OCTOBER
12 Face your fears at Goose Bumps! The Science of Fear, a traveling exhibition developed by the California Science Center. Kids can experience the scary emotion in a safe environment as they learn how their brain and body work together to confront danger. Visit Boston’s Museum of Science to get your heart pumping in hands-on activities, including an interactive video game where the player learns how fear helps animals survive in nature.
Boston
www.fearexhibit.org/about_exhibit
15 On this day in 1963, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram published his groundbreaking article, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. The infamous Milgram experiment, in which subjects believed they were delivering increasingly painful high-voltage shocks to other participants for giving incorrect answers, demonstrated people’s willingness to obey an authority figure even when asked to do something reprehensible. Milgram’s findings helped to inform debates about how atrocities such as the Holocaust could have happened.
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23–26 Can vitamins or folic acid prevent stroke and dementia? Should doctors treat patients in early stages of Parkinson’s disease, when drug side effects may be worse than the symptoms they alleviate? Neurologists from around the world will debate these and other questions at the 2nd World Congress on Controversies in Neurology, hosted this year in the ancient Greek city of Athens.
Athens
http://comtecmed.com/cony/2008
NOVEMBER
10 The first broadcast of Sesame Street aired on this day in 1969. In a pioneering move, the show’s creators employed the latest principles of developmental psychology to teach academic and social skills. They tailored math and vocabulary lessons, for instance, to the ability of the typical two- to five-year-old and interspersed short, varied segments to engage that age group’s attention span appropriately. The show continues to rely on the latest psychological science as a basis for its success today.
11–30 Frost/Nixon, a play by Peter Morgan, who also co-wrote the award-winning screenplay for The Last King of Scotland, reenacts the famous 1977 interview in which British talk-show host David Frost extracted an on-air apology from Richard Nixon regarding his role in the Watergate scandal. The play’s power lies in its insight into the thrill of public confession—and the complex intersection of politics and psychology in the media.
Washington, D.C.
www.culturecapital.com/event.php?id=2554
15 Trompe l’oeil (literally, “trick the eye”) painting has intrigued viewers for centuries. In Illusions in Art for Young Eyes at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, contemporary master Eric Conklin borrows tools such as conical mirrors from 17th-century Dutch artists and mathematical principles from ancient Egyptian architecture to create a sense of depth when there is none or to imply volume when only area exists.
Wausau, Wis.
www.lywam.org/exhibitions
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Calendar".
