THE 2015-16 IHC SERIES: THE HUMANITIES AND THE BRAIN
Seat of consciousness and the unconscious; motor of knowledge, memory, judgment and problem-solving; locus of language and creativity; regulator of movement and emotion; processor of sense perception – the brain reigns sovereign over human cognition and sentience. The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2015-16 public events series “The Humanities and the Brain” will explore the workings of the brain from perspectives deriving from the humanities and fine arts, as well as from newer interdisciplinary fields such as neuroesthetics and neuroethics. The program will bring humanists and neuroscientists into dialogue to consider diverse analyses and representations of this most elusive organ. 

The Humanities and the Brain | 2015-16

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Susan Collins

From In Conversation (1997) which provided a live link between the street and the internet and Transporting Skies (2002) which relayed sky live, in real-time, between Penzance and Sheffield, to more recent pixel-by-pixel transmissions from remote locations including Fenlandia (2004), Seascape (2009) and London 2013; the lecture will present a number of works which each in different ways rely on an ‘open system’ or structure for their realisation. The lecture will also explore issues raised by the works including the role of belief in their construction and interpretation; the relationship between time, landscape and technology, and reflect on what it means materially to record a digital image and transport it across space and time.

Susan Collins is Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she founded the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in 1995. She works across public, gallery and online spaces often employing networking and time as primary materials. The work is exhibited widely nationally and internationally with key works including the BAFTA nominated Tate in Space for Tate Online, Fenlandia, and Seascape. Public commissions include Underglow, a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London.

Transporting Skies - Professor Susan Collins (Slade School of Fine Art)

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Dorian Fuller

Full title - Growing Societies: the Archaeobotany of Food Production and Globalization of Agriculture

The origins of agriculture irrevocably changed the relationship of humans and the earth, literally transforming earth at local scales of cultivation, and over the long-term, promoting population growth and economic specialization globally.While archaeologists have long investigated this “Neolithic revolution”, the ways in which humans changed plants through domestication and reordered their use of the vegetative world has come to be appreciated more recently through advances in the archaeobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains. This lecture considers recent insights on the transition from wild plant gathering to farming, drawing on examples from India, Southwest Asia, China, and Africa.

Dorian Q Fuller grew up in San Francisco, California, received a BA from Yale University in Anthropology and Biology, and a PhD from Cambridge. After his PhD on the origins of agriculture in South India, he began teaching archaeobotany at UCL in 2000. His archaeological fieldwork has included India, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand, Sudan, Ethiopia, Morocco, Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. He has authored more than 170 papers and is a founding editor of the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Growing Societies - Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Last week, biographer and journalist Walter Isaacson delivered the 43rd annual Jefferson Lecture—the government’s highest honor for people working in the humanities. But Isaacson’s message wasn’t just for humanists. He argued that the future belongs to those who can appreciate both the arts and the sciences. Isaacson joins Ira to explain how thinkers from Einstein to Steve Jobs drew on both spheres to make their breakthroughs, and why mixing the two is more important than ever in the digital age.

Find out more at http://scifri.me/S0d88c.

Why Science and the Humanities Are Better Together

Juan Cobo Betancourt | The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Ecstasy: Linking the Humanities and the Brain
Ann Taves (Religious Studies, UCSB)
Thursday, October 15, 2015 / 4:00 PM 
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Ecstasy, an experience that is widely discussed in the humanities and sought after in the general culture, illuminates many of the difficulties involved in linking research in the humanities with research in the social, psychological and neurosciences.  In order to link these approaches, which employ different methods to study human experience at different levels, we need to identify features that are often associated with, but do not uniquely specify, ecstasy at the cultural level (studied by humanists) and specify these features in precise enough terms that they can be studied sociologically, psychologically, and neurologically.  The lecture will draw on humanistic approaches to examine the range of experiences that people have characterized as ecstatic and the meanings that people have found in and drawn from them and on the psychological and brain sciences to help understand the underlying mechanisms involved.

Ann Taves is a former President of the American Academy of Religion. She holds the chair of Catholic Studies at the university. Taves is especially known for her work Religious Experience Reconsidered, stressing the importance of the findings and theoretical foundations of cognitive science for modern religionists.

Empirically, she pursues research primarily within the contexts of American religious history, the history of Christianity in the modern era, and the history of the scientific study of religion, psychology, and related phenomena (e.g., psychical phenomena, magic, superstition).  Theoretically, her work builds on classical theorists, such as Durkheim and Weber, as well as evolutionary and developmental approaches to the study of human behavior.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Ann Taves: Ecstasy: Linking the Humanities and the Brain

TALK: Conditions of the Brain: Meaning, Metaphor, and Mechanism in Illness and Healing
Rebecca Seligman (Anthropology, Northwestern University)
Thursday, October 22, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Increasing evidence suggests the importance of meaning in conditioning bodily experiences and outcomes. This talk will explore the relationship between meaning and the body, with particular focus on the neurobiological and cultural mechanisms that mediate this relationship. Seligman explores the role of meaning and metaphor in illness and healing specifically, using the case of religious healing to illustrate how states of health and illness may be conditioned by interacting qualities and processes of mind, body, and brain.

Rebecca Seligman is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy research at Northwestern University. Her work explores the intersections of mental and physical health in social and cultural context, with an emphasis on the mechanisms through which cultural, social, and political-economic forces become embodied. Seligman also incorporates and critically evaluates relevant neurobiological research in these areas as a means to better understand how cultural beliefs and practices operate within bodies. Her book, Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion, investigates the connections among mental health, embodied experience, and religious participation in northeastern Brazil

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Rebecca Seligman: Conditions of the Brain: Meaning, Metaphor, and Mechanism in Illness and Healing

TALK: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain
Kenneth S. Kosik (The Neuroscience Research Institute, UCSB)
Thursday, November 12, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Human interactions are finely calibrated and many of these interactions are prosocial, that is a social behavior that benefits other individuals or a larger group. The repertoire of prosocial behaviors is vast: How much eye contact we make, how much affection we show, how much concern we feel for the plights of others, what we reveal to others and what we don’t.  In a sense, the motivation for language itself is a prosocial activity. Among humans the degree to which we utilize these social tools is highly variable. At the extremes of the social behavior spectrum are clusters of neurological conditions caused by highly specific mutations. At one end of the spectrum are the autistics and savants; at the other end is a condition called Williams syndrome in which affected individuals are hyper-social and despite cognitive impairment have remarkably preserved language ability. Some neurodegenerative disorders such as fronto-temporal dementia selectively affect prosocial behavior. Knowledge of a genetic mutation in some of these cases tells us the root cause. Because genes have changed very little among primates, this genetic hook allows us to track genes related to social behavior through evolution and perhaps gather insights regarding the emergence of our particularly prosocial lifestyle relative to other primates.

Kenneth S. Kosik completed a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Case Western Reserve University in 1972 and an M.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1976. He served as a resident in neurology at Tufts New England Medical Center and was Chief Resident there in 1980. Beginning in 1980 he held a series of academic appointments at the Harvard Medical School and achieved the rank of full professor there in 1996. He also held appointments at McLean Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 2004, Kosik became the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience Research and Co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He founded and serves as Medical Director of the non-profit center, Cottage Center for Brain Fitness (CCBF).

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Kenneth Kosik: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain

TALK: The Neuroscience of Aesthetics and Art
Anjan Chatterjee (Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania)
Thursday, November 19, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What can neuroscience possibly tell us about aesthetics and art? In this talk, Anjan Chatterjee will offer a framework from which a neuroscientist might deconstruct aesthetic experiences. Chatterjee will discuss findings from neurology and cognitive neuroscience that reveal neural structures and networks engaged when we respond to beauty and react to art. Finally, informed by our understanding of the neural underpinnings of art, he will speculate about its evolution. Previous debates about whether art-making and appreciation represent an instinct or an epiphenomenon of other evolved capacities are probably not well-framed. His talk offers a third way to think about why we are now – and perhaps have always been – surrounded by these mysterious objects that we call art.

Anjan Chatterjee is the Frank A. and Gladys H. Elliott Professor and Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital. He is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA in Philosophy from Haverford College and his MD from the University of Pennsylvania; he completed his neurology residency at the University of Chicago. His clinical practice focuses on patients with cognitive disorders. His research addresses questions about spatial cognition and language, attention, neuroethics, and neuroaesthetics. He is the author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art and co-editor of Neuroethics in Practice: Mind, Medicine, and Society, and The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology.

He was awarded the 2002 Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology. He is a founding member of the Board of Governors of the Neuroethics Society, the President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and the President of the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Society. He serves on the Boards of Haverford College, the Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and Universal Promise and is on the Advisory Board of Cognitive Dynamics.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain

Anjan Chatterjee: The Neuroscience of Aesthetics and Art

TALK: Listening and the Semiosphere: How Our Individual Brains Build Shared Worlds
Seth Horowitz  (The Listening Program)
Thursday, January 14, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

We build the world from our senses. We see color and form, hear sound and vibration, feel temperature and texture, each sense taking a specific form of energy to create pieces of an ever streaming perceptual puzzle.   Our perceptions create our reality, our own personal psychophysical map of the world. But the map is not the territory.

We use complex neural behaviors like attention to filter and focus this map, turning seeing into looking and hearing into listening. We constantly try to validate our version of reality by comparing it to our memories and others’ perceptions, seeking a consensus. But sensory errors, interpersonal differences in perception, the endemic fuzziness of biological senses, psychological processes and interpersonal communication create gaps in reality, letting us see faces in rocks, hear a phantom cell phone ringing in the noise of a shower, “remember” an childhood event that probably never happened. And while we may think of our innate perceptual limitations as problems, these gaps between what we perceive and what exists in the world outside our head give rise to everything from illusion to art, from sound art to music, transforming the physics of the external world into the meaningful stories that drive the human mind.

Seth Horowitz is a neuroscientist whose work in comparative and human hearing, balance and sleep research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and NASA.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Seth Horowitz: Listening and the Semiosphere: How Our Individual Brains Build Shared Worlds

CONFERENCE: The Humanities, the Neurosciences and the Brain
Thursday-Friday, May 12-13, 2016
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Panel 3: Theories of Mind, Machines and Mechanical Metaphors
Chair: Rebecca Chenoweth, English, UCSB
Jennifer Duggan, English, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, “The Victorians and the Mechanical Brain”
Melissa M. Littlefield, English and Kinesiology & Community Health, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “Public Displays of Arousal: EEG Wearables and the Fashioning of Instrumental Intimacy”

This conference is free and open to the public.

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the multiple accords, and discords, that characterize humanistic and neuroscientific approaches to the study of the brain.  Gabrielle Starr, author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience, will give the keynote address. Participants will explore creative framings of neuroscientific inquiry through humanistic perspectives, as well as artistic explorations of inner states and mental landscapes.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

CONFERENCE Part 3: Theories of Mind, Machines and Mechanical Metaphors

Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella are the co-editors of Translation and Creativity (Continuum 2006) and One Poem in Search of a Translator (Peter Lang 2008).  

They met in 1998 at the University of East Anglia, UK, while studying for postgraduate degrees in literary translation, Eugenia specialising in experimental translation, Manuela in theatre translation, and have since collaborated in several translation projects. 

They are both interested in developing the idea of translation as a creative form of text making, and have set up The Creative Literary Studio (http://thecreativeliterarystudio.wordpress.com/) in November 2012, a blog and a virtual space encouraging experimentation, performance and the creation of texts through translation.

For further podcasts in the Between the Lines series visit: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cics/between-the-lines 

Between The Lines: Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella

A conversation reflecting on thirty years of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center with Peter Brooks, Founding Director, and Founding Fellows Kai Erikson, Geoffrey Hartman, and Robert Shulman is held as part of the Whitney’s 30th Anniversary celebration. In 1981, the Whitney Humanities Center began at Yale University under the new university presidency of A. Bartlett Giamatti. For this celebration of thirty year’s growth and activity at Yale, the WHC’s founding director and three of its founding fellows return to discuss and offer reflections on their experience both in the University at large and their place at the WHC within it, especially with regard to the role of the humanities in relation to the sciences in the undergraduate experience at Yale. Peter Brooks, Founding Director, is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton. Kai Erikson is the William R. Kenen Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies at Yale. Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar of English and Comparative Literature at Yale, and Robert Shulman is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Senior Research Scientist in Diagnostic Radiology. Jul 23, 2012

For the Record: A Conversation Reflecting on Thirty Years of the Whitney Humanities Center

Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) is a Syrian poet and essayist who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century. He has written more than 20 books in his native Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics. He is visiting the US to celebrate his 80th birthday, and in this netcast, he and Khaled Mattawa read from Adonis: A Selection, published by Yale University Press in 2010 in the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters Series. Jan 06, 2011

Adonis visits the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University

Between the Lines - Adam Freudenheim

Artist Grayson Perry joined a panel discussion on the Future of the Arts, as part of UCL's Festival of the Arts.
The panel also included: 
• Professor Lisa Jardine (UCL Historian and Broadcaster) 
• Professor Malcolm Grant (UCL President and Provost) 
• The Rt Hon David Willetts MP (Minister for Universities and Science) 

Chaired by the Dean of Arts and Humanities, Professor Jonathan Wolff.

The panel discussion examined the broad definition of what we mean by the 'arts', from fine art and performing arts to its more general use in academia, 
incorporating also the humanities, including literature, philosophy and history. The panel also questioned whether the arts are threatened by recent cuts in funding.

More info on the Festival of the Arts: 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-the-arts

Future of the Arts - panel discussion

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

CONFERENCE Part 3: Theories of Mind, Machines and Mechanical Metaphors

IHC UCSB

Related tracks