What We Talk About When We Talk About Genius
A personal essay about the meaning of genius and the importance of intellectual ancestry.
Galleries
Affecting Perception: Interview + Gallery
A new gallery show in Oxford presents the work of artists affected by neurological conditions, and contemporary art inspired by discoveries in neuroscience. We interviewed the three co-curators of the show about issues in art and neuroscience.
Gallery + Interview: Greg Dunn
Greg Dunn is a visual artist and has a Ph.D in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. It’s not so easy to tell at first glance whether Dunn is painting a branching pattern of a plant or that of a neuron. But maybe that’s the point.
GALLERY: Elizabeth Jameson Spring 2011
Elizabeth Jameson found her art when her own brain lost one of its most basic functions. We are proud to feature an online gallery of some of her brand new works.
Essays
What We Talk About When We Talk About Genius
A personal essay about the meaning of genius and the importance of intellectual ancestry.
The Cold Humanists
The cold humanists have arrived: a parade of skeptical voices, mostly from the humanities, that has steadily gone about dismissing the brain sciences with a cold, cynical, and doubtful attitude— as if neuroscience has long overstayed its welcome, and must now be hurried out the door. Noah Hutton offers a response.
Art and Neuroscience: a State of the Union
Ahead of an art/brain panel discussion this week in Brooklyn, NY, Noah Hutton presents an outline of the current state of the dialogue between the arts and brain sciences, with three major lines of inquiry apparent.
Reviews
Deconstructing the Conscious Mind, Theatrically
Noah Hutton reviews The Deconstructive Theatre Project’s recent production of The Orpheus Variations. In its innovative blend of live projection and constantly shifting scenery, the play was a fascinating reflection of the constant stitching-together of human consciousness.
Gateway Books: The Storytelling Animal
Ben Ehrlich reviews Jonathan Gottschall’s new book, “The Storytelling Animal,” whose main idea is a magical one: we are Homo fictus– fiction fiends– creatures of an imaginative realm called Neverland, “where we ramble in make believe.”
Seeing Ourselves: A Brain and Art Gallery Show Hits New York City
Visual art and neuroscience are stitched together in a new gallery show in New York City at MUSECPMI, and the results are a mixed bag of intriguing syntheses and frustrating shortcomings. Noah reviews “Seeing Ourselves.”
Dispatches
Artists and Scientists in Dialogue at the Rubin Museum of Art
The Brainwave series returns to the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, where artists and scientists enter into a one-hour public dialogue. Neuroscientist Carl Schoonover and director François Girard took the stage last week to talk about opera and emotional reality.
The Creativity of Chess: a Conversation with Elizabeth Spiegel
The renowned educator and subject of the new documentary film “Brooklyn Castle” talks about the game of infinite possibilities.
A Heavyweight Brain Debate
The New York City-based group NeuWrite hosted a public debate on minds, maps, and the future of neuroscience between Sebastian Seung of M.I.T. and Anthony Movshon of NYU. The debate was a barometer of where neuroscience stands in the 21st century.
Podcasts
PODCAST: An Interview with Carl Schoonover
To kick off our new season of The Beautiful Brain Podcast, host Noah Hutton sits down with Carl Schoonover, author of “Portraits of the Mind,” to talk about how we have imaged the brain from antiquity to the present.
PODCAST: The Philosophy of Art and Mind
In this month’s podcast we proudly present a conversation with the outspoken artist and author Garry Kennard. Kennard, the founder of artandmind.org, and has hosted many conferences and festivals that have brought together leading thinkers in the fields of art and brain research.
PODCAST: The Magic Forest
In this month’s podcast, Noah Hutton speaks with British artist Andrew Carnie, whose current installation at the GV Art Gallery in London uses slide projections to explore the evolving narrative of the brain.
re:COG
The Evolution of Chalkboard Torture
Sam McDougle explains the purported evolutionary relevance of that horrible nails-on-chalkboard sound.
Free(r) Wills
Interesting new reasearch suggests that individuals perceive different “amounts” of free will in themselves vs. others.
Tools Don’t Suffer Fools
Language, upright posture, tool-making — these are examples of commonly cited “human-specific” behaviors. But how unique are these behaviors to us clever, hairless apes? New research on a bird from the South Pacific shows that some humbling evolutionary parallels can be lightly drawn between human and nonhuman tool-using behaviors.
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