Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics The Creative Process

“We've got four billion years of biological accidents that created all of the intricate aspects of everything about life, including consciousness. And it's about what's going on in each of those cells at the time that allows it to be connected to everything else and for the information to be understood as it's being exchanged between those things with their multifaceted, deep, complex processing.”

How does the brain process emotions? How are emotional memories formed and stored in the brain, and how do they influence behavior, perception, and decision-making? How does music help us understand our emotions, memories, and the nature of consciousness?

Joseph LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University at NYU and was Director of the Emotional Brain Institute. His research primarily focuses on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions, such as fear and anxiety. He has written a number of books in this field, including The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human, The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious, and The Deep History of Ourselves. LeDoux is also the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Amygdaloids.

“AI is brilliant at cognitive empathy. However, the next kind is emotional empathy. Emotional empathy means: I know what you feel because I'm feeling it too. And this has to do with circuitry in the fore part of the brain, which creates a brain-to-brain circuit that's automatic, unconscious, and instantaneous. And emotions pass very  well across that. I think AI might flunk here because it has no emotion. It can mimic empathy, but it doesn't really feel empathy. The third kind is empathic concern. Technically, it means caring. It's the basis of love. It's the same circuitry as a parent's love for a child, actually. But I think that leaders need this very much."

How can we enhance our emotional intelligence and avoid burnout in a changing world? How can we regain focus and perform in an optimal state? What do we mean by ecological intelligence?

Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. Before becoming an author, Goleman was a science reporter for the New York Times for 12 years, covering psychology and the human brain. In 1995, Goleman published Emotional Intelligence, a New York Times bestseller. In his newly published book Optimal, Daniel Goleman discusses how people can enter an optimal state of high performance without facing symptoms of burnout in the workplace.

“I've been playing with AI just to see what it can do. People who are not privileged with the skills of conceptualizing, the skills of abstract thinking, they will be replaced. And I'm just thinking about people from the Global South at this moment. People from the Global South have been working as supporters. They do a lot of support for creative work of entrepreneurs in the Global North. They do social media. They create content and things like that. The people who would provide the support live in, let's say, the Philippines. So, what I'm worried about is how AI technology could take the jobs of people who are not really trained to sort of do conceptual thinking.”

“As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.”