The Helix Center

The Many Minds of Memory

The Helix Center — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Memory is not a dusty cellar, open treasure chest, or sealed pandora’s box. It is a dynamic process, a stream of renditions and reflections. It conveys to us not what strictly happened, but embeds us in a retained internal moment, in an external encounter, or an imprint from another’s story. … read more »

How Deep Do We Go? Behavior, Mind, and The 4-Billion-Year History of Life

The Helix Center — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The starting point of this roundtable discussion is Joseph LeDoux’s book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. LeDoux’s research on how the brain detects and responds to danger helped jumpstart and define the modern science of emotion.… read more »

The Library as Reality and Metaphor

The Helix Center — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism ….… read more »

Male-Male Competition: Globalization, War, and Violence

The Helix Center — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Little attention is paid to the fact that in his book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin devoted twelve chapters to male-male competition (describing it as “the law of battle”), detailing intra-species male morphological and behavioral differences from molluscs through mammals, arriving finally and specifically at human mammals.… read more »

Living in the Anthropocene

The Helix Center — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What underlying conceptual questions prompted this new characterization of our planet’s present era? What does this imply for the distinctions we have become accustomed to: between human subjects (however varied) and the non-human realm, between nature and artifice, between agency and objectivity?… read more »

Ignorance and Curiosity

The Helix Center — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Physics Nobel laureate David Gross claims that the most important product of science is ignorance. Science is the quest not just for knowledge, but for better questions, and we’re generally more engaged by questions than by answers. Thus, ignorance drives science and curiosity is its engine.… read more »

Life and Movement

The Helix Center — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How does the study of evolution, coordination dynamics, sports, social interactions, and aesthetics help us understand movement and life? In this roundtable, we will explore: movement and objects as distinctively different “things” to study; coordination dynamics and intrinsic dynamics and tendencies; kinesthesia; the evolution of social coordination; how, in the living company of others, we are both challenged and supported; and the value of nurturing and pursuing a moving life with all its risks and challenges.… read more »

Ethics & AI

The Helix Center — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Justice is blind, the saying goes, which means that a person’s particulars – their social status, race, gender, etc. – should have no bearing on fair judgement in any legal dispute. By this standard, we are all considered equal before the law.… read more »

Women and Science

The Helix Center — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

An ancient Egyptian hieroglyph at Saqqara declared Merit-Ptah as “the Chief Physician.” 4700 years after her achievement, we ask: How are women in science faring?

It is a well-documented phenomenon that for all STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, the gender gap widens in the progression from undergraduate study, through graduate and post-doctoral work, up through academic appointment.… read more »

Understanding Genius II: Women

The Helix Center — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Name five female geniuses off the top of your head. If you find yourself stumbling after Madame Curie, you are hardly alone. Why should this be when there is no shortage of brilliant, creative women, who are as numerous in history as they are today?… read more »

The Span of Infinity

The Helix Center — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

The Changing Nature of Free Will

The Helix Center — Sat, 25 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

The Displaced and The Other

The Helix Center — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Generationally and historically, our species has moved through great migrations, across seas, continents, and borders. Some have been journeys infused with hope for the better, or impelled by longing for the unknown, the foreign, the other. Others have been forced.

Today, with more than 65 million refugees and displaced persons around the globe, we are bearing witness to flights of desperation, escaping threats of extinction or submission, environmental disaster, religious and tribal conflict, slavery, and war.… read more »

From Children’s Sights to Our Insights: Ethiopian Children’s Drawings, Stories and Inner Lives

The Helix Center — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For a study by Nathan Szajnberg, Ethiopian/Israeli six-year old children drew pictures of their lives, of their fantasies and fears, hopes and wishes. Their compelling drawings and stories will be the foundation upon which our roundtable participants will bring to bear art historical, linguistic, and psychoanalytic perspectives to explore questions of representation, the developmental issues related to the transition from visual to narrative representation, the universal and the culture-specific dimensions of human experience, and what we can learn about the inner lives of these children and of all of us.… read more »

The Realm of Mystery

The Helix Center — Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Happiness

The Helix Center — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Call no man happy until he is dead.

– Solon of Athens (c. 640 – c. 560 BCE)

“Happiness” may be understood in prosaic and philosophic senses: as referring to a moment of experience or the entirety of a life; as referring to a psychological state of mind, relating to pleasurable emotions, as well as referring to a life regarded as going well, flourishing, for the individual leading it, and as such, a prudential value judgement of ultimate goods.… read more »

Music to Whose Ears II: Embodied Cognition

The Helix Center — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Love, the Interrogative

The Helix Center — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In one of his novels, Milan Kundera suggested that “love is a continual interrogation.” What is this thing called love? Is it, as Shakespeare might have it, “the star to every wandering bark”? Or, in Bronzino’s words, “always a fountain and a vase of tears”?… read more »

Embodied AI

The Helix Center — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The increasing appreciation of the body’s role in cognition—that the brain-mind is embedded in a physical, sensory-motor system interacting with the real world—is shedding the dualistic straitjacket that has characterized “classical” artificial intelligence research. So, as proposed by Grady Booch, let’s imagine unleashing a technology platform using natural language processing and machine learning, such as IBM’s Watson, in the physical world.… read more »

Design in Nature

The Helix Center — Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Though human ingenuity may make various inventions…it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous…

– Leonardo da Vinci, The Da Vinci Notebooks, Vol.

Biology of Mind

The Helix Center — Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

What is mind? Is it a property attributable to biological functionality alone, and, in particular, arising from the morphology of the mammalian brain and/or the influence of that animal’s body? How far down the evolutionary scale can we apply terms like cognition, consciousness, and intelligence?… read more »

Translation Matters

The Helix Center — Sat, 21 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Lying

The Helix Center — Sat, 21 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

This familiar courtroom oath unpacks some of the subtleties of truth-telling. Making true statements is not all there is to it. What one says may be true, but what is omitted in the telling may present a false picture.… read more »

Boredom

The Helix Center — Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Schopenhauer described boredom as “a tame longing without any particular object,” Dostoevsky as “ a bestial and indefinable affliction,” and poet Joseph Brodsky as “time’s invasion of your world system.”

Unsurprisingly, not many can describe boredom even though most have felt it, and it is one of the central preoccupations of the age.… read more »

Particle Fever / The Quest

The Helix Center — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Particle Fever / The Quest: Part 2 Q&A

The Helix Center — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2: Particle Fever Q&A with Mark Levinson

Fail Again, Fail Better

The Helix Center — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 02:22:22 +0000

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. – Samuel Beckett

Why do NY Mets fans stay true to their team, season after losing season? The answer may have to do with the kind of delirious joy they experience when that special year comes around and they finally win the World Series.… read more »

See Memory

The Helix Center — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:19:20 +0000

An Afternoon of Art, Neuroscience & Storytelling

Join us for the New York premiere of the newly expanded 2025 edition of See Memory—the Bronze Telly Award–winning, hand-painted short documentary that premiered on PBS this spring.

Created by filmmaker and visual artist Viviane Silvera, See Memory brings the invisible workings of memory, trauma, and healing to life through over 40,000 individually painted frames.… read more »

Resurgence of Freud

The Helix Center — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 02:19:03 +0000

For most of the 20^th century Freud’s thoughts were foundational in understanding mental functioning while also offering the consensus approach to treating mental conditions, from neurosis to other more severe psychopathologies. With the advent of psychotropic medications and advances delving more deeply into the brain’s biology, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and his followers lost much of their influence within the realm of psychotherapeutics.… read more »

Neurodiversity

The Helix Center — Sat, 10 May 2025 02:23:56 +0000

What counts as a deficit? I can’t do sums in my head. I’m terrible at recognizing people’s faces. I can’t carry a tune and meanwhile truffles make me gag. I am so very overweight. Please don’t stand so close to me!… read more »

Mindfulness Meditation: Benefits and Dilemmas

The Helix Center — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 01:25:28 +0000

Mindfulness meditation is one of the most popular contemplative techniques in the world. Recently, however, a number of influential criticisms of the practice have emerged, many of which frame the technique as part of a larger neoliberal endeavor meant to privatize emotional well-being.… read more »

Music and Mind

The Helix Center — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 22:52:19 +0000

Pan played the Flute, Orpheus the lyre, Jimi Hendrix the guitar, Mickey Hart the drums. Melody, whether harmony or dissonance, could soothe the brow, agitate the body, or link with the mystical. In the 6^th century BCE Pythagoras, listening to the “music of the spheres”, uncovered the celestial mechanics and mathematics inherent to music. … read more »

Why War?

The Helix Center — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 18:38:19 +0000

This question is nearly always posed rhetorically, as in: there is no “good” reason for war, is there? But responses to Why War? that grasp it literally are surely also called for. At the very least, merely insisting on war’s moral vacuity has sadly failed to drive it to extinction.… read more »

Otherness

The Helix Center — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 02:09:47 +0000

The notion of Otherness—for all its familiarity and slipperiness—has become so relevant in our era of rapid political polarization that a fresh and interdisciplinary examination of its roots seems in order. This roundtable will bring together philosophers, psychoanalysts, social theorists and historians to trace its origins and significance at multiple levels. … read more »

The Poetry of Aging

The Helix Center — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 21:53:44 +0000

“So here it is at last, the distinguished thing”

So Henry James described his intimation of death. His brother, William, was grittier, but no less poetic in calling it the “worm at the core” that frightens and fascinates us.

Thoughts of aging and death have inspired some of our most beautiful poetry: “Upon those boughs which shake against the cold/Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” wrote William Shakespeare.… read more »

Come Out Wherever You Are: In Search of Consciousness

The Helix Center — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 13:13:17 +0000

Panpsychism is the lightly subscribed philosophical position that consciousness is a property of all matter, large and small, simple and complex, alive and inert. According to panpsychism mind is everywhere.

Eliminativism is the view that consciousness, at least what most of us consider our mind’s eye access to reality (phenomenal consciousness), exists quite literally nowhere, not even in our brains.… read more »

Striking a Chord: Hearing and Space

The Helix Center — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 19:37:04 +0000

Vibration sense is one component of touch. Refinements of this sense, and in some animals the emission of vibration – typically from the vocal cords – has evolved to echolocation, to clicks, grunts, roars and to speech.

The vibration of one special membrane, the ear drum, creates that wonderful interface that enables us to appreciate and locate sounds in 3-dimensional space and to discern what the source of that sound is.… read more »

A ≠ B → Taste & Discernment

The Helix Center — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 19:36:44 +0000

Where life begins to distinguish the edible, the nutritious, the appealing, from the insipid, the poisonous, and the disgusting; this is where taste and discernment come into being. From a bag of Cheetos to Michelin 3-star fare we cover a lot of ground, yet financial means alone fails to account fully for the popularity of both ends of this culinary spectrum.… read more »

Touch as the Ur-Sense: From Presence to Poesy

The Helix Center — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 19:37:17 +0000

“Now the touch only is common to all animals.” Agrippa

The very notion of sentience, with its root in feeling, cannot be understood without some reference to sensation. And sensation itself has at its bare core a “something” we feel. The response to that feeling is the mark of life: “quickening” upon touch is how we distinguish the animate from the inanimate. … read more »

Discovering the What and the Wherefore: Scents and Sensibility

The Helix Center — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:37:26 +0000

As the first sense to engage the world “remotely”, beyond the boundary of an organism’s body, olfaction delivers news from “over there”. But whereas it adumbrates a space beyond, what kind of space, what sort of world does it proffer? Smell engages the world as a series of pathways laid out on gradients.… read more »

Synthetic Consciousness: Seeing and Believing

The Helix Center — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:36:04 +0000

“The Aleph was probably two to three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it . . .” – JL Borges

Our eyes move. They rove and they direct attention. Indeed, vision and our ability to focus attention more generally are intimately intertwined.… read more »

The Effects of Media

The Helix Center — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 04:32:48 +0000

What are the effects of media today? What exactly is “social” about social media? How do media shape reality? Are developments in AI changing media as we understand communications technologies? Sixty years ago, the Canadian Professor of English and Media, Marshall McLuhan published the unexpectedly popular volume Understanding Media (1964), which would go on to establish a vocabulary addressing these questions — a vocabulary and set of ideas that scholars continue to grapple with to this day.… read more »

Covid and Literature

The Helix Center — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 14:49:13 +0000

Fractured: Covid 19 – Memento Mori vs. Memento Vivere; “COVID-19 Betrays America’s Cult of Curdled Optimism”; This Exquisite Loneliness; The Lonely Stories; 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed; The Quarantine Tapes; these titles were all attempts by our panelists to endure and make sense of the Pandemic. … read more »

Permanence and Impermanence of Mathematical Concepts

The Helix Center — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 14:16:40 +0000

What do you think of when you think of the number five? Do you think of symbol like 5, a pattern like ⁙, or the fifth item on a list? Today, the concept of number is fixed and eternal, unlinked to anything in the universe. … read more »

Emotion

The Helix Center — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 14:14:08 +0000

What is human life without emotion? Could the “dawn of humankind” even be imagined without emotion exerting its effects right there from the start? And across the millennia emotion has forever been at the heart of most matters. Human history has been shaped by emotion and reshaped by attitudes toward emotion; a powerful human force philosophers and theologians confront and reckon with again and again throughout history and in every culture.… read more »

Shakespeare Forever

The Helix Center — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 19:50:00 +0000

The date of this Round Table is not a coincidence: William Shakespeare was born on or about April 23, 1564, and he died on April 23, 1616. This is a particularly auspicious year for celebrating Shakespeare: 2023 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected printing of Shakespeare’s plays and one of the most important books in all of English literature. … read more »

Life Beyond Earth: When and How Will it be Found?

The Helix Center — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 19:45:00 +0000

Astrobiology is the study of life on the universe. It uses an understanding of the nature and history of life on this planet to frame expectations for biology beyond Earth. Starting in 1995, astronomers have discovered exoplanets: planets orbiting other stars. Over 5300 have been confirmed, and it’s likely there are more planets than stars in the universe.… read more »

The Technē of Memory

The Helix Center — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 06:13:51 +0000

What is memory? How does it determine our experience and identity? To what extent does memory influence our understanding of the future? Or of time itself? How do individual memories differ from collective ones? What happens to our sense of belonging and selfhood when our memories are externalized in digital devices?… read more »

The Body and Psychosis

The Helix Center — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 23:04:49 +0000

A new movement within Cognitive Psychology, known as 4E Cognition, views thought and behavior as embodied, embedded, enactive & extended. Each of these four strands has a rich (and ongoing) philosophical history. Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Bahktin, Vygotsky and others have drawn attention to the role of action and interaction in (in)forming our experience. … read more »

Living in Difficult Times

The Helix Center — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 20:28:03 +0000

Daily headlines have been startling and scary: “U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans,” reported The New York Times. “The Pandemic has Made Homelessness More Visible in Many American Cities,” noted The Economist, while The Guardian announced “The Latest UN Report is Clear: Climate Change is Here, It’s a Crisis, and It’s Caused by Fossil Fuels.”… read more »

Coding and the new Human Phenotype: Are Natural Language Generators for Real?

The Helix Center — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 03:38:22 +0000

The program GPT-3 can create language that gives the impression that it is thinking. What will our interaction with robots of greater and greater verbal agility mean in the near future? What sort of Other will these robots become, evolve to?… read more »

Coding and the New Human Phenotype: Is the Universe a Metaverse?

The Helix Center — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 03:42:22 +0000

Our panel will discuss the suggestion that we have been living in a sort of metaverse all along. This claim starts with the notion that the Universe evolves as one giant algorithmic computation, and that information is the basic substance. A variation on this line of thought asks the question: could we be living in a simulation à la the Matrix.… read more »

Coding and the New Phenotype: In Search for Lost Time

The Helix Center — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 03:17:14 +0000

How we discover codes, bearers of meaning, and how we reconstruct that meaning in archeology & paleoanthropology, in psychoanalysis, and in neuroscience research on memory.… read more »

Coding and the Human Phenotype: Manipulated Perception?: Fakery, Authenticity, and the Birth of NFTs

The Helix Center — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 03:27:36 +0000

What counts as true and how we might know the truth in the age of coding. A discussion about misinformation, the decentralization of knowledge, and the struggle to establish what is real. Encoded algorithms help to provide security but also risk an encroachment on privacy.… read more »

Coding and the New Human Phenotype: Coding, Fiction, Metafiction – the Parcellation of What Isn’t There

The Helix Center — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 03:32:01 +0000

The humanities deal with the manipulation of ideas. Ideas can be encoded, metabolized, and contribute to cultural evolution. What roles do cultural memes – be they fact, factoid, or fiction – play in what goes on. Does fiction provide any insight into this complex dynamic?… read more »

Metaphysics

The Helix Center — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:05:40 +0000

Physics being the study of the fundamental properties of Nature, as the name implies, metaphysics investigates the nature of Nature, the what-must-therefore-be-the-case of those discoverable physical properties. For centuries, either explicitly or implicitly, metaphysics created the background and organizing principles for scientific research.… read more »

Psychedelics

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 22:35:35 +0000

Neuroplasticity: it’s what our brains do. We alter our minds when we engage with the world and with the people in it. But, of course, when we think of “mind altering drugs” we refer to something else. That there might be a shortcut, a wormhole, a portal to some new and improved state of mind has long held our fascination.… read more »

People & Things in Motion: Economics and the Future

The Helix Center — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 15:32:05 +0000

The Dismal Science seems to analyze and involve most aspects of our lives. While traditional macroeconomics continues to concern itself with natural rates of inflation and unemployment, with tariffs and taxes, with supply and demand, at both the meso- and micro-levels, economics has productively linked with sociology, social history, anthropology, and psychology.… read more »

Designer Genes

The Helix Center — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:08:21 +0000

Supernatural and other circumventions of the natural process of conception have been an abundant wellspring for magical, mythological, and religious narratives. It was held that the widowed queen of an Egyptian pharaoh could pull his posthumous sperm into her womb to create a child.… read more »

Knowledge and Limitations

The Helix Center — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Complexity and Emergence II: Visions of Cosmic Order, from Particles to People

The Helix Center — Sat, 20 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

What principles of order underlie the ascent of complexity, from the simplest particles of physics heralding the birth of the universe, through biological forms, to the achievements of civilization? Has a recurrent theme of combination and integration led to multiple fundamental levels from quarks to culture?… read more »

Panacea or Poison: Placebos and Nocebos in Modern Medicine

The Helix Center — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Placebos “work” for quite a few medical problems. But how? And what is the work they do?

What one thinks a medicine is capable of, one’s idea of that medicine, may affect us in the way “proper” medicines do. This implies that, in observing the work of a placebo we are watching an idea affect biology, the mind moving the body.… read more »

Populism

The Helix Center — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

– James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10

Populism refers to the political mobilization of “the people” against a perceived elite caste of professional politicians. And whereas a corps of elected representatives was Madison’s and Hamilton’s buffer against the tyranny of factions, from time to time the political class may come to be viewed as insufficiently attentive to the needs of their constituents and then become the target and nidus that creates a populist movement.… read more »

Genes, Computers, and Medicine

The Helix Center — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Developments in computational neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics have opened up new ways of looking at disease. In a relatively short time span, these advances may lead to significant innovations in the understanding of various diseases, as well as in therapeutics designed to treat them.… read more »

Where Does It End?

The Helix Center — Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We follow up our inquiry into beginnings by posing complementary questions about endings: why are we curious about endings, whether that of the cosmos or our own? What can we discover from each other’s curiosity about endings? What are the organizational properties necessary to call something an ending?… read more »

Math models Mind

The Helix Center — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If a biologist were asked for a single word that would appropriately point to the essence and substance of biology, the word might be Life. It stands for the essential unity of that subject despite the enormous range of different interests of biologists—from proteins to the behavior of elephants to medical applications.… read more »

American Poetry Today

The Helix Center — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The American poet Ezra Pound proclaimed that “Poetry is news that stays news!” On a different note, his contemporary William Carlos Williams said that “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”… read more »

Shame

The Helix Center — Sat, 18 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of this discussion is to examine shame as a social mechanism. When, why, and how do we shame each other? Who profits from shame? Who maintains power or gains power through shame? When is shame valid, and when is it simply mean and cruel?… read more »

Second Annual Heavy MeNtal Variety Show

The Helix Center — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A night of mind, brain, and magic. The Amygdaloids will play several suites of our original songs on mind/brain topics: the mind-body problem, memory, emotion, unconscious processes, and mental disorders. Each suite will be preceded by a short (3 min) lecture on the scientific or philosophical foundations of the topic by Neuroscientist and Amygdaloid, Joseph LeDoux.… read more »

The Mind of a Child

The Helix Center — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Animal Language

The Helix Center — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The animal kingdom has evolved multiple adaptive strategies for the efficient transmission of information, one way of defining language. In this roundtable, led by experts in fields ranging from the communication in dolphins, monkeys, and whales to speech recognition technology, we will explore the phonics and sonics of animal communication.… read more »

Women and the Work World

The Helix Center — Sat, 17 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The last 50 years has seen increasing parity of opportunity for, and achievement by, women in the work world as reflected in their increasing numbers in leadership roles in medicine and other sciences, academe, business, and politics. Yet, obstacles to women’s employment and career advancement remain.… read more »

Emergence of Empathy: Encountering The Other Through Fiction

The Helix Center — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Like sympathy, empathy derives from the Greek root pathos meaning “to endure or to undergo.” It was coined in 1909 by a psychologist at Cornell University, Edward Bradford Titchner, who suggested the term as a translation of the German Einfühlung.

Human and Nonhuman Minds: Continuities and Discontinuities

The Helix Center — Sat, 16 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Elizabeth Bishop: A Conversation about Her Poetry

The Helix Center — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the great masters of American poetry of the 20th Century. Her remarkable gifts have been described in a variety of ways, but one gift repeatedly recognized by readers is her skill at recounting the results of her capacity for observation.… read more »

Urdu Poetry: Ghalib and the Ghazal

The Helix Center — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Plaintiffs in Paper Robes: The First Ghazal of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib” Frances Pritchett and Mustafa Menai will discuss the poetry of Ghalib and the ghazal form by looking at the first verse of the first ghazal of his divan. In Pritchett’s words, “An Urdu ghazal consists of a series of miniature poems, each two lines long.… read more »

The Animal Human Continuum

The Helix Center — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Ancient Egyptians placed animal and bird heads on divinities’ bodies, in an embracing worldview wherein both gods and beasts extend and transcend the human ken. In his scientific extension of this ancient mythology, Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals explored non-human sentience.… read more »

Complexity and Emergence

The Helix Center — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

What Can Mathematics Teach Us About Mind/Brain?

The Helix Center — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Philosophy meets mathematics meets neuroscience in this roundtable investigating how cutting-edge mathematical models are elucidating the computational rules encoding brain functions and the implications for a deeper understanding of mind.

Free and open to the public.… read more »

“Fake” Knowledge: Knowing and the Illusion of Knowing

The Helix Center — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A nomenclator was a slave whose duty was to accompanying his master in canvassing the streets of Classical Rome in order to recall the names of those his master encountered. Each of us is, in a way, both that ancient politician and that slave, relying on others’ memories to supply us with knowledge, and others relying on us for the knowledge we recall for them.… read more »

Collaborations: Jazz and Poetry

The Helix Center — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

What is jazz poetry? How can words, inert objects, be used to convey this blues-based, improvisatory, aural form? What is a jazz-related piece of writing? Is it merely “about” jazz, or does it do something more? How do poems respond to jazz in all its musical and cultural overtones?… read more »

Creative Turbulence

The Helix Center — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Creative Turbulence roundtable is the culmination of the Creative Turbulence art exhibition—on view at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from the afternoon of Saturday, June 9th through Saturday, June 16th—of four artifacts fusing art and science in a collaborative creative process embodying the physics of fluid dynamics, turbulence, and complex systems, and exemplifying the experimental methodology at the root of art and science alike.… read more »

Responses: Poetry with Patrick Rosal and Jean Valentine

The Helix Center — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The “Responses” series at the Helix Center involves poets reading aloud each other’s poetry and commenting on those poems they’ve selected. For our first event in this series, we are fortunate to have two marvelous poets as participants: Patrick Rosal and Jean Valentine.… read more »

Curiosity

The Helix Center — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

The Search for Immortality

The Helix Center — Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 2, Part 2

The Helix Center — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2: Mnemosyne: Memory & Unconscious

This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought – the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical – at the heart of Warburg’s atlas.… read more »

Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 2, Part 3

The Helix Center — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Part 3: Additional questions/comments regarding both Sunday roundtables and wrap-up

Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 2

The Helix Center — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Why Do Economists Disagree?

The Helix Center — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A pre-election roundtable of a politically diverse group of noted economic theorists exploring their philosophical convergences and divergences.

Free and open to the public.… read more »

Music to Whose Ears? Music, Emotion, and Mind

The Helix Center — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A foundational work on emotion and music, Leonard Meyer’s 1956 treatise,Emotion and Meaning in Music, describes competing philosophical positions regarding musical meaning. It might rest exclusively within the context of the work itself; or refer to the extra-musical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character; or stem from an intellectual perception of the formalist qualities of the work; or find its foundations in an emotional response to musical relationships.… read more »

Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 1, Part 2

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2: An Eccentric Science

Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 1, Part 3

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Part 3: Classical & Renaissance Art

Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 1

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Epigenetics at Work

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

The Completeness of Physics

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Science can stake its claim to truth on the evidence of its empirical success accounting for reality. Does it therefore follow, necessarily, that science can lay claim to its universality? Does reality cohere in such a way that we are ultimately seeking a reductionistic account of it in toto, as some would argue is promised by physics?… read more »

Synchronicity: On the Spectrum of Mind and Matter

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“I have no doubt that the placing side by side of the points of view of a physicist and a psychologist will also prove to be a form of reflection.”

—Wolfgang Pauli

“Since physicists are the only people nowadays who would be able to deal with such a concept successfully, it is from a physicist that I hope to meet with critical understanding, although…the empirical basis seems to lie wholly in the realm of psychic phenomena.”… read more »

The Meditative State

The Helix Center — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

What is meditation? As difficult as it may be to define this state of mind, its beneficial effects on mental and physical health are incontrovertible. What are the respective roles of conscious and unconscious processes in this voluntarily invoked mental state?

Cancer: Body & Mind

The Helix Center — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

The Amygdaloids Warburg Symposium Concert

The Helix Center — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Amygdaloids are a New York band made up of scientists who shed their scientific garb at night and take to the stage with songs about love and life peppered with insights drawn from research about mind and brain and mental disorders.… read more »

Synthetic and Systems Biology: Reinventing the Code of Life

The Helix Center — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Synthetic biology, and its sister field systems biology, offers the means to reengineer DNA in ways (and at a pace) that Nature, in her evolutionary wisdom, never envisioned. Standing at the unique crossroads of biology, engineering, computer science and neuroscience, these emerging fields are working toward the development of novel drugs and energy sources, the cure of disease and prolongation of life, and even the creation of new forms of life.… read more »

Music to Whose Ears III: Music and Healing

The Helix Center — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

There are well-known therapeutic effects of melody and rhythm on people with various cognitive and motor problems such as non-fluent aphasia, autism, Alzheimer disease, and Parkinson’s disease. By helping alleviate pain and anxiety, music can be also beneficial for preterm babies and for patients before and after surgeries.… read more »

Pain

The Helix Center — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart, grief of memory.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon

What is it to feel pain? We sense it in the body, as a non-trivial, unmediated and imperative perceptual event associated with tissue damage, possessing particular spatiotemporal characteristics of a physical object (e.g.,… read more »

The Future of Psychiatry

The Helix Center — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Psychoanalysis ushered a new era of understanding psychiatric conditions which lasted half a century. The advent of psychopharmacology moved the focus back to the importance of diagnosis and selection of the appropriate medication. As we learn more about the brain, with increasingly sophisticated technology, we are looking towards a revolution in diagnosis, etiology and treatment of mental illnesses.… read more »

Transhumanist Predictions and the Human Predicament

The Helix Center — Sat, 10 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The rapid development of technology in the modern era has inspired a movement known as transhumanism. Envisioned is a near future in which human bodies and minds will be transformed and enhanced through genomics, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and any number of prosthetic devices inside and outside our bodies.… read more »

Mind Matters: Past, Present, and Future

The Helix Center — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

From Xenophanes’ 6th c. BCE theory of divine intellection imbuing, comprehending, and organizing the cosmos, through Nicholas of Cusa’s 15th c. definition of mind as “the limit and measure of all things,” through Hume and his Enlightenment kin’s aspiration to be the “Newton of the mind,” to the naturalized explanations of contemporary cognitive science, Western men and women have wrestled with the proper place of mind among the constituents—material and non-material—of the universe.… read more »

Life in the Universe

The Helix Center — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With billions of stars and galaxies in the observable universe, the possibility of life elsewhere has intrigued both scientists and philosophers alike. In this roundtable, we will explore the notion of life in the universe and what it might look like elsewhere.… read more »

The Topology of Fear

The Helix Center — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

How do emotions color and shape our actions? How do we decide to take action in the midst of fear for our own lives–go to war, fight an intruder, save a person falling on subway tracks–or to ward off catastrophes such as global climate change and the irreversible loss of species that could lead to the extinction of our own species?… read more »

Status

The Helix Center — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A recent New York Times article proclaimed “status anxiety” one of the defining preoccupations of our time (Michelle Goldberg, “Status Anxiety and the Scam Economy,” March 15, 2019). But what are we really anxious about? What, in fact, is status and why do we want it?… read more »

Altruism and Empathy

The Helix Center — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Is selflessness a necessary illusion? Are we condemned to weigh the costs (whether consciously or not) of the welfare of others against the benefits to ourselves ? We develop a “theory of mind” around age three, concurrently building our capacity to recognize emotions experienced by others.… read more »

Mathematics and Other Realities

The Helix Center — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The question of what the world in which we live consists of is as old as mankind itself. In philosophical jargon, this is the question of the ontological basis of reality. With the growing success of physics and other sciences, the idea of one fundamental ontology, that of particles and fields, became dominant as a physicalist version of ontology.… read more »

Secrecy and Transparency

The Helix Center — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The internet makes possible the unprecedented sharing of, access to, and data manipulation of, individual and social information with far reaching implications for personal privacy, healthcare, citizenship and national security, and for the definitions of personhood, institutional power and information itself. In this roundtable, we aim to explore contemporary notions of privacy, relationships between individuals and between individuals and institutions that arise through data exchange.… read more »

Speak, Memory

The Helix Center — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

Fear: Wherefore, Whence?

The Helix Center — Sat, 07 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Someone is shouting! Ho! Do you hear? Am I howling in vain? For if one is frightened, everything makes a noise!

– Sophocles, Acrisius [fragment]

…the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.

Apprehending Consciousness

The Helix Center — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

The Sublime Experience

The Helix Center — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today: Part 3

The Helix Center — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Part 3: Identity

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 »

A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today: Part 4

The Helix Center — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Part 4: Culture

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 »

A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today: Part 5

The Helix Center — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Part 5: Conclusion

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 »

A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today

The Helix Center — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

French Surrealism: A Revolution of the Mind

The Helix Center — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today: Part 2

The Helix Center — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2: Education and Civilizational Crisis

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 »

Autism and the Mind/Brain

The Helix Center — Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects more than 1% of the population. For many years, it was thought to be a rare disorder, resulting from a bad relationship of the children with their so-called refrigerator mothers. However, there is clear evidence now that autism results from abnormalities in brain development, and that the behavior observed in children is the consequence of disturbances in brain circuitry.… read more »

Mechanization of Math

The Helix Center — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Proof, in the form of step by step deduction, following the rules of logical reasoning, is the ultimate test of validity in mathematics. Some proofs, however, are so long or complex, or both, that they cannot be checked for errors by human experts.… read more »

Where Does It Begin?

The Helix Center — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Why are we curious about beginnings, whether that of the cosmos or our own? What can we discover from each other’s curiosity about beginnings? What are the organizational properties necessary to call something a beginning? Might similar processes apply to both individual consciousness and the universe at large?… read more »

Science, Art & Society 2

The Helix Center — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The multi-directional relationship between science, art, and society is in great need of repair. Due to the casting out of beauty from art and validity of facts from science by Postmodernism, art and science both suffer from a disconnect with the public.This… read more »

Understanding Genius

The Helix Center — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

STEAM & the Future of Education 1

The Helix Center — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

STEAM – or ScienceTechnologyEngineeringArtMathematics – is the hot topic educational movement sweeping our nation and the world. Growing out of the emphasis to get more students in STEM subjects to remain a scientific and technologically advanced nation, STEAM was born in 2008, and advocates for the integration of arts and design learning in STEM.… read more »

Science-Art Collaboration 2

The Helix Center — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Collaboration between the arts and sciences has a rich history dating back to the Renaissance, and recently experienced a resurgence in the 1960s with the art-engineering group Experiments in Art & Technology. Even more recently, artists have begun to actively collaborate with scientists in all disciplines to expand their artistic reach.… read more »

Science, Art & Society 1

The Helix Center — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Steam and the Future of Education 2

The Helix Center — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Trauma and its Aftereffects, Part I: War and Genocide

The Helix Center — Sat, 02 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 »

The Beauty and Unity of Mathematics

The Helix Center — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Science-Art Collaboration 1

The Helix Center — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Stress

The Helix Center — Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A testament to its ubiquity, STRESS is woven into our very words, our thoughts and our emotions. We stress words to give them emphasis. We stress wood to make it stronger rather than splinter. And we feel distress, both when overwhelmed with dread, but also sometimes in joyous anticipation. … read more »

Identity and Fanaticism

The Helix Center — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“I have specially in mind that a small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.… read more »