HISTSCI 1771: Science and the Quest for Consciousness

Welcome to the course website for HistSci 1771! This website is still under construction and  will be updated with more details on readings and assignments prior to the start of class.

Instructor: Anne Harrington

Thursday, 12-2:45pm

with several modest experiential activities outside of class time, details forthcoming

Questions? Want to know more? feel free to email Professor Harrington at aharring@fas.harvard.edu

All concentrations and levels, including first-years, are welcome to join this course!

Also, this course is a tiny bit famous: see Crimson profile here

The Vision for this Course

Consciousness, we all know, is both one of the most familiar and omnipresent realities of our lives, and also one of the most mysterious and elusive phenomena for science. If we think science (broadly understood) should not shy away from tackling it, where do we look for insights? 

This course proposes an answer by asserting something at once obvious and surprisingly fruitful: place matters. The questions you ask about consciousness – even what you mean by the word – are different if you are a scientist in a well-funded brain scanner research center; a clinician talking about a comatose patient to a distraught family member in an intensive care unit; a teacher of meditation in a retreat center, or a marine biologist observing the behavior of octopi. In this course, therefore, we will seek to understand the scientific quest for conscousness by "visiting" a diverse range of places where it has been studied: from brain science labs to coma wards to neonatal clinics to primate reserves to hospices.

We will be interested in the work of each of these spaces in its own right, but we will also seek to understand how they relate and how they interact.  What makes some seem more "mainstream" or hard-nosed and others more "marginal"  or "soft"?  Who decides? Where are the most promising collaborations? The most serious points of friction? The most unsettling challenges? 

We will not all always agree in this course! Instead we will debate, reflect, rethink, maybe change our minds and tolerate uncertainty -- together! 

Assignments

• READING: Disciplined reading of all assigned sources.  Reading work each week will include use of Perusall, a cool collaborative tool that lets students read sources together, by collectively posting comments, questions and responses to issues raised by the text.  For each source assigned in Perusall, you will be asked to post at least one comment or question, and one response to something said by a fellow student. We will use Perusall for only a small subset of the assigned readings (usually primary sources); you should plan to read the rest of the assigned readings on your own and to come to class with further questions about them: 25% 
• REFLECTING: A more personal blog (with posts of about 500 words) designed to let you reflect synthetically on larger issues raised by the course. You will post every 2-3 weeks, according to an assigned schedule, 5 entries in total: 25%
• SYNTHESIZING: Midterm in-class synthetic writing project -- fair, interesting and not stressful -- that  gives you a chance to reflect synthetically on the course material so far: 15%
• EXTENDING: End of semester  oral history or critical book review project 15%
• ENGAGING: In-class oral engagement, active listening, good-faith efforts at participation in experiential exercises and enrichment activities: 20%
• EXTRA CREDIT: coming to office hours at least twice (with any member of the teaching staff) and giving us a chance to get to know you: 2%