Presentation by Barbara Sorg. Starting from a very young age, humans are driven to seek out novel sensations and rewarding experiences. During adolescence, some seek out drugs because they create novel sensations. Repeated exposure creates new experiences and powerful persistent memories. Professor Sorg discusses what happens in the brain with rewarding experiences and how drugs can alter the brain’s structure and function to make addiction a chronic disease. Sorg is a professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience and co-director of the Washington State University Translational Addiction Research Center.
We walk through this world with assumptions about how others view us. We don’t intend to have those filters, but we do because of how we were raised and because of what we have been exposed to in our lives. What does it look like to confront all of our preconceptions? What does it look like to reimagine how we interact with others? Jo H Victoria is a teacher, a youth advocate, and Unitarian Universalist lay leader. She lives in Eugene. Jo is passionate about creating safe spaces to confront our own bias and celebrate our diversity, and is an enthusiastic gardener.
Members share their research on influential women of science, politics, exploration and entertainment. Presentations include women who have changed the world but are not well known. Presenters were Anne Henderson, Joyce Lackie, Marsha Abelman, Lenora Warren, Arnie Panitch, Laurent Beauregard, and Carolyn Tomei.
Presentation by Dave Collamer about Theodore Roszak who was a history professor at California State University and a social critic for over 40 years. Roszak’s view is that people in developed countries have bought into the techno-industrial scheme of life so much that they have lost contact with their inner sources of transcendent vision, and thus are out of balance. Roszak is the author of The Making of a Counter Culture. Dave Collamer is a member of HGP. He retired from teaching high school science and moved from to Portland in 2010. Dave has always been interested in philosophy and history.