MARGHETIS
Lab
WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF HUMAN IMAGINATION?
How are we able to make sense of the invisible, imagined, or impossible –
ideas like time travel, climate change, or infinity?
Why does our thinking settle into stable regimes...
...but also undergo sudden ruptures?
(e.g., mathematical insights, artistic breakthroughs)
How do our bodies, culture, language, and technology
shape our abstract thinking?
Take the ability to do mathematics, from low-level number processing to expert mathematical practice.
In a noisy environment, using fleshy bodies, with imperfect collaborators, we somehow generate precise, stable mathematical inferences –
that is, seemingly perfect knowledge.
How do we actually do this? How did we learn?
How does it depend on culture and history?
Our research has consequences for what it means to be human,
how to improve education,
the impacts of technology,
the value of diversity.
Big questions require a diversity of tactics.
We use methods ranging from cross-cultural field experiments to computational modeling of massive datasets;
from historical case studies to controlled lab experiments;
from philosophical analysis to machine learning.
Publications are available here.