Neurosciences Institute Collaboration

Our understanding of age-old questions about what makes us human is now being transformed as our insight into the human brain dramatically expands. A new collaboration between Bennington College and the Neurosciences Institute enables us to be in the midst of this great exploration.

Through research that borrows from many disciplines, the Neurosciences Institute is striving for a complete view of how the brain and central nervous system develop and function, how together they determine human behavior and form the basis for individuality and creativity. Bennington is a college dedicated to the kind of human creativity the Institute means to understand. Bennington strives to hone and extend its students’ imaginative reach by treating each student as an individual, free to plunge into any authentic intellectual or artistic frontier, but held singularly responsible for the shape and quality of his or her own education.

Beginning in the fall of 2004 there has been an ongoing exchange program involving Bennington College faculty and NSI researchers. Joint research projects are being developed and implemented on a continuing basis in both locations involving students as well as faculty. Curriculum informed by this collaboration is being developed extending from the sciences to the arts.

A lab designed for the purpose of pursuing ideas emerging from this exchange has now been set up in the Visual and Performing Arts center (VAPA), and future elements in the collaboration include the creation of new course materials; continued conversation between the two institutions; and an online library of materials related to the collaboration, including an annotated, specially organized bibliography, which could be of widespread use to individuals and other institutions.

Bennington undergraduates—regardless of academic concentration—have access to courses that explore the nature of the human mind. What is new and exhilarating about this inquiry is that for the first time, students can center that study building on the scientific understanding that the mind emerges from and is mediated by the brain and, as part of the human body, is in turn embedded in and shaped by an environment. The subject is fundamental to an understanding of ourselves, probing issues that have warranted consideration from multiple perspectives throughout human history.