Konferencje i seminaria na UG

Cognition, Emotion and Memory

Cognition, Emotion and Memory

In the title of this conference – Cognition, Emotion and Memory – the center term mediates between the other two, which is not without significance. After all, the primary difference between human memory and computer memory is that the latter is always mediated by feeling: we better remember things that carry some emotional load, positive or negative, and easily forget facts (events, people) that have no emotional significance for us. Computers remember everything they are told to remember and nothing else.

These speciously simple observations are, of course, inherently psychological, in both the stricter sense (psychology as a science practiced by psychologists) and broader sense (psychology as a "discourse" – Gr. λ??γος, logos – about the “inner self” – Gr. ψυχÎ?, psyche) of that word. Yet thinking, feeling and remembering, and the relations between and among them, have been the object of reflection for thousands of years. That is the primary motivation for bringing together under one roof so disparate a group of people: classicists, psychologists, comparatists, neuropsychologists, and several who defy any convenient label. All of us have various ways of talking about the things that interest us, some of us are interested in things that none of the rest of us even understand, much less care about, and yet it all comes down to thinking, feeling, remembering. So there must be something important at the center, a common ground that needs to be explored.

Last October, under similar circumstances, and with similar goals, an equally disparate group of speakers gathered in Katowice, Poland, to talk about “Truth, Fiction, and Reality.” Roughly half of the speakers present at that conference are also on the program of “Cognition, Emotion, and Memory, ” and indeed to a great extent the initiative of organizing this latest meeting came from a consensus among the participants in Katowice that the experiment had been successful. Once again the speakers come from diverse academic disciplines, and we shall all be challenged at least once to think in a different way about things we think we know. Or at least that is the goal.

We sincerely welcome you to Gdansk, and hope that each of you will return home with some new ideas and many pleasant memories.


Maria PÄ?chalska, Prof.
Bruce Duncan MacQueen, Prof.

Strona konferencji: www.cemsymposium.com