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

TALK: Blurring Boundaries: Interlacing Evolution, Epigenetics, Creativity and Diversity in Understanding the Human
Agustin Fuentes (Anthropology, Notre Dame)
Thursday, January 21, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Human evolutionary history is ongoing, human creativity is expanding, and human populations continue to grow. Getting a handle on “the human” in the Anthropocene is no easy matter. Inter, or even trans-disciplinary approaches are necessary, and crossing boundaries, ideologies and perspectives is more urgent than ever. But the dialogues needed to best engage these themes, especially those across the presumed humanities-sciences divide, have not caught up. These are not easy undertakings—where does one start? Fuentes suggests that the interface of contemporary evolutionary theory, emerging data on physiological and epigenetic systems, and human social complexity is a good place to begin. We are in a time of radical expansion in our theoretical and methodological tool kits in regards to understanding the processes and patterns of evolutionary change in bodies and behavior. Simultaneously, we are immersed in amazingly rich dialogues about the human across the social sciences and the humanities. Linking these emerging trends offers insight and a potentially fruitful landscape for discourse and advancement. 
In this talk, Fuentes will summarize what he sees as core information for this endeavor and, via examples, offer a few possibilities for interfaces that might help us better assess and understand the moving target that is the human.

Agustín Fuentes’ current foci include cooperation and bonding in human evolution, ethnoprimatology and multispecies anthropology, evolutionary theory, and public perceptions of, and interdisciplinary approaches to, human nature(s).  Fuentes’ recent books include Evolution of Human Behavior (Oxford University Press), Centralizing Fieldwork: Critical Perspectives from Primatology, Biological and Social Anthropology (Co-edited, Berghahn Press), Biological Anthropology: Concepts and Connections (McGraw-Hill), Monkeys on the Edge: Ecology and Management of Long-Tailed Macaques and their Interface with Humans (co-edited, Oxford University Press), and the forthcoming Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature (UC Press). Key recent articles include “Naturecultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology” in Cultural Anthropology and “The New Biological Anthropology: Bringing Washburn’s New Physical Anthropology into 2010 and Beyond” in The Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. Current research projects include the ethnoprimatology of Singapore, interdisciplinary approaches to understanding human nature(s), and an evaluation of the roles of cooperation, community, and niche construction in human evolution.
Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Agustin Fuentes: Interlacing Evolution, Epigenetics, & Diversity in Understanding the Human

PANEL: Interdisciplinary Dialogues: The Humanities and the Neurosciences

Moderator: John Hajda (Associate Director, SAGE Center)
Participants: Julie Carlson (English, UCSB)
Scott Grafton (Psychological and Brain Sciences, UCSB)
Kenneth Kosik (Neuroscience Research Institute, UCSB)
Thursday, January 28, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Please join UCSB faculty members in dialogue about their current work, which is commonly situated on the cusp of the humanities and the neurosciences.  In addition to discussing their specific projects, the panelists will consider the methodological and institutional challenges they encounter when enlisting multiple disciplines to pursue their research goals, and they will offer reflections on the impetus for their interdisciplinary approach. Julie Carlson will address her work on British Romantic and contemporary neuroscientific and psychoanalytic accounts of creativity. Scott Grafton will discuss embodied cognition: the intelligence of complex action. This intelligence is celebrated in dance, music, painting and other arts requiring high competency in specific physical skills. In his contribution to this panel, neuroscientist Ken Kosik will address the importance of the humanities for a deep understanding and conduct of science.  Audience members will be encouraged to take part in the conversation.

Sponsored by the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind and the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Panel: Interdisciplinary Dialogues: The Humanities and the Neurosciences

Talk: Brains, Brawn and Bravery: The Power of Professional Networks among late Nineteenth Century Women Physicians
Gesa Kirsch (English, Bentley University, IHC Visiting Scholar)
Thursday, February 4, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In this talk, Gesa Kirsch will examine how the brain has been socially constructed as both metaphor and anatomy in medical history. Specifically, she investigates the ways in which late nineteenth century women physicians responded to the formidable challenges they faced. Despite growing numbers of women in the profession, many medical schools did not accept women, opportunities to train as interns were restricted, and most women had to justify their career choices in terms of propriety, morality, intelligence, physical endurance, and character. Against this backdrop, medical women created and maintained professional networks that enabled their intervention in arenas of society that were often restricted, such as public spaces and professional practice.

Drawing on the rarely examined Woman’s Medical Journal (WMJ), Kirsch traces an early network of women physicians who deliberately showcased their brainpower, brawn and bravery. Publishing a wide variety of editorials, notices, and announcements alongside articles on the latest medical research, the editors of the WMJ fostered social and professional networks that enabled these women to educate, mentor, and inspire each other. She argues that the “miscellany” sections of the WMJ are particularly significant—but overlooked—because they reveal how information, resources, and knowledge circulated: they include opportunities for fellowships, medical training, and admission to medical schools; announcements of vacation leaves, office relocations, and obituaries; biographical sketches of successful women physicians; and listings of male physicians with a history of either supporting or denigrating medical women. She concludes by arguing that we can best understand the rhetorical practices and professional performance of early women physicians by examining how their work circulated across time, generations, and geographical regions, evidence of which remains today in public policy, advocacy work, and professional organizations.

Gesa E. Kirsch is professor of English at Bentley University and Director of the Jeanne and Dan Valente Center for Arts and Sciences. She was named the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University for 2015. She won the 2014 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award for Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (co-authored with Jacqueline Jones Royster), and the 2013 Excellence in Scholarship Award from Bentley University. She has held visiting professorships at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Orgeon. Kirsch co-founded and co-directed the Women’s Leadership Institute (now the Center for Women and Business) at Bentley University. Her research and teaching interests include feminist rhetorical studies; ethics and qualitative research methodology; archival research and methodology; women’s rhetorical education, past and present, feminist pedagogy, and environmental rhetoric.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Gesa Kirsch: Brains, Brawn and Bravery

TALK: Embodying Mind: The Case of the Sigh
Aranye Fradenburg (English, UCSB)
Thursday, February 11, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Fradenburg will discuss the importance of expression and interpretation — of embodied meaning-making — in autopoietic activity generally, and will focus on the particular example of the sigh as a form of respiratory expressivity that recruits a number of different brain functions in order to criss-cross the borders between “psyche” and “soma.” Various functions of the sigh are explored, including its timing and significance in psychoanalytic sessions, in respiratory therapy, and in poetry.

Aranye Fradenburg’s particular interests are psychoanalytic theory and practice, interdisciplinary study of the mind and the environment, biopoetics, and English and Scottish medieval literature.  She is the author of City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland; Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer; Staying Alive:  A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts and many articles on a variety of topics from medieval literature to cognitive literary studies and psychoanalytic technique.   She has edited two essay collections, Women and Sovereignty and, with Carla Freccero, Premodern Sexualities.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Aranye Fradenburg: Embodying Mind: The Case of the Sigh

TALK: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Scientific Study of Meditation and the Cognitive Science of Religion
John D. Dunne (Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Thursday, February 18, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Over the last two decades, some of the most influential scientific studies of meditation have examined practices derived from Buddhism, and the success of these studies — as expressed in impact factors, citation rates, and grant funding — likely rests in part on their capacity to articulate “meditation” in a fashion that remains strictly naturalistic. During the same period, however, the cognitive science of religion (CSR) has routinely deployed the category of the “supernatural” as essential to anything that we can properly call “religion.” From the CSR perspective, one might conclude that the naturalistic rhetoric found in scientific studies simply reflects the ongoing modernist strategy of formulating a “scientific Buddhism” that is not a “religion.” While illuminating, this interpretation nevertheless leaves in place the highly problematic notion of the “supernatural” itself, especially as the marker of “religion.”  

This talk explores the aligned oppositions of natural/supernatural and science/religion within both the science of meditation and the Cognitive Science of Religion. Drawing on the critique offered long ago by Emile Durkheim, it shows how the rhetoric of both contexts remains largely blind to the modernist assumptions inherent in the concept of the “supernatural.”

Sponsored by the IHC’s Idee Levitan Endowment and the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

John Dunne: The Natural & Supernatural in Study of Meditation & Cognitive Science of Religion

SCREENING AND TALK: Your Brain, My Mind: Memory, Language and Perception in Artists’ Video
Laurel Beckman (Art, UCSB)
Maya Gurantz (Visiting Lecturer, Art, UCSB)
Thursday, February 25, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

To download the URL list from Laurel and Maya's talk, please visit: http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/your-brain-my-mind/

Inherent in video art is the uncanny ability to manifest and express the unseen and partially known. Nowhere is this more apparent than in video works that explore functions we attribute to the brain, particularly memory, language and perception. Manipulation of key aspects of the moving image – point of view (physical, mental, and emotional subjectivity), time, visual and sonic fields, combined with the dynamics and mobility of viewership, add up to nothing less than the exposition of what it means to be sentient.

Promiscuously embracing convention and experimentation, narrative and abstraction, spectacle and intimacy, video is ubiquitous; and in the hands of artists, still a frontier. Featuring an evocative selection of artists’ video works, this screening & talk address the theme with criticality, humor, and poignancy.

Laurel Beckman’s practice involves working primarily with digital media in public spaces and in experimental video-animations. Her projects, thematically at the nexus of consciousness + social conditions, meta-physics + science; highlight perception, public display, stage/screen space, the built and imagined environment, and affect. Beckman’s commissioned and un-commissioned public art projects are often situated in commercial and unusual environments. Her video-animation work is frequently created for and exhibited on public screens, such as public transit, billboards, and recently at gas stations. A short list of her exhibitions, public projects and notable screenings include those in Turkey, Switzerland, Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, India, Berlin, Pittsburgh, Macau, San Francisco, Palestine, Louisiana, and Virginia.

 Maya Gurantz uses video, performance, and installation to interrogate how constructions of gender, race, class and progress operate in American communities, shared myths, public rituals and private desires; in so doing, she dissects the contradictions embedded in performances of power.  Formally, Gurantz draws on her extensive background in movement-based theater and dance, as well as historical vernacular forms of manipulating sensation.  Most recently, her work has been shown by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, High Desert Test Sites, Autonomie Gallery,  Gurantz is artist working in video, movement and performance, installation and community-generated projects. She has created new works in New York, rural Mississippi, San Diego, the SF Bay Area, and most recently, LA. Her company, Temescal Labs, has been recognized as one of most original performance companies in the Bay Area and has received grants and awards from the NEA, CCI, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theater Bay Area, the Puffin Foundation, and the Bay Area Critics Circle. Gurantz has a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from UC Irvine.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Laurel Beckman & Maya Gurantz: Your Brain, My Mind: Memory, Language & Perception in Artists’ Video

TALK: Creativity in Dementia
Bruce L. Miller (Memory and Aging Center, UC San Francisco)
Thursday, March 3, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

While many physical and mental conditions decline with time, creativity is one characteristic that has been observed to improve, both in healthy elders and people with neurodegenerative disease. In this talk, Miller will address the way that art made by people with brain disease or damage often provides insight into brain anatomy and function. For instance, patients who lose their ability to express themselves with words may develop abilities to express themselves with pictures; the artistic choices they make reflect their changed understanding of the world.

Bruce L. Miller is a behavioral neurologist who focuses on dementia, with special interests in brain and behavior relationships as well as the genetic and molecular underpinnings of disease. His work in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) emphasizes both the behavioral and emotional deficits that characterize these patients, while simultaneously noting the visual creativity that can emerge in the setting of FTD. He is the principal investigator of the NIH-sponsored Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) and of a program project on FTD called “Frontotemporal Dementia: Genes, Imaging and Emotions.” He oversees a healthy aging program, which includes an artist in residence program. In addition, he helps lead two philanthropy-funded research consortia: the Tau Consortium and the Consortium for Frontotemporal Research, which focus on developing treatments for tau and progranulin disorders, respectively. He works with the National Football League to help with the education and assessment of players related to brain health.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Bruce Miller: Creativity in Dementia

TALK: Reading the Brain: Neuro/Science/Fiction
Pierre Cassou-Noguès (Philosophy, University of Paris XIII)
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint recently displayed at the museum Le Louvre in Paris a machine for reading thoughts. It looked like a shower cabin, connected to a TV screen. The subject would sit inside wearing an EEG helmet, and the screen would show the images popping up in her mind while the subject read a novel. Toussaint noted in an interview that people would be able to see what was going on in their minds. But don’t we already know? Don’t we somehow see the images that pop up in our minds, since, precisely, they appear in our minds? But, if so, why do we want to try (as we obviously do) Toussaint’s machine? Referring to various machines for reading thoughts, real or fictitious, Cassou-Noguès will argue that brain reading leads us to a change in our form of life, where thinking receives a new meaning, and various paradoxical situations may arise.

Pierre Cassou-Noguès is Professor in the Philosophy Department of University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis. He is co-editor of the journal SubStance. His work concerns philosophy in France in the 20th and 21th centuries, and the relationship between science and fiction, Reason and Imagination in Bachelard’s terms. He has recently published Lire le cerveau (Seuil, 2012), Les rêves cybernétiques de Norbert Wiener (Seuil, 2014)

Sponsored by the IHC series Humanities and the Brain.

Pierre Cassou-Noguès: Reading the Brain: Neuro/Science/Fiction

TALK: “Representations in the Brain”: Neuroscientific Discourse and the Humanities

Deborah Jenson (Romance Studies, Global Health, Duke University)
Thursday, April 21, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

From the Old Testament injunction “You shall not make to yourselves any graven image, or any likeness of anything” (Exodus 20:4) to Plato’s parable of the brain-like “Cave” into which artificial and distorted reflections of a distant reality are beamed like propaganda onto the retinas of the enchained prisoners, mimesis has often been depicted as a false representation of a phenomenological world that only capriciously and partially channels an original reality. A less defensive Aristotelian approach to the human being as the “mimetic animal” also has age old partisans, including the creative world of imitation charted by Ricoeur as “the kingdom of the as if” (1984, 1:53). In this approach, aesthetic representations such as literary works or images prompt us to test “sensuous and non-sensuous similarity” in our inevitably mediated (re-presented) relationship to the real. In the late twentieth century and the new millennium, however, something dramatically new occurred: it became possible to research questions of mimesis and representation without an external mimetic product such as an opera or a photograph. This talk serves as a guided tour of a few of the ways that neuroscientific research currently challenges us to engage with questions of representation on the level of “biomimesis,” including motor mirroring, developmental imitation, memory content and storage, mind reading, and the brain’s perception of the body. The goal is not to marginalize the traditional objects of humanities study, but to desegregate cultures of mimetic research and application.

Deborah Jenson’s literary history of the Haitian Revolution, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution, was published with Liverpool UP in 2011. A co-edited volume with medical historians Warwick Anderson and Richard E. Keller, Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties is just out with Duke UP. With Michaeline Crichlow and Pat Northover, the special issue from our 2010 “States of Freedom: Freedom of States” conference in Kingston, Jamaica, will be published soon in The Global South. An article on mirror neurons and literary bio-mimesis with neuropsychiatrist Marco Iacoboni will be out soon in California Italian Studies. The Haiti Humanities Laboratory that she co-directs with Laurent Dubois continues to generate collaborative projects with social and/or instrumental relevance, such as our Haiti: History Embedded in Amber artwork and catalog, and a forthcoming article and digital map on the history of Caribbean cholera in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Deborah Jenson: “Representations in the Brain”: Neuroscientific Discourse and the Humanities

Alva Noë (Philosophy, UC Berkeley)
Thursday, May 5, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What is art? Why is it so important? What does it tell us about ourselves? These days it is tempting to look to neuroscience for answers to these questions. But for the most part neuroscience has yielded no insights.  In this talk, Noë tries to explain why this is the case. Rather than use neuroscience to help us to better understand art and its place in our lives, he proposes that art can help us frame a more plausible conception, even a more plausible biological conception, of ourselves.
Alva Noë is a philosopher of mind, whose research and teaching focus on perception and consciousness as well as the theory of art (with special attention to dance as well as visual art). Other interests include phenomenology, Wittgenstein, Kant, and the origins of analytic philosophy, as well as topics in the philosophies of baseball and biology. He is a weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.
Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain and the Center for Spatial Studies.

Alva Noë: Can Neuroscience Help Us Understand Art?

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

Panel 1: Sight and Sound
Chair: Evelyn Rick, Classics, UCSB
Katie Adkison, English, UCSB, “Speaking What We Feel: The Sense of Speech in King Lear”
Chip Badley, English, UCSB, “’If not in the Word, in the Sound’: Sound, Affect, Frederick Douglass”
Cole Cohen, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB, “Merleau-Ponty and Me: The Phenomenology of Neurodiversity”
Phillip Grayson, Literature, St. John’s University, “At The Edge of Evening, Often Forever: Extramission, Consciousness, Literature”
Ery Shin, English, Eureka College, “Imaging the Mind in Literary Contexts”

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 1: Sight and Sound

PANEL: Considering Oliver Sacks
Julie Carlson, English, UCSB: Moderator
Cole Cohen, IHC, UCSB
Aranye Fradenburg, English, UCSB
Dominique Jullien, French and Italian, UCSB
Mark Leffert, M.D., Santa Barbara
Jonathan Schooler, Psychological and Brain Sciences, UCSB
Ann Taves, Religious Studies, UCSB
Tuesday, May 10, 2016 / 3:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

This panel seeks to celebrate the life and work of Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) – whose best-selling books were exemplary in bridging discourses and describing the life of the brain from a variety of viewpoints – by bringing together a panel of discussants from different disciplines: literature, neuroscience, medicine, religion, and psychoanalysis.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Panel: Considering Oliver Sacks

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

Panel 2: Sociality, Intersubjectivity, Empathy
Chair: Sara Ballance, Music, UCSB
Corinne Bancroft, English, UCSB, “The Face of Friendship in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction”
Ksenia Fedorova, Cultural Studies, UC Davis, “Identity Transactions and Interpersonal Dynamics in Art and Science”
Cheryl Jaworski, English, UCSB, “The Embodied Mind and ‘the Demon of Domesticity’ in Dickens’s Dombey and Son”

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 2: Sociality, Intersubjectivity, Empathy

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

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

Panel 4: Altered States and Technology’s Unconscious
Chair: John Thibdeau, Religious Studies, UCSB
Elliott D. Ihm, Psychological and Brain Sciences, UCSB, “Neurocognitive Foundations of Self-Transcendent Experiences:
A Speculative Predictive Coding Account”
Jap-Nanak Makkar, English, University of Virginia, “Libet’s Missing ½ Second, Digital Technology, and Political Critique”
Brianna K. Morseth, Psychological and Brain Sciences, UCSB, “To Forget the Self: Religious, Cultural, and Neuroscientific Dimensions of Ego Death through Contemplative Practice”

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 4: Altered States and Technology's Unconscious

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.

The Humanities and the Brain | 2015-16

IHC UCSB