camminando | New York, February 24

On my way to the "Bringing the Body Back in Humanities and Social Sciences Conference" in a rainy day

Total walk length: 10.5 km

Events | Linking Mind and Brain, lecture at CUNY Graduate Center

Tonight the CUNY Graduate Center hosted a conversation between the theoretical physicist (neurophysicist) William Bialek and the philosopher of psychology, Jesse Prinz ,author of the forthcoming book The Conscious Brain.
The conversation touched several topics ranging from quantitative biology and neuroscience to philosophy, visual illusions, pseudoscience.

Bialek started the conversation introducing that the focus of  theoretical physics as the mathematical analysis of nature, is often taken over by a qualitative description, able to fill the gaps left by quantitative methods. Jesse Prinz then introduced his philosophical investigations, which in opposition to Bialek methods, start from a very large scale  and then narrow down to physical analysis — from abstract generalizations to concrete cases.

Can consciousness  be explained as a series of brain processes? The human brain has over one-hundred billions of  neurons and only a small percentage relates to consciousness. Prinz then narrowed consciousness to visual experiences, more specifically to the retinal representations occurring  in the visual cortex referred to as V1, V2, V3, V4, V5 in the brain mapping.  Brain injuries have also a great role in explaining consciousness.
Another interesting phenomenon in the study of consciousness is in the interpretation of ambiguous such as the Kanizsa triangles. Subliminal advertisement also is based on the connection between perception and conscious interpretation of perception.
The conversation continued with the fascinating numbers involved in the description of the human brain:100 billions of neurons reside in the human brain and 1mm thick of the folded cortex contains 100000 neurons cells each with 5000 connections (axons).The conversation ended with a mention of the pseudoscience often present in writings on neuroscience from mainstream publications such as the recent NY Times article "You Love Your iPhone. Literally".
The conversation dealt with several visual topics and I would have appreciated a more visual presentations. Nevertheless the overall themes were introduced in simple terms to be appreciated by a general audience —simplicity and clarity which are often lacking in the many neuroscience related events which are becoming increasingly popular.

Events NYC | Neuroscience: Eric Kandel on Memory at CUNY

Erkenne Dich selbst (know yourself)

This evening my walkabouts took me across the street from the Empire State Building: the Graduate Center of CUNY presented Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, as launching event of the new Interdisciplinary Committee for Science Studies. Eric R. Kandel, M.D., professor at Columbia University and director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 2000.

In his presentation dr. Kandel focused on memory and introduced the history of research on memory as a system problem and as molecular problem. He started with phrenology (from the Greek φρήν "mind" and λόγος "knowledge"): the popular XIX century discipline (now considered pseudoscience) was developed by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall and assigned cognitive functions and emotions to areas of the brain. The history of how cognitive functions became assigned to specific brain region was quite fascinating and quite amusing to learn how intelligence and emotional responses were determined as function of measurement of the skull.

Dr. Kandel's presentation progressed into contemporary neuroscience and introduced memory related topics such as the relationship between short term, long term, implicit and explicit memory, spatial learning in the hippocampus, influence of aging and how memory is effected by emotions. He also mentioned his upcoming book on art and neuroscience, with references to the German expressionism as well as Gestalt and visual illusions. The content was delivered with great clarity to be fully understood and appreciated even by an audience without specific more technical knowledge in the field of neuroscience.

In the QA session the audience introduced major themes such as neuroscience and ethics: can evil have a biological explanation?

Unfortunately the QA session ended before I was able to ask a question on mnemonic systems from the ancient Greece, Rome and the Renaissance ---as narrated in The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates. As an artist interested in neuroscience and concerned with the transformation of space, the association between space and memory is quite relevant to my work.

To be continued...

PS The Empire State Building has nothing to do with dr. Kandel's presentation, I only took the photo on my way to CUNY, as I am always fascinated by the interaction of light with landmark building ---and I am not the only one, remember Andy Warhol? As the topic of the lecture was memory and this blog (as many others) is a collection of visual memories...why not including it?