From traumatic memory to utopian imagination

Mythos, Memory, and Utopian Visions

Toward a Politics of Possibility: Charting Shifts in Utopian Imagination through the World Social Forum Process

In a workshop entitled "Utopia and politics" at the fifth World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Nobel Laureate José Saramago squared off with famed Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. While Galeano celebrated the "utopian impulse", Saramago said: I consider the concept of utopia worse than useless....What has transformed the world is not utopia, but need....The only time and place where our w...

Computer Networks in Africa: From Utopian Discourse to Working Reality

Memory, Imagination, and Predicting the Future

On the face of it, memory, imagination, and prediction seem to be distinct cognitive functions. However, metacognitive, cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evidence is emerging that they are not, suggesting intimate links in their underlying processes. Here, we explore these empirical findings and the evolving theoretical frameworks that seek to explain how a common neural system su...

Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory.

Functional MRI (fMRI) studies investigating the neural basis of episodic memory recall, and the related task of thinking about plausible personal future events, have revealed a consistent network of associated brain regions. Surprisingly little, however, is understood about the contributions individual brain areas make to the overall recollective experience. To examine this, we used a novel fMR...