Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 02, 2010, 10:13 AM

I'm fascinated by experimental psychology experiments that reveal that we know almost nothing about ourselves--or that our "selves" reveal far more about "us" than we ever imagined in our rationalist paradigms.  The West has been clinging, against odds, to the mind v. body dualism for thousands of years, gave it a few booster shots in the Enlightenment, and now requires psychologists with cagey experiments to trick us into seeing that the mind and body are, in fact, not opposites but all part of the same thing.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 18, 2010, 06:43 AM

That's one of the "big think" questions in ISIS 120, "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."  To think big, you have to begin by understanding what communication as a process really i

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 17, 2010, 11:29 AM

ISIS 120S-01, English 173S-05: This is Your Brain on the Internet (HASTAC Tag 1SIS 120)

This is Your Brain on the Internet is an experimental, innovative, adventurous, non-traditional, multidisciplinary, student-led, contract- and peer-evaluated course open to any student fascinated by how we come to know the world and how we may or may not know the world differently in the Information Age.  It is not for the faint of heart.  If you are not up for what John Seely Brown calls thinkering (thinking while doing, project-based thinking, evolving and progressive thinking), this is not a course for you.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 13, 2010, 10:01 AM

For those following our course online on the HASTAC site, here's my opening welcome post to the students.  To find all of our posts, remember the tag to search for is ISIS 120.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 12, 2010, 04:20 PM

If you are interested in the content and conversation in ISIS 120, please follow me and my students in the course on this HASTAC site.  We will be using the tag "ISIS 120" on our posts and that way you can easily find all of the different posts we make.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Oct 27, 2009, 08:48 AM

If the twentieth-century paradigm for the brain is the hardwired CPU, I would argue that the new paradigm for the twenty-first century brain is the iPod or iPhone, with 75,000 possible Apps (and counting) available for downloading, some created by developers, others by users, all in constant need of updates and customising. There's an App for just about everything in the twenty-first century brain because a changing world needs a brain that is not a product but an interactive processor.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 05, 2009, 03:59 PM
This Is Your Brain on the Internet: Episode 4

. . . In which we identify galaxies, Ananth loses sleep thinking about Jeff Hawkins? On INTELLIGENCE . . . Michael brings Jeff Hawkins to TYBI . . . and blogger Jennifer is invited to lecture the faculty on blogging . . .

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 06, 2009, 08:19 AM
I'm not sure if I'll blog here every week as a way to chart what is happening from TYBI (This Is Your Brain on the Internet), but today is Friday and, once again, my head is spinning from discussions we've had in class, from comments students have posted on our class blog, from media they have given me to watch (Rugrats, Degrassi, Gossip Girl this week). As I noted in a parallel post as part of the terrific HASTAC Scholars Forum on "The Future of Digital Humanities," with NEH's Director of the Office of Digital Humanities, Brett Bobley, one unexpected outcome of the class spending time before our f2f meetings writing blogs and posting multimedia for us to watch is that something intense and urgent happens when we're actually together. (You can join that discussion at: http://tinyurl.com/djvpa2). What I'm thinking about today is translation, a topic inspired by this week's reading of Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation. Each book we read is intended as a provocation, a centerpiece for further exploration. Here are some of my thoughts.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on May 18, 2008, 02:09 AM
When I lectutred last week in Italy on digital youth, someone asked me how I made the connection between digitality and neuroscience. That's an easy question and an extremely difficult one and the path from one to the other is: learning.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on May 11, 2008, 04:01 PM
Joking on the backchannel. Fun, yes. But what does it do to the front channel . . . (not to mention the nucleus accumbens) . . . ?