When:
Thursday, May 26, 2016
12:00 PM - 12:45 PM CT
Where: Robert H Lurie Medical Research Center, Searle Seminar Room, 303 E. Superior, Chicago, IL 60611 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Bryan Morrison
(312) 503-1927
Group: Medical Humanities & Bioethics Lunchtime Montgomery Lectures
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Raashi Rastogi
Doctoral Student, English Department
Graduate Affiliate, MH&B Program
Memory Technologies and Cognitive Prosthetics in the Renaissance and Today
What is memory? How do we understand its functionality? What role do technological metaphors play in shaping how we describe memory operations? And how does this cognitive function depend on an external environment?
This talk asks what it might mean to think about the possibility of a cognitive prosthetic, a device that offers to supplement or extend a metaphysical aspect of the self – like, for instance, the memory – outside the body. In my talk, I examine Renaissance theories of memory alongside modern cognitive science and philosophy to examine how both written texts and digital devices serve/d as prosthetic external memories. My paper focuses around the idea of extended cognition and socially-extended cognition to consider how, today, the Internet – much as the Renaissance album amicorum (book of friends) - might facilitate collaborative, crowd-sources memories that shift our understandings of memory and of the self. Importantly, what implications might these ideas have for how we treat patients with memory loss and/or neurodegenerative diseases?