Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

The "Embodiment of Thinking" a musical interlude/lesson sung by Dr. Ken Cheng. 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 reflect those held by the C...

Robert Hampton introduces Ken Cheng: Ants as a group feature especially small brains even for their small size, and yet many species are expert navigators forging learned routes about their habitat. Working to bring food to their next, they make excellent research animals for navigational research because they do not satiate when given food repeatedly. I review briefly ants' navigational tool kit,...

All biological sounds originate with body movements. However, theories of speech production and perception have not generally been grounded in models of how bodies move. In this talk, I will argue that the body has been a crucial missing link in theories of speech, and will show how a deeper – and less culturally biased – understanding of the body’s role in speech, gained partly through advances i...

High Church evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts - organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts. Research in psychology and neuroscience - involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans - now suggests that g...

A striking feature of the real world is that there is too much to think about. This feature is remarkably understudied in laboratory contexts, where the study of decision-making is typically limited to small “choice sets” defined by an experimenter. In such cases an individual may devote considerable attention to each item in the choice set. But in everyday life we are often not presented with def...

I outline a computational theory of phenomenal conscious experience, that is, of the basic awareness and its obligatory attendant feelings, involving neither the awareness of awareness nor a sense of self. This Dynamical Emergence Theory (DET) identifies phenomenality with certain intrinsic properties of the dynamics of the system in question. More specifically, it aims to explain the structure, t...

What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an approximation to such a grammar, for any language, has been formulated; the idea that grammar is universal and innately specified has proved barren; and attempts to show h...

What are the components of musical ability, and to what extent are they shared with spoken language processing? Both music and language are composed of sounds combined into complex sequences. Both also exhibit tonality, pitch, and rhythmic grouping and convey emotional meaning. Drs. Laura Emmery (Department of Music) and Christina Tzeng (Department of Psychology) will explore the intersections bet...

How your digital footprint can improve your life, advance science, and harm you 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 reflect those held by the Center for...

To make sense of sound, there is a wide activation of sensorimotor, cognitive, and reward circuitry in the brain. Active and repeated engagement with sounds that activate all these circuits, therefore, is a route to honing our brain function. Playing music is like hitting the jackpot for the brain because it requires the motor system, deeply engages our emotions, and absolutely gives us a cognitiv...

Cultural traits—behaviors that are learned from others—can change more rapidly than genes and can be inherited not only from parents but also from teachers and peers. How does this complex process of cultural evolution differ from and interact with genetic evolution? In this talk, I will discuss the dynamics of culturally transmitted behaviors on dramatically different evolutionary timescales: the...

Which Way to the Dawn of Speech?      (click for link to PowerPoint) Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science Louis-Jean Boë  & Thomas R. Sawallis  1 GIPSA-lab, CNRS, Grenoble Alpes University, France 2 New College, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA In the weeks around New Years, 2017, two complementary articles discussing speech evolution appeared in respecte...

Barbara Ternes was one of several personal assistants to Margaret Mead. Barbara Ternes served as Dr. Mead’s “gatekeeper” during the early 70’s, scheduling and travelling extensively with Dr. Mead. Barbara Ternes was married to the late, Alan Ternes, former Editor Emeritus of the Natural History Magazine and editor of the 1975 publication, Ants, Indidans, and Little Dinosaurs. The Ternes lived in N...

VIDEO Although great apes collaborate for some purposes, recent studies comparing chimpanzees and human children suggest that human collaboration is unique both cognitively and motivationally. In particular humans seem adapted for collaborative foraging, as even young children display numerous relevant mechanisms, from special ways of coordinating and communicating to special ways of sharing food...

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer...

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer...

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer...

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer...

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer...

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer...

Perspectives from dance professionals and professors (Teague and Abarca) on the issue of self-consciousness and the quest for authenticity will be discussed in light of developmental research on the origins of self-concept (Rochat). A developmental blueprint of self-awareness will be presented (Rochat), alongside somatic approaches to dance training, grounding the discussion in what might be the f...

The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth and the Transition to Adulthood tells the story of the Baltimore-based Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a probability sample of typical urban children who came of age over the last decades of the 20th Century and into the first decade of the 21st. It is an account of their social mobility from origins to destinations, framed...

Taking the Lead on Motivation Proponents of Predictive Processing (PP) describe it as a grand unifying theory of the mind (Hohwy 2014, Clark 2015). However, the relationship between PP and its closest rival, reinforcement learning (RL), is controversial. Unificationists about PP sometimes argue that active inference can account for core features of RL (Friston et al. 2009). Anti-unificationists re...

Professor Tecumseh Fitch Dept of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Austria I investigate human language viewed as a species-typical aspect of our biology, and attempt to understand it via comparison with other species’ cognition and communication systems (the comparative approach). The first step in doing so is to break language down to its components (the multi-component approach) and then...

Neuroscience has advanced considerably in the 40 years after Nagel’s classic essay, posing the question of “what it’s like to be a bat.” Drawing on recent results in which dogs are trained for awake fMRI studies, Profs. Berns and Risjord will discuss and debate whether we are at the point where neuroscience can provide meaningful insights into the subjective experiences of other animals. If you wo...