Antonio Damasio, the author of Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, opens this hour-long video featuring three substantive talks. Damasio is the head of the recently founded USC Brain and Creativity Institute.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher gives her talk, Art, Emotion, and Romantic Love, at exactly twenty minutes in. Isabelle Peretz, with The Emotional Power of Music, is at 39:00 minutes.

These talks were part of a symposium, Evolutionary Origins of Arts and Aesthetics, held last March at the Salk Institute. You can download videos of all the talks at the conference website, or simply catch them at the YouTube playlist, Evolutionary Origins of Arts and Aesthetics.

Come on, don’t you want to see, Art in Neanderthal and Paleolitic Cultures? Actually, this video starts by introducing the symposium, and if you stop at 5 minutes in, you can see Jean Pierre Changeux speaking broadly about the conference. Jean-Jacques Hublin’s presentation on Neanderthal art kicks in at 7:50, and Randall White follows with Paleolithic Art at 30 minutes. White’s talk is the most anthropological – and crucial to thinking about what art is and what art means and how we are to understand it.

The conference was put on by CARTA: Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, with the tagline “to explore and explain the origin of human phenomena”.

CARTA is a virtual organization formed in order to promote transdisciplinary research into human origins, drawing on methods from a number of traditional disciplines spanning the humanities, social, biomedical, biological, computational & engineering and physical & chemical sciences.

CARTA is hosting another great symposium on October 2nd, 2009: Human and Non-Human Cultures.