Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Research on Pavlovian fear conditioning has been very successful in revealing what has come to be called the “fear system” of the brain.  The field has now matured to the point where a sharper conceptualization of what is being studied could be very useful as we go forward. Terms like “fear conditioning” and “fear system” blur the distinction between processes that give rise to conscious feelings...

Broadly speaking, empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” (Iacoboni). More narrowly, an emotion is usually deemed empathic only when “the agent is aware that it is caused by the perceived, imagined, or inferred plight of another, or it expresses concern for the welfare of another” (Maibom). In the broad sense, the tender reciprocal relationship that develops betwee...

The widely held belief that the diagnosis of mental disorder is a matter exclusively for value-free science has been much reinforced by recent dramatic advances in the neurosciences. In this lecture, I will use a detailed case study of delusion and spiritual experience to indicate to the contrary that values come into the diagnosis of mental disorders directly through the language of the diagnosti...

Normal self-consciousness typically includes the compelling sense that my own experiences belong to me – one person, one whole and unified center of consciousness. That common and compelling feature of wholeness and distinctness often is lost or broken in certain experiences in schizophrenia as well as in mystical or religious experiences. The experience of self-consciousness or self-awareness in...

A growing body of research points to a significant effect of bilingualism on cognitive outcomes across the lifespan. The main finding is evidence for the enhancement of executive control at all stages in the lifespan, with the most dramatic results being maintained cognitive performance in elderly adults and protection against the onset of dementia. These results shed new light on the question of...

Neuromechanical principles define the properties and problems that shape neural solutions for movement. Although the theoretical and experimental evidence is debated, I will present arguments for consistent modular structures in motor patterns that are neuromechanical solutions for movement particular to an individual and shaped by evolutionary, developmental, and learning processes. NEUROSCIENCE...

Advancements in machine learning and data mining have already led to amazing breakthroughs in the natural sciences, including the unlocking of the human genome and the detection of subatomic particles. Such techniques promise to wield a similar impact on the study of mind. In my talk I will discuss how the large-scale structure of the human mental lexicon, roughly 50,000 words, can be recovered fr...

The engineering and applied math communities often exploit the fact that natural stimuli have significant structure that lends itself well to dimensionality reduction. The efficient coding hypothesis for sensory neural coding postulates that stages of neural processing should sequentially make the representations more efficient by removing stimulus redundancies, and this is often expressed in the...

Animals perform a complex array of behaviors, from changes in body posture to vocalizations to other dynamic outputs. Far from being a disordered collection of actions, however, there is thought to be an intrinsic structure to the set of behaviors and their temporal and functional organization. In this talk, I will introduce a novel method for mapping the behavioral space of organisms. This method...

Most sensory, cognitive, and motor functions rely on the interaction among many neurons. To analyze the activity of many neurons together, many groups are now adopting advanced statistical methods, such as dimensionality reduction. In this talk, I will first describe how dimensionality reduction can be used in a closed-loop experimental setting to understand how learning is shaped by the underlyin...

I discuss two new studies that focus on general questions about the cognitive science and neural implementation of speech and language. I come to (currently) unpopular conclusions about both domains. Based on a first set of experiments, using fMRI and exploiting the temporal statistics of speech, I argue for the existence of a speech-specific processing stage that implicates a particular neuronal...

Ritual is a puzzling aspect of behavior, as it involves obvious expenditures of effort, energy and resources without equally obvious payoffs. Evolutionary theorists have long proposed that such costly behaviors would not have survived throughout human history unless they conveyed certain benefits to their practitioners. But what might those benefits be, and how can they be operationalised and meas...

In 1993, Time magazine dubbed Miami “the Capital of Latin America.” At the time, Miami’s Hispanic / Latino population was at roughly 50% and was overwhelmingly Cuban-origin. In the ensuing two decades, Miami’s Hispanic / Latino population has continued to grow, reaching 65% in Miami-Dade County and 78% in the City of Miami in 2010. At the same time, the Cuban-origin share has fallen to below 50%....

Anthropology has a long history of investigating human variation with the goal of understanding the genetic, environmental, and epigenetic sources of variation existing within and between human populations. Yet the field has historically focused on variation from the neck down. In this discussion we identify inherent challenges to understanding the varieties of mental experience and explore severa...

People often choose larger future rewards over smaller immediate ones, but then abandon that choice before the future reward arrives. Examples include starting a diet but then not sticking to it, quitting smoking but then relapsing, and most new year's resolutions. Psychologists often explain such behavior by reference to fundamental limitations in human cognitive systems, such as limited willpowe...

We will discuss our collaboration as co-teachers of a course called "Sleep in Science and Culture" and our consultations with each other since. We aim to show how a discussion between disciplines can help define what is normal and what is pathological, and the consequences of making those distinctions. (September 29, 2015) If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please le...

In psychology (e.g., Schooler, 2011) and other fields (e.g., Jennions & Møller, 2001), there are reported cases of effect sizes declining over time. Later studies of a given phenomenon report smaller effect sizes than earlier studies. This decline suggests a publication bias toward large effects and regression to the mean. In the current study, we examine whether evidence exists for such a dec...

In recent years, cultural sociologists have grown increasingly interested in psychology and some influential psychologists (e.g., Oishi et al 2009; Haidt 2012) have argued for closer connections to sociological theory and research. In this talk, I will outline some past and current work in which I have attempted to create bridges between sociology and psychology. I will also consider some concrete...

There has recently been an international surge of interest in building large brain models. The European Union's Human Brain Project (HBP) has received 1 billion euros worth of funding, and President Obama announced the Brain Initiative along with a similar level of funding. However the large scale models affiliated with both projects do not demonstrate how their generated complex neural activity r...

Why is there some “religious stuff” in all human societies? A tempting answer is that religions are somehow grounded in evolved properties of human minds. Recently, some have even suggested that religion could have been selected for ensuring large-scale cooperation and prosocial behavior. Considering the empirical evidence leads to a more sober understanding of the evolutionary processes underpinn...

An essential feature of any society is the capacity of its members to distinguish one another from outsiders and reject outsiders on that basis. Some social insects and humans are able to form huge societies because their membership is anonymous—members aren’t required to distinguish all the other members as individuals for the society to remain unified. Societies are instead bonded by shared iden...

The language(s) that we know shape the way we process and represent the speech that we hear. Since real-world speech recognition almost always takes place in conditions that involve some sort of background noise, we can ask whether the influence of linguistic knowledge and experience on speech processing extends to the particular challenges posed by speech-in-noise recognition, specifically the pe...

Collective memory—sometimes referred to as public memory, or social (or cultural) memory—is a term commonly used in the humanities. It posits the act of remembering as ineluctably linked to what the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (who is credited with elaborating the concept) called the “social frameworks” of memory such as family, class, ethnic, national or religious communities. Within the...

The time seems right to rethink how the fields of cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience could take advantage of each other. Both fields make use of quantitative models, one of cognitive processes the other of brain processes. Since the brain ultimately supports cognitive processes one should think these levels of description should merge. Interestingly that has largely not happened y...

Few would contest the claim that Shakespeare was a great poet and playwright. Less indisputable, perhaps, is the notion that he was also a great social theorist. By this, I'm not referring to theory in the weak sense of occasional philosophically nuanced comments by characters, or speeches with philosophical overtones. I mean that Shakespeare was a social theorist in the strong sense that, in addi...