[photo credit: The Huntington]
But Anne Harrington, Harvard University’s Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, will explore how that early certainty has encountered unexpected challenges in a free public lecture at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens on Saturday, Nov. 1, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
In “Did the Soul Die in the 1990s? The Making (and Unmaking) of So-Called Consciousness Studies,” Harrington will trace how research emerging from intensive care units, operating rooms, hospices and meditation retreat centers is reshaping fundamental questions about human consciousness.
Crick and collaborator Christoph Koch published “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness” in 1990, marking consciousness as newly respectable for scientific inquiry. Fellow Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman proposed combining the search for “neural correlates of consciousness” with a Darwinian view of brain function.
Harrington received her Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1985. She served seven years on the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interaction, 12 years on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute, and co-directed Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative for six years. Her books include “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness” (2019).
The event is co-hosted by the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine and The Huntington.
“Did the Soul Die in the 1990s? The Making (and Unmaking) of So-Called Consciousness Studies” will run on Saturday, Nov. 1, from 4-6 p.m. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. For more information, call (626) 405-2100 or visit https://www.huntington.org/event/did-soul-die-1990s-making-and-unmaking-so-called-consciousness-studies. Ticket prices: Free with advance reservation.
