University of Helsinki, Finland
13-15 June 2016

http://blogs.helsinki.fi/coghum-2016/

Organisers:
Merja Polvinen
Karin Kukkonen

In cooperation with:
Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki
Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

Confirmed plenary speakers:
Peter Garratt (Durham)
Pirjo Lyytikäinen (Helsinki)
Anne Mangen (Stavanger)
Jean-Marie Schaeffer (CNRS)
Deirdre Wilson (UCL)

Building on the conferences associated with the network Cognitive Futures in the Humanities in Bangor (2013), Durham (2014) and Oxford (2015), the 2016 conference in Helsinki aims once again to bring together a wide array of papers from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, literary studies, linguistics, cultural studies, critical theory, film, performance studies, musicology and beyond.

In accordance with the original purpose of the network, the aims of the conference are:
(1) to evolve new knowledge and practices for the analysis of culture and cultural objects, through engagement with the cognitive sciences
(2) to assess how concepts from the cognitive sciences can in turn be approached using the analytical tools of humanities enquiry (historical, theoretical, contextual)
(3) to contest the nature/culture opposition whose legacy can be identified with the traditional and ongoing segregation of scientific and aesthetic knowledge.

We continue to examine these issues through a variety of approaches from cognitive sciences and the humanities, and draw on methods ranging from quantitative research to critical theory. The topics studied include mindreading or mentalizing, embodiment, ‘bio’ narratives and biocentrism, perception and memory, affect and emotion, performance, movement and kinesis, subjectivity/qualia and the narrated self, conceptual blending, multimodality, linguistic creativity and figurative language, bilingualism/multilingualism, translation and digital text processing.

To examine these and other related phenomena, we invite proposals addressing e.g. the following questions:

• How are cognitive universals related to sociohistorical particulars?
• What changes have taken place in conceptualisations of cognition, and what are the connections of those changes to cultural and historical contexts? Read the rest of this entry »

Second NeuroHumanities Dialogue

Metaphors as a Source of Creative Thought

4-6 June 2015

NHS Research Group
Department of Humanities
University of Catania

On the dates of June 4-6, 2015, the University of Catania and the Teatro Machiavelli hosted the Second NeuroHumanities Dialogue on the theme of “Metaphors as a Source of Creative Thought”, organized by the NeuroHumanities Research Group based at the Department of Humanities of the University of Catania.

The event built on the success of last year’s NeuroHumanities Dialogue about “Neuroaesthetics and Cognitive Poetics” and expanded the number of sessions and participants, while promoting lively scholarly discussion through its tried and tested dialogical format, already introduced with the first meeting.

Specifically, the Second NeuroHumanities Dialogue addressed the issue of metaphor from a variety of points of view, ranging from cognitive and neural approaches to linguistics, literature, and art.

The conference program featured three dialogical sessions with two invited keynote speakers and six other speakers, together with a final roundtable-session with all the participants contributing to the discussion.

The opening address of the conference was delivered by the NHS research group leaders, Professor Grazia Pulvirenti and Professor Renata Gambino, who presented the NewHums – Neurohumanities Studies Research Centre, inaugurated in Catania on the 11 May 2015 with a guest lecture on “The Origin of Beauty” delivered by Prof. Semir Zeki, neurobiologist at the University College London. Newhums is the first research centre in Italy to be devoted to the analysis of such phenomena of human mind as memory, consciousness, imagination, cognition and learning, with a specific focus on creative processes. Professors Gambino and Pulvirenti explained that the centre is the result of a complex networking activity with both private and public scholarly institutions, in order to promote, coordinate, and publish research which put together neurological, cognitive, biological and digital studies with best practice and knowledge in the field of art, performance and the humanities.

Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered the first keynote speech on the theme “Building Metaphors in the Brain”. Professor Chatterjee presented his current research on the neural bases of human cognition. He reported on behavioural experiments conducted on patients with cognitive disorder, aimed at investigating the neural underpinnings of such phenomena as relational thinking, spatial thought, and the procedures of abstraction and extraction that take place in our brains, especially when exposed to metaphorical language. Further experiments contrasting the patients’ reactions to novel and familiar metaphors gave evidence of two different cognitive strategies, pointing out that novelty in language demands a higher level of abstraction and increased cognitive control in order to creatively elaborate the sense of the sentence. Read the rest of this entry »

Metaphors as Source of Creative Thought

June 4, 5, 6, 2015

Neuro Humanities Studies
University of Catania
Department of Humanities

The Neuro Humanities Research Group of the University of Catania (Italy) is proud to announce the Second NeuroHumanities Dialogue, “Metaphors as source of creative thought”, which is going to take place on June 4, 6 and 7, 2015 at the Machiavelli Theatre, University Square, Catania (Italy).

The Neuro Humanities Studies Network, directed by Grazia Pulvirenti and Renata Gambino from  University of Catania, from 2011 aims at creating a multidisciplinary research community in order to develop and structure a linking platform for neuro-scientific, cognitive topics and humanities.

After an inspiring and ground-breaking First Neuro Humanities Dialogue about “Neuroaesthetics and Cognitive Poetics” at the University of Catania in 2014, the second edition of the Dialogue addresses relevant questions of the recent discussion about metaphors, such as: their cognitive value  and the concomitant neural processes, their embodied nature, the difference between metaphors conventionalized in language and discourse and novel ones, deliberate and non-deliberate metaphors.

Keynote speakers of the “Dialogue” 2015 are Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee from the University of Pennsylvania and Humanities Scholar Gerard Steen, Director of the Metaphor Lab and Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Amsterdam. The peculiarity of the meeting relies on its format: a real dialogue between two keynote speakers and ten discussants  from University of Osnabrück (Germany), Potsdam (Germany), Warsaw (Poland), Duke (USA), Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle, France), Bari, Palermo e Naples (Italy).

The convention is going to take place at the Machiavelli Theater, historic site in Catania, which was recently reopened thanks to the effort of the Department of Humanities at University of Catania and the non-profit Association INGRESSO LIBERO, founded in 2009 by the theatre director and pedagogue Lamberto Puggelli.

For further details, visit the website:  http://www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu/NHS2015/

Directors
Grazia Pulvirenti
Renata Gambino

Assistant Director
Federica Abramo (federica.ab@gmail.com)

Secretary Office
Simona Di Mari (simo_d_86@hotmail.it)
Sabrina Apa (sabrinaapa27@gmail.com)

Communication Office
Natalia Scandurra (natalia.scandurra@gmail.com)

Neuro Humanities Studies Research Group
University of Catania
Monastero dei Benedettini
Piazza Dante, 32 – 95124 Catania

neuhums@gmail.com

Journal Special Issue: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Literature and Empathy

Guest Editors: Paul Sopcak, Massimo Salgaro & J. Berenike Herrmann

The journal of the Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL) is planning a special issue dedicated to empirically exploring the relationship between literature and empathy. In proposing this special issue we have three main interests: 1) The integration of literary, aesthetic and philosophical theories concerning literary reading and empathy with existing empirical findings; 2) The application of key distinctions from psychology and the neurosciences that highlight the multidimensionality and distinctness of the concept ‘empathy’ to the explication ad understanding of literary reading 3) The systematic empirical examination of the textual characteristics such as style, narrative form, character description, and genre that contribute to empathic responses in literature.

We invite contributions addressing one or more of the following themes:

• The multidimensionality of the construct ‘empathy’ and related constructs, as well as phenomena from which it must be differentiated in the context of literary reading;
• The role of textual/poetic characteristics in the relationship between literary reading and empathy;
• Individual differences between (types of) readers and situational constraints on readers’ empathic responses;
• Methodological aspects of researching the link between empathy and literature;
• Novel interpretations of empirical findings on ‘empathy’ (and related constructs) in light of recent theoretical developments at the nexus of the neurosciences and philosophy, philosophy of mind, psychology, etc.

Contributor guidelines:
Please follow the journal’s submission guidelines for authors:

https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ssol/guidelines

Deadline for submission of papers: 15 October 2015.

Please direct your queries to:
Paul Sopcak (sopcakp@macewan.ca), Massimo Salgaro (massimo.salgaro@univr.it), and J. Berenike Herrmann (bherrma1@gwdg.de)

Workshop and Conference: Preliminary notice and call for participation

Deadline May 15 2015

Short papers and posters are invited for a conference to be held at the University of Plymouth, UK between 7-11 September 2015.

Workshops: 7-8 September
Conference: 9-11 September

Confirmed Plenary Speakers:

Amy Ione,
Director of the Diatrope Institute, Berkeley, California, USA

Roger Malina,
Distinguished Professor of Arts and Technology, Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Sundar Sarukkai,
Professor and Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal, India

The promise of cognitive innovation as a collaborative project in the sciences, arts and humanities is that we can approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process in which the energies that shape the poem are necessarily indistinguishable from those that shape the poet. For the purposes of this conference the exploration of the idea of cognitive innovation concerns an understanding of creativity that is not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but also as intrinsic to our cognitive development. As a consequence, we see the possibility for cognitive innovation to provide a theoretical and practical platform from which to address disciplinary differences in ways that offer new topics and concerns for research in the sciences and the humanities.

Papers should consider cognitive aspects of creativity, including but are not confined to:

– Poetics, language and cognition

– The dynamics and performativity of imagination

– Affect and named emotions

– Affective artefacts (artefacts as scaffolding device for mind)

– Creativity as a ‘self corrective process’

– Cognition as creativity

– Memory, metaphor, and media literacy

– Archives, identity and emotionality

– Art, mental health and consciousness

– Networking and Network Studies

– Creativity and mental imagery

– Creativity and innovation in development

– Social creativity

– Neuroscience of creativity

– Creativity as an iterative process

– Simulating and modelling creativity

Confirmed Workshops:

Prof. James Daybell, ‘Gender, Archives and Memory in Early Modern England’

Dr. Min Wild, ‘Hanging in Dreams on the Back of a Tiger: Lies, Science and the Philosophy of Metaphor’

Prof. Gemma Blackshaw, ‘The Art of Consumption: Picturing tuberculosis in alpine sanatoria around 1900’

Prof. Mat Emmett, ‘Visual Mediators: Exploring the transactional capabilities of diagrams, maps and schematic notations’

Dr. Daniel Grey, ‘Oral History, Infanticide and the Archive’

The workshops will engage participants in the contributions made by past and current research in the Humanities in the understanding of cognition as a creative interaction with daily life, Read the rest of this entry »

Neuro Humanities Research Group of the Department of Human Sciences University of Catania

Second NeuroHumanities Dialogue

“Metaphors as source of creative thought”

4th –  6th June 2015

CATANIA- Italy

Deadline: 30 March 2015

After an inspiring and groundbreaking First Neuro Humanities Dialogue about “Neuroaesthetics and Cognitive Poetics” at the University of Catania in 2014, the Neuro Humanities Research Group of the Department of Human Sciences in Catania will organize a second Dialogue between neuroscientists and humanists. It will take place from the 4th to the 6th June 2015 at the Benedictine Monastery in Catania.

The topic of the 2015-Dialogue is: Metaphors as source of creative thought.
Keynote speakers of the “Dialogue” 2015 are Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee from the University of Pennsylvania and Humanities Scholar Gerard Steen, Director of the Metaphor Lab and Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Amsterdam. The peculiarity of the meeting relies on its format: a real dialogue between two keynote speakers and ten discussants with plenty of time for discussion and a final roundtable.

Relevant questions of the recent discussion about metaphors will be at stake: from their cognitive value to the concomitant neural processes, from their embodied nature to the difference between those conventionalized in language and discourse and novel ones, between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphors. Metaphors are at the core of creative thought, daily communication and artful expression. After the “cognitive turn” determined by Lakoff and Johnson’s “Metaphors we live by” (1980) metaphors have been considered as the result of conceptual mappings across different conceptual domains.

We aim to collect new insights into the origin and function of metaphors as tools of creative thought comparing the following different disciplinary perspectives:

-       metaphors in cognitive approaches
-       metaphors evaluation in empirical studies
-       neural correlates in conventionalized and novel metaphorical expression
-       metaphors as mental process
-       metaphors as artful tool
-       metaphors in language and literature.

We invite papers reflecting on problems of research and methodology as well as case studies, theoretical inquiries, comparative and interdisciplinary approaches.

Please send a 250-word abstract by March 30 to neuhums@gmail.com

Deadline (Letter of Intent): 30 September 2014

The Imagination Institute has issued a request for proposals for grants for scientific on imagination.

“Supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Imagination Institute, a non-profit organization based in Pennsylvania dedicated to advancing the understanding of and research on imagination, has established under its initiative, Advancing the Science of Imagination: Toward an “Imagination Quotient,” a grants competition targeted to psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators who conduct research on theory of mind, mental imagery, mental simulation, perspective taking, prospective thought, daydreaming, mind wandering, counterfactual thinking, creativity, memory, curiosity, child development, aging, social cognition, and related fields, to support projects that seek to test and validate a proposed measure and develop an intervention for imagination/perspective. This initiative encourages such researchers to collaborate with individuals in corporate, military, school, health, university, governmental, and artistic settings to demonstrate that the proposed measure and interventions work in such a setting. Proposals from around the world will be welcomed.

In 2015, up to fifteen (15), two-year grants in the range of $150,000 to $200,000 will be awarded to scholars from around the world. The awards are intended to generate new scientific information in order to further clarify the construct of imagination and its measurement for the purpose of advancing an understanding of the human mind and its role in the optimization of human potential and flourishing. The award recipients will be brought together for a retreat at the conclusion of the program in the summer of 2017 in order to compare the results of their projects and to discuss longer-term efforts at generating an “Imagination Quotient”.”

Further info about the request for proposals and its full description can be found in the website: http://imagination-institute.org/

An article from the Italian magazine L’Espresso, introducing the field of Neuroaesthetics, founded by Prof. Semir Zeki, and the 1st NHS Dialogue 2014, organized by our research project Neuro Humanities Studies. At the end a short interview with our Project Leader, Grazia Pulvirenti.

L’Espresso – L’arte svela il funzionamento del cervello

1st Transdisciplinary Dialogue:

Neuroaesthetics and Cognitive Poetics

6-7 June 2014

The research group of NeuroHumanitieStudies Project is proud to announce the 1st Transdisciplinary Meeting about Neuroaesthetics and Cognitive Poetics in Catania. The meeting will focus on the dialogue between Prof. Semir Zeki and Prof. Michael Burke.

Visit the website

www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu/NHS2014

Read flyer

Michael Burke is professor of rhetoric at the Humanities Faculty of UCR, Utrecht University  in Netherlands. His research interests range from rhetoric to neuroscience. He is member of several international projects about pedagogical stylistics, cognitive literary science and rhetorical pedagogy. Chair of the international Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and member of many other research associations. His recent book, Literary Reading Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of Oceanic Mind (2011) has broken a new path in the linguistic research field.

http://www.ucr.nl/about-ucr/Faculty-and-Staff/Academic-Core/Pages/Prof–Dr–Michael-Burke.aspx

Semir Zeki  is a British neurobiologist who has specialized in studying the primate visual brain and more recently the neural correlates of affective states, such as the experience of love, desire and beauty that are generated by sensory inputs within the field of neuroesthetics. Professor of Neurobiology, since 2008 he is professor of Neuroestetics at UCL, his last three books, A Vision of the Brain (1993), Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (1999); Splendors and Miseries of the Brain (2009) have opened the way to a new trans-disciplinary approach to art fruition and brain functions.

http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/

For further info please contact:

Simona Di Mari (simo_d_86@hotmail.it)
Prof. Renata Gambino (renatagambino@gmail.com)

May 20 2014 - 4 to 7 pm

Institut du Monde anglophone – Grand amphithéâtre
Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
5, rue de l’école de médecine – 75006 Paris
Métro Odéon

PROGRAM

16h00 Alejandra Juno Rodríguez Villar (Duke University)

“I didn’t know this was going to happen.” Calderón and why protagonists don’t have memories
Calderón de la Barca occupies, according to most literary critics, the pinnacle of the autos sacramentales theatrical genre. In this type of religious theater, Calderón exalted the mystery of Eucharist as part of the counter-reform propaganda. If the auto sacramental is usually a symbolic and allegoric genre, with Calderón, these plays reached an even higher level of philosophic ontology. One of his most cherished topics was the “Fall of Man,” or the idea of the original sin. This myth represents the foundation of Christian anthropology, and is also, a clear display of the traditional storytelling structure.

In the case of “El veneno y la Triaca”, Calderón offers a clear account of how the protagonist’s memory (or the lack thereof) is paramount in properly setting any general narrative structure. The conflict must be new to the protagonist, but at the same time, to facilitate the audience’s understanding, the conflict must convey the use of memory to properly explain what is happening on stage. This complex use of memory also explains the typical characters in conventional storytelling structures. The variety of different types of memories helps to advance the plot, while at the same time, balances the entropy and redundancy so that the audience feels engaged by the story.

16h20 Vanille Roche-Fogli (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3)

Une approche cognitive de la relation acteur, personnage, spectateur dans Le comédien désincarné de Louis Jouvet
Antonio Damasio écrit :

« […] notre connexion avec autrui passe non seulement par des images visuelles, du langage et des interférences logiques, mais aussi par quelque chose de plus profond dans notre chair : les actions par lesquelles nous pouvons représenter les mouvements des autres. Nous pouvons effectuer quatre formes de traduction : 1) mouvement réel, 2) représentations somatosensorielles du mouvement, 3) représentations visuelles du mouvement et 4) souvenir. […] Les bons acteurs, bien sûr, utilisent à la pelle ces procédés. » (L’autre moi-même – Les nouvelles cartes du cerveau, de la conscience et des émotions, 2010)

Cette réflexion d’un neuroscientifique de renom sur la pratique des acteurs soulève plusieurs points intéressants : l’empathie que ressent le spectateur pour le comédien découle de processus neurobiologiques et ceux-ci peuvent être manipulés consciemment et volontairement par l’artiste. Néanmoins, on pourra remarquer que Damasio décrit ici une relation directe entre l’interprète et le spectateur, alors que nous pourrions considérer qu’il s’agit d’une relation triangulaire, dont il laisse un terme de côté : le personnage. Au regard de ce que les recherches neuroscientifiques récentes nous apprennent sur les mécanismes d’identification, de projection et d’empathie, comment peut-on analyser les rapports de l’acteur à son rôle, du spectateur au personnage, et de l’artiste à son public ?

On proposera ici d’observer les modalités de cette relation triangulaire dans Le comédien désincarné de Louis Jouvet, ouvrage issu des notes prises entre 1939 et 1951 en répétition, en tournée, ou après ses cours au Conservatoire, en confrontant ses réflexions sur son expérience aux études récentes sur le système miroir (Rizzolatti), le cerveau projectif (Berthoz) et la conscience de soi (Damasio).

16h40 Gabriele Sofia (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 / MSH Paris Nord)

Le langage incarné du théâtre : hypothèses et données expérimentales
Au mois de mai 2010 s’est constitué à la Sapienza Università de Rome un groupe de recherche empirique et interdisciplinaire constitué par spécialistes du théâtre et neurophysiologistes. Ce groupe se propose d’étudier les mécanismes de cognition incarnée (embodied cognition) de l’acteur. Pour ce faire, il a réuni douze acteurs provenant de six troupes théâtrales. Ces acteurs ont été soumis à une série de tests qui avaient pour but d’explorer les mécanismes d’activation motrice relatifs aux processus de cognition linguistique. Ces recherches mettent en jeu une “Théorie du langage incarné” (Gallese et al. 2005; Buccino et al. 2001) selon laquelle l’élaboration linguistique, loin de reposer sur des représentations symboliques abstraites et conceptuelles, impliquerait l’activation du système moteur. Les expériences qui furent conduites avaient pour but de déterminer s’il existait une différence, au niveau de la cognition incarnée, entre des individus impliqués depuis des années dans un processus d’apprentissage de type théâtral et des individus privés de ce type d’apprentissage. Malgré leur caractère encore parcellaire, et bien qu’ils soient à l’évidence susceptibles de changements ultérieurs, les premiers résultats obtenus permettent d’établir une différence statistiquement significative entre les acteurs et les autres individus.

Read the rest of this entry »