The Helix Center

This roundtable will examine the role of curiosity and ignorance in driving scientific inquiry, including how we identify unknowns, generate questions, and apply these processes to education, research, and policy.

This roundtable will examine how music conveys meaning and evokes emotion, considering whether its effects are rooted in the work itself, formal structure, extra-musical associations, or listeners’ emotional responses, and whether these experiences are individual or universal.

This roundtable will feature a discussion and readings of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry by Bonnie Costello, Alice Quinn, Lloyd Schwartz, and Jean Valentine, focusing on what makes her work distinctive and enduring.

This roundtable will examine how fear shapes decision-making under extreme risk and consider how insights from economics, neuroscience, psychology, and topology can expand our understanding of rational choice in complex and uncertain situations.

This roundtable will examine the nature of love across different forms and perspectives, considering insights from history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, poetry, and other disciplines.

This roundtable will examine the poetry of Ghalib and the ghazal form by focusing on a single two-line verse as a way to understand the genre as a whole.

This roundtable will examine animal communication through its sonic and phonetic dimensions, exploring how different species transmit and interpret information and what this reveals about communication more broadly.

This roundtable will examine Darwin’s concept of male-male competition and its modern interpretations, including its relevance to human behavior and evolutionary biology.

This roundtable will examine movement in life through evolution, coordination dynamics, social interaction, kinesthesia, and aesthetics, and how these perspectives help us understand how we move, adapt, and relate to others.

This roundtable will examine jazz poetry as a written form that engages with the improvisatory, blues-based qualities of jazz, and how poetry can reflect, respond to, and collaborate with musical expression.

A pre-election roundtable of economic theorists exploring their philosophical convergences and divergences.

This roundtable will examine how mathematical models in neuroscience help explain brain function and inform our understanding of the mind.

This roundtable will examine our curiosity about endings and how ideas about the ends of consciousness, life, civilization, and the universe inform one another.

This roundtable will examine our curiosity about beginnings, including what constitutes a beginning and how such concepts may apply to both individual consciousness and the universe.