Science and the Big Questions: Roundtable Series on the Physical and Spiritual World, the Brain-Mind Connection, and Human Development and Genetics Through 2015 Past Event 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 Emergence; The 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video [Part 1] » Watch the video [Part 2] » 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video [Part 1] » Watch the video [Part 2] » 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video » 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 »
Trauma and its Aftereffects, Part I: War and Genocide Saturday, May 2, 2015 2:30-4:30 pm Past Event Watch the video » What does it mean to be a survivor of the traumatic violence of war and genocide, as victim or perpetrator—or descendant of either? What are the implications for the individual and collective conscience of doing violence to others sanctioned by the state or consecrated—or condemned—by one’s culture or that of other cultures?… read more »
Human and Nonhuman Minds: Continuities and Discontinuities Saturday, May 16, 2015 2:30-4:30 pm Past Event Watch the video » When Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, the scientific community was still pondering the question: Do other animals think? The subsequent prodigious scientific study of animal cognition and behavior has answered this question with an emphatic “yes”!… read more »
Epigenetics at Work Saturday, September 12, 2015 2:30-4:30 pm Past Event Watch the video » 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video » 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 Watch the video » 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 Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today December 5 & 6, 2015 Past Event Watch the video [Part 1] » Watch the video [Part 2] » Watch the video [Part 3] » Watch the video [Part 4] » 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 »