On Meditation

Each renowned in their own fields, the married couple discusses the elemental nature of their work and how it is impacted by their meditation practice with a neuroscientist who studies neuroplasticity’s ability to form and revise memory. This conversation follows a short filmed portrait of the pair in “On Meditation”, part of an on-going series first introduced during last year’s Brainwave.

About the Speakers

Mark Epstein, M.D. is a regular participant in the Rubin’s programs. A highly-regarded psychiatrist in private practice in New York City, he is the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, Going on Being, Open to Desire and Psychotherapy without the Self. His newest work, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press), uses the Buddha’s biography as a means of exploring the hidden psychodynamics, and contemporary relevance, of Buddhist thought. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University and is currently Clinical Assistant Professor in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University.

Arlene Shechet has received broad recognition for her corporeal and suggestive ceramic work. Her work is included in both public and private collections worldwide including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS. Her most recent solo shows include Shechet’s Meissen porcelain sculptures produced during her residency at Meissen Porcelain factory (Rhode Island School of Art and Design Museum); That Time, ( VCUarts Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC); Breaking the Mold (Nature Morte, Berlin, 2012); .SUM (Nerman Museum, Overland Park, KS, 2012); Blow by Blow, curated by Ian Berry, (Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2009). In 2004 together with Kiki Smith, Arlene Shechet invited 108 artists to create contemporary prayer flags to mark the opening of the Rubin Museum of Art. The flags became an exhibition, Written on the Wind. The artist was also featured in a group exhibition at the Rubin, The Missing Peace, in 2007.

Kay M. Tye is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, Cambridge, Mass. where she employs an interdisciplinary approach including optogenetics, electrophysiology, pharmacology and imaging techniques to find a mechanistic explanation for how emotional and motivational states can influence learning and behavior, in both health and disease. Although most animals are capable of learning to assign either positive or negative associations to environmental cues, neuroscience is only beginning to understand the underlying neural circuits and the plasticity that mediates the formation, revision or extinction of an associative memory.