Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

"Widowhood, Archives, and the Musical Work of Mourning in Postwar Europe" Martha Sprigge | Musicology | University of California, Santa Barbara Presented by Dept. of Music with co-sponsorship from Dept. of Philosophy / Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture / Center for Faculty Development and ExcellenceThis presentation examines how gendered mourning practices have shaped the historiography of German art music after World War II. It focuses on widows in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). Artistic widows in the GDR took on considerable emotional labor in the wake of their husbands’ deaths: they maintained their husbands’ gravestones, oversaw their archives, held together their artistic communities, and sustained their ideological commitments. Several were renowned artists in their own right, including Helene Weigel (actress married to dramaturg Bertolt Brecht) and Ruth Berghaus (theater director married to composer Paul Dessau). These women were sidelined in their husbands’ state funer

Have you thought about applying to the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER)?  These prestigious awards can provide a major boost to your career and require an integration of education and research activities different from more conventional research grant applications.Learn more about this program and how to put together a successful application through this discussion and informal Q&A with two recent Emory awardees, Dr. Joyce Ho (Computer Science) and Dr. John Lindo (Anthropology)Timing cues:0:09 Introduction, Dietrich Stout, CMBC Director 1:02 What is an NSF Early Career Grant? 2:20 Introduction of Joyce Ho and John Lindo 3:56 Is this the right grant? 4:59 Should you volunteer to serve on an NSF panel? What are panels looking for? 13:55 Collaboration and stages of putting your program together 16:04 Educational component and innovations 18:30 NSF vs. NIH 18:57 What do panelist want to know? 19:15 At what point in your career should you apply? 25:03 How is the "educational component" ass

Keynote Address | The Evolution of Culture and Technology Mini Symposium | Tel Aviv University  The simple fact of tool-making no longer provides a sharp dividing line between “Man the Tool-Maker” and the rest of the animal world. It is now clear that many other species make and use tools, and that distinctly human technology emerged through a long, multi-lineal, and meandering evolutionary process rather than the crossing of some critical threshold. However, it would be a mistake to underestimate the transformative effects of technology on everything from our hands and brains to our reproductive strategies and social organization. Understanding this complex and contingent evolutionary history will require simultaneous attention to particularistic details and more generalizable processes and relationships. In this lecture, I provide a critical review of evolutionary approaches to technology and, drawing on evidence from my own lab’s experimental neuroarchaeology studies of stone tool making, advance a “Percep

Vernelle A. A. Noel | Architecture & Interactive Computing | Georgia Institute of TechnologyCraft practices and communities carry histories and cultures of people, knowledges, innovations, and social ties. Some reasons for their disappearance include dying practitioners, lacking pedagogy, changing practices, and technocentric developments. How might we employ computation in the restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration of these practices, knowledges, and communities? How might social and cultural values and practices shape cognitive abilities and creative expressions? How might investigations in these practices at the intersection of culture, cognition, and material inform our conceptualizations and understanding of the human mind? In this talk, I present research in the dying craft of wire-bending, and the diasporic design practice of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival to answer some of these questions. By employing design/ making, computation, and ethnographic methods as forms of inquiry, I will share

Karen Adolph | Psychology and Neural Science | New York University All behavior is movement—walking, talking, reaching, eating, looking, touching—all of it. Motor behavior is foundational for learning and doing in everyday life. Most important for functional movement is behavioral flexibility—the ability to tailor movements to local conditions. Where does flexible, functional behavior come from? I argue that complex, intelligent behavior emerges in real time and over development from immense amounts of varied, time-distributed, error-filled practice perceiving, planning, and acting in a changing body with changing skills in a changing world. Perception guides movement and movement gives rise to perceptual information. So planning involves obtaining information for perceptual systems and using perceptual information to decide what to do next.

Tobias Overath | Psychology and Neuroscience | Duke UniversitySpeech perception entails the transformation of the acoustic waveform that reaches our ears to linguistic representations (e.g., syntax, semantics) to enable communication. The nature of this acousto-linguistic transformation - how different acoustic properties of the speech signal are processed throughout the auditory system and then interface with linguistic representations - is still not fully understood. I will present data from a series of fMRI studies from my lab that allow the explicit dissociation of acoustic analyses and linguistic analyses of temporal speech structure, using a novel 'speech quilting' algorithm that controls the temporal structure of speech. The results suggest that superior temporal sulcus (STS) and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) play important roles in the acousto-linguistic transformation of temporal speech structure.

Andrew Buskell | Public Policy | Georgia Institute of TechonologyThe current consensus in cultural evolution is that cumulative cultural evolution (“CCE”) set hominins apart: capacities for CCE are distinctive to hominins and help explain their geographic spread and evolutionary success. CCE is an intuitive idea: cultural traits are modified upon over time as they are learned by others—and these modifications can generate traditions of extraordinary complexity, adaptiveness, and economy. Yet this intuitive idea has been remarkably hard to operationalize and define. A key reason for is that work on CCE is “lumped”, adopting a general and coarse-grained analysis of phenomena. It is lumped because researchers focus on explaining paradigmatic cases of cumulative cultural change—notably, the technologies and skills of Holocene-era hominins. But to understand the role of CCE in explaining hominin evolution, one needs to look at the margins of the concept’s applicability in early hominins and non-human animals. Look

Robert Liu is the new Associate Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, a Professor of Biology and an Affiliate Scientist at the Emory National Primate Research Center. He is interviewed about his research in his Computational Neuroethology Lab by CMBC Director and Professor of Anthropology, Dietrich Stout.Bio PageRobert Liu Lab WebsiteNational Primate Research Center

Kathryn Kadous, the Schaefer Chaired Professor of Accounting and Director and Associate Dean of PhD Program in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University talks with Lynne Nygaard, the recent past-director of the CMBC and current Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology at Emory, discuss her research into the judgement and decision-making issues in auditing and accounting and spotlights some of her favorite insights. https://goizueta.emory.edu/faculty/profiles/kathryn-kadous

Frans de Waal (Director of the Living Links Center and C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology, Emory University) sits down for a discussion with the CMBC former-Director, Lynne Nygaard (Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, Emory University) and Dietrich Stout (CMBC Director and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Emory University) to discuss his research, career, and recent book, "Different, Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist" (https://bookshop.org/books/different-gender-through-the-eyes-of-a-primatologist/9781324007104)

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 continued until the final stages of the Pleistocene, providing humans with both meat and, especially, fat. Meat eating, large-game hunting and food-sharing appeared in Africa some two million years ago and these practices were accompanied and supported by growing social complexity and cooperation. This argument emphasizes the dependency of early humans on calories derived from mega herbivores through the hunting of large and medium-sized animals as a fundamental and very early adaptation mode of Lower Paleolithic humans, and the possible emergence of social and behavioral mechanisms that appeared at these early times

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 occurring interaction in couples’ homes alongside time-matched psychophysiological data on moment-to-moment shifts in each partners’ respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) —an aspect of heart rate variability (HRV)—gathered with a mobile impedance cardiography device (Mindware Technologies, Ltd. Westerville, OH). In analyzing video data, I demonstrate how the theories and methods of linguistic anthropology complicate a quantitative approach to emotion-in-interaction that often hinges upon the identification of specific, discrete “emotions” and/or designation of particular interactions as either “conflict” or “agreement” (s

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 of millions of social media posts and behavioral experiments confirm that social rewards amplify moral outrage at the level of individual users. I’ll then present evidence for several troubling consequences of amplified digital outrage: it facilitates the spread of misinformation, exacerbates hate speech and networked harassment, and inflates collective beliefs about intergroup hostility. I’ll conclude with a discussion of the ethical and policy implications of these findings.

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 techniques in real-life environments. To understand the real-time dynamics of communication between children and caregivers at the biological level, I have used brain-to-brain coupling as a measure of interpersonal alignment to predict communicative success and learning outcomes. In one study, we found that activation in the infant prefrontal cortex preceded and drove similar activation in the adult brain, a result that advances our understanding of children’s influence over the accommodative behaviors of caregivers. In other work, we have found that both pupillary synchrony and neural synchrony while listening to sto

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 meet several disparate requirements: (a) a framework that resolves tautological definitions reached solely by mutual, revocable agreement; (b) a rationale that transcends differences in beliefs, creed and culture; and (c) a personalization that empowers both individuals and governments to further human rights protections.  We propose that human rights in existing agreements comprise five elemental types: (1) agency, autonomy and self-determination; (2) freedom from want; (3) freedom from fear; (4) uniqueness; and (5) unconditionality, including protections for vulnerable populations.  We further propose these rights an

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 distress upon partner separation. In this seminar, I will focus on recent work delineating transcriptional signatures of pair bonding and partner loss as an example of how we have leveraged our research on bond formation to understand the neural processes that enable recovery from loss. Ultimately, I anticipate that this work will lead to novel ways in which we can harness the positive biological effects of social bonds and ameliorate the emotional pain and harmful health consequences of loss.

Bree Beal talks about the value he's received from completing the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture's Certificate Program. 

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 

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—based on An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)—will reveal how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive. Klein will tell the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation

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 individuals. This research is informed by the constructionist proposal that culturally learned knowledge may account for the discrete and functional nature of emotions. I will suggest that the functioning of the conceptual system (what we "know" about emotions) serves as a source of both variation and consistency across levels. To illustrate, I will present ongoing research examining synchrony in emotion perception across individuals and outline the future directions of this approach.