Our efforts will be towards providing a forum for cross-talk between experts (in a language and atmosphere that is fruitful for students and non-expert scientists too) in different fields to critically evaluate some of the commonly held perspectives on the plausibility of establishing similarities, analogies and homologies in neuroscience.
In this workshop we would like to create a forum for discussion about several topics related to variability in biological systems and in the brain. We feel that these issues are still open and general enough that approaches from any one field can potentially be valuable in others. We are, thus, encouraging a diversity of themes and perspectives rather than a focus on any of them in particular.
The term “embodied cognition” appears with increasing regularity in cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. But what could possibly be exciting about the claim that cognition is embodied? After all, if the brain is part of the body, and thinking goes on in the brain, then isn’t cognition trivially embodied?
Our lecturers will tell us how the hippocampus contributes to memory-guided decision-making, from imagining possible actions to integrating contextual information, and they will give us hands-on experience in analyzing data from hippocampal recordings.