What if attention is a path and the mind is not a “point of subjectivity” but a landscape of subjectivities we navigate through thinking? The hippocampus is often called the brain's GPS – and recent neuroscience suggests this role may be even stranger and more expansive than it first appears. As it turns out, we use the same bodily habits to move through a neighborhood as we do to move through a difficult conversation, a grief, an idea, or a virtual space. What kinds of attention does this “navigational mind” make possible, and what emerges when we give our attention to these orienting patterns themselves?

Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, philosophers, and Hiott’s own accomplished research on the navigational mind, we'll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by attention fracking. 

This is about the embodied, ongoing action (movement) of attention. It is about noticing where we are and how that is always connected to all the places (geographical, social, virtual, etc.) that we have ever been. We will let science and philosophy come together with our own ongoing way-making and way-finding to empower practical shifts in the power and presence of our mind, consciousness and care.

Led by Andrea Hiott, philosopher and neuroscientist at Universität Heidelberg and author of Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 21st-August 4th