Roger Bingham

Last updated
Roger Bingham
Roger Bingham.jpg
Born
Died21 October, 2023
Alma mater University College London [1] [2]
Known forCo-founder and director of the Science Network (TSN)
Creator and Host of television series The Human Quest
Co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self
Co-author of science-based novel Wild Card
Spouse
(m. 1970,divorced)
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Neuroscience
Science communication
Institutions Salk Institute for Biological Studies
University of California, San Diego

Roger Bingham was a science educator, author and television host based in La Jolla, California. He was co-founder and director of the Science Network (TSN), a virtual forum dedicated to science and its impact on society. Bingham was also the creator of the Beyond Belief conferences.

Contents

Career

Bingham developed the Science and Society Unit at the Los Angeles PBS station, KCET. [3] There, he wrote, produced and presented the Frontiers of the Mind series, which included "The Addicted Brain", "The Sexual Brain", "The Time of Our Lives", and "Inside Information", [4] programs which have been broadcast in multiple countries and languages. Bingham also co-wrote and hosted the PBS television series The Human Quest (1996). Philip Hefner wrote in The Christian Century that "it provides a benchmark of the minimal scientific knowledge all informed persons should possess (...) Bingham and his PBS series represent the best and brightest of Western scientific intelligence today." [5] The Human Quest episode The Nature Of Human Nature won a Writers Guild of America Award. [6] [7] He co-authored the novel Wild Card (1974) and The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self (Harmony, 2002).

From 1995 to 1996, Bingham was a visiting associate at Caltech in the laboratory of evolutionary neuroscientist, John Allman and a visiting fellow at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UC Santa Barbara (co-directed by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides). Bingham and Peggy La Cerra presented an alternative to the model of evolutionary psychology, first in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , [8] then in The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self. This model was based on the concept of adaptive representational networks (ARN). According to this theory, these networks encode the history of an individual's behavioural successes and failures in relationship to the energy costs of any particular behaviour. Hence, memory becomes an accounting mechanism for computing the energy costs of behaviour. [9] La Cerra and Bingham called this model "Theoretical Evolutionary Neuroscience". [8]

After the publication of The Origin of Minds, Bingham turned his attention to developing a platform for science education and communication. In 2003, with Terry Sejnowski, he initiated the project that became known as the Science Network. [10] The launch of The Science Network was a landmark Symposium and Town Hall meeting, Stem cells: science, ethics and politics at the crossroads, held at the Salk Institute in 2004. [11] [12] Roger Bingham served as the director of the Science Network.

Bingham was an affiliate of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies [13] and the Institute for Neural Computationat UC San Diego. [14] Bingham was also a member of the Director's Council, UC San Diego Center for Brain Activity Mapping (C-BAM) [15] and an Executive Committee member of the UCSD Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC). [16]

In 2009, Bingham was named a member of the Board of Advisers of Scientific American . [17]

Books

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salk Institute for Biological Studies</span> Scientific research institute in San Diego, US

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine; among the founding consultants were Jacob Bronowski and Francis Crick. Construction of the research facilities began in spring of 1962. The Salk Institute consistently ranks among the top institutions in the US in terms of research output and quality in the life sciences. In 2004, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranked Salk as the world's top biomedicine research institute, and in 2009 it was ranked number one globally by ScienceWatch in the neuroscience and behavior areas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">V. S. Ramachandran</span> Indian-American neuroscientist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Churchland</span> Canadian-American analytic philosopher

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Revelle</span> American scientist (1909–1991)

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Jeffrey Locke Elman was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He specialized in the field of neural networks.

The Science Network (TSN) is a non-profit virtual forum dedicated to science and its impact on society. It was initially conceived in 2003 by Roger Bingham and Terry Sejnowski as a cable science TV network modeled on C-SPAN. TSN later became a global digital platform hosting videos of lectures from scientific meetings and long form one-on-one conversations with prominent scientists and communicators of science, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, V.S. Ramachandran, Helen S. Mayberg, and Barbara Landau. TSN has also sponsored and co-sponsored scientific forums, such as Stem cells: science, ethics and politics at the crossroads, held at the Salk Institute in 2004 and the Beyond Belief conference series.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ursula Bellugi</span> American psychologist (1931–2022)

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References

  1. "Welcome to CaltechCampusPubs - CaltechCampusPubs". campuspubs.library.caltech.edu.
  2. "Memories of 68".
  3. Biomarine: Roger Bingham
  4. Holdings: Frontiers of the Mind
  5. Stories Science Tells: Defining the Human Quest by Philip Hefner, The Christian Century
  6. 1 2 "Roger Bingham". IMDb.
  7. 1 2 "Writers Guild Awards". Archived from the original on May 22, 2015.
  8. 1 2 The adaptive nature of the human neurocognitive architecture: An alternative model, PNAS La Cerra, P; Bingham, R (September 1998). "The adaptive nature of the human neurocognitive architecture: an alternative model". PNAS. 95 (19): 11290–11294. Bibcode:1998PNAS...9511290L. doi: 10.1073/pnas.95.19.11290 . PMC   21635 . PMID   9736729.
  9. "Human Nature Review, 2000, Vol 3, 440-447".
  10. Philipkoski, Kristen. "Are You Ready for Some Science?". Wired via www.wired.com.
  11. "TSN: Stem Cells: Science, Ethics and Politics at the Crossroads". thesciencenetwork.org.
  12. "Inside Salk 11 04" (PDF).
  13. "CNL : CNL People". cnl.salk.edu.
  14. "INC Members". inc.ucsd.edu.
  15. "People". cbam.ucsd.edu.
  16. "Executive Committee". tdlc.ucsd.edu.
  17. DiChristina, Mariette (November 1, 2009). "The Scientists Behind the Stories at Scientific American". Scientific American.
  18. Proceedings of the American Psychological Association, Incorporated, for the year 1991
  19. "National Magazine Award Searchable Database".