Thinking the Self

A forum for interdisciplinary approaches to cognition and mind, Thinking the Self explores the nature of human experience from perspectives ranging from art and literature, cognitive and neuro-science, clinical medicine, philosophy, and psychology. The group focuses on the making and unmaking of the self. Topics might include: the ambivalent connections between brain trauma, psychic trauma, and identity; memory and narrative; creative thought; distributive personhood; the performing self; the self "under siege" -- in dementia, in intense pain, and at the end of life; the case study method. The group examines questions such as: What does it mean to have no memory but to have a personality? What is "emotional richness" and what does it mean to lose it? What connects and distinguishes human experience from the life of non-human or robotic beings? What is at stake in selfhood when the brain is considered to be a plastic organ, capable of radical and ongoing reorganization?

Thinking the Self