NeuroImpact – Today's Neurosciences and Their Effects (NINE)

The NINE project looks at areas of research that adapt (data-intense) neuroscientific knowledge and neurotechnologies to their own ends without following an empirical and descriptive – rather than an hermeneutic and interpretative – agenda themselves. From a comparative perspective, the project examines the ways the neurosciences and their applications are appropriated in interdisciplinary work in neuroaesthetics, neuropoetics, and neuroethics i.e. neuroscience of morality. Besides the project takes into account the effects of the neurosciences on society and culture from a general reflective science, technology and innovation point of view.

Project management: Dirk Hommrich (Heidelberg)

Group members: Elisabeth Gamer (Zürich), Christian Grüny (Frankfurt), Andreas Hetzel (Hildesheim), Guido Isekenmeier (Karlsruhe), Jens Kertscher (Heidelberg), Hanne Loreck (Hamburg), Louise Röska-Hardy (Essen), Fabian Rohden (Winnipeg, CAN), Klaus Wiegerling (Kaiserslautern)

Recordings (in German) are available here.

German version

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Mind the Gap? – Aesthetics between Neuroscience and the Humanities

International Conference

June 9 – 10, 2022, University of Stuttgart, KII, Room 17.23, Keplerstraße 17, 70174 Stuttgart

In the past two decades researchers in cognitive and affective neuroscience have become increasingly interested in investigating the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience and its valuation with brain-imaging techniques. Neuroaesthetics has set out to reveal correlations between brain mechanisms and processes and aesthetic phenomena on the personal level of the experiencing subject in a search for the neuronal signature of aesthetic experience.

The fundamental idea of correlating knowledge about the bottom-up processes studied by neuroscience and the top-down conceptualizations of the humanities remains the key problem of neuroaesthetics. For even if robust correlations between material processes in the brain and aesthetic experiences at the personal level can be empirically established, the gap between the neurobiological processing level and the level of conscious aesthetic experience remains. So how are we to bridge the gap between the physical brain and the aesthetic mind?

Conference webpage