Upcoming in fall 2017, co-sponsored by the Twentieth Century Area Studies Group

Omri Moses – “Poetry and the Environmentally Extended Mind”

Friday, October 27th, 4pm – 7pm, room 4406

Over the last two decades, cognitive scientists working in embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded cognition have sought to understand mental processes in ways that take us “out of our heads.” In this paper Omri Moses (Concordia University, Montreal) argues that this new science of mind offers humanists a better entry point than we have so far found into productive cross-disciplinary engagement with scientists. By privileging the role that the body and physical and cultural environment play in organizing and constituting thought, it transforms our understanding of such supposedly “inward” meditative experiences as poetry reading into a more collaborative, individually tailored, and culturally situated activity.