This presentation explores models of the body as self-relation and as other-relation in interpretations of Paul, and in Vittorio Gallese's work on mirror neurons, and asks how the interface between them might inform accounts of personal action. How might questions of personhood evolve in an interdisciplinary neuroscience and religious studies perspective? The talk will conclude[...]

Abstract: Just as titles like “The Limits of Empathy” and “After Empathy” are populating humanities conferences, academic medicine is embracing empathy as essential to clinical competence. Yet efforts to put empathy to use in healthcare has in turn produced a sub-genre of clinical humor that pokes fun at the instrumentalization of feeling. This paper takes[...]

Abstract: Human beings have the unique ability to extract the meaning, or semantic content, from spoken language. Yet little is known about how the semantic content of everyday narrative speech is represented in brain. I used a new fMRI-based approach to show that semantic information is represented in complex cortical maps that are highly consistent[...]