• Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, FAAAAI, is a member of the academic faculty at Stanford Medical School and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Director of Allergy Clinics at Stanford Medical Center within the Division of Immunology and Allergy. She is a practicing clinician and a prominent researcher in the field of allergies Dr. Nadeau oversees: Translational Basic Science Research in the laboratory based on tolerance mechanisms of immune cells and Clinical Research on immunotherapy and induction of desensitization vs. tolerance. The Nadeau laboratory focuses on the role of human T cells in allergic diseases. Dr. Nadeau has been working in the field of T cell tolerance for more than 22 years and hypothesizes that disruptions in the normal maintenance of tolerance by T cells lead to some human immune-mediated diseases, like food allergies and asthma. She is currently studying twins for allergy and asthma diseases and has preliminary results that she will share on the program. She is also the mother of two sets of twins.
  • Dr. Margery Runyan, psychotherapist, discusses the practices of Dr. Carl Jung, a disciple of Sigmund Freud until they separated over theoretical differences. Dr. Jung believed that the unconscious had a collective component composed of symbolic energy nodes known as archetypes. Freud believed that the unconscious was filled solely with repressed personal material. Dr. Mercy contrasts ‘symbols’ and ‘signs.’  A symbol belongs to the dream world and intuition; it resonates with deeper levels of meaning as it unfolds within the unconscious and bridges the gap to the consciousness. Signs are equations that have known meanings within the cultural consciousness.
  • The Navajo have occupied their sacred lands in the Four Corners for centuries. The Hero Twins tells the story of two brothers born to Changing Woman and trained by the Holy People to save their people from the naayéé', a race of monsters. Kit Carson joins the story as naayéé'. Kit Carson was ordered to subdue the Navajo in New Mexico through destroying crops and starvation, forcing them to move from their ancestral lands to a distant, inhospitable reservation on the Pecos River.
     
  • In this program, Dr. Mercy will discuss studies performed with identical and fraternal twins as participants. If you have been a participant in a twin study perhaps through one of the large registries that exist through the United States and the world, we would love to hear your experiences. Twin studies can be cross-sectional or longitudinal; they often focus on the interrelationship among genetics, shared environment, and non-shared environment in order to determine the relative effects on personality, aptitudes, life experiences, and health. Some studies have been done with MRI technology to measure the size of fetal brains. Dr. Mercy will cover these resources and will also discuss the recent findings that identical twin DNA is not necessarily identical; she welcomes callers to discuss the implications of such results for society and the twins themselves. She will also report on various twin registries across the world, their purposes, and some results of the longitudinal studies that these registries are used to conduct.
  • Dr. Mercy interviews Dr. Nancy Segal, Professor of Psychology and Director of Twin Studies at the California State University, Fullerton, will be discussing twins switched at birth. As a fraternal twin, psychologist and researcher, Dr. Segal has been uniquely positioned to perform ground-breaking studies on twins including her work at the University of Minnesota with twins separated at birth and reunited in adulthood and her most recent study on the development of Chinese twins adopted internationally both apart and together. Her other research has included the behavioral similarities of virtual twins (same age unrelated children raised together) and the behavioral consequences of twin loss. Dr. Segal is considered one of the foremost experts on the nature versus nurture controversy based on her quantitative studies of twins’ behaviors. Dr. Segal will be prepared to discuss the nature of twin relationships, twin development, twins accused of cheating at school, and twin relationships within the family. Dr. Nancy Segal has written seven books about twins.  Dr. Segal has authored approximately 250 scientific articles and book chapters in addition to her many books. A recent paper won a 2007 Award for Excellence in Research from the Mensa Foundation. She is also an Associate Editor of Twin Research and Human Genetics, the official journal of the International Society for Twin Studies. She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Twin Research and Human Genetics, Evolution and Human Behavior and Human Ethology.
  • Dr. Mercy discusses the process of synchronicity proposed by Dr. Carl Jung, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, a practicing psychiatrist in Switzerland during the 20th century, and a proponent of the collective unconscious. He used the term synchronicity to describe acausal events that occur simultaneously in the realm of Consciousness. In 'On the Nature of the Psyche,' Jung regretted that synchronicity is bound to the notion of Time. In mathematical terms, Time is the curvature of Space. Thus Jung concluded that the Archetypes have not only psychic reality but also relate in some fashion to the Space/Time continuum. Two events might occur at different times within the Unconscious where Time is distorted and then be linked in the Consciousness as if they occurred simultaneously. Dr. Mercy is thus compelled to speculate that Two Twins may have arrived on earth simultaneously even though in the realm of the Twin Archetype they have been joined outside of the human experience of Time.
     
  • Dr. Mercy provides a guided tour through the sages of the monomyth known as the hero's journey. In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's journey, or the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Earlier figures had proposed similar concepts, including psychologist Otto Rank and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan. Eventually, hero myth pattern studies were popularized by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology. Campbell used the monomyth to analyze and compare religions.
     

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