Wine, Cheese, and Wonder by The Science of Woo
Wine, Cheese & Wonder: Why Do We Have Only One Mind?
Your brain is doing an astonishing number of things at once.
It is processing sights and sounds, monitoring your body, retrieving memories, interpreting language, making predictions, evaluating choices, and directing movement—all through billions of neurons operating simultaneously.
And yet, you don’t experience yourself as thousands of minds. You experience one.
Why?
Join neuroscientist René Marois for an intimate evening exploring one of the strangest facts about human consciousness: as powerful and massively parallel as the brain is, why do we have the experience of only one mind?
Marois is the Winkelried Family Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, where his laboratory studies attention, working memory, awareness, and the limits of human mental capacity. His research asks deceptively simple questions: Why can we attend to only a few things at once? Why are we so bad at performing two demanding tasks simultaneously? And what might those limitations reveal about the architecture of consciousness itself?
Over wine, cheese, and charcuterie, just 30 of us will gather for a conversation about what the limits of attention might tell us about the nature of the mind.
Why does consciousness seem to have a bottleneck?
Could we ever genuinely think two thoughts at once?
What makes all of the brain’s distributed activity feel like a single point of view?
And why, inside all that complexity, does it feel like there is only one “you”?
This isn’t a lecture. It’s one fascinating conversation with 30 people, with plenty of room for questions, disagreement, speculation, and following the conversation wherever it leads.
Wine, Cheese & Wonder is a Science of Woo event presented in partnership with TEDxNashville.
October 22 • 7 PM
East Nashville • Only 30 seats
Admission includes wine, cheese, and charcuterie. The exact East Nashville location will be provided to guests after purchase.