About this Event
Public Lecture: State of the Arts: A NeuroHumanities Perspective
Speaker: Michael Stanley, Division Director of Neurocognitive Disorders, Tufts Medical Center; Associate Professor, Tufts University
4:00PM October 22, 2026 (Thu)
Abstract
What can neurology tell us about art? Nobody doubts that the brain is at work when we paint, read, or listen. Indeed, neuroaesthetics has produced many scans of the Beautiful and many popular books, but little that the humanities would recognise as criticism. What, then, might the neurologist say to the humanist, and the humanist to the neurologist? What becomes of a work of art when disease alters how a person perceives, symbolises, or expresses? Can the clinic enrich our understanding of culture, or only reduce it? Perhaps what is needed is not a science of aesthetics but a criticism – one that reads the patient's diary alongside the EEG. This lecture proposes the NeuroHumanities as such a translational discipline, considering the brain as metaphor-maker and the artwork as a 'thought thing', in what is here termed the question of how brains who.
Biography
Michael Stanley is Division Director of Neurocognitive Disorders at Tufts Medical Center and an Associate Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a graduate of Harvard College, Tufts University School of Medicine Maine Track Program, Mass General Brigham's neurology residency program, and Brigham & Women's Hospital's Behavioral Neurology/ Neuropsychiatry Fellowship. In addition to his administrative and clinical duties, he serves on a number of national boards and committees including the American Academy of Neurology's Brain Health Committee. He is a recognized fieldbuilder in the neurohumanities and in nearly every division of its manifold activities he has contributed lectures, workshops, essays, or support.
This is an in-person only event. We welcome you to sign up.
If quota via Enventbrite is full, please sign up through the link below.
https://english.hku.hk/event/615/Dr._Michael_Stanley_-_Public_Lecture_&_Workshop
Event venue & nearby stays
HKU Black Box, Room 54, LG/F, Centennial Campus, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
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