Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio comes to your emotional rescue at REDCAT's “Art and the Conscious Brain,” his lecture on how emotions are as scientifically measurable as any of the physical senses, and how this applies to the arts. Turns out artistic types create their art because they're emotional wrecks, and the brain's neurons store this information for further mining in later states of emotion. His research also proposes that consciousness is not simply a neural reaction to the external world but that the human-specific element of self-perception is what makes us create, and makes us what we are. Damasio is the author of Descartes' Error and The Feeling of What Happens.

Wed., March 3, 8:30 p.m., 2010