The Helix Center: Recent Episodes
The Helix Center
The primary objective of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation is not to obtain knowledge, per se, but to aspire to an unhurried search for wisdom, emphasizing the centrality of a sense of wonder in this endeavor.
Philosophically, we stand against the trivialization of thought and the balkanization within and between the sciences and the arts. Fundamental to our promotion of these views is our roundtable format of open, spontaneous discourse, one facilitating novel encounters of questioning and understanding among participants. Each program endeavors to expand the boundaries of inquiry by facilitating a creative encounter with uncertainty in the face of scientific and artistic advances. To further nurture opportunities for creative social and intellectual exchange, we also sponsor musical performances, poetry readings, film screenings, and other opportunities for imaginative experience.
Visit https://www.helixcenter.org for more!
Physics being the study of the fundamental properties of Nature, as the name implies, metaphysics investigates the nature of Nature, the what-must-therefore-be-the-case of those discoverable physical properties. For centuries, either explicitly or implicitly, metaphysics created the background and organizing principles for scientific research.… read more »
Neuroplasticity: it’s what our brains do. We alter our minds when we engage with the world and with the people in it. But, of course, when we think of “mind altering drugs” we refer to something else. That there might be a shortcut, a wormhole, a portal to some new and improved state of mind has long held our fascination.… read more »
The Dismal Science seems to analyze and involve most aspects of our lives. While traditional macroeconomics continues to concern itself with natural rates of inflation and unemployment, with tariffs and taxes, with supply and demand, at both the meso- and micro-levels, economics has productively linked with sociology, social history, anthropology, and psychology.… read more »
Supernatural and other circumventions of the natural process of conception have been an abundant wellspring for magical, mythological, and religious narratives. It was held that the widowed queen of an Egyptian pharaoh could pull his posthumous sperm into her womb to create a child.… read more »
A testament to its ubiquity, STRESS is woven into our very words, our thoughts and our emotions. We stress words to give them emphasis. We stress wood to make it stronger rather than splinter. And we feel distress, both when overwhelmed with dread, but also sometimes in joyous anticipation. … read more »
Placebos “work” for quite a few medical problems. But how? And what is the work they do?
What one thinks a medicine is capable of, one’s idea of that medicine, may affect us in the way “proper” medicines do. This implies that, in observing the work of a placebo we are watching an idea affect biology, the mind moving the body.… read more »
“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
– James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10
Populism refers to the political mobilization of “the people” against a perceived elite caste of professional politicians. And whereas a corps of elected representatives was Madison’s and Hamilton’s buffer against the tyranny of factions, from time to time the political class may come to be viewed as insufficiently attentive to the needs of their constituents and then become the target and nidus that creates a populist movement.… read more »
Memory is not a dusty cellar, open treasure chest, or sealed pandora’s box. It is a dynamic process, a stream of renditions and reflections. It conveys to us not what strictly happened, but embeds us in a retained internal moment, in an external encounter, or an imprint from another’s story. … read more »
Justice is blind, the saying goes, which means that a person’s particulars – their social status, race, gender, etc. – should have no bearing on fair judgement in any legal dispute. By this standard, we are all considered equal before the law.… read more »
The starting point of this roundtable discussion is Joseph LeDoux’s book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. LeDoux’s research on how the brain detects and responds to danger helped jumpstart and define the modern science of emotion.… read more »
The question of what the world in which we live consists of is as old as mankind itself. In philosophical jargon, this is the question of the ontological basis of reality. With the growing success of physics and other sciences, the idea of one fundamental ontology, that of particles and fields, became dominant as a physicalist version of ontology.… read more »
Like sympathy, empathy derives from the Greek root pathos meaning “to endure or to undergo.” It was coined in 1909 by a psychologist at Cornell University, Edward Bradford Titchner, who suggested the term as a translation of the German Einfühlung.… read more »
Proof, in the form of step by step deduction, following the rules of logical reasoning, is the ultimate test of validity in mathematics. Some proofs, however, are so long or complex, or both, that they cannot be checked for errors by human experts.… read more »
“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
This familiar courtroom oath unpacks some of the subtleties of truth-telling. Making true statements is not all there is to it. What one says may be true, but what is omitted in the telling may present a false picture.… read more »
A recent New York Times article proclaimed “status anxiety” one of the defining preoccupations of our time (Michelle Goldberg, “Status Anxiety and the Scam Economy,” March 15, 2019). But what are we really anxious about? What, in fact, is status and why do we want it?… read more »
The goal of this discussion is to examine shame as a social mechanism. When, why, and how do we shame each other? Who profits from shame? Who maintains power or gains power through shame? When is shame valid, and when is it simply mean and cruel?… read more »
What underlying conceptual questions prompted this new characterization of our planet’s present era? What does this imply for the distinctions we have become accustomed to: between human subjects (however varied) and the non-human realm, between nature and artifice, between agency and objectivity?… read more »
With billions of stars and galaxies in the observable universe, the possibility of life elsewhere has intrigued both scientists and philosophers alike. In this roundtable, we will explore the notion of life in the universe and what it might look like elsewhere.… read more »
If a biologist were asked for a single word that would appropriately point to the essence and substance of biology, the word might be Life. It stands for the essential unity of that subject despite the enormous range of different interests of biologists—from proteins to the behavior of elephants to medical applications.… read more »
Ancient Egyptians placed animal and bird heads on divinities’ bodies, in an embracing worldview wherein both gods and beasts extend and transcend the human ken. In his scientific extension of this ancient mythology, Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals explored non-human sentience.… read more »
Proof, in the form of step by step deduction, following the rules of logical reasoning, is the ultimate test of validity in mathematics. Some proofs, however, are so long or complex, or both, that they cannot be checked for errors by human experts.… read more »
Psychoanalysis ushered a new era of understanding psychiatric conditions which lasted half a century. The advent of psychopharmacology moved the focus back to the importance of diagnosis and selection of the appropriate medication. As we learn more about the brain, with increasingly sophisticated technology, we are looking towards a revolution in diagnosis, etiology and treatment of mental illnesses.… read more »
The Creative Turbulence roundtable is the culmination of the Creative Turbulence art exhibition—on view at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from the afternoon of Saturday, June 9th through Saturday, June 16th—of four artifacts fusing art and science in a collaborative creative process embodying the physics of fluid dynamics, turbulence, and complex systems, and exemplifying the experimental methodology at the root of art and science alike.… read more »
Science can stake its claim to truth on the evidence of its empirical success accounting for reality. Does it therefore follow, necessarily, that science can lay claim to its universality? Does reality cohere in such a way that we are ultimately seeking a reductionistic account of it in toto, as some would argue is promised by physics?… read more »
Schopenhauer described boredom as “a tame longing without any particular object,” Dostoevsky as “ a bestial and indefinable affliction,” and poet Joseph Brodsky as “time’s invasion of your world system.”
Unsurprisingly, not many can describe boredom even though most have felt it, and it is one of the central preoccupations of the age.… read more »
The rapid development of technology in the modern era has inspired a movement known as transhumanism. Envisioned is a near future in which human bodies and minds will be transformed and enhanced through genomics, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and any number of prosthetic devices inside and outside our bodies.… read more »
From Xenophanes’ 6th c. BCE theory of divine intellection imbuing, comprehending, and organizing the cosmos, through Nicholas of Cusa’s 15th c. definition of mind as “the limit and measure of all things,” through Hume and his Enlightenment kin’s aspiration to be the “Newton of the mind,” to the naturalized explanations of contemporary cognitive science, Western men and women have wrestled with the proper place of mind among the constituents—material and non-material—of the universe.… read more »
The multi-directional relationship between science, art, and society is in great need of repair. Due to the casting out of beauty from art and validity of facts from science by Postmodernism, art and science both suffer from a disconnect with the public.This… read more »
The multi-directional relationship between science, art, and society is in great need of repair. Due to the casting out of beauty from art and validity of facts from science by Postmodernism, art and science both suffer from a disconnect with the public.This… read more »
Collaboration between the arts and sciences has a rich history dating back to the Renaissance, and recently experienced a resurgence in the 1960s with the art-engineering group Experiments in Art & Technology. Even more recently, artists have begun to actively collaborate with scientists in all disciplines to expand their artistic reach.… read more »
STEAM – or ScienceTechnologyEngineeringArtMathematics – is the hot topic educational movement sweeping our nation and the world. Growing out of the emphasis to get more students in STEM subjects to remain a scientific and technologically advanced nation, STEAM was born in 2008, and advocates for the integration of arts and design learning in STEM.… read more »
STEAM – or ScienceTechnologyEngineeringArtMathematics – is the hot topic educational movement sweeping our nation and the world. Growing out of the emphasis to get more students in STEM subjects to remain a scientific and technologically advanced nation, STEAM was born in 2008, and advocates for the integration of arts and design learning in STEM.… read more »
Collaboration between the arts and sciences has a rich history dating back to the Renaissance, and recently experienced a resurgence in the 1960s with the art-engineering group Experiments in Art & Technology. Even more recently, artists have begun to actively collaborate with scientists in all disciplines to expand their artistic reach.… read more »
The American poet Ezra Pound proclaimed that “Poetry is news that stays news!” On a different note, his contemporary William Carlos Williams said that “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”… read more »
A nomenclator was a slave whose duty was to accompanying his master in canvassing the streets of Classical Rome in order to recall the names of those his master encountered. Each of us is, in a way, both that ancient politician and that slave, relying on others’ memories to supply us with knowledge, and others relying on us for the knowledge we recall for them.… read more »
What principles of order underlie the ascent of complexity, from the simplest particles of physics heralding the birth of the universe, through biological forms, to the achievements of civilization? Has a recurrent theme of combination and integration led to multiple fundamental levels from quarks to culture?… read more »
Though human ingenuity may make various inventions…it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous…
– Leonardo da Vinci, The Da Vinci Notebooks, Vol.
… read more »
There are well-known therapeutic effects of melody and rhythm on people with various cognitive and motor problems such as non-fluent aphasia, autism, Alzheimer disease, and Parkinson’s disease. By helping alleviate pain and anxiety, music can be also beneficial for preterm babies and for patients before and after surgeries.… read more »
Generationally and historically, our species has moved through great migrations, across seas, continents, and borders. Some have been journeys infused with hope for the better, or impelled by longing for the unknown, the foreign, the other. Others have been forced.
Today, with more than 65 million refugees and displaced persons around the globe, we are bearing witness to flights of desperation, escaping threats of extinction or submission, environmental disaster, religious and tribal conflict, slavery, and war.… read more »
Wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart, grief of memory.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon
What is it to feel pain? We sense it in the body, as a non-trivial, unmediated and imperative perceptual event associated with tissue damage, possessing particular spatiotemporal characteristics of a physical object (e.g.,… read more »
One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism ….… read more »
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects more than 1% of the population. For many years, it was thought to be a rare disorder, resulting from a bad relationship of the children with their so-called refrigerator mothers. However, there is clear evidence now that autism results from abnormalities in brain development, and that the behavior observed in children is the consequence of disturbances in brain circuitry.… read more »
The increasing appreciation of the body’s role in cognition—that the brain-mind is embedded in a physical, sensory-motor system interacting with the real world—is shedding the dualistic straitjacket that has characterized “classical” artificial intelligence research. So, as proposed by Grady Booch, let’s imagine unleashing a technology platform using natural language processing and machine learning, such as IBM’s Watson, in the physical world.… read more »
Call no man happy until he is dead.
– Solon of Athens (c. 640 – c. 560 BCE)
“Happiness” may be understood in prosaic and philosophic senses: as referring to a moment of experience or the entirety of a life; as referring to a psychological state of mind, relating to pleasurable emotions, as well as referring to a life regarded as going well, flourishing, for the individual leading it, and as such, a prudential value judgement of ultimate goods.… read more »
Someone is shouting! Ho! Do you hear? Am I howling in vain? For if one is frightened, everything makes a noise!
– Sophocles, Acrisius [fragment]
…the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.
… read more »
Name five female geniuses off the top of your head. If you find yourself stumbling after Madame Curie, you are hardly alone. Why should this be when there is no shortage of brilliant, creative women, who are as numerous in history as they are today?… read more »
What is meditation? As difficult as it may be to define this state of mind, its beneficial effects on mental and physical health are incontrovertible. What are the respective roles of conscious and unconscious processes in this voluntarily invoked mental state?… read more »
Developments in computational neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics have opened up new ways of looking at disease. In a relatively short time span, these advances may lead to significant innovations in the understanding of various diseases, as well as in therapeutics designed to treat them.… read more »
A Colloquium of
The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation
and
L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud
December 5th and 6th, 2015
at the Helix Center
Participants:
Marilia Aisenstein
Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris
(Paris Psychoanalytic Society)
Ian Buckingham
Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
Vincent Crapanzano
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature,
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Philippe Douste-Blazy
United Nations Under-Secretary-General
Paul Fry
Professor Emeritus of English and Literature, Yale University
Lynn Gamwell
Writer, Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, New York
Claude Landman
Psychoanalyst; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)
(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)
Patrick Landman
Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University)
Emile H.… read more »
Part 4: Culture
A Colloquium of
The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation
and
L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud
December 5th and 6th, 2015
at the Helix Center
Participants:
Marilia Aisenstein
Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris
(Paris Psychoanalytic Society)
Ian Buckingham
Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
Vincent Crapanzano
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature,
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Philippe Douste-Blazy
United Nations Under-Secretary-General
Paul Fry
Professor Emeritus of English and Literature, Yale University
Lynn Gamwell
Writer, Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, New York
Claude Landman
Psychoanalyst; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)
(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)
Patrick Landman
Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University)
Emile H.… read more »
Part 5: Conclusion
A Colloquium of
The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation
and
L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud
December 5th and 6th, 2015
at the Helix Center
Participants:
Marilia Aisenstein
Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris
(Paris Psychoanalytic Society)
Ian Buckingham
Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
Vincent Crapanzano
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature,
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Philippe Douste-Blazy
United Nations Under-Secretary-General
Paul Fry
Professor Emeritus of English and Literature, Yale University
Lynn Gamwell
Writer, Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, New York
Claude Landman
Psychoanalyst; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)
(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)
Patrick Landman
Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University)
Emile H.… read more »
Part 3: Identity
A Colloquium of
The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation
and
L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud
December 5th and 6th, 2015
at the Helix Center
Participants:
Marilia Aisenstein
Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris
(Paris Psychoanalytic Society)
Ian Buckingham
Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
Vincent Crapanzano
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature,
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Philippe Douste-Blazy
United Nations Under-Secretary-General
Paul Fry
Professor Emeritus of English and Literature, Yale University
Lynn Gamwell
Writer, Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, New York
Claude Landman
Psychoanalyst; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)
(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)
Patrick Landman
Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University)
Emile H.… read more »
Part 2: Education and Civilizational Crisis
A Colloquium of
The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation
and
L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud
December 5th and 6th, 2015
at the Helix Center
Participants:
Marilia Aisenstein
Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris
(Paris Psychoanalytic Society)
Ian Buckingham
Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
Vincent Crapanzano
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature,
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Philippe Douste-Blazy
United Nations Under-Secretary-General
Paul Fry
Professor Emeritus of English and Literature, Yale University
Lynn Gamwell
Writer, Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, New York
Claude Landman
Psychoanalyst; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)
(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)
Patrick Landman
Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University)
Emile H.… read more »
Why is translation, which formerly referred to a set of restricted technical procedures taking place between two languages, now widely understood to be the basis of all human culture? What is it about this dynamic principle of displacement, exchange, and creative renewal that also links it to the exercise of political power and the possession of linguistic/literary capital?… read more »
Over the last thirty years, significant progress has been made in our understanding of the various types of memory, the neural processes of consolidation and reconsolidation, and the biochemistry of memory, as well as the malleability and limits of autobiographical memory.… read more »
Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”… read more »
Schopenhauer defined genius in relation to the more conventional quality of talent. “Talent hits a target others miss. Genius hits a target no one sees.” Is originality indeed the sine qua non of genius? Is there, following Kant, a radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the brilliant scientific mind?… read more »
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck might today say, echoing the words of Mark Twain, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, once derided as “soft inheritance,” has been revived through the field of epigenetics: the study of alterations in gene expression or phenotype caused by mechanisms other than primary alterations in nucleotide sequence, and through transgenerational epigenetics, the study of the inheritability of such effects.… read more »
When Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, the scientific community was still pondering the question: Do other animals think? The subsequent prodigious scientific study of animal cognition and behavior has answered this question with an emphatic “yes”!… read more »
What does it mean to be a survivor of the traumatic violence of war and genocide, as victim or perpetrator—or descendant of either? What are the implications for the individual and collective conscience of doing violence to others sanctioned by the state or consecrated—or condemned—by one’s culture or that of other cultures?… read more »
Central to Eastern and Western philosophical and theological traditions, the notion of free will, once confined to discussions of human agency, can find application in understanding a broader set of phenomena. How are advances in genetics and neuroscience influencing our concept of voluntary, individual choice, and what are the implications for jurisprudence?… read more »
How does a one-year-old understand the world? A three-year-old? A five-year-old? How does the mental functioning of very young children differ from that of older children and of adults? Recognizing the ways in which children conceptualize the world, remember their experiences, and modulate emotions is crucial in providing both normally developing children and children with developmental disorders, like autism, with optimum care throughout their formative years.… read more »
Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question “Why?” has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different contexts throughout the chapters of human history.… read more »
Is science nearing an answer to the question of how and why consciousness and self-consciousness come about? In attempting to resolve the mystery of sentience, what roles do physics, psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience play? How do various philosophical and religious traditions contribute to our inquiries into this obvious and everyday universal experience?… read more »
Part 2: Particle Fever Q&A with Mark Levinson
Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s award-winning 2013 documentary (for which Helix Center Executive Committee member Carla Solomon was a producer), tells the remarkable story of the monumental search for the Higgs boson, the elementary force particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.… read more »
Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s award-winning 2013 documentary (for which Helix Center Executive Committee member Carla Solomon was a producer), tells the remarkable story of the monumental search for the Higgs boson, the elementary force particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.… read more »
Prior to the eighteenth century, and before Edmund Burke’s foundational treatise, the sublime was understood as beauty and greatness beyond measure. Subsequently, awe, the emotion classically associated with the sublime, was given new psychological depth and even physiological dimensions, bringing fear and the grotesque into aesthetic considerations of the sublime.… read more »
In our previous roundtable, Music to Whose Ears? Music, Emotion, and Mind (April 13, 2013), our participants explored a multitude of ideas connecting music and emotion. In this follow-up roundtable, artists and scientists will explore together the body’s role in musical experience, its perception and cognition.… read more »
In the Phaedo, Plato asserts that the philosophical life is a preparation for death. Human aspiration, expressed in our science and in our spirituality, nevertheless seeks to transcend the philosophical and biological confines of mortality. How do differences in our awareness of mortality, from developmental death anxieties to the philosopher’s embrace, influence the diverse lives we lead? Can… read more »
French Surrealism is probably best known for its paintings–images of floppy watches or men in bowler hats and topcoats falling from the sky. But just as central to the movement was the poetry produced from the beginning by André Breton, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret, Louis Aragon, René Char, and a host of others.… read more »
Psychobiologist Roger Sperry proposed that, “mind and consciousness are dynamic emergent properties of the living brain in action.” This seemingly simple observation raises a host of questions. How do novel entities arise from self-organizing complex systems? If a system itself shows adaptive, self-organizing properties not attributable to its aggregate micro-potentialities—such that at each new level of complexity, new properties arise—can science ever be confidently predictive?… read more »
Perhaps no thing conceived in the mind has enjoyed a greater confluence of cosmological, mathematical, philosophical, psychological, and theological inquiry than the notion of the infinite. The epistemological tension between the concrete and the ideal, between the phenomenological and the ontological, is nowhere clearer in outline yet more obscure in content.… read more »
Throughout history, no other disease entity has exceeded cancer in its evocation of fear, taboo, misconceptions, and metaphors.
In her 1978 book, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag threw down the gauntlet in her denunciation of metaphor applied to illness, as leading to a false connection between psychological traits and disease, scorning the contemporaneous, popular notion of a “cancer personality,” that “[p]assion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.”… read more »
What do we know about the universe and how do we know it? As John Locke would ask, what are the extent and limitations of human knowledge? Is our understanding of the laws of nature bound by limits on what the mind can grasp, or can formulate linguistically, or are there inherent limitations of physical and mathematical knowledge?… read more »
The “Responses” series at the Helix Center involves poets reading aloud each other’s poetry and commenting on those poems they’ve selected. For our first event in this series, we are fortunate to have two marvelous poets as participants: Patrick Rosal and Jean Valentine.… read more »
The last 50 years has seen increasing parity of opportunity for, and achievement by, women in the work world as reflected in their increasing numbers in leadership roles in medicine and other sciences, academe, business, and politics. Yet, obstacles to women’s employment and career advancement remain.… read more »
An ancient Egyptian hieroglyph at Saqqara declared Merit-Ptah as “the Chief Physician.” 4700 years after her achievement, we ask: How are women in science faring?
It is a well-documented phenomenon that for all STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, the gender gap widens in the progression from undergraduate study, through graduate and post-doctoral work, up through academic appointment.… read more »
“I have no doubt that the placing side by side of the points of view of a physicist and a psychologist will also prove to be a form of reflection.”
—Wolfgang Pauli
“Since physicists are the only people nowadays who would be able to deal with such a concept successfully, it is from a physicist that I hope to meet with critical understanding, although…the empirical basis seems to lie wholly in the realm of psychic phenomena.”… read more »
“I have specially in mind that a small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.… read more »
What is mind? Is it a property attributable to biological functionality alone, and, in particular, arising from the morphology of the mammalian brain and/or the influence of that animal’s body? How far down the evolutionary scale can we apply terms like cognition, consciousness, and intelligence?… read more »
For a study by Nathan Szajnberg, Ethiopian/Israeli six-year old children drew pictures of their lives, of their fantasies and fears, hopes and wishes. Their compelling drawings and stories will be the foundation upon which our roundtable participants will bring to bear art historical, linguistic, and psychoanalytic perspectives to explore questions of representation, the developmental issues related to the transition from visual to narrative representation, the universal and the culture-specific dimensions of human experience, and what we can learn about the inner lives of these children and of all of us.… read more »
The internet makes possible the unprecedented sharing of, access to, and data manipulation of, individual and social information with far reaching implications for personal privacy, healthcare, citizenship and national security, and for the definitions of personhood, institutional power and information itself. In this roundtable, we aim to explore contemporary notions of privacy, relationships between individuals and between individuals and institutions that arise through data exchange.… read more »
This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »
Part 2: Mnemosyne: Memory & Unconscious
This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »
Part 3: Additional questions/comments regarding both Sunday roundtables and wrap-up
This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »
Part 3: Classical & Renaissance Art
This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »
Part 2: An Eccentric Science
This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »
This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »
The Amygdaloids are a New York band made up of scientists who shed their scientific garb at night and take to the stage with songs about love and life peppered with insights drawn from research about mind and brain and mental disorders.… read more »
Is selflessness a necessary illusion? Are we condemned to weigh the costs (whether consciously or not) of the welfare of others against the benefits to ourselves ? We develop a “theory of mind” around age three, concurrently building our capacity to recognize emotions experienced by others.… read more »
A night of mind, brain, and magic. The Amygdaloids will play several suites of our original songs on mind/brain topics: the mind-body problem, memory, emotion, unconscious processes, and mental disorders. Each suite will be preceded by a short (3 min) lecture on the scientific or philosophical foundations of the topic by Neuroscientist and Amygdaloid, Joseph LeDoux.… read more »
Synthetic biology, and its sister field systems biology, offers the means to reengineer DNA in ways (and at a pace) that Nature, in her evolutionary wisdom, never envisioned. Standing at the unique crossroads of biology, engineering, computer science and neuroscience, these emerging fields are working toward the development of novel drugs and energy sources, the cure of disease and prolongation of life, and even the creation of new forms of life.… read more »
Physics Nobel laureate David Gross claims that the most important product of science is ignorance. Science is the quest not just for knowledge, but for better questions, and we’re generally more engaged by questions than by answers. Thus, ignorance drives science and curiosity is its engine.… read more »
A foundational work on emotion and music, Leonard Meyer’s 1956 treatise,Emotion and Meaning in Music, describes competing philosophical positions regarding musical meaning. It might rest exclusively within the context of the work itself; or refer to the extra-musical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character; or stem from an intellectual perception of the formalist qualities of the work; or find its foundations in an emotional response to musical relationships.… read more »
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the great masters of American poetry of the 20th Century. Her remarkable gifts have been described in a variety of ways, but one gift repeatedly recognized by readers is her skill at recounting the results of her capacity for observation.… read more »
How do emotions color and shape our actions? How do we decide to take action in the midst of fear for our own lives–go to war, fight an intruder, save a person falling on subway tracks–or to ward off catastrophes such as global climate change and the irreversible loss of species that could lead to the extinction of our own species?… read more »
In one of his novels, Milan Kundera suggested that “love is a continual interrogation.” What is this thing called love? Is it, as Shakespeare might have it, “the star to every wandering bark”? Or, in Bronzino’s words, “always a fountain and a vase of tears”?… read more »
“Plaintiffs in Paper Robes: The First Ghazal of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib” Frances Pritchett and Mustafa Menai will discuss the poetry of Ghalib and the ghazal form by looking at the first verse of the first ghazal of his divan. In Pritchett’s words, “An Urdu ghazal consists of a series of miniature poems, each two lines long.… read more »
The animal kingdom has evolved multiple adaptive strategies for the efficient transmission of information, one way of defining language. In this roundtable, led by experts in fields ranging from the communication in dolphins, monkeys, and whales to speech recognition technology, we will explore the phonics and sonics of animal communication.… read more »
Little attention is paid to the fact that in his book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin devoted twelve chapters to male-male competition (describing it as “the law of battle”), detailing intra-species male morphological and behavioral differences from molluscs through mammals, arriving finally and specifically at human mammals.… read more »
How does the study of evolution, coordination dynamics, sports, social interactions, and aesthetics help us understand movement and life? In this roundtable, we will explore: movement and objects as distinctively different “things” to study; coordination dynamics and intrinsic dynamics and tendencies; kinesthesia; the evolution of social coordination; how, in the living company of others, we are both challenged and supported; and the value of nurturing and pursuing a moving life with all its risks and challenges.… read more »
What is jazz poetry? How can words, inert objects, be used to convey this blues-based, improvisatory, aural form? What is a jazz-related piece of writing? Is it merely “about” jazz, or does it do something more? How do poems respond to jazz in all its musical and cultural overtones?… read more »
A pre-election roundtable of a politically diverse group of noted economic theorists exploring their philosophical convergences and divergences.
Free and open to the public.… read more »
Philosophy meets mathematics meets neuroscience in this roundtable investigating how cutting-edge mathematical models are elucidating the computational rules encoding brain functions and the implications for a deeper understanding of mind.
Free and open to the public.… read more »
We follow up our inquiry into beginnings by posing complementary questions about endings: why are we curious about endings, whether that of the cosmos or our own? What can we discover from each other’s curiosity about endings? What are the organizational properties necessary to call something an ending?… read more »
Why are we curious about beginnings, whether that of the cosmos or our own? What can we discover from each other’s curiosity about beginnings? What are the organizational properties necessary to call something a beginning? Might similar processes apply to both individual consciousness and the universe at large?… read more »