GV Art & Mind Symposium #26 | Professor Margaret Boden | Monday 16 March 2015, 7pm

GV Art & Mind Symposium #26

CAN NEUROSCIENCE EXPLAIN CREATIVITY? – No: it doesn’t ask the right questions.

Professor Margaret Boden

Monday 16 March 2015, 7pm

Please RSVP to garry.kennard@btopenworld.com
Cost £30.00 per person including dinner (fantastic Indian buffet) & wine

It is a great privilege for us to present an evening with Professor Maggie Boden OBE. Professor Boden, during her distinguished career, has held important positions at the heart of the scientific community and has written ground breaking books. She has a special interest in creativity and has a passionate interest in human culture in its widest sense. She says of herself:

I do lots of different things . . . . All of them relate to my abiding interest (since I was a Sixth-Former) in the human mind: what it is, how it works, and how it relates to the brain and to evolution. All these questions straddle individual “disciplines.”

She is to speak on one of the key issues which exercise the minds of those involved in the art/science dialogue. We strongly recommend this extraordinary opportunity to take part in a discussion which promises to be both enlightening and hugely entertaining.

‘There are three sorts of creativity, and current neuroscience is relevant only to one. The psychological processes involved in the other two are better understood by concepts from artificial intelligence. Part of the reason is that neuroscience can’t yet represent stylistic structures—whether in music, mathematics, or mime’.

Biography

Margaret A. Boden OBE ScD FBA is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, where she helped develop the world’s first academic programme in AI and cognitive science. She holds degrees in medical sciences, philosophy, and psychology (as well as a Cambridge ScD and three honorary doctorates), and integrates these disciplines with AI in her research, which has been translated into twenty languages. She is a past vice-president of the British Academy and past Chair of Council of the Royal Institution, and an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (and of its British and European equivalents). Her recent books include The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms; Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science; and Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise. She has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Brighton.