Meaning

Nikolay Kukushkin connects research on cellular memory with a broader account of mind and meaning. Drawing on molecular biology, evolution and his book One Hand Clapping, he examines relationships across scales and the proposal that minds are continuous with the processes and environments from which they emerge.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen discusses meaning, relationships and human experience through anthropology and personal reflections. Conversation in Norwegian.

Visual working memory (VWM) is limited in capacity, but memorizing meaningful objects may refine this limitation. However, meaningless and meaningful stimuli usually differ perceptually and an object’s association with meaning is typically already established before the actual experiment. We applied a strict control over these potential confounds by asking observers (N=45) to actively learn associations of (initially) meaningless objects. To this end, a change detection task presented Chinese characters, which were meaningless to our observers. Subsequently, half of the characters were consist