The Cuneiform Brain

Seminar organized by Markham Geller, Professor of Semitic Languages at University College London, former Paris IAS Fellow, and Alain Berthoz, Collège de France, member of the scientific committee of the "Brain, Culture and Society" program.

Seminar closed to the public.
Invitation upon request : m.geller@ucl.ac.uk

Interdisciplinary research is best defined by two separate disciplines benefitting from the fusion of very different approaches and methodologies into a single research question.   In this specific case, the philologist meets the neuroscientist on a level playing field, since there are important questions relevant to both disciplines.   The issues involving the origins and development of writing in Mesopotamia have never been addressed, such as the biomechanics of writing on clay with a stylus from left-to-right (exceptional for Semitic languages), the unique literature produced in cuneiform (and whether this is related to the writing system), and the rationale for changing to an alphabetic system of under 30 characters. Neuroscience has so far not sufficiently studied the history of writing in relation to brain function, specifically memory, lateralization, simplexity-theory, and the brain's flexibility and rapidity in deciphering complex cuneiform scripts.  Moreover, the two fundamental occupations of the human brain, to note patterns and predict the future, are well adapted to the essential structures and applications of ancient scripts from Mesopotamia, although this connection has so far gone unnoticed.

Since 2020, Alain Berthoz and Mark Geller have initiated a project to discuss these issues confronting both disciplines, and they have consulted several colleagues in the field of neurosciences.  Results so far have been encouraging and Berthoz and Geller will produce a preliminary draft of a position paper to summarise the state of the qestions and hypothesis. The purpose of this IEA meeting is to expand the group of potentially interested colleagues in order to select and focus on a limited number of clearly formulated themes for future interdisciplinary cooperation.