Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Our Bodies, Our Minds,” an exploration of the relationship between our biology and our thought processes, with Justin Brooks, M.D., associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and scholar of computational psychophysiology.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-bodies-minds-771 .]

For millennia, humans have wondered how mind and body are connected. Are our thoughts just the electrical murmurs of nerve cells, or is there something more? Are they the result of millions of years of evolution?

Explore the mind-body problem through the lens of measurable physiology with Dr. Justin Brooks, a physician-scientist whose research focuses on using mobile and wearable technologies to understand, predict, and influence human behavior and health.

He’ll describe how millions of years of evolution shaped the way our minds and bodies speak to each other, with our nervous system being the product of countless adaptations that shape how we react, think, and survive. Reflexes hidden in our physiology, attention, and mental effort reveal a “biotype,” a stable but adaptable signature of how we process the world.

The problem is that reflexes honed by a prehistoric world of predators and scarcity now must navigate the strange demands of a modern society. Rather than mirroring who we truly are, our reflexes often are just echoes of ancient survival needs. As a result, many of us live slightly out of sync with our own biology. We think faster than we feel, ignore our body’s quiet warnings, and misread the signals from our bodies that guide balance and well-being. Breakdowns in the conversation between mind and body cause stress to accumulate, performance to falters, and health to erode.

In a talk that blends neuroscience, physiology, and philosophy, Dr. Brooks will discuss how our specific biotypes might hold clues for realigning our ancient wiring with the pace of contemporary life to avoid the pitfalls of burnout, chronic stress, and mental fatigue. He’ll explore how measuring the body can illuminate the mind and how both can be brought back into harmony for the world we live in now. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: Part of an illustration of the brain in Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, a textbook completed by anatomist Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery and artist Nicolas Henri Jacob in 1854.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “When Nazis Prowled Our Coasts,” a look at how Hitler brought war to America, with Kevin Matthews, professor of history at George Mason University and teacher of courses on early 20th century European history and World War II.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-when-nazis-prowled]

A German submarine surfaces in New York’s harbor. Nazi saboteurs armed with explosives land on a Florida beach with orders to blow up factories in Tennessee and dams on the Ohio River. American ships are sunk in broad daylight while vacationers look on from New Jersey to Virginia Beach, from the Outer Banks to Key West.

It wasn’t the plot of a bad movie. Such events actually happened during the early months of 1942, helping to explain why watchtowers still stand near the beaches of Delaware and New Jersey today.

Come learn about this forgotten episode of our nation’s World War II past with Professor Kevin Matthews, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on the Battle of the Bulge, the rise of Fascism, and the history of the Irish Revolution.

He’ll describe how Nazi Germany sought both to make the United States pay for siding with Britain, and defeat us at home before our forces could get to Europe, by sending its forces places you now associate with boardwalks and bodysurfing. It ordered its U-boats to beat America like a “kettledrum” as part of a campaign known as Operation Paukenschlag (which translates as “drumbeat.”) And by the spring of 1942 its submarines also were prowling the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Aiding the success of Nazi Germany’s campaign were two unwitting allies: the U.S. Navy, which refused to change tactics in the face of Germany’s attacks; and the leaders of American cities, who refused to impose blackouts and thereby created a neon-lit shooting gallery the length of the East Coast.

You’ll learn how Britain’s Royal Navy and Royal Air Force helped defeat the U-boats at a time when they threatened our entire war effort, and how the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover helped establish himself as the nation’s top cop by doggedly tracking down Nazi agents.

It’s a talk that will give you plenty to think about on your next trip to the beach. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: The tanker S.S. Dixie Arrow after being torpedoed by a German submarine off Cape Hatteras in March 1942 (U.S. Navy photo).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Designing Belonging,” on the messages sent by various institutional environments and how they can be made more welcoming, with Martha Kakooza, research associate in the department of higher education and student affairs at Morgan State University, where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality, and narrative and qualitative research.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-belonging .]

Why do some rooms make people relax while others make them stiffen? Why do certain workplaces, schools, restaurants, churches, airports, and waiting rooms seem to say, “you are welcome here,” while others quietly signal “this was not built with you in mind”?

Explore how ordinary spaces shape belonging at a talk that will offer guidance to those seeking to create inclusive environments for students, clients, and customers. Being on hand will help anyone out there sort out why some environments have felt so welcoming while others left them focused on exits.

You’ll learn how a room's layout, lighting, seating, signage, sound, artwork, security presence, and history all affect whether people feel at ease or on edge, powerful or invisible, cared for or merely processed. People read these cues almost instantly, usually before they can explain why a place feels welcoming or alienating.

Dr. Martha Kakooza, a scholar whose research has focused space, identity, and institutional environments, will discuss why the same environment can feel like home to one person and like a closed door to another. She’ll describe how experiences of race, culture, class, gender, age, disability, and migration all shape how we read a space. We’ll look at how no space is truly neutral, because each one carries social messages and histories.

Drawing on research on students navigating higher-education institutions built without them in mind, Dr. Kakooza will discuss three distinct things spaces do to us: Some leave us drifting and unanchored. Some put us on display and grant only a conditional, watched kind of welcome. And some we manage to come to see as genuinely ours. She calls these different effects, respectively, “Drift,” “Quota,” or “Turn.”

Among the questions Dr. Kakooza will answer: What makes a place feel welcoming? How do buildings and rooms communicate power? What would it take to design schools, workplaces, and public spaces with belonging built in? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Demography as Destiny,” on understanding the links between population trends and world events, with John Rennie Short, geographer, professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Demography and the Making of the Modern World: Public Policies and Demographic Forces.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-demography-destiny ]

The size of a family doesn’t just affect food and clothing budgets and space needs. If it reflects a broader trend in birth rates, it also can have a profound impact on politics, the economy, and world affairs.

Come to Baltimore’s Guilford Hall for a fascinating look at how demographic forces shape the modern world and have driven developments such as the Arab Spring, political unrest in Sri Lanka and Nepal, economic growth in Vietnam and India, the budget crisis in the United States, and the rise of nationalist populism in Europe.

Dr. John Rennie Short, who has written several acclaimed books on world trends and gives excellent Profs and Pints talks focused on geopolitical affairs, will break down how various demographic changes can alter nations’ destinies.

You’ll learn how baby booms can dampen economic growth, as has occurred in central Africa, and how a “youth bulge” caused by the aging of a baby boom provides tinder for social unrest, as happened in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s and is the case today in Nepal and Sri Lanka.

We’ll look at the “demographic dividend” reaped when a youth bulge ages enough to become economically productive and the roles that such dividends played in periods of sustained economic growth in Japan, China, and, most recently, Vietnam. We’ll look at how the aging of a demographic bulge into retirement years can strain national budgets and strengthen the appeal of conservative or populist political movements.

You’ll emerge from the talk better equipped to make sense of political and economic developments in the United States and elsewhere around the world. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.