Decoding the Social Brain: Maths, Drugs and How We Read Each Other

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-min& Q+A with Dr Joseph Barnby Perth Launch Event Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6.30pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: Decoding the Social Brain: Maths, Drugs and How We Read Each Other Imagine your friend looks at you from across the street, but they don’t say hi. Did they see me? Are they mad at me? You can’t see inside their head but you've already built a theory about what they're thinking. Our social life is fundamental to being human, and essential to cooperation, coordination, and competition. Yet, how our brain accomplishes this task so efficiently, and what causes it to go wrong in psychiatric disorder, is still a mystery. My research turns the complex process of social interaction into something measurable. Using social games, computer algorithms, and psychoactive drugs, I uncover the maths and chemistry the brain uses to build theories of ourselves and others. The answers we find help us explain human mental health and development, improve the efficiency of artificial intelligence, and can scaled to enable more targeted support for those in distress. Your Speaker: Dr Joseph Barnby Dr Joseph Barnby is an Associate Professor and AI+ Senior Fellow at King’s College London and the University of Western Australia. He runs the Social Computation and Representation Lab (socrlab.net) that uses computer algorithms and drug studies to understand social interaction in human health and psychiatric disorder. He also is the founder and PI at Hypatia (hypatia.health), a spin out scaling precision algorithms to improve treatment development and allocation in mental health