Jim Coan

Biography

Jim Coan is an American affective neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, writer, podcast host, human-rights activist, and psychology professor at the University of Virginia, where he serves as director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, codirector of the University of Virginia College Fellows Program, and principal of Brown College at Monroe Hill.

See Work

DRAWING IT OUT / Winter 2023

Our Social Baseline: Part 3

By Jim Coan

There is no sugarcoating this: Climate change is going to be tragic.
DRAWING IT OUT / Fall 2023

Our Social Baseline: Part 2

By Jim Coan

I love jazz, the way individuals combine into an irreducible whole—unpredictable but coherent, a collaborative act of unbounded creation. When I see a good jazz combo, I see humanity itself.
DRAWING IT OUT / Spring/Summer 2023

Our Social Baseline: Part 1

By Jim Coan

What is a salamander without a cool, damp, shady place full of hiding space and things like worms and snails and slugs to eat? With its habitat? *
DRAWING IT OUT / Winter 2022

Why Do We Hold Hands?

By Jim Coan

In 2019, in the Ciro Menotti Cemetery of Modena, Italy, a couple of 1,600-year-old skeletons were discovered.
DRAWING IT OUT / Fall 2022

Gods and Ancestors

By Jim Coan

Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll die glad you did, or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything. 
DRAWING IT OUT / Summer 2022

The Self and the Other

By Jim Coan

One of our body’s chief concerns is with distinguishing between inside and outside, me from NOT-me.
DRAWING IT OUT / Spring 2022

The Golden Fleece

By Jim Coan

Long ago, in the ancient year of 1975, two ambitious young scientists sought to apply the awesome power of SCIENCE to the study of LOVE. But a strange little senator from Wisconsin vowed to MAKE THEM PAY! Jim Coan presents: The Golden...