Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture
What is the nature of the human mind? The Emory Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture (CMBC) brings together scholars and researchers from diverse fields and perspectives to seek new answers to this fundamental question. Neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, biological and cultural anthropologists, sociologists, geneticists, behavioral scientists, computer scientists, linguists, philosophers, artists, writers, and historians all pursue an understanding of the human mind, but institutional isolation, the lack of a shared vocabulary, and other communication barriers present obstacles to realizing the potential for interdisciplinary synthesis, synergy, and innovation. It is our mission to support and foster discussion, scholarship, training, and collaboration across diverse disciplines to promote research at the intersection of mind, brain, and culture. What brain mechanisms underlie cognition, emotion, and intelligence and how did these abilities evolve? How do our core mental abilities shape the expression of culture and how is the mind and brain in turn shaped by social and cultural innovations? Such questions demand an interdisciplinary approach. Great progress has been made in understanding the neurophysiological basis of mental states; positioning this understanding in the broader context of human experience, culture, diversity, and evolution is an exciting challenge for the future. By bringing together scholars and researchers from diverse fields and across the college, university, area institutions, and beyond, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture (CMBC) seeks to build on and expand our current understanding to explore how a deeper appreciation of diversity, difference, context, and change can inform understanding of mind, brain, and behavior. In order to promote intellectual exchange and discussion across disciplines, the CMBC hosts diverse programming, including lectures by scholars conducting cutting-edge cross-disciplinary research, symposia and conferences on targeted innovative themes, lunch discussions to foster collaboration across fields, and public conversations to extend our reach to the greater Atlanta community. Through our CMBC Graduate Certificate Program, we are training the next generation of interdisciplinary scholars to continue this mission.
Episodes
Héctor Álvarez | Theater Studies, Emory University
"Dilating Time: Tempo as Contemplative Tool in Ota Shogo’s Poetics of Deceleration"
This talk explores Ota Shogo's groundbreaking wordless play "The Water Station" as a paradigm of temporal expansion in contemporary theater, examining how extreme deceleration creates unique spaces for audience reflection and embodied awareness. Together we'll investigate how slowed theatrical time ...
Shay Welch | Associate Professor of Philosophy | Spelman College
"The Bio-Psycho-Social Affect Loop, HyperSensitivity, and Radical Embodied Cognition"
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Tara Callaghan | Professor of Psychology, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada
"Fostering Prosociality in Refugee Children: An Intervention with Rohingya Children"
Prosocial behavior is a distinguishing characteristic of human nature. Although prosocial behaviors emerge early in development, contextual factors play an important role in how these behaviors are manifested over development. A large body of research focu...
Alexandra (Sasha) Key | Professor, Marcus Autism Center, Emory University School of Medicine
"Building a functional communication system: Does the baby have a say?"
For a long time, language development has been framed mainly in the context of nature-nurture interactions. However, research in non-typical development suggests that another critical contributor should be considered. In this talk, I will present findings from neurophys...
Anna Ivanova | Assistant Professor, School of Psychology | Georgia Tech College of Sciences
"Dissociating Language and Thought in Humans and in Machines"
“What is the relationship between language and thought? This question has long intrigued researchers across scientific fields. In this talk, I will propose a framework for clarifying the language-thought relationship. I will introduce a distinction between formal competence—knowle...
Leah Krubitzer | MacArthur Fellow Professor of Psychology | University of California, Davis
"Combinatorial Creatures: Cortical Plasticity Within and Across Lifetimes"
"The neocortex is one of the most distinctive structures of the mammalian brain, yet also one of the most varied in terms of both size and organization. Multiple processes have contributed to this variability including evolutionary mechanisms (i.e., changes in gene s...
Ivana Ilic | Music Theory, Emory University
Jasna Veličković | Composer and Performer
"How Do We Know It's Music? On Musical Capacities of the Electromagnetic Field"
What happens when the electromagnetic signal is not only deliberately made audible, but also exploited with a specifically musical aim? In this presentation, I investigate the distinctively musical use of electromagnetism in art from the 1960s until the present day. The ...
Richard Moore | Executive Director, Children in Crossfire
"Freedom, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Northern Ireland"
Dr. Moore’s talk is part of the CMBC's Spring 2024 sponsored course “Empathy, Theater and Social Change” taught by Dr. Lisa Paulsen and Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva.
This lunch talk was Co-sponsored by Emory’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics & Woodward Academy
“Freedom, Forgivenes...
Arkarup Banerjee | School of Biological Science / Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
"Neural Circuits for Vocal Communication: Insights from the Singing Mice."
My long-standing interest is to understand how circuits of interacting neurons give rise to natural, adaptive behaviors. Using vocal communication behavior across rodent species, my lab at CSHL pursues two complementary questions. How does the auditory system interact with th...
Jack Gallant (Psychology, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science / University of California, Berkeley)
"The Distributed Conceptual Network in the Human Brain"
Human behavior is based on a complex interaction between perception, stored knowledge, and continuous evaluation of the world relative to plans and goals. Even seemingly simple tasks such as watching a movie or listening to a story involve a range of different perceptual ...
Claire White | Religious Studies, California State University, Northridge
"An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion"
In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understanding, explaining, and predicting many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that relig...
Harvey Whitehouse | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK
"Against Interpretive Exclusivism"
Interpretive exclusivism is the claim that studying cultural systems is exclusively an interpretive exercise, ruling out reductive explanation and scientific methods. Following the lead of Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, I will argue that the costs of interpretive exclusivism are heavy and the benefits illusory. By contrast, the int...
Emma Cohen | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK
"From Social Synchrony To Social Energetics. Or, Why There's Plenty Left in the Tank"
Thirty years ago, in an article entitled Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity, Bob McCauley and Tom Lawson powerfully critiqued the “hermeneutic exclusivism” that by then prevailed in anthropology and the history of religions. When I read the article as a new doctoral student in anthropology, i...
Dimitris Xygalatas | Anthropology, University of Connecticut
"Ritual, Embodiment, and Emotional Contagion"
While the Cognitive Science of Religion has brought the mind to the forefront of analysis, it has had little to say about the body. As a result, the mechanisms underlying much-discussed and well-documented effects often remain elusive. In this paper, I will discuss ritual’s ability to facilitate the alignment of people’s bodies...
Justin Barrett | President, Blueprint 1543
"Bringing Technology to Mind: Cognitive Naturalness and Technological Enthusiasm"
Sometimes new technologies spread before society has had sufficient time to evaluate them. Can we make better decisions about whether to be enthusiastic or reticent regarding new tech without waiting for thorough testing or the emergence of unintended negative consequences? In his book Why Religion Is Natural a...
E. Thomas Lawson | Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, Western Michigan University
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NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or ...
Mark Risjord | Director, Institute for Liberal Arts, Emory University + Kareem Khalifa | Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles pay a unique video tribute to their former mentor and friend, Robert McCauley on the occasion of his retirement.
If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please let us know.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get updates on our latest videos.
Follow along with us on Instagram | &nb...
Pascal Boyer | Psychology & Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis
"What Kinds of Religion are "Natural"?"
McCauley emphasized that religious representations are “natural”, in contrast to other cultural systems that require systematic training or leaning and institutional scaffolding. Pursuing this line of reasoning, we can see how some limited domains of religion are far more natural than others, in McCauley’s sense of that ...
Kareem Khalifa | Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles
"The Methodenstreit Ain't Right: McCauley on Interpretation and Explanation"
Does interpretation distinguish the human sciences from the natural sciences? Or do explanations drive the human sciences in a manner akin to their more venerable natural-scientific cousins? These questions fueled the decades-old Methodenstreit (“methodological dispute”) about the foundation...
Bryon Cunningham | Psychology, Occidental College
"Evolution, Mood Disorders, and Religious Coping: Interactions Between Explanatory and Interpretive Theories in Clinical Practice"
In this talk, I advocate for the view that explanatory and interpretive theories can be mutually enriching in clinical practice. I start with the ecumenical view that the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory a...
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