Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Humans and Proboscideans (the taxonomic order of elephants as well as several extinct animals such as mammoth) have shared habitats across the Old and New Worlds during the past two million years, starting with the appearance of the Genus Homo in Africa and following the dispersals of humans to other continents. Proboscideans were included in the human diet starting from the Lower Paleolithic and...

Drawing upon data from an ongoing ethnographic study of embodiment and emotion in everyday interaction among cohabitating couples in the U.S., this presentation engages with key theoretical and methodological questions involved in conducting ethnographic research at the intersection of linguistic and biocultural anthropology. My discussion, specifically, focuses on video-recordings of naturally oc...

Moral outrage shapes fundamental aspects of social life and is now widespread in online social networks. How does social media change the expression of moral outrage and its social consequences? Drawing on evidence from neuroeconomics, I will develop a theory that social media platforms amplify moral outrage by exploiting our capacity to learn from social rewards. Data from observational studies o...

Communication is inherently social and requires an efficient exchange of complex cues between individuals. What are the behavioral and neural processes that allow people to understand, couple to, and learn from others in complex, everyday interactions? My research examines the interpersonal dynamics of communication across the lifespan using behavioral, computational, and dual-brain neuroimaging t...

Universal human rights are defined by international agreements, law, foreign policy, and the concept of inherent human dignity.  However, rights defined on this basis can be readily subverted by overt and covert disagreements and can be treated as distant geopolitical events rather than bearing on individuals’ everyday lives.  A robust case for universal human rights is urgently needed and must me...

Romantic bonds reinforce our health and well-being while their sudden loss is highly detrimental. To identify the neural and genetic mechanisms that contribute to the positive physiological effects of social bonds, my laboratory has taken advantage of the unique behavioral repertoire of monogamous prairie voles. Unlike laboratory rats and mice, prairie voles form life-long pair bonds and exhibit d...

Aubrey Kelly, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Emory University talks with Dietrich Stout, Assistant Director of the CMBC about her work in https://www.thekellylab.org/ http://psychology.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/kelly-aubrey.html   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...

Bree Beal talks about the value he's received from completing the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture's Certificate Program.  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 expressed by the speaker do not ne...

There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, this talk—...

Unpacking the nature of emotions is critical to a scientific understanding of the human condition.  Recent evidence reveals that emotion categories contain considerable neural, physiological and behavioral variation, challenging long-held views of emotions. Consistent with these broad patterns, I will present research highlighting diversity in perceptions of emotion across societies and individual...

Empathy allows us to understand and share one another’s emotional experiences. It allows one to quickly and automatically relate to the emotional states of others, which is essential for the regulation of social interactions and cooperation toward shared goals. Behavioral and neuroimaging findings have led researchers to identify two broad types of empathic reactions. One is emotional empathy, whi...

Presented by Music Department, Emory University with co-sponsorships by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Hightower Fund, Department of Philosophy, Department of Film and Media, and the Department of German Studies. In certain languages the words for “history” and “story” are the same, as in French (histoire) or Russian (история). There are of course differences. “History” usually implies a...

Loneliness is everybody’s business. Neither a pathology, nor a rare affliction, it is part of the human condition. Severe and chronic loneliness, however, is a threat to individual and public health and appears to be on the rise. In 2018, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said, “Loneliness is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” and appointed the country’s first ever Minister f...

Musicians ubiquitously apply spatial metaphors when describing the stability hierarchy established by tonal syntax: stable tones are considered spatially central and, as gravitational foci, spatially lower. We investigated whether listeners, musicians and non-musicians, indeed associate tonal relationships with visuospatial dimensions, including spatial height, centrality, laterality, and size, an...

Stephanie Koziej talks with Dietrich Stout about her work and upcoming gallery show, "Tender Rhythms"  Stephanie Koziej, PhD is an award-winning interdisciplinary researcher, artist, educator, curator and activist working on the intersection of the humanities, arts, science and technology. Specialized in theorizing intimate connections through interactive art installations, with the use of brain-c...

Chikako Ozawa de-Silva talks with Dietrich Stout about her research and upcoming book " The  Anatomy of Loneliness " 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 expressed by the speaker do not necessarily...

Most of us crave new experiences and sensations. Whether it's our attraction to that new burger place or the latest gadget, newness tugs at us. But what about those who can't seem to get enough? They jump out of planes, climb skyscrapers, and will eat anything (even poisonous pufferfish)… Prompting others to ask 'what's wrong' with them. These are high sensation-seekers and they crave intense expe...

According to Elliot Turiel, religious affiliation does not influence the distinction between so-called “moral" and “conventional” norms. By contrast, according to Jonathan Haidt, religious affiliation results in a broadened moral domain: As he puts it, “big gods have big moralities." This talk will present new data showing the limits of both Turiel's and Haidt’s views. The scope of the moral domai...

Although most scientists nowadays would not argue that brains of males and females belong to two distinct types, the binary framework still dominates thinking about the relations between sex and the brain. I’ll describe challenges to the binary formulation of these relations and how this formulation has evolved in response to these challenges, with the latest version claiming that brains are typic...

An emerging body of work in cognitive philosophy and computational neuroscience depicts human brains as prediction machines – multi-level networks that specialize in using generative models to both match and anticipate the evolving stream of sensory information. However, the relationship between these posited cascades of prediction and conscious human experience itself remains unclear. Recent work...

Benjamin Wilson talks with Dietrich Stout about his research and lab.    BIO Benjamin Wilson received his BSc in Psychology from the University of York, UK, in 2005, before completing an MSc in Evolutionary Psychology from the University of Liverpool, UK, in 2008. In 2014, he completed his PhD in Neuroscience at Newcastle University, using behavioral and neuroimaging approaches to directly compare...

Jinho Choi talks with Lynne Nygaard about his research and lab. BIO Jinho Choi  is an assistant professor in the  Department of Computer Science , the  Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods , and the  Program in Linguistics  at  Emory University . He conducted his postdoctoral research at the  University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2014 with  Andrew McCallum . He was a full-time lecturer i...

Translation is often thought of as a transparent, objective act in which words from a source language are rendered into a target language, thereby carrying a message into new linguistic territory. Theorists, practitioners and lay readers argue tirelessly over the success or failure of various translations and their degree of (in-)fidelity. In this talk, I would like to begin from the premise that...

Groups adopt strikingly different attitudes and practices centered on how humans and other living beings relate to their environment. These bodies of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) have been the focus of extensive research in ethnobiology. Understanding TEK is important both theoretically and for advancing political projects such as ecological conservation and cooperative resource manageme...

For millennia, sociocultural complexity increased (and occasionally decreased) gradually over many human generations, as people inherited traditional knowledge within kin-based local communities. In these settings, where knowledge was shared within populations and across generations, selection was probably the key driver in norms of human adaptive behavior. In the 21st century, however, knowledge...