Mellon Dissertation Seminar

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The present seminar is organized around a sequence of overlapping historical units: in the first instance, a broad overview of a key decade of inquiry, the 1950s; in the second, recent autobiographies by major practitioners of neuroscientific inquiry (all trained in the '50s) who possess vastly different understandings of the field; and, third, a casen study of ongoing theoretical and experimental claims stemming from a single institution-the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla-across several generations of practitioners. In the seminar's concluding unit, the humanistic frame becomes less historical and more problem-oriented as we focus on recent neuroscientific work in a pair of paradigmatically humanistic domains: the problem of consciousness and experience of reading.