Tag Archives: Brain

In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses (a review by Garry Kennard)

In 1976, Julian Jaynes proposed that the language of poetry and prophecy originated in the right, “god-side” of the brain. Current neuroscientific evidence confirms the role of the right hemisphere in poetry, a sensed presence, and paranormal claims as well as in mental imbalance. Left-hemispheric dominance for language is the norm. An atypically enhanced right hemisphere, whether attained through genetic predisposition, left-hemispheric damage, epilepsy, childhood or later traumas, can create hypersensitivities along with special skills. Dissociative Others may arise unbidden or be coaxed out through occult practices. Based on nearly twenty years of scientific and literary research, this book enters the atypical minds of poetic geniuses Blake, Keats, Hugo, Rilke, Yeats, Merrill, Plath and Hughes by way of the visible signs in their lives, beliefs, and shared practices.

Revelations by Flicker, Dreamachines and Electroencephalographic signals in art

How did ordinary tools in the Neurophysiology department become means for spiritual enlightenment ?

The combination of brainwave (EEG) monitoring by the early adopters with stroboscopes induced side-effects in many of the clinical experimentees in neurophysiological research, hallucinations that were named ‘Flicker.’ Patient’s experiences described increasingly bright, complex patterns of colour behind their closed eyelids. Soon Cyberneticians, psychologists and artists were spontaneously informing this interdisciplinary exchange, during a time of pioneering chemistry, new artistic styles and by their implementation of new tools for experiencing Art. I will describe how artists’ work, including my own, is harnessing the EEG signal, bridging various methods and arousing questions in art and human experience.

Awareness and Identification of Self

David Rosenthal is a philosopher at Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly about consciousness, mental qualities, and the self. Rosenthal’s work extends into the related area of cognitive science and he is Coordinator of the Graduate Center’s Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science.

Metaphysics Naturalized

“Naturalised metaphysics exists to say how the world is in the light of all the sciences”. In this exclusive interview, James Ladyman discusses how metaphysics can contribute to objective knowledge, one that is based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and how a fundamentally relational view of reality may help in thinking about consciousness.

Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

In this exclusive interview, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë discusses his latest book, ‘Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature’, which raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, he offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

Quantum Theory, the Implicate Order and Consciousness

Basil Hiley is one of the most outstanding living quantum physicists. Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics, he was David Bohm’s longtime collaborator and co-author of his final book, ‘The Undivided Universe’. In Bohm and Hiley’s work on implicate and explicate order, mind and matter are considered to be different aspects of the same process. In 2012 he was awarded the Majorana Medal for “best person in physics”. In this exclusive interview he discusses his ideas and work.