Hampshire College

April 13, 2010. A public lecture by Antoine Lutz, Exploring the potential influences of meditation on brain and behavior.
Franklin Patterson Hall Main Lecture Hall at 6 p.m. Free and open to the public.

ABSTRACT:
Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Among these various practices, there are three styles that are commonly studied. One style, focused attention meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The second style, open monitoring meditation, involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The last style, compassion meditation, entails deliberately invoking an emotional state of empathy, affection, and compassion for others. We will present key neuroimaging findings illustrating how specific neurophysiological mechanisms are involved in such meditation practices and how meditation training has a long-term impact on mental processing and on the brain.

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:
Antoine Lutz is an associate scientist at the Laboratory For Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the Waisman Center in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University of P. et M. Curie, Paris (VI) under the supervision of Dr. Francisco Varela in 2002. His principal research focus has been on the neurodynamical correlates of consciousness and on the relationship between neuroplasticity and meditation training.  His research has been largely supported by grants from the National Institute of Health. He is associated with the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds in Madison.

April 29, 2010. A public lecture by Charlene Elliott, associate professor of communication and culture, University of Calgary, Canada. Franklin Patterson Hall Main Lecture Hall at 5:30 p.m.

Spring 2010

February 11, 2010 Rapture: Religious Ecstatics and "Deep Listeners," by Judith Becker, professor emeritus of ethnomusicology, University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

ABSTRACT:
In her book Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing (2004), Judith Becker proposed that there may be a physiological relationship between religious ecstatics and secular "deep listeners." She defines "deep listeners" as those people who may feel chills or goosebumps, or who may cry when listening to music they find moving. She proposes that both religious ecstatics and "deep listeners" experience strong, deep brain emotional responses when listening to music they find deeply moving. Her talk is about a scientific experiment that she conducted to test the hypothesis concerning a physiological relationship between religious ecstatics and deep listeners.

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:
An authority on Indonesian music, JUDITH BECKER was director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and co-founder and director of the Center for World Performance Studies at the University of Michigan. Becker is the author of numerous articles and three books, including Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (2004) for which she received the Alan Merriam award from the Society for Ethnomusicology for the best book in ethnomusicology published in 2004. She is also author of the three-volume set of translations entitled Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music (1984, 1986, 1987). Through exploring the common ground between the humanistic/cultural/anthropological and the scientific/cognitive/psychological, Becker’s research focuses on the relationships between music, emotion, and ecstasy in institutionalized religious contexts and in secular contexts.

FALL 2009

November 13, 2009 Ferocious Beauty: Genome by Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Genetic research raises prospects that previous generations may scarcely have imagined: of prolonging life and maintaining youth indefinitely; of replicating an individual; of choosing the bodies and brains of our children; and of creating new species to feed and serve us. How we heal, age, procreate, and eat may all be altered in the next years by scientific research happening right now. 

In Ferocious Beauty: Genome Liz Lerman Dance Exchange explores the current historic moment of revelation and questioning in genetic research. Under the artistic direction of choreographer Liz Lerman the subject is represented through a plurality of viewpoints, mirroring a dialogue among multiple voices--artistic, scientific, and scholarly--in all their varied perspectives.

November 12, 2009 Panel Discussion: Dancing Through Science
Discussion of collaborations between artists and scientists:
Liz Lerman
Choreographer and Director, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Laura Grabel
Lauren B. Dachs Professor of Science in Society, Wesleyan University
Billbob Brown
Director of Chaos Theory Dance and Associate Professor of Dance, University of Massachusetts/Amherst
Herb Bernstein
Professor of Physics, Hampshire College

September 24, 2009  Is It Art? A Case-Study in the Cognitive Science of Pleasure. A public lecture by Paul Bloom, professor of psychology, Yale University.
ABSTRACT:
Why are original paintings so much more valuable than forgeries? Why do people pay millions for abstract art? How do creations such as Duchamp's urinal get to be artwork in the first place? I present evidence that our understanding and appreciation of art--even contemporary art--reflects universal aspects of human nature. I argue that the experience of art is not special: There are deep parallels between the pleasures we get from artwork and the pleasures we get from seemingly simpler activities such as eating and sex.

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:
PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the major journals in the field. Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic. He is the author or editor of four books, including How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, and, most recently, Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. He is currently writing a book about pleasure.

SPRING 2009:

April 27, 2009 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy, a Documentary by Robert Lemelson
Hampshire College invited the public to a special screening of the film 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy. The film, from Elemental Productions, was directed and produced by documentary filmmaker and psychological anthropologist Robert Lemelson, a Hampshire College alum, and edited by two-time Academy Award winner Pietro Scalia (JFK and Black Hawk Down). Filmmaker Lemelson will attend the screening and be available for a question-and-answer session with the audience immediately after.

40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy is the powerful feature-length documentary that deals with how children perceive, cope with, and come to terms with severe trauma caused by the death, imprisonment, and disappearance of close family members. It primarily focuses on the long-lasting multi-generational consequences of psychological, physical and socio-cultural trauma. 
 
Told in the context of one of the largest unknown mass-killings of the 20th century--the secret and systematic murders of an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Indonesians in 1965 when General Suharto’s New Order regime began a bloody purge of suspected “communists” throughout the country--“40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy” represents more than a tragic story of a genocide and its victims.
 
Through the compelling testimonies of four individuals and their families, all of whom have broken their silence publicly for the first time, each person provides an intimate and frightening look at what it was like to experience and survive Suharto’s mass killings. Central to the film’s message of childhood trauma and its effects is Budi, a young boy from Java, who is beaten and harassed by local villagers because of his father’s status as a former political prisoner under Suharto’s rule. Fearful for his life because he has been traumatized so severely, Budi’s parents decide to place him in an orphanage to remove him from his destructive social milieu.
 
On a broader, more universal scale, the documentary provides insight on how to recognize clearly and effectively treat severe childhood trauma, which can only be accomplished by comprehending a society’s history, culture, contexts, and meanings of how its people are affected by violence, fear, and loss. In doing so, those who experience and/or work in societies experiencing extreme political or military unrest, such as, for example, Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, can best deal with the long-lasting, and often overlooked, consequences such turmoil has on children.

The documentary proves especially timely as President Obama, who arrived in Jakarta with his mother only a few years after the mass killings took place, has vowed to be a compassionate world leader who responds forcefully to all genocides.