Description:

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?

Description:

Kathy Johnson Neely, MD
Northwestern Memorial Hospital Ethics Committee Chair
Northwestern Memorial Hospital Ethics Consultant
Attending Physician, Palliative Medicine
Associate Professor of Medicine
Alum, Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Regrettable Moments in Ethical Hot Zones: Inevitable or Avoidable?

Situationist philosophers persuasively use empirical social science to demonstrate the ways in which normative ethics fail us in everyday “ethical hot zones.” If we want predictable ethical behavior, they tell us, best to engineer the milieu and forget about ethics education. This presentation will examine situationist arguments in light of Milgram’s seminal "shock" experiments and hospital-based reality show filming and suggest what we in medical education might learn from them.

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This is our last lecture of the academic year. Please join us again in September!