(In)Coherence: Recent Episodes
Ellen Berkovi
Brain meets world. Neuroscience chats with art. We mean for this podcast to trail the phosphorescent nets that capture the shared preoccupations of neuroscience and art. What do we really know about the hard problem of consciousness? And how does what has been learned about the brain overlap with what remains unknown: the mysteries of violence, beauty, sublimity, human sentience? Where is the edge between me and world? What do some of the world's leading neuroscientists say about what they go to work for? We gather as an interdisciplinary team of a writer, a painter, a physicist and a neuroscientist. The idea was for artists to ask questions about how neuroscience sees what it sees, and knows what it knows, and what we all can learn about the promise and challenge of asking better questions.(In)coherence was funded by a STEAMPlant grant from Pratt Institute.
When neuroscientists set out to study emotion, one logical question arose: Which human emotion would lend itself to a close, if hitherto untried, investigation?
American neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux began looking into the emotion of fear in the 1970s. LeDoux runs the LeDoux Lab at the Center for Neural Sciences at New York University.
We spoke to Joseph LeDoux about how fear manifests in us. What do we actually know about fear? What does the experience we call fear, tell us not only about the brain, but about the role of language in describing human emotion?
Then we interview the singular American jazz guitarist Pat Metheny. He tells us about improving his own hearing of music, and continually trying to sharpen the aspirations that musical creativity archs toward. Pat Metheny reflects on both the unknowability of art's impact on people and the measurable returns of practice, practice, practice.
Producer and Host: Ellen Berkovitch
Co-Interviewer this episode: Iliyan Ivanov
Guests: Joseph LeDoux; Pat Metheny
Post-Production and Theme Music: Dennis Javier Jasso
Music Samples: All the Things You Are, Keith Jarrett on piano; Jack DeJohnette on drumsVibrophone player Gary Burton playing a Pat Metheny song, Falling Grace
STEAMPlant Team: Ellen Berkovitch, Mary Jo Vath, Iliyan Ivanov, Agnes Mocsy
(In)coherence podcast is funded by a STEAMPlant grant from Pratt Institute.
In this episode we contend with monstrosity as we look into creativity’s double binds: The unintended consequences of scientific creation.
What it means to be human in the presence of moral challenges and the absence of certainty. How science fiction may show that paranoia is precedented when it comes to evaluating our rush toward artificial intelligence.
Mary Shelley started it all. Frankenstein was published in 1818.
Mary Shelley had spent the year without a summer at Lake Geneva in 1816. The gloomy weather found her writing by candlelight about Victor Frankenstein, a scientist and inventor who finds the secret to creating artificial life, and creating a conscious life.
The monster creation became the subject of dozens of movies. (The 1931 James Whale version starring Boris Karloff as the Monster was made with a $262,000 budget. Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks may be the second-best known.)
In part one, Larry Lockridge, professor emeritus at New York University, talks about virtue ethics and botched creations. Owen Flanagan, neurobiologist and professor of philosophy at Duke University, discusses his founding of a new term in philosophy, neuro existentialism--and how motivated are we, actually, to flourish? Science fiction illustrator Vincent Di Fate talks about why the brain itself, "a rather homely organ," has played such a starring role in sci-fi imagery.
Producer and Host: Ellen Berkovitch
Co-Producer and Interviewer this episode: Mary Jo Vath
Guests: Larry Lockridge, Owen Flanagan, Vincent Di Fate
VoiceOver Artist: Roberto Sharpe
Post-Production and Theme Music: Dennis Javier Jasso
Creative Commons Samples: Spinning Merkaba, The Stars Look Different under a creative commons license courtesy ccmixter.org
STEAMPlant Team: Ellen Berkovitch, Mary Jo Vath, Iliyan Ivanov, Agnes Mocsy
Funding: STEAMPlant grant from Pratt Institute.
Karl Friston is a British neuroscientist and professor at the Institute of Neurology, University College, London. In March 2021 amid the COVID pandemic, we spoke to Karl Friston by Zoom from his home in London. It was one of the most marvelous professional experiences of my life in the satisfactory resolution of pre-game anxiety and conversational delight in his brilliant mind, and humorous and generous spirit.
We discussed the role of play in creativity; the advantages and limitations of what brain imaging "sees;" whether the particular problem and benefit of human language casts more light or greater opacity on the hard problem of what is consciousness?
We also hear Karl Friston pose a great definition of art, and share with us his view on the near-future of artificial intelligence and our fears it will take over the world.
Producer and Host: Ellen Berkovitch
Co-Interviewer this episode: Iliyan Ivanov
Guest: Karl Friston
Post-Production and Theme Music: Dennis Javier Jasso
Music Samples: Uncertainty by The Fray
STEAMPlant Team: Ellen Berkovitch, Mary Jo Vath, Iliyan Ivanov, Agnes Mocsy
(In)coherence podcast is funded by a STEAMPlant grant from Pratt Institute.
Today we circle around to neuroaesthetics, a relatively new discipline in neuroscience that is developing new understanding about how humans gravitate overwhelmingly to facial beauty, but also have threat responses to and biases against those with facial anomalies or scars.
Anjan Chatterjee is Professor of Neurology, Psychology and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Questions that his laboratory 's work is frontloading include how people experience architectural spaces, and which components of architecture seem to align with our neural processing.
As a line of research that is new, neuroaesthetics fronts controversies about science and a reluctance to rely on subjective experience. It also is pushing the frontiers of inquiry forward by questioning how the immobility of lying inside fMRI machines does not in any way mimic the sensorium at work and life in the world.
Katherine Sherwood is a visual artist and professor emerita at the University of California at Berkeley. After suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage more than two decades ago, Sherwood had to re-learn a new way of painting, and in so doing has explored the landscape of her own brain imaging and the history of brain depictions in work that flaunts pattern and proposes the beauty of disability.