Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

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, which is characterized by feeling other people’s emotions. The other is cognitive empathy, which is characterized by understanding other people’s thoughts and motivations. Despite the developments in the study of empathy, the vast majority of empathy paradigms focus only on passive observers, carrying out artificial empathy tasks in socially deprived environments.  This approach significantly limits our understanding of interactive aspects of empathy and how empathic responses affect the distress of the sufferer.We recently proposed a brain model that characterizes how empathic reactions alleviate the distress of a targ

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 an accurate account of past events, a summary of what happened over a period a time, while “story” usually refers to events that may or may not accurately reflect on the past, embellished as necessary by the “storyteller.” But in this distinction race is rarely mentioned. Anyone, irrespective of race, can write histories or tell stories, yet with remarkable consistency in the academic study of music in the U.S., our histories have been written by white persons, usually men, passing from generation to generation with little divergence from the main narratives of “great works” of the “western canon.” And when a nonwhite

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 for Loneliness. Contemporary scholarship is therefore focusing on loneliness not as merely an individual matter, but as a public health issue that negatively impacts both physical and psychological health, even increasing the risk of mortality. This talk examines what is and is not loneliness, conditions of the “lonely society” and the role of culture in loneliness. Based on my long-term ethnographic studies, I point to how society itself can exacerbate experiences of loneliness. One of the most important messages of this talk, is that the anatomy of loneliness is not the anatomy of a single individual, but of a type

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, and whether such mappings are consistent with tonal discourse. We examined explicit and implicit associations. In the explicit paradigm, participants heard a tonality-establishing prime followed by a probe tone and coupled each probe with a subjectively appropriate location on a two-dimensional grid (Exp. 1) or with one of 7 circles differing in size (Exp. 4). The implicit paradigm used a version of the Implicit Association Test to examine associations of tonal stability with vertical position (Exp. 2), lateral position (Exp. 3) and object size (Exp. 5). Tonal stability was indeed associated with perceived physical spa

Chikako Ozawa de-Silva talks with Dietrich Stout about her research and upcoming book "The  Anatomy of Loneliness"

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-computer-interface, sound and visuals. Looking for a new opportunity to continue my research and teach young artists the foundations of critical theory, to subvert problematic ideologies through their own artistic practice. (https://koziejstephanie.com/)

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 experiences, despite physical, or social risk. They don't have a death wish, but seemingly a need for an adrenaline rush, no matter what. In this talk, Dr. Carter explores the lifestyle, psychology, and neuroscience behind adrenaline junkies and daredevils. This tendency, or compulsion, has a role in our culture, but where is the line between healthy and unhealthy thrill-seeking and what can we all learn from thrill seekers? Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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 typically male or female because brain structure can be used to predict the sex category (female/male) of the brain’s owner. I will also present several lines of evidence revealing that sex category explains only a small part of the variability in human brain structure, and a recent study challenging the masculinization hypothesis. I suggest to replace the binary framework with a new, non-binary, framework, according to which mosaic brains reside in a multi-dimensional space that cannot meaningfully be reduced to a male-female continuum or to a binary variable. This framework may also apply to sex-related variables and ha

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 domain is neither fixed nor is simply broadened by religion. A more sophisticated understanding of the relation between religion and morality is thus called for. Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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 in computational psychiatry provides important clues. For example, it is thought that malfunctions in hierarchical inference can explain core patterns of alteration seen in autism and schizophrenia, and can shed new light on so-called ‘psychogenic’ symptoms - functional impairments without standard organic causes. Such accounts reveal the deep continuities between perception and hallucination and may help reveal common processing motifs underlying both typical and atypical forms of human experience.VIDEO LINK

Jinho Choi talks with Lynne Nygaard about his research and lab.

Benjamin Wilson talks with Dietrich Stout about his research and lab.  

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 an instrumentalist view of translation will by default always evaluate target texts through a rhetoric of loss (Venuti). More useful is an a priori appreciation of translation as a creative, authorial act. To this end, I will explore connotation and subjectivity in literary translation, with several examples from contemporary Hispanophone literature.

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 management. However, attempts to integrate insights from TEK with scientific biological thought often misconstrue its content and function. Ethnobiology frequently represents TEK as a cultural module that can be cleanly separated from religious, symbolic, or mythic beliefs, rites and practices, and material culture. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous botanical and zoological TEK, I argue that knowledge of the natural world does not constitute a cultural domain that can be carved off and represented in isolation. This claim is bolstered by psychological studies of belief in ritual efficacy and causal explanations of natura

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/KfTYHlPUfvY ) Inside the Lab | Daniel Dilks (dilkslab) interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

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 is transmitted across populations and within generations — and evolutionary patterns may resemble random drift more than selection in increasingly many settings. To span these different scales and modes of cultural evolution, different representations are useful, including fitness landscapes and a heuristic representing the transparency of payoffs in social learning. Using examples from computational social science, I will discuss how cultural evolution may have profoundly changed from the ancient past to present-day.

Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are highly related as shown by labs around the world and in any populations.  My recent work demonstrates that individual differences in ability to control attention underlies this relationship.  Attention control is both a state and a trait variable. Measures of attention control are highly reliable and valid predictors of performance in multitasking and other complex cognitive tasks. In addition, environmental variables such as sleep deprivation and psychopathology lead to reduced capability to control attention which can, in turn, lead to reduced cognitive ability.

How many published articles and grant awards would you like to add to your CV this year? The more the better, right? But is life in the fast lane really the best way to do science?In her Trends in Cognitive Science (January 2020, vol. 24, no. 1) article, Uta Frith (University College, London) asserts that Fast Science is bad for scientists and for science.  She provides suggestions for ways in which researchers might pursue Slow Science and make faster progress as a result.  Slow Science may also lead to a shift in research culture that is more sustainable and healthier for researchers.LINK TO PAPER

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/5JEuBLdFw38 ) Inside the Lab | Arber Tasimi interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL (https://youtu.be/KkP6QqCTREY) Inside the Lab | Ken Carter interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC