Podcast: The Helix Center

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

Curiosity

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 »

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

Curiosity

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 »

  Watch

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

Music to Whose Ears II: Embodied Cognition

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 »

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

Music to Whose Ears II: Embodied Cognition

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 »

  Watch

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

The Sublime Experience

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 »

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

The Sublime Experience

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 »

  Watch

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

Apprehending Consciousness

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 »

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

Apprehending Consciousness

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 »

  Watch

Saturday, December 6, 2014
2:30-4:00 pm

French Surrealism: A Revolution of the Mind

French Surrealism is probably best known for its paintings–images of floppy watches or men in bowler hats and topcoats falling from the sky. But just as central to the movement was the poetry produced from the beginning by André Breton, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret, Louis Aragon, René Char, and a host of others.… read more »

Saturday, December 6, 2014
2:30-4:00 pm

French Surrealism: A Revolution of the Mind

French Surrealism is probably best known for its paintings–images of floppy watches or men in bowler hats and topcoats falling from the sky. But just as central to the movement was the poetry produced from the beginning by André Breton, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret, Louis Aragon, René Char, and a host of others.… read more »

  Watch

Saturday, October 11, 2014
2:30-4:30pm

Cancer: Body & Mind

Throughout history, no other disease entity has exceeded cancer in its evocation of fear, taboo, misconceptions, and metaphors.

In her 1978 book, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag threw down the gauntlet in her denunciation of metaphor applied to illness, as leading to a false connection between psychological traits and disease, scorning the contemporaneous, popular notion of a “cancer personality,” that “[p]assion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.”… read more »

Saturday, October 11, 2014
2:30-4:30pm

Cancer: Body & Mind

Throughout history, no other disease entity has exceeded cancer in its evocation of fear, taboo, misconceptions, and metaphors.

In her 1978 book, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag threw down the gauntlet in her denunciation of metaphor applied to illness, as leading to a false connection between psychological traits and disease, scorning the contemporaneous, popular notion of a “cancer personality,” that “[p]assion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.”… read more »

  Watch

Saturday, December 13, 2014
2:30-4:30 pm

The Search for Immortality

In the Phaedo, Plato asserts that the philosophical life is a preparation for death. Human aspiration, expressed in our science and in our spirituality, nevertheless seeks to transcend the philosophical and biological confines of mortality. How do differences in our awareness of mortality, from developmental death anxieties to the philosopher’s embrace, influence the diverse lives we lead? Can… read more »

Saturday, December 13, 2014
2:30-4:30 pm

The Search for Immortality

In the Phaedo, Plato asserts that the philosophical life is a preparation for death. Human aspiration, expressed in our science and in our spirituality, nevertheless seeks to transcend the philosophical and biological confines of mortality. How do differences in our awareness of mortality, from developmental death anxieties to the philosopher’s embrace, influence the diverse lives we lead? Can… read more »

  Watch

Saturday, November 15, 2014
2:30-4:30 pm

Complexity and Emergence

Psychobiologist Roger Sperry proposed that, “mind and consciousness are dynamic emergent properties of the living brain in action.” This seemingly simple observation raises a host of questions. How do novel entities arise from self-organizing complex systems? If a system itself shows adaptive, self-organizing properties not attributable to its aggregate micro-potentialities—such that at each new level of complexity, new properties arise—can science ever be confidently predictive?… read more »

Saturday, November 15, 2014
2:30-4:30 pm

Complexity and Emergence

Psychobiologist Roger Sperry proposed that, “mind and consciousness are dynamic emergent properties of the living brain in action.” This seemingly simple observation raises a host of questions. How do novel entities arise from self-organizing complex systems? If a system itself shows adaptive, self-organizing properties not attributable to its aggregate micro-potentialities—such that at each new level of complexity, new properties arise—can science ever be confidently predictive?… read more »

  Watch

Saturday, October 25, 2014
2:30-4:30 pm

The Span of Infinity

Perhaps no thing conceived in the mind has enjoyed a greater confluence of cosmological, mathematical, philosophical, psychological, and theological inquiry than the notion of the infinite. The epistemological tension between the concrete and the ideal, between the phenomenological and the ontological, is nowhere clearer in outline yet more obscure in content.… read more »

Saturday, October 25, 2014
2:30-4:30 pm

The Span of Infinity

Perhaps no thing conceived in the mind has enjoyed a greater confluence of cosmological, mathematical, philosophical, psychological, and theological inquiry than the notion of the infinite. The epistemological tension between the concrete and the ideal, between the phenomenological and the ontological, is nowhere clearer in outline yet more obscure in content.… read more »

  Watch

Saturday, September 20, 2014
2:30-4:30pm

Knowledge and Limitations

What do we know about the universe and how do we know it? As John Locke would ask, what are the extent and limitations of human knowledge? Is our understanding of the laws of nature bound by limits on what the mind can grasp, or can formulate linguistically, or are there inherent limitations of physical and mathematical knowledge?… read more »

Saturday, September 20, 2014
2:30-4:30pm

Knowledge and Limitations

What do we know about the universe and how do we know it? As John Locke would ask, what are the extent and limitations of human knowledge? Is our understanding of the laws of nature bound by limits on what the mind can grasp, or can formulate linguistically, or are there inherent limitations of physical and mathematical knowledge?… read more »

  Watch