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.
Hooked on a Feeling
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When neuroscientists set out to study emotion, one logical question arose: Which human emotion would lend itself to a close, if hitherto untried, investigation?
Mary Shelley Started It
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In this episode we contend with monstrosity as we look into creativity’s double binds: The unintended consequences of scientific creation.
The Creative Uses of Uncertainty
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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.
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.
