Playfulness: A Surprising State of Mind

A Digital Creativity Labs Lecture by Andreas Roepstorff

February 19, 2019, 2:30-3:30pm

Heslington East, room CSE/082&083 http://bit.ly/2E7aWXW

Attendance is free, no registration required

These days, theories of prediction error minimization are en vogue across the cognitive sciences. Cognition seems to be all about control: of events, hidden causes, environments, and many things in between. Playful activities seem to open up a very different terrain. They appear to involve letting go of control, to let processes, materials and collaborators do ‘their’ thing, and in and through that create unexpected trajectories. We have recently explored a number of such activities involving unusual research tools, like Ouija boards, Lego bricks, and haunted houses. I will describe some of these experiments, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, to explore emergent dynamics of play-like activities. This will allow us to explore whether playfulness is a surprising state of mind.

Biography

Andreas Roepstorff is a Professor of Cognition, Communication and Culture at Aarhus University (Denmark). He works at the interface between anthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, and is equally interested in the workings of the mind and brain, and in how cognitive science and brain imaging, as fields of knowledge production, relate to other scientific and public fields. He is the director of the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University and is involved in a number of transdisciplinary collaborations, focusing on aspects of human interaction. Most recently, he won a major grant to work with renowned artist Olafur Eliasson to create engaging experiments on perception, decision-making, action, and collaboration in public spaces. For more, visit interactingminds.au.dk.