Between March and June 2008, a group of fifteen Performance Studies and Communications students at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia undertook a course on comedy based on a series of six lectures by Agnes Heller in which she outlined ideas from her book, Immortal Comedy. Subsequently, the students attended a number of comedy shows and other events to perform practical group phenomenological research with an aim to activate the ground opened by Heller’s theories through description of actual comic phenomena. The (...) outcomes—theoretical, experiential and, most surprisingly, pedagogical—were remarkable in their demonstration of the efficacy of group phenomenology as a method of intertwined practice, research and learning. (shrink)

A common view in affective neuroscience considers emotions as a multifaceted phenomenon constituted by independent affective and motor components. Such dualistic connotation, obtained by rephrasing the classic Darwin and James’s theories of emotion, leads to the assumption that emotional expression is controlled by motor centers in the anterior cingulate, frontal operculum, and supplementary motor area, whereas emotional experience depends on interoceptive centers in the insula. Recent stimulation studies provide a different perspective. I will outline two sets of findings. First, affective (...) experiences can be elicited also following the stimulation of motor centers. Second, emotional expressions can be elicited by stimulating interoceptive regions. Echoing the original pragmatist theories of emotion, I will make a case for the notion that emotional experience emerges from the integration of sensory and motor signals, encoded in the same functional network. (shrink)