Creativity in all its states

Meeting-performance organised as part of the Brain Awareness Week 2025, by Etienne Koechlin, neuroscientist, Research Director at INSERM and of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the ENS Paris, and Gretty Mirdal, member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Professor Emeritus at the University of Copenhagen, co-directors of the “Brain, Culture and Society” program at the Paris IAS.

Free admission with registration (see form at the bottom of the page)

Presentation

Creativity is often seen as an innate, quasi-magical gift with which certain brilliant individuals are endowed. Creativity particularly seems to escape the scientific principle that “nothing is created, neither in the operations of art or in those of nature”, as the 18th-century chemist Lavoisier stated. But creativity may be no more than an illusion, based on the idea that all creation is merely apparent and is, in reality, a transformation of existing things, as the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras put it in the 5th century BC. Creativity also rhymes with the pseudo-scientific theories of the “spontaneous generation” of microbes or the “creationism” of living species...

So what is creativity? Is it an illusion? Or is it a fundamental property of living organisms in general and our brains in particular? Are we all creative people? Can creativity be cultivated? Is artificial intelligence creative?

An event combining performances with scientific and artistic presentations, with:

Fabrice Guedy, musician-composer, Musical Director of the Atelier des Feuillantines in Paris
Etienne Koechlin, neuroscientist, Research Director at INSERM and of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the ENS Paris
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Artificial Intelligence researcher, Research Director at INRIA, University of Bordeaux
Patricia Ribault, philosopher of Art and Design, Professor at the Beaux-Arts de Paris