Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

We now recognize that our brains are more plastic than once imagined.  Research in neurobiology has shown that how our brains function is shaped by reciprocal influences between genetics, development, behavior, culture, and environment.  However, much of this research has been done in laboratory and clinical settings, without concurrent examination of how brains vary in the wild.  This talk will o...

What does it mean for a musician to “think musical thoughts”?  How does such thinking interact with processes that seem more like “feeling” than thinking? And how do both relate in real time to pre-established habits of thought and feeling, communal conventions regarding interpretation and performance, one’s own highly trained but flexible motor routines, and feedback from hearing oneself?  We loo...

Thursday, 4:00 pm, PAIS 290 We have known for more than forty years that the brains of humans and other animals are sexually dimorphic. That is, there are reliable differences in the average size, shape, and connectivity of male and female brains. While the existence of neural sex differences is beyond dispute, their significance is controversial. What do neural sex differences mean for social nor...

Over a decade ago, I proposed that memory errors can b e classified into seven fundamental categories or "sins": transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. During the past decade, much has been learned about each of the seven sins, especially as a result of research that has combined the methods of psychology and neuroscience. This pre...

The development of psychopathology occurs through the complex interplay of genes, experience, and the brain.  In this talk, I will describe a developmental neurogenetics approach to understanding the development of psychopathology.  In this approach, individual variability in genetic background is linked to neural function and subsequent risk and resilience through interactions with the environmen...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University. 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   N...

Some things are easier to mix together than others.  There is the proverbial problem of mixing oil and water, but then there is also the smooth blending of coffee and cream.  Bringing together students from film studies and psychology in order to study theory of mind might best be described as midway between these extremes—for us the best metaphor is peanut butter and chocolate—not always easy to...

‘Willusionists’ argue that science is discovering that free will is an illusion. Their arguments take a variety of forms, but they often suggest that if the brain is responsible for our actions, then we are not.  And they predict that ordinary people share this view.  I will discuss some evidence that most people do not think that free will or responsibility conflict with the possibility that our...

Rituals pose a cognitive paradox: although widely used to treat problems, they are cultural conventions and lack causal explanations for their effects. How do people evaluate the efficacy of rituals in the absence of causal information? To address this question, I have examined the kinds of information that influence perceptions of ritual efficacy experimentally (Legare & Souza, 2012; 2013). I...

As a group, we will examine the kinds of ritualistic remedies used to treat a great variety of problems across highly diverse cultural contexts and vast stretches of historical time. Our objective will be to identify the kinds of information people may use to evaluate the efficacy of these pervasive cultural practices. If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please let us know. Sub...

In the context of three major Mediterranean modes of religious thought and practice—mythical, philosophical, and ritual—early Christians produced writings during the first century CE that exhibit six discursive-religious forms of life. The conceptual blending of time, space, and body in this discursive-religious environment created interactive emergence identifiable as prophetic, apocalyptic, wisd...

Scientific research on meditation has grown exponentially in the last two decades, yet that research often remains disconnected from the academic study of religion. Likewise, cognitive scientific approaches to religion often seem irrelevant to the scientific study of meditation. Why do these fields of research largely fail to interact, and what does it tell us about our notion of religion? If you...

In both lay and scientific writing, natural explanations (potentially knowable and empirically verifiable phenomena of the physical world) and supernatural explanations (phenomena that violate or operate outside of, or distinct from, the natural world) are often conceptualized in contradictory or incompatible terms. My research has demonstrated that this common assumption is psychologically inaccu...