“Our minds have never been exclusively in our heads, have they? But the worlds inside our minds are as extensive, multiple and varied as the environments that engender them. Come and explore them with me.” Professor Jennifer Årnstay
Jennifer Årnstay is a Professor of Material and Analogical Eco-Cognition and winner of the Zen Dyson Award for InterZonal Collaboration. She has developed IMPROVISING CONSCIOUSNESS as an educational package for peoples of this aerea (a portmanteau word Årnstay uses evoking area/space and era/time i.e. the West/early twenty-first century).
Her stunning IMPROVISING CONSCIOUSNESS LECTURE traces the evolution of human cognition and consciousness making clear their close relationship to both gradual and punctuated environmental pressures.
- Her rigorously historical model argues that radical changes in the environment lead to equally radical alterations in the human mind.
- A central thesis of her work is that the cognitive module for spoken language that was leveraged as a solution to survival pressures in 12 thousand BCE became an existential threat to humans by 2000 CE.
- She reveals that the Dislocated Mind – with its multiple and non-linguistic consciousnesses – that makes survival of the Anthropocene possible, is rooted in the deep history of humans in landscape.
To ground her lecture, Professor Årnstay has worked in collaboration with Zen Dyson researches, Davi aliens, and development teams of this aerea to create a series of COGNITIVE EXERCISES. These exercises are grounded in material experiences and designed to allow peoples of this aerea to experience mind configurations from previous and futures aereas.
For the last few years, Professor Årnstay has been traveling the world giving her IMPROVISING CONSCIOUSNESS workshops and lectures. This web-site aims to make her affective scholarship widely available to peoples of the aerea online.
Currently and very unfortunately, a pan-temporal anomaly is making it impossible for Professor Årnstay to maintain a consistent and coherent presence in this aerea. It has also disrupted Zen Dyson funding for the project. We therefore apologize for missing and partial material, but we believe that her message of hope for, and radical cognitive change in, the future is clear.
“Do you ever feel you can’t put the true richness of your thoughts into words? Do you ever wake up and find the solution to a nagging problem is suddenly in your head? What is really going on in our minds: hiding in there behind language?” Professor Jennifer Årnstay
