“Maybe we can access the brain’s hidden repertoire through music” by Randy McIntosh | Music is culturally ubiquitous, supporting social and personal functions. Unlike language, music listening and performing seem to engage several brain networks. My talk will lay the foundation for these ideas and the link to music listening. I will present some preliminary data from EEG, where we start linking flows using Hidden Markov modelling. I will finish with ideas for an extension to ageing and dementia.
The concept of information plays a central role in theories of consciousness, and more generally cognition. Typically, a variable X in the brain is claimed to be informative if it covaries with some other variable Y in the world. This narrow view of information is misleading.
The human mind is curious. It is strange, remarkable, and mystifying; it is eager, probing, questioning. Despite its pervasiveness and its relevance for our well-being, scientific studies of human curiosity that bridge both the organ of curiosity and the object of curiosity remain in their infancy. In this talk, I will integrate historical, philosophical, and psychological perspectives with techniques from applied mathematics and statistical physics to study individual and collective curiosity.