Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

"Performing for Failure: Embodying Grief on Stage Through Ethnodrama"  Yoon Won Chang | PhD Candidate Department of Anthropology, Emory University  This talk is an excerpt from an ethnography that documents the making of a theater performance about grief after suicide in contemporary South Korea. I analyze how the actors and the director interpret and embody the real-life stories collected through...

Raphaël Julliard | Anthropology of the Creative Process | Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Ehess, Paris, France  "The Creative Engine and the Sense of Rightness"  My research operates at the intersection of anthropology, the psychology of creativity, and micro-phenomenology. It is driven by a central question: in the uncertainty of the creative act, how do creators know when it works? While tr...

Chris Krupenye | Psychological & Brain Sciences | Johns Hopkins University  "The Social Minds of Humans and Other Apes"  Humans are defined in no small part by the complexity of our social lives, and the cognitive mechanisms we possess for making sense of our social worlds. These capacities support unique forms of communication, cooperation, and culture. But how did they evolve, and to what extent...

Ken Paller | Neuroscience | Northwestern University  "Sleep-based Memory Reactivation and Opportunities for Better Benefits from Sleep"  "Sleep is critical not only for its restorative benefits but also for its contributions to memory function. Memory reactivation occurs covertly during sleep. Corresponding changes in the brain move memory consolidation forward, enhancing the likelihood of later r...

Jared Medina | Department of Psychology, Emory University My presentation will explore the cognitive mechanisms behind how the mind actively does embodiment. Using evidence from perceptual illusions (such as the mirror box and rubber hand illusion) and individuals with brain damage, I will discuss foundational processes that shape our bodily awareness. This overview is designed to provoke a broade...

Davor Vincze | Guest Artist | Hong Kong Baptist University  "Interdisciplinary Performance in Immersive & Interactive Environments"  In this lecture, Vincze explores how contemporary artistic practices move beyond single disciplines to create experiences that are immersive, interactive, and integrative. Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Janet Murray (immersion and the fourth wall), Ronald Rowe...

Sashank Varma | Interactive Computing / Psychology | Georgia Institute of Technology "The Travelling Salesperson Problem: How Humans 'Efficiently' Solve a Problem Which is 'Hard' for Computers" “The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is an important problem in mathematics and computer science. A TSP instance is a set of points. To solve it is to produce a ‘tour’ that starts at one point and retur...

Shaun Gallagher | Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy | University of Memphis "Compassion: Real and Artificial" I’ve proposed a pattern theory of compassion. On this view, compassion is a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include physiological, cognitive, and affective processes, relational/intersubjective processes, and motivational/action tendencies (Gallagher, Raf...

Deepu Murty | Associate Professor, Chair of the Committee for an Inclusive Community Psychology | University of Oregon "Understanding, Remembering, and Communicating Threatening Events" Threat alters how we represent information. Under threat, individuals tend to prioritize central details at the expense of surrounding contextual information—a shift that reflects and drives changes in medial tempo...

David Sloan Wilson | Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology / Biological Sciences Binghamton University | State University of New York  "Mind, Brain and Culture from a Generalized Darwinian Perspective"  Generalized Darwinism refers to any process combining the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication (VSR). It is both old and new: Old, because all the insights associated...

Apurva Ratan Murty | Assistant Professor, Psychology | Georgia Institute of Technology  Jared Medina | Associate Professor, Psychology | Emory University  "To Predict or To Explain"  What is even the point of our science? Is it to build models that predict what brains and minds will do even if we don’t fully understand how, or is it to explain the inner workings of the mind and brain, even if our...

Gil Weinberg | Professor, School of Music and Founding Director of the Center for Music Technology | Georgia Institute of Technology  "Embodied Creative Machines"  Human creativity is directly linked to embodied interaction with the physical environment. At the Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech, we explore how embodiment effects and enhances both human and artificial creativity. The talk...

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 in...

Shay Welch | Associate Professor of Philosophy | Spelman College  "The Bio-Psycho-Social Affect Loop, HyperSensitivity, and Radical Embodied Cognition" 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 |   Facebook   NOTE:  The views and opinions expresse...

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 devel...

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...

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 distinc...

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 evolutionar...

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...

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...

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...

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 inv...

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...

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 be...

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 ne...