Registration opens on Monday, March 23 at 12 PM.

Brain scans like these helped scientists classify how study participants made decisions.
© Jonathan Nicholas / Shohamy Lab / Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute

How does one study memory? What questions do you ask? What methodologies do you use? How does memory construct the present? How do we use it to reconstruct the past in stories, memoir, and dramatic work? Playwright and Alan Kanzer Writer-in-Residence Sarah Ruhl — author of Eurydice, Demeter in the City, Passion Play, etc.—and Columbia neuroscientist Daphna Shohamy discuss the art and science of memory. Moderated by Professor of the Arts and Dean Emerita Carol Becker. 

Introduced by Brian Kulick, Chair of Theatre and author of Staging the End of the World: Theatre in a Time of Climate Crisis.

Co-presented by the MFA Theatre Program at Columbia University School of the Arts and the Zuckerman Institute.

Where Ideas Come From is curated by Carol Becker, Professor of the Arts and Dean Emerita of Columbia University School of the Arts. Events, panels, interviews and conversations bring together practitioners and theorists from multiple disciplines such as visual and sound arts, dance, theatre, writing, film, neuroscience, politics, and philosophy to discuss where ideas originate and how they evolve.