Charlie Rose interviewed me for the Nobel Prize, and we got along extremely well. And he had me back once or twice more, and we had very good programs. And then he invited me to Aspen where he runs a series of roundtables. He asked me to organize something on age-related… any topic, I organized an age-related memory loss.
And so they had a roundtable on Iran, on Afghanistan, on, you know, Israel/Palestinian interaction. One depressing topic after another. So this audience was moving around, becoming progressively more despondent. And then he came to our roundtable with this delusional optimism of biologists really is at work, and they loved it. They thought it was the best thing they heard. It was B+, but fine.
So Charlie said we have to do something about it. So we started the first of what turned out to be three series on the brain. The first was the normal brain, perception, action, etc, memory. The second one was abnormal brain, psychiatric and neurological diseases. And we've just started the third series on brain science in society - aggression, parenting, and just now we did a terrific program on transgender.
So having a wonderful time. I've always enjoyed sort of the public outreach aspect of science. I mentioned earlier how Principles of Neural Science was really an attempt at least to reach medical students in a coherent way. The two books that I wrote were designed for the general reader, and this was wonderful, and Charlie's just fantastic in his capability of doing that, and I've learned an enormous amount from him about that. So that has been very enjoyable.