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Exploring particular issue themes, articles will be created by contributors via invitation, commission and open submission from subscribers.

The flowers of Dolpo

Garry Kennard is a painter, writer and founding director of Art and Mind (www.artandmind.org). A fascination with how the brain reacts to works of art has lead Kennard to research, write and lecture on these topics. With Rita Carter and Annabel Huxley he devised and directed the unique Art and Mind Festivals which attracted leading artists and scientists to explore what light the brain sciences can throw on contemporary culture. He has an interest in mountaineering and has climbed in the Alps and Africa, as well as leading his own expeditions to the Nepalese Himalayas.

Life, Death, and the Quantum Soul

Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D. is a social anthropologist, researcher, writer, and charismatic public speaker. For more than three decades, she has been a leader in the field of consciousness studies. Her research and extensive publications focus on personal and social transformation, cultural pluralism, extended human capacities, and mind body medicine. She recently wrote and produced a feature film (called Death Makes Life Possible) with Deepak Chopra on the topic of death and dying, and how engaging that topic in a deep and meaningful way informs the way we live our lives.

Talking about Consciousness (Blog)

Links to the Interalia Magazine blog, ‘Talking about Consciousness’, featuring – Daniel Dennett: The Hard Question of Consciousness ; David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness? ; Christof Koch: The Search for Consciousness ; Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness ; Sir Roger Penrose: The quantum nature of consciousness ; Max Tegmark: Consciousness is a mathematical pattern ; Nicholas Humphrey: The Magic of Consciousness

Consciousness Spirited Away

Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist, based in Cambridge, who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide ranging. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, he was the first to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” after brain damage in monkeys, he proposed the celebrated theory of the “social function of intellect”, and he is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta.

From Consciousness and the Brain

How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before.

In his lively book, ‘Consciousness and the Brain’, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. The book explores cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness.
This excerpt is from the Introduction; The Stuff of Thought.

Colour-Form Abstraction

Roy Osborne is an artist, educator and writer. He was twice Chairman of the Colour Group GB and the first recipient of its Turner Medal (2003). Since 1978 he has presented some 2,000 lectures at 200 institutions worldwide and contributed to over 100 group exhibitions and several solo shows. In 1989 he curated a touring exhibition, From Prism to Paintbox: Colour Theory and Practice in Modern British Painting. He is author of a number of books on colour and colour theory, including Lights and Pigments (1980) and Color Influencing Form (2004) – (see Library section for more publications).

On Theme and Variation

The ways in which the author, the sculptor Peter Randall-Page, has made use of the ideas of D’Arcy Thompson are described. How Thompson showed that commonalities of form and pattern exist across the biological and abiotic realms is described, and the implications that physical constraints limit and sometimes dominate the capabilities of evolutionary natural selection are explored. Since we evolved in a world shaped in this manner, the likelihood that this palette of forms is one that carries strong psychological meanings and associations is examined, and the ways in which these forms are a rich source of inspiration and allusion for visual artists are discussed, hinting at the play of opposing tendencies, the dance between order and randomness, and the ways in which nature can derive variations on a theme.

Random Art

John D Barrow is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has been Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge since 1999, carrying out research in mathematical physics, with special interest in cosmology, gravitation, and particle physics. He is the author of over 420 articles and 19 books, translated in 28 languages, a number of which deal with the relationship between art, maths and science. This article is taken from his latest book ‘100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Maths and the Arts’.

The Infinite Possibilities of Line

Artist, Maureen McQuillan, explores aspects of growth and unpredictability, repetition, replication and imperfection in the process and activity of drawing itself. Her work has often been compared to scientific imagery and encoding but paradoxically results from simple means. As she has stated, “I do not believe it is necessary to sacrifice working by hand in order to reflect my interest in the way technology has shaped, changed and enriched the way we see the world.”