Fifth NHS Dialogue 2018

What is What? Focus on transdisciplinary concepts and terminology in neuroaesthetics, cognition and poetics.

May 31st – June 1st 2018

University of Catania

On May 31 and June 1 2018 the interdepartmental research centre NewHums – Neurocognitive and Humanities Studies organises the fifth NeuroHumanities Dialogue with the title “What is What? Focus on transdisciplinary concepts and terminology in neuroaesthetics, cognition and poetics”. The aim of this year dialogue is to focus on the terminological difficulties encountered during transdisciplinary research studies.

The differences between disciplines correspond to different languages. These create a further distance of positions when researchers approach to transdisciplinary studies. The lack of a common language creates sometimes incomprehension, misunderstandings and, above all, confusion. For the last five years,the NewHums research centre has been promoting a prolific transdisciplinary discussion (in the form of yearly NHS Dialogues) between different international research groups on several topics, such as neuroaesthetics, metaphors, cognition and imagination. The creation of a possible frame for transdisciplinary study of literary texts and arts has been the central focus of the dialogue whichhas led to a continuous discussion on the terms to be used in the scientific research. Different works and studies propose new terms and categories to set the possible frame for future research. However, there is still confusion on what should be used and in which case, as it is proven by the lack of a handbook about the topics above mentioned, an useful tool for the new generation of young researchers. For these reasons, a reflection on terms, concepts and categories seems to be necessary in order to clarify the uncertainties and differences in terminology that have emerged over the years of collaboration. This is the natural consequent step to take the research on neurocognitive and humanities studies further.

Starting from Mark Turner’s pioneer project “An Atlas for Research in Cognition and Poetics”, created online as webportal, we intend to propose an implementation of this project in order to work on a near possible publication. As final product we propose the living dictionary of transdisciplinary research in neuroaesthetics, cognition and poetics.