applications of quantitative economics to strategy and arms control; health economics; the future of the Russian economy.

 
BOB JESSE serves as president of the Council on Spiritual Practices, which sponsors research on primary religious experience and its consequences.  CSP is also the publisher of a Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides.

 
MARIA JOYOUSPIRIT JIMAKAS is a clinical psychologist who has been exploring the realms of spirituality within humanistic psychology for many years. She evolved as a visual artist and  later combined  creativity  within the social-political arenas.  She was involved in the woman's equality movement, as well as into disseminating the radical therapy  model of psychology with its original focus on equalizing power of all involved in receiving and providing treatment. She provided psychological services in the largest women’s prison in California, to the Latino elderly in LA, and to agencies who serve poor minorities. Her prime interests include intuition and the eastern spiritual philosophies. Her focus has been in live-action-in-difficult-spots instead of joining academia. She is currently writing a book about personal relationships.

 

NORMAN JOHNSON is currently a Project Manager of a highly successful industrial collaboration at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His training is in kinetic theory and numerical methods in Rheology - the study of viscoelastic fluids. He graduated with his Ph.D. under R. Byron Bird, a J. D. MacArthur Fellow, at the University of Wisconsin in 1983. His research and over 50 publications cover a breadth of interests for multiphase flows, inertially confined fusion, engine and combustion modeling, self-organizing knowledge creation, diversity in collective systems and developmental theories of evolution. He is the founder of the Symbiotic Intelligence Project, an interdisciplinary investigation into problem solving using distributed networks, such as the Internet, that combine the unique abilities of information networks with human problem solving to create a capability greater than the sum of the parts. He is the recipient of a variety of honors, including an Award of Excellence in 1996 by the Department of Energy and a Distinguished Performance Award in 2000 by Los Alamos. He is a widely sought after popular speaker in the areas of finance, diversity in social systems, and complexity. He currently is President of a state-wide non-profit in New Mexico.

Norman Johnson’s work sheds light on revelation as the super-intuition of the mind — when we know things beyond what we can or should know. His research studies how distributed systems solve problems that are more difficult than can be solved by the components of the system. The central themes are emergence of properties in decentralized systems and the development of capabilities in evolving systems. Here, awe-inspiring experiences are the emergent connectivity between levels of reality, self and world, which enables us to function within a context that is, from a reductionist viewpoint, personably unknowable.

 

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Though trained iin psychology, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty." Dr. Kahneman has integrated insights from psychology into economics, thereby laying the foundation for a new field of research. Kahneman’s main findings concern decision-making under uncertainty, where he has demonstrated how human decisions may systematically depart from those predicted by standard economic theory. Together with Amos Tversky (deceased in 1996), he has formulated prospect theory as an alternative, that better accounts for observed behavior. Kahneman has also discovered how human judgment may take heuristic shortcuts that systematically depart from basic principles of probability. His work has inspired a new generation of researchers in economics and finance to enrich economic theory using insights from cognitive psychology into intrinsic human motivation.

 
TIMOTHY KETELAAR (Ph.D. Michigan, 1993) was a recent participant in Paul Ekman’s three year Postdoctoral Training Program in Emotion Research, spending the final two years of the program at the University of Illinois where he worked with Dr. Gerald Clore exploring social-cognitive approaches to emotion. He spent 1996-1997 in Munich, Germany as a postdoctoral fellow studying evolutionary psychology at the Center for Adaptive Behavior & Cognition in the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research.  From 1997 to 2002, he was a lecturer in the Communication Studies Program at UCLA and a member of the Behavior, Evolution, and Culture (BEC) group.  He is currently an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at New Mexico State University.  Dr. Ketelaar’s research focuses on the role of emotions (e.g., guilt) in social bargaining decisions (Ketelaar & Au, 2002; Ketelaar & Clore, 1997; Ketelaar & Goodie, 1998) and epistemology in evolutionary psychology (Ketelaar & Ellis, 2000; Ellis & Ketelaar, 2000).

 
MARK A.R. KLEIMAN is Professor of Policy Studies and Director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program in UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research. His teaching and research cover drug policy, crime control policy, theories of imperfect rationality, and methods of policy analysis. Before entering academic life, he worked on Capitol Hill, as Special Assistant to Edwin Land at Polaroid, as deputy director of management and budget for the City of Boston, and as Director of Policy and Management Analysis for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He is also the editor of the Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin and the Chairman of BOTEC Analysis Corporation, which provides policy advice to governments at all levels on drugs, crime, and health. His books include Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control and Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results. He is currently at work on Getting Deterrence Right: Crime Control Policy in the Light of Game Theory and Behavioral Economics. Before moving to UCLA, he taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in public policy.

DAVID KYDD received a Master’s in Buddhist Philosophy from the University of Virginia; spent a year in India, Nepal, and Thailand in meditation retreats; trained for six years in Zurich, Switzerland at the Carl Jung Institute; has almost completed his doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. His dissertation is about the cultural evolution of mental representations. In the past year he has lectured on this topic in Montreal, at the University of Essex, and at Boston University.

 

PIETER LECHNER is the Coordinator of the UCLA Academic Technology Services Visualization Portal. The Visualization Portal is an entryway into much of the research and instruction being done at UCLA. It is both a research tool, in which people can develop their work, and a presentation facility which can be used to most dramatically present that work. In the Portal, audiences can hear, see and otherwise experience information through a theater that was designed to highlight and enhance the presentation of information. The key element of the Portal is its immersive virtual reality display. The system uses three 3-gun projectors to display images on a floor-to-ceiling spherical screen, which can display a single image at 3520x1024 resolution by blending the edges of overlapping projectors. Or, three separate images can be displayed simultaneously, which could allow a presenter to have a PowerPoint presentation on one screen, a web page displayed on another, and a computer simulation on the third. The system also supports the display of 3D objects and virtual environments with stereographics, surround sound, and interactive object manipulation.

 
CATHY LEE is a third-year undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in political science. She works in the cultural theory tradition pioneered by anthropologists Mary Douglas, Steve Rayner, and Michael Thompson and political scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Ellis. She is contributing research towards a book titled “Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World,” which spells out and tests the implications of cultural theory for democratic decision-making through case studies. Cathy is also conducting a comparative study of arms control policies and is seeking to continue her research in graduate school.

 
SUSANNE LOHMANN is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Governance at UCLA. She was James and Doris McNamara Fellow at Stanford University in 1991/92, Olin Fellow at the University of Southern California in 1996, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1998/99, and  Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2000/01. She has published on collective action and central banking and is completing a book on How Universities Think. Her current research interests include ethics and governance (as in “Why some groups work and others fail”).

 
JORDAN B. PETERSON is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a scholar who has published extensively on the topics of self-deception, personality, mythology, motivation for social conflict, aggression and alcoholism. He was raised in a small town in northwestern Alberta, received his bachelor’s degree at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral work at McGill, in Montreal, and was a professor of psychology at Harvard from 1993-1998. He is married and has two children.

Dr. Peterson is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, published (1999) by Routledge (New York). This book presents a comprehensive theory of the grammar of religious and ideological thought, and describes the implications of that grammar for understanding ideological conflict. More information about this book, and about Dr. Peterson’s work, can be found at www.psych.utoronto.ca/~peterson/welcome.htm.

TRACY SANTOSO is a third-year undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in political science and economics. She reads American Political Science Review and Econometrica and wonders, sometimes, how much more un-awe-inspiring can social science research possibly become. Upon graduation, she hopes to be working for an awe-inspiring aerospace firm like Lockheed Martin.

 
ALEXANDER (SASHA) SHULGIN, Ph.D., is a chemist/pharmacologist with academic training from Harvard and the University of California.  His research, largely in the area of the creation and action of psychotropic drugs, has led to the appearance of about two hundred scientific publications and book chapters over the last 50 years.

ANN SHULGIN has participated in research into the effects of new psychotropic drugs.  Before 1985, she did work as a lay therapist for several years, using mostly MDMA for both individual and marital problems, as well as for the spiritual growth of some individuals.  She co-authored the books PIHKAL and TIHKAL with her husband Sasha Shulgin.

EDWARD SLINGERLAND, Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, holds a joint appointment in the departments of East Asian Languages & Cultures and Religion. His specialties and teaching interests include early Chinese thought, cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory, methodologies for comparative thought, evolutionary psychology, virtue ethics and the classical Chinese language. His first book, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in Spring of 2003. Prof. Slingerland will also be publishing a critical translation of the Analects of Confucius, with running traditional commentary and extensive textual notes, with Hackett Publishing Co. in March 2003. He has also published various articles and reviews in Philosophy East & West, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Religious Ethics.

 
HUSTON SMITH, holder of twelve honorary degrees, is an internationally recognized philosopher and scholar of religion. His book The World's Religions has been the most widely-used textbook on its subject for a third of a century, selling over two and a half million copies worldwide.  In 1996, Bill Moyers devoted a 5-part PBS special to Smith's life and work, "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith."  Smith has produced three series for public television: "The Religions of Man," "The Search for America," and (with Arthur Compton) "Science and Human Responsibility."

FRANCIS STEEN is Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at UCLA. He is interested in phenomena relating to mental simulations, such as animal and children's play, fictional narratives, movies, art, and religion. His research projects include collaborative parent-child learning strategies, the cognitive basis of art, and the evolutionary history of popular entertainment.

 

MARK TERRANO is Technical Game Manager in the Microsoft Xbox Advanced Technology Group at Microsoft. In this role he works with game developers world-wide to help them make the best possible Xbox games. Previously he worked with Ensemble Studios on all of the "Age of Empires" series of games, and on various multi-user experiences (MUDs to Telephone audio games). His first career was as a programmer and network specialist involved in every area of computing from stock markets to oil pipelines. His current interests involve fostering Strategy and RPG games on the Xbox, improving user interfaces and usability, game dialog, and pretty much anything involving online games. When not working, he performs music with friends, enjoys the lakes and mountains near Seattle, and plays a lot of games with his 11 year old son.

 
PAMELA THOMPSON was appointed Director of Communications and Media Relations at the John Templeton Foundation in November 1997. In her role as Director of Communications, she has focused on developing strategic leadership to help achieve worldwide recognition and understanding for the initiatives funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Whether through articles in top newspapers, magazines and peer reviewed journals, or appearances on programs and web casts, she works to inform thought-leaders around the globe. Her design concepts for collateral materials have been innovative, favorably received and important for attracting the attention of other like-minded individuals and organizations. To nurture interest and support, Pamela conducts campaigns that orchestrate a full range of communications vehicles, including press relations with national and international journalists, and preparation and placement of news feature articles.

Pamela received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Louisville and Masters Degree in Social Psychology from the University of Dayton. She has been principal of two award-winning and significant advertising/public relations agencies, Vice President of the Greater Louisville Fund for the Arts, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Louisville, Psychology Department.She is a member of the American Psychological Association, The American Psychological Society, Public Relations Society of America, and the Consumer Psychology Research Association.

 

CARLO TOGNATO is currently ABD in Political Science at UCLA. He received a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Ancona, Italy, and an M.Phil. in International Relations at the University of Oxford. During 2001-2002 he will be Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter for the Chair in Macrosociology at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He was awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship in 1998-2000 by the Center for German and European Studies, UC Berkeley, and a Dissertation Grant by the Center for European and Russian Studies, UCLA. He lectured a course on European Monetary Integration and Unification at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Diplomaticos "Pedro Gual," Caracas. He was visiting scholar at the Evolutionary Economics Unit of the Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Wirtschaftssystemen, Jena, at the Economic Research Directorate of the Department of National Planning, Bogota, and at the Research Group of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main. He is also coordinator in Bogota of two Working Groups respectively on Economics as Local Knowledge and on theInculturation of Economic Theory that involve the Departments of Economics at the Universidad Nacional and Universidad Externado de Colombia and the Department of Theology at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. His current research focuses on central banking, money and national identity and on the practice of economics. In particular, Carlo is interested in exploring the potential isomorphisms in the process of creation, administration and diffusion of orthodox economics and pre-conciliar Catholic theology.

 

DAVID SLOAN WILSON, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Departments of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Dr. Wilson is an evolutionary biologist with a wide range of interests, including natural selection as a hierarchical process, the nature of intraspecific variation, the evolution of ecological communities and human evolutionary biology. He is the author of dozens of scientific papers and the following books: The Natural Selection of Populations and Communities (1980), Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (with E. Sober, 1998), and Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (2002).

 

PAUL ZAK is Chair of the Department of Economics at the Claremont Graduate University. Professor Zak's research and teaching integrates neuroscience and economics into a new discipline, neuroeconomics. His current research focuses social cognition producing cooperation or conflict, decision- making under uncertainty, the neural foundation of human capital, and the effect of institutional design on economic development.