Big Ideas Event: The Ideas Behind The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

From NYU Alumni Magazine:

In the 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey’s character, Joel Barrish, undergoes a medical procedure to erase some aching memories after a break up with his girlfriend. Thought scenario intrigued many – the movie won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay – most assumed it was merely the stuff of cinematic fantasy. But director Michel Gondry acknowledges that the story was inspired, in part, by neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux’s 2000 paper on the prospect of memory erasure for those with post-traumatic stress disorder. And while LeDoux’s real world progress is still far behind the film’s fictional technology, his therapeutic goals are no less ambitious.

From Salon.com:

A much-lauded pioneer in his field, the 58-year-old LeDoux, who is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU's Center for Neural Science as well as director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety, is perhaps used to being greeted by scientists, students and brain buffs alike with, as the New York Times put it, "enthusiasm usually reserved for rock stars."

The acclaimed neuroscientist, Joseph LeDoux, who currently heads NYU’s new Emotional Brain Institute, will be coming to the Residential College on April 23rd to talk his fascinating research on fear and memory and what it can tell us about the War on Terror. The event is sponsored by the Big Ideas Stream – we’re hoping it will be one of our best events this semester.

Students from other streams are also encouraged to attend. Please come and bring your friends and favorite faculty members.

Food and drinks will be served after the event.

Please let me know if you plan on coming, by emailing me at Eric.Ozawa at NYU.edu.

Wednesday April 23^rd.
5:45-7:30 in the Broome Room.

You can find out more about Professor LeDoux here.
Listen to an interview on NPR here:

Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia

From The New York Review of Books:

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact it's up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it's very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn't a commercial product. There are no banners for E*Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.

It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because for a work of reference Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: "stub." At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, "This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." And you'd think: That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I'm writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.

More here.