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: 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

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.

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

IHC UCSB