Universidad Pontificia Comillas

Sophia-Iberia organized a high profile and very successful scientific session at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF2008), entitled "Mind, human perception and social evolution", which took place on Monday 21 July 2008, from 8.30 to 10.00am (Palau de Congressos Barcelona). Introduced and moderated by Anders K. Christensen (Science Journalist, Denmark), the first speaker, Steven Rose (Emeritus Professor, Dept. of Life Sciences, Open University, UK), presented Why the mind is wider than the brain; then Silke Paulmann (Postdoctoral Fellow, Neuropragmatics and Emotion Lab, McGill University, School of Communication, Sciences & Disorders, Canada) spoke about Exploring the time-course of emotional speech processing and, finally, Andreas Bartels (Dept. Logothetis, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany) offered his work on Understanding the biology of emotions. Preparations have been made for the publication of a booklet with the speeches from this session.

Together with the Metanexus Institute, Sophia Europa, ESSSAT (European Society for the Study of Science and Theology) and ISSR (International Society for Science and Religion), Sophia-Iberia has also organized and manned an exhibition stand (with daily cocktail receptions at the booth) at the Exhibition Area of ESOF2008 (July 18-22), in order to have intensive interaction with the ESOF attendees. In addition, a joint session about "Constructive engagement of science and the humanities: different perspectives" was presented on Saturday 19 July, from 4.30 to 6.00 pm, where representatives of each organization (Edward J. Devinney, Roberto Poli, Chris Wiltsher, Ronald Cole-Turner and Christine Heller) explained their projects and their shared will to pursue the objective of increasing the public awareness about the need for constructive engagement between Sciences and Humanities in debates on science policy in Europe.