The Neuroscience of Embodiment
a feeling for the body
How do we understand the feeling we have for our own body? Where does that feeling start and finish when we are using a familiar tool or playing a musical instrument, for example? Modern neuroscience is getting ever closer to answering these questions with the development of concepts such as ‘Motor Cognition’. Ian does not do primary research in this area, but he knows the field well, having taught about it for years…
Since 2007, Ian has been collaborating with artist, Catherine Truman, to explore the consequences of these ideas on the ways we learn anatomy and how we communicate the feelings for the body we have acquired throughout our lives. This formed the basis of their work in not absolute and The Microscope Project. This work also deeply informed his collaborations with Garry Stewart and the Australian Dance Theatre in the development of Be Your Self and Proximity.
Read Phantom Limb, one of Ian’s poems about body sense here.
Read about Ian’s collaborations with Catherine Truman in the study of anatomy here.
Read a conversation between Ian and Garry Stewart here.
Music and the Brain
get in the groove, sing along…
Since the 1990s, neuroscientists have made enormous advances in understanding how the brain “does” music: which parts of the brain keep us in time and in tune, what happens as we learn the skills necessary to play an instrument, and so on. Ian combines his knowledge of neuroscience with his musical experience in his popular presentations about the neuroscience of music.
Sample some of Ian’s own music here.