Columbia University

I have been here nearly two weeks. There has been so much to take in, not only just the City of New York, but the incredible place of the university itself. I have been made really welcome by the staff of Teachers College and have been invited to participate in lecturers, presentations and conferences. The academic community here is incredibly vibrant and open and I have been involved in sitting in on classes with very distinguished people. I sat in on an aesthetics class by the philosopher Maxine Greene who is the founder and director of the Centre for Social Imagination at Teachers College. She is also a beautiful writer and speaker. I am reading, amongst other things, The Dialectic of Freedom by her.

I went to a lecture last night by the nobel prizewinner Eric Kandel who has just published a book called In Search Of Memory. Oliver Sacks has written an introduction to his work "Eric Kandel explains the revolutionary landmarks of modern biology and illuminates how behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science of the mind...Scientists are now positioned to provide meaningful and nuanced insights into mental functioning-from perception, thought, emotion,and memory to schizophrenia, depression,and age-related memory loss."

What is really exciting about this is the comming together of disciplines, and in terms of my own research, its relationship to art. He also came across as a generous wonderfully articulate and humourous speaker.