Talk: Microbes on the Mind
- Wednesday 11th January
- 9:00-9:45 Dr Louise Whiteley, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.
- In the Auditorium at Medical Museion, Bredgade 62.
- No tickets required, doors open from 8.45.
The microbes living in and on us are crucial to our health – as well as causing both colds and existential threats. A disturbed microbial ecosystem can cause soils to deplete, guts to leak, and moods to darken. But how does one cultivate an invisible ecosystem, especially when whether microbes are good or bad for us depends on what else is going on?
In 2019 the Microbes on the Mind project set out to investigate how scientists, artists, philosophers, and citizens are thinking about this question. We found that everyone lacked ways to talk about, visualize, and engage with the mind-boggling idea that we are more than human: the idea that when we talk about human health, we’re talking about the dynamic state of a multispecies being entangled with its environments.
In this talk Dr Louise Whiteley will share some of the group’s findings, and their experiments to develop new ways to communicate, in collaboration with artists, podcasters, and curators. She argue for communicating about mess, process, and complexity alongside the everyday; the power of sound; and the provocative value of introducing microbes into enduring puzzles about mind and body.
This open lecture is part of the project ‘Microbes on the Mind’, funded by the Velux Foundation Core Group Awards and supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR). Microbes on the Mind was led by Louise Whiteley, and included (alphabetically) Adam Bencard, Marie Chimwemwe Degnbol, Joana Formosinho, Tine Friis, Cecilie Glerup, Guston Sondin-Kung, and Andréa Wiszmeg,
