“We are the stars burst into consciousness.” This is my favorite bit of wisdom from evolutionary philosopher Brian Thomas Swimme. His words are not simply metaphor; we truly are made of the stars. While stars are initially composed of just hydrogen and its fusion product helium, at the end of the star’s life carbon, oxygen, and all the rest of the elements are rapidly formed before the star’s last massive explosion into both nothingness and everything.

Swimme spoke at this year’s Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City, CA after a screening of his new movie Journey of the Universe: An Epic Story of Cosmic, Earth, and Human Transformation.  (As a side note for those of you interested in environmental advocacy, conservation politics, and edge-of-your-seat epic adventures — think free-soloing El Cap and class V white-water in the crocodile-filled Nile — I highly recommend next year’s festival).  In just 57 minutes, Swimme’s movie highlights 14 billion years worth of history, from the Big Bang to the beginnings of life and finally to our current precarious place on this planet.  But as environmental pressures mount to historically severe levels, Swimme says in his post-screening talk that it is difficult not to fall into despair if you are an intelligent and aware human being.

I recently went to see (or, I suppose, hear) a new sound exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco called “Are We There Yet?”, which will be on display until July. This exhibit is, in a word, cool. I walked into an architecturally beautiful room and heard different voices reading questions, sometimes overlapping and sometimes complementing each other. Just as cool as the aesthetic experience, though, is the visual tracking system that UC Berkeley engineers developed to give every participant a unique experience. The combination of cutting edge sound equipment with cleverly engineered computer tracking allows the voices to seemingly follow a viewer throughout the room.

The questioning voices of the exhibit are intended to invoke the practice of questioning within the Jewish faith. The engineers who designed the technical scaffolding to achieve this vision also started with a question. “How do you accurately tell the difference between the sun’s reflection on the floor and a person’s bright white shirt, if you’re a computer?” asks UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering graduate student Andrew Godbehere.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Amy Cook, a professor at Indiana University, about some interesting new inroads that are being made between psychology and art. Professor Cook exists at the intersection of two fields that have historically been very far apart: theater and cognitive science.

She explained to me that both of these fields are ultimately touching on the same kinds of ideas, albeit from very different directions. While it is quite obvious that cognitive science is concerned with understanding the mind, theater is driven by our knowledge of the human psyche as well. Put the two together, and you have a very powerful combination. In a talk she gave at UC Berkeley, Professor Cook used a cognitive science perspective to look at Henry V, one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays. It turns out that The Bard was actually quite crafty about weaving a story that plays with your mind and deals with some pretty sophisticated mental concepts.

One of the fundamental themes that Dr. Cook sees embodied in Henry V is emergence.