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John Krakauer

The Humanities as an Emergent Level of Explanation

A cardinal feature of complex systems is that they are comprised of hierarchical levels that are largely autonomous or screened off from the levels below them. An argument could be made that folk psychology is the emergent level that links explanations between art and science.

Dr. John Krakauer is currently John C. Malone Professor, Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab (www.BLAM-lab.org) at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. Krakauer is the co-founder of the company MSquare Health and of the creative engineering Hopkins-based project named KATA. KATA and MSquare are both predicated on the idea that animal movement based on real physics is highly pleasurable and that this pleasure is hugely heightened when the animal movement is under the control of our own movements. A simulated dolphin and other cetaceans developed by KATA has led to a therapeutic game that has been interfaced with an exoskeletal robot in a multi-site rehabilitation trial for early stroke recovery, and with motion tracking for cognitive therapy in the normal aged.  Dr. Krakauer was profiled in the New Yorker in 2015 and his book, “Broken Movement: The Neurobiology of Motor Recovery after Stroke” was published by the MIT Press in November 2017.

The Humanities as an Emergent Level of Explanation