How people think about the self strongly influences their social communica-

tion and behavior. Recent cultural neuroscience studies have shown increas-

ing evidence for modulation of neural representation of the self by cultural

contexts and cultural experiences. I will present our recent research that used

different psychological paradigms and different brain imaging methods to in-

vestigate cultural influences on neural mechanisms underlying self-reflection

on personal attributes. I will also present preliminary brain imaging results that uncover how genes may interact with culture to shape the social brain network activity involved in reflection on the self and close others. These findings are helpful for understanding the biosocial nature of neural mechanisms of human self-concept.

Dr. Shihui Han is a professor at the Department of Psychology, Peking Uni-

versity. He is the director of the Cultural and Social Cognitive Neuroscience

Laboratory. He served as the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Peking

University between 2003 and 2007. He studies cultural and genetic influences

on neural substrates of social cognition such as self-referential processing,

empathy, and theory-of-mind. He has published over a hundred research papers

in journals such as Nature Review Neuroscience, Annual Review of Psychology, Brain, Journal of Neuroscience, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Psychological Science, NeuroImage, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Human Brain Mapping, Journalof Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Social Neuroscience, etc. He is now the chief editor of Culture and Brain and the associate editor of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscienc, Social Neuroscience, and Acta Psychologica

Sinica.

— Train your body and brain through rhythmical phrases via talking, clapping, moving, and walking?

— Enjoy your body & brain in examples of rhythm & groove

— Synchronize in a group of individuals

— Learn about archetypes of rhythms in a global setting

Prof. Udo Dahmen is Artistic Director and Executive Director of the Pop Academy Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim, and Vice President of the German Music

Council. After studying classical percussion at the music academies of Aachen and Cologne, he completed his studies with jazz drum tuition under Dante

Agostini in Paris. From 1983 to 2003 he was lecturer at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre, and from 1994 to 2003 head of the Department of Rock,

Pop, and Jazz at the Dinkelsbühl College of Music. Since 1995, he is President ofthe German drummers’ association “Percussion Creativ.” He is also a member

of the board of trustees of the German Phonoacademy.

Although music is generally acknowledged as a powerful tool for eliciting emotions, little is known concerning

the neurobiological basis of these emotions.

We investigated the psychological and neurobiological basis of strong emotional responses to music (SEM),

leading to shivers down the spine (chills) and changes in heart rate. From previous studies it is known that these SEMs are accompanied by the activation

of a brain network that includes areas involved in reward, emotion, and motivation.

In order to observe distinct acoustical and music structural elements related to chill reactions, in a series of experiments,

on-line emotional self report and psychophysiological

data was obtained while participants were listening to music inducing strong emotions and aesthetic feelings.

Despite of highly individual emotional reactions towards music, some interindividually constant characteristics of music eliciting chill responses can be

found. Chills were much more frequent in previously known music and in familiar music stiles.

Furthermore, distinct musical events frequently caused strong emotional responses, especially when violating expectancies.

These results demonstrate that strong emotional responses are not only related to the psychoacoustic properties

of the respective pieces of music, but furthermore to biographical memories, personality traits and social environments.

Prof. Dr. med. Eckart Altenmüller is a full university professor and medical doctor, and has an active clinical and academic research career.

He holds a Masters degree in Classical flute, and a M.D. and Ph.D. degree in Neurology and Neurophysiology.

Between 1983 and 1985, he held a postdoctoral position in the department of Clinical Neurophysiology in Freiburg. In this position,

he performed research into brain activation during auditory processing of music and learning of fine motor skills, an area in which he has published extensively.

He received his clinical training in Neurology at the Department of Neurology at the University of Tübingen between 1985 and 1992, and was appointed Assistant Professor in Neurology in 1992.

Since 1994 he is Chair and Director of the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine at the University of Music Drama and Media in Hannover.

He continues research into movement disorders in musicians as well as motor, auditory and sensory learning. He has published more than 120 peer reviewed

papers on this topic and received 18 grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Since 2005 he is a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

Numerous studies conducted under the banner of cultural psychology during

the last two decades have documented substantial cultural variation in

attention and perception. This literature has made three important points.

First, whereas people in Western cultures tend to place a greater emphasis on an object in lieu of its context, those in Eastern cultures tend to be more holistically attentive to both the object and its context and closely attuned to the relationship between the two.

Second, although the origin of this cultural difference is multifaceted,

one potent factor is the culturally dominant mode of the self and social relations.

The object-focused perception and the holistic perception have been traced back, respectively, to an independent or an interdependent form of the self and social relations.

Third, although behavioral evidence is indispensable, neuroscience investigations of culture and perception have presented a strikingly strong promise, beginning to uncover important neural bases of the cultural variation in attention and perception.

In this lecture, I will review evidence pertaining to each of these points and discuss some implications for cultural variations in art forms and art appreciation.

Dr. Shinobu Kitayama is Robert B. Zajonc Professor of Psychology at the

University of Michigan. He also directs the University’s Center for Culture, Mind,

and the Brain. Over the last two decades, he investigated cultural variations

in self and other related psychological processes including cognition, emotion,

and motivation. Most recently, he has started to examine the neural basis of

these cultural variations, with the ultimate goal to better understand the

nature of the mutually constitutive process between cultural beliefs and practices and the human brain. Before Michigan, he taught at Oregon, Kyoto, Stanford, and Chicago.

He was a Fellow, twice, at the Center for Advanced Studies in

Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (1995–1996, 2007–2008). A recent recipient of

a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has been inducted to the American Academy of

Arts and Sciences. His work on culture and self with Hazel Rose Markus

(Psychological Review, 1991) is one of the most frequently cited in the entire field of social and behavioral sciences.

“Qualia” to some refers to the absolute, unique quality of a conscious sensory

experience, which may not be “explained away” by neurophysiology. Whereas

we do not endorse to the qualia as a “hard” (that is impossible in principle)

problem for science, we still agree that the current sensory sciences fail to

critically characterize such unique quality of sensory experiences.

We aim to find insights in the latest progresses of sensory substitution. The

“vOICe” is one of such devices translating visual into auditory inputs for blind people. There are some superusers who claim “visual” experiences. Moreover, some of them showed neural activity in the visual cortical areas in fMRI, when engaged in a variety of tasks relying on this type of device.

Our strategy is to come up with a brief list of psychophysical and

neuroscientific criteria for “vision-like” processing, and to search for empirical evidence,

including (1) cortical mapping of space via the device, (2) accomplishment of

perceptual constancy, and (3) intrinsic (synesthesia-like) crossmodal mapping.

The results suggest that “qualia”, if one still wants to use such a word, should be understood with regard to adaptive behavior. Moreover, what such

training/experience accomplishes should be characterized best as the third kind of “qualia”. Enrichment of sensory experiences due to intrinsic and associative

mapping provides scientists and artists with ample opportunities.

Prof. Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo is an experimental psychologist/cognitive

neuroscientist, with long-standing interests in visual psychophysics and their

applications to visual illusions, cross-modal plasticity, human emotion, preferences, and decision-making.

He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University

of Tokyo (1978, 1980), and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1985).

He is currently Gertrude Baltimore Professor in Experimental Psychology in the division of Biology/Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. His laboratory at Caltech has been applying

quantitative psychophysical techniques to understand human implicit

perception and social behaviors, with applications of eye tracking, fMRI, EEG, TMS and tDCS, and other techniques. He has approximately 150 publications, including multiple papers in high-impact journals, such as Nature, Science, Nature Neuro-science, and Neuron. He is also known for his collaborations with artists, and a science column (ASAHI WEBRONZA).

In my talk I will review the structural and functional imaging studies on

synaesthesia. Since many imaging studies have focused on grapheme-colour

synaesthesia, the emphasis of my talk will reflect this, and so I will give a summary

of the current knowledge about structural and functional brain differences in

grapheme-colour synaesthetes in particular. Moreover, I will examine how

these structural and functional imaging results might inform current theories

about the neural mechanisms of synaesthesia.

Initially, functional imaging studies concentrated on the phenomenology

of synaesthetic experiences: activation of colour-processing areas in the brain

confirmed the “perceptual reality” of these experiences. Further studies ex-

plored the neural correlate of individual differences in synaesthesia with the

help of functional imaging. Recently, modern network analysis methods have

been applied in the field of synaesthesia to assess the neural network

architecture during rest and task performance in grapheme-colour synaesthetes.

These advances in functional imaging were paralleled by studies using

structural imaging methods, like voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and

diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to explore grey and white matter differences in

synaesthesia, respectively.

Finally, I will also provide a critical discussion of the kinds of limitations

found in previous approaches to studying synaesthetic brain differences, and I

discuss future perspectives and challenges that structural and functional

neuroimaging research in synaesthesia will face.

Prof. Dr. Peter Weiss-Blankenhorn studied medicine at the Heinrich-Heine-

University Düsseldorf. After research projects on Parkinson’s disease in

Arizona, USA, and on apraxia in Lyon, France, he was trained in neurology at the

University Hospitals in Düsseldorf and Aachen, Germany. As a board-certified

neurologist he works in the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-3)

of the Research Centre Jülich (FZJ), Germany, leading the group “Motor Cognition”.

Since 2010, he is also professor of cognitive neurology at the University

of Cologne, Germany. In addition to synaesthesia, his scientific interests in the

area of cognitive neurology are focused on the neural basis of cognitive deficits

after stroke using structural and functional imaging. This translational research

aims at the development of new, innovative therapies for neurorehabilitation.

Helga Griffiths has been working for over 20 years on the integration of

various sensory stimuli into her multi-sense installations. With reference to

several practical examples (one of which ‒ the animated video Brainscape ‒ will be shown during the conference), she illustrates some of the advantages, but also some of the difficulties that she has encountered in this approach.

A successful experience space as she terms it, enables the percipient to

immerse him- or herself in a multi-dimensional sensory space and experience memories, emotions and ideas that originate from, but at the same time are not necessarily identical to, the memories, emotions and ideas of the artist. Typical of Griffiths’ work is her technique of taking sensory information received through one sense (e.g. sight or sound) and transforming it into another, such as odor, in order to communicate with the percipient at a more direct, intuitive level and enable the sensory immersion experience to transcend conventional boundaries of perception.

Helga Griffiths is a Multi-Sense-Artist working at the intersection of science

and art. She holds a B.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers

University, and from 1992–1994 completed her postgraduate studies at the

Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. In 1994 she continued with further

studies in New Media at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. She received several awards such as the first prize at “Kunst auf Zeit” in Graz, an “Honorable Mention” at the International Biennale of Paper Art in Düren,

the “Lichtenberg”- Award (all in 1998), and the first prize at “LichtRouten”- festival in Lüdenscheid in 2003. She received grants for artist residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris in 2001 and an NEA grant at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico in 2004.

Her work is in permanent collections such as the TBA TV Station in

Tokyo, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, or the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum

in Düren, Germany. She has exhibited her multi-sense-installations at several

biennials such as Cairo Biennale, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan, Havanna Biennial, and Seoul International Media Art Biennale. Her work has been

shown in international museum exhibitions like the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn;

Artificial Light in Art Centre, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle Kiel, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Upper Austrian Culture Quarter, Linz, and at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

All perception is based on the topology of neuronal swarms. The brain is a

swarm of that kind: harmonic aesthetic experiences are based upon the isomorphy

of neural structures in the brain, that is topological compatibility between

communicators and recipients, while an anisomorphy evokes disharmonic

interpretations of aesthetic signals. Based upon the topology of a superstructure similar to the brain, it will be attempted to audially depict the chaotic trajectory which is called thinking, and make the harmonics of a thought hearable to the naked eye. The holy harmonies, the music invoked by the mythical muses, present themselves as a mathematical set of signs and are spawned by mechanical vibrations: as melodies.

Reto Schölly is a Swiss artist. He studied cybernetics and business administra-

tion in Stuttgart and worked initially as an author of technical books,

programmer, and project manager. After small projects in painting, street theater, and music he is now preparing a dissertation on the subject of cybernetic reflexivity between humans, technology, art, and mysticism. In 2010, he participated in Bazon Brock’s lecture series “Pythagoras in Delphi” at the German Historical Museum Berlin and at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. His exhibitions include MATGX_BLAU at the Contemporary Art Ruhr, in the Arttower Berlin, an exhibition of 33 matrix graphics at the A+K Freiburg, and “Poetry of Mathematics” at the Kultur- und Bürgerhaus Denzlingen. He is the author of the book Linuxprogrammierung mit C++, published in 2001 by Data Becker.