Bring a research-based perspective to your event with Samah Karaki, a neuroscientist and author whose work explores how people understand the mind, talent, and creativity. Her talks draw on cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences to examine how beliefs about the brain influence education, culture, and collective life.
Samah Karaki is a neuroscientist, writer, and public speaker whose work sits at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and social psychology. She holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience as well as master’s degrees in cognitive neurobiology and ecology. Her research and writing examine how ideas about talent, intelligence, and authority emerge and circulate in society.
Through her books and public lectures, Samah Karaki addresses topics such as neuromyths, mental health, creativity, and the social construction of ability. Her work questions widespread assumptions about individual talent and highlights the cultural, psychological, and institutional factors that shape how we understand human potential.
She is the author of several books exploring themes including talent, empathy, collaboration, and authority. In Talent Is a Fiction (2023), she examines the scientific and cultural narratives that surround talent and the ways these narratives influence how individuals and institutions interpret success and ability.
In her lectures, Samah Karaki invites audiences to reflect on how cognitive biases, social beliefs, and institutional structures shape our understanding of intelligence, creativity, and achievement. Her talks connect neuroscience with broader questions in psychology and the social sciences, offering a critical perspective on widely held ideas about the brain and human behavior.
Keynote by Samah Karaki:
For a long time, the brain was considered a static organ, developing during childhood and then ceasing to evolve in adulthood. One of the major discoveries of cognitive neuroscience is, on the contrary, that our brain is plastic, adaptable, and capable of learning throughout life.
This brain plasticity allows us to adapt to a constantly changing world. It does not only concern technical or motor skills but also encompasses essential dimensions such as emotional regulation, the ability to collaborate, to unite people, to create, as well as to organize and plan individual and collective projects.
These dynamic skills lie at the heart of leadership, which therefore appears not as an innate talent, but as a process that can be learned and developed.
This talk explores what characterizes a learning brain, the factors that foster or hinder this dynamic, and how each individual can help create environments that support development, both on an individual and collective level.
Keynote by Samah Karaki:
Cognitive sciences show that our decisions are not purely rational: optimism bias, psychological distance, and the influence of social norms shape how we perceive climate risk.
However, reducing the climate issue to individual choices would be an oversimplification.
By drawing on neuroscience, social psychology, and sociology, this talk analyzes how motivations, beliefs, and social structures interact. It highlights the collective conditions that make certain behaviors possible or impossible and explores systemic transformation approaches that can support lasting change.
Keynote by Samah Karaki:
This talk examines what artificial intelligence is truly transforming in the workplace, through the lens of neuroscience.
It shows that our decisions are neither fully rational nor stable, but deeply influenced by emotions and cognitive biases that shape our judgments.
AI then appears as a powerful yet partial tool: it enables the externalization of certain cognitive tasks while also amplifying risks such as information overload and loss of reference points.
In contrast, this talk highlights what remains uniquely human: the ability to interpret ambiguous situations, to grasp implicit meanings, and to make decisions under uncertainty.
A conference designed to clarify the concrete challenges behind often abstract discussions about “the future of work.”
