Entertaining Science

Pay Attention!

Even your brain doesn’t have the capacity to process everything in the environment simultaneously!  The brain’s solution to this problem is to select from the environment things to process, and to filter out other things, so as not to waste brain energy on them.  This filtering process is called attention.  Michael E. Goldberg, David Mahoney Professor of Brain and Behavior at Columbia University, and Ellen K. Levy, an artist and educator at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts who has long visualized interconnections between art and scientific investigations, will describe the art and science of attention – how the brain organizes attention and how the artist uses it to shape what the viewer looks at and thinks about. Goldberg will explore the trajectory of his original experiments on the cerebral cortex demonstrating how the brain creates a priority map of the world by integrating topdown and bottom up signals.  Levy will expand on their collaboration, which led her to conduct a mischievous experiment, involving inattention blindness and 3-Card Monte in several galleries that functioned as atypical ‘laboratories’ for exploring the realm of human behavior.

On Sunday June 10, 2012, at 6PM it is, in Roald Hoffmann and Dave Soldier’s Entertaining Science cabaret at the Cornelia Street Cafe (in the Village, at 29 Cornelia Street  between Bleecker and W. 4th; Christopher St. is probably the nearest subway stop). 212-989-9319. See their website at www.corneliastreetcafe.com. Admission $10 + 1 drink. Reservations can be made by calling the café, but only in the week before the show, i. e. from 10AM, Monday, June 4. 

Oliver Sacks explains his interest in metallic properties (and metallic t-shirts)