Anna Dumitriu is an artist whose work blurs the boundaries between art and science with a strong interest in ethical issues raised by emerging technologies and their impact on society. The “Emergence of Consciousness” project was a collaboration with scientists at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at The University of Sussex.
For a physicist, all the world is information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. In this engaging and mind-stretching interview, Vlatko Vedral considers some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information.
Creationism and Scientism appear to disagree on almost everything but, as B Alan Wallace examines, they share much more in common than either group would like to admit.
Cognitive scientists hypothesize that our ability to imagine is the result of something called a “mental workplace,” a neural network that coordinates activity across multiple regions of the brain.
Discussing his latest research, neuroscientist Alex Schlegel explores this in its relation to consciousness and the future of ‘fathoming the mind’.
Murray Hunter explores imagination as a multidimensional concept which encompasses a number of different modes that may overlap, work in tandem, be functional, or even dysfunctional.
Metaphorical thinking — our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other — shapes our view of the world and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. Brain Pickings founder and author, Maria Popova, discusses how children have an instinctive metaphor-making ability.
What do we imagine we are talking about when we speak of the imagination? Or, to put it another way, can we imagine the imagination? Lindsay Clarke explores imagination as an energetic process of negotiation between the inner world and outer world.
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives. Eco-poet, Helen Moore, provides a glimpse of a change of thinking that points to us visioning a new ecological age… to be continued in a future issue.
Originally published in ‘Brain Pickings’, the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, this forms the second part of her article on W.I.B Beveridge’s ‘The Art of Scientific Investigation’ in which she examines his ideas on the role of intuition and the imagination.