Santa Fe Institute

Join us tomorrow at the Lensic Performing Arts Center for SFI’s Community Lecture with Thalia Wheatley.

In this lecture, Wheatley will explore conversation as a powerful mechanism for coupling minds — aligning attention, beliefs, emotions, and behavior across individuals. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and network science, she will show how everyday features of human interaction are precision tools that synchronize brains, strengthen social connection, and shape mental health.

Tomorrow | June 23 | 7:30 pm MT

Free tickets: https://lensic.org/events/the-beautiful-engineering-of-us/ or watch the live stream on SFI’s YouTube

The dominant model of opinion dynamics has long assumed that people average all views, outliers included.

In a new paper in PNAS, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton and colleagues test a different conformity model, based on the most popular opinion, not the average, against real-world data and find it consistently beats DeGroot averaging.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/model-redefining-conformity-excels-against-real-world-data

In the 1970s, Thomas Nagel famously asked "what is it like to be a bat?" Today, large language models clamor to give an answer. Researchers optimistically argue that AI will allow humans to speak to whales, monkeys, even bats within a handful of years. However, interspecies communications experts have raised important questions about such bold claims.

To explore what interspecies communication actually requires, historically, philosophically, and empirically, SFI co-organized the working group "Interspecies: Decoding, Translation, and Interpretation" this May in collaboration with Interspecies Internet.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/interspecies

SFI External Professor Nicholas de Monchaux has been named the new dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED), with a term commencing July 1, 2027.

De Monchaux, an acclaimed architect, urbanist, and scholar, has led MIT’s Department of Architecture since 2020 and is returning to UC Berkeley, where he was a professor from 2006 to 2019. He has been a frequent visitor to SFI since 2001, participating in research collaborations with SFI faculty, and joined SFI’s external faculty in 2025.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/sfi-external-professor-nicholas-de-monchaux-named-dean-of-uc-berkeley-college-of-environmental-design

SFI Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University) has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Since the 1970s, his work has been rooted in mathematical theories and models to better understand a range of environmental issues. He has been involved with SFI for more than three decades, joining the SFI Science Board in 1994 and serving as its chair from 2007 to 2010.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/simon-levin-named-fellow-of-the-royal-society

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Thalia Wheatley on June 23, 7:30 pm at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

For more than a century, neuroscience has viewed intelligence as a property of individual brains. But brains did not evolve in isolation. Humans are an intensely social species whose minds are continuously shaped by other minds. Increasingly, evidence suggests that our most sophisticated cognitive abilities emerge not from solitary brains, but from networks of interacting people.

In this lecture, Wheatley will explore conversation as a powerful mechanism for coupling minds — aligning attention, beliefs, emotions, and behavior across individuals. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and network science, she will show how everyday features of human interaction are precision tools that synchronize brains, strengthen social connection, and shape mental health.

When: June 23, 2026 | 7:30 pm
Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM.
Free tickets: https://lensic.org/events/the-beautiful-engineering-of-us/

Presented free to the public thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.