The Helix Center is pleased to announce receipt of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation in support of a series of fourteen roundtables addressing big questions in the physical, natural, and biological sciences and the humanities. The topics are: Knowledge and Limitations; The Span of Infinity; Complexity and EmergenceThe Search for Immortality;  The Sublime Experience; The Meditative State; The Realm of Mystery; The Changing Nature of Free Will; Genes, Computers, and Medicine; Epigenetics at Work; Speak, Memory; Apprehending Consciousness; Understanding Genius; and The Mind of a Child.read more »

Music to Whose Ears II: Embodied Cognition

Saturday, January 24, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

In our previous roundtable, Music to Whose Ears? Music, Emotion, and Mind (April 13, 2013), our participants explored a multitude of ideas connecting music and emotion. In this follow-up roundtable, artists and scientists will explore together the body’s role in musical experience, its perception and cognition.… read more »

The Sublime Experience

Saturday, February 7, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Prior to the eighteenth century, and before Edmund Burke’s foundational treatise, the sublime was understood as beauty and greatness beyond measure. Subsequently, awe, the emotion classically associated with the sublime, was given new psychological depth and even physiological dimensions, bringing fear and the grotesque into aesthetic considerations of the sublime.… read more »

Particle Fever / The Quest

Saturday, February 21, 2015
Film Screening: 10:30 am – 12:30 pm
Q&A: 12:30 pm – 1:15 pm
(Intermission)
Roundtable: 2:30 pm – 4:30 pm

Past Event

Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s award-winning 2013 documentary (for which Helix Center Executive Committee member Carla Solomon was a producer), tells the remarkable story of the monumental search for the Higgs boson, the elementary force particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.… read more »

Apprehending Consciousness

Saturday, March 7, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Is science nearing an answer to the question of how and why consciousness and self-consciousness come about? In attempting to resolve the mystery of sentience, what roles do physics, psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience play? How do various philosophical and religious traditions contribute to our inquiries into this obvious and everyday universal experience?… read more »

Curiosity

Saturday, March 14, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question “Why?” has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different contexts throughout the chapters of human history.read more »

Psychological Types Then and Now: The Relevance and Application of Jung’s Theory

Saturday, April 11, 2015
9:30 am to 5 pm
Einstein Auditorium, Barney Building
34 Stuyvesant Street
New York, NY

Past Event

PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES: THEN AND NOW
The Relevance and Application of Jung’s Theory
Presented by The Jungian Psychoanalytic Association with The International Association of Analytical Psychology, The Philemon Foundation, NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions

Early registration before March 15, 2015 – $125. … read more »

The Mind of a Child

Saturday, April 18, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

How does a one-year-old understand the world? A three-year-old? A five-year-old? How does the mental functioning of very young children differ from that of older children and of adults? Recognizing the ways in which children conceptualize the world, remember their experiences, and modulate emotions is crucial in providing both normally developing children and children with developmental disorders, like autism, with optimum care throughout their formative years.… read more »

The Changing Nature of Free Will

Saturday, April 25, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Central to Eastern and Western philosophical and theological traditions, the notion of free will, once confined to discussions of human agency, can find application in understanding a broader set of phenomena. How are advances in genetics and neuroscience influencing our concept of voluntary, individual choice, and what are the implications for jurisprudence?… read more »

Epigenetics at Work

Saturday, September 12, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck might today say, echoing the words of Mark Twain, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, once derided as “soft inheritance,” has been revived through the field of epigenetics: the study of alterations in gene expression or phenotype caused by mechanisms other than primary alterations in nucleotide sequence, and through transgenerational epigenetics, the study of the inheritability of such effects.… read more »

Understanding Genius

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Past Event

Schopenhauer defined genius in relation to the more conventional quality of talent. “Talent hits a target others miss. Genius hits a target no one sees.” Is originality indeed the sine qua non of genius? Is there, following Kant, a radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the brilliant scientific mind?… read more »

The Realm of Mystery

Saturday, October 24, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the  ones we don’t know we don’t know.”… read more »

Speak, Memory

Saturday, November 7, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Over the last thirty years, significant progress has been made in our understanding of the various types of memory, the neural processes of consolidation and reconsolidation, and the biochemistry of memory, as well as the malleability and limits of autobiographical memory.… read more »

Translation Matters

Saturday, November 21, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Why is translation, which formerly referred to a set of restricted technical procedures taking place between two languages, now widely understood to be the basis of all human culture? What is it about this dynamic principle of displacement, exchange, and creative renewal that also links it to the exercise of political power and the possession of linguistic/literary capital?… read more »

A Colloquium of

The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation

and

L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud

December 5th and 6th, 2015

at the Helix Center


Participants:

Marilia Aisenstein

Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris

(Paris Psychoanalytic Society)

Ian Buckingham

Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute

Vincent Crapanzano

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature,

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Philippe Douste-Blazy

United Nations Under-Secretary-General

Paul Fry

Professor Emeritus of English and Literature, Yale University

Lynn Gamwell

Writer, Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, New York

Claude Landman

Psychoanalyst; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)

(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)

Patrick Landman

Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University)

Emile H.read more »