Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/oWKZz4HWtmk ) Inside the Lab | Lauren Klein interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL (https://youtu.be/OK-_FL0zePY ) Inside the Lab | John Lindo (lindoancientdna.com) interviewed by Dietrch Stout, Associate Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/9WjuZKPWQb8 ) Inside the Lab | Marcela Benitez interviewed by Dietrich Stout, Associate Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/6nyI8oGw59k ) Inside the Lab | Mel Konner interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

An interdisciplinary discussion about the intersection of Theater and Linguistics, and specifically their approach to dialects.  The lunch will explore language, and its performance, through the lens of emotion, culture, and practice.     

No sensory system is an island.  The auditory and visual systems work together to provide information about the nature of the events occurring in the environment.  I will talk about why they do this, where in the brain it happens, and how the brain performs the necessary computations to achieve it.  I will emphasize the following general insights:  1. Interactions between sensory systems occur at the earliest possible point in the auditory pathway, namely, the eardrum. 2. The brain may employ a strategy akin to time-division multiplexing, in which neural activity fluctuates across time, to allow representations to represent more than one simultaneous stimulus.   These findings speak to several general problems confronting modern neuroscience such as the hierarchical organization of brain pathways and limits on perceptual/cognitive processing. 

Media require active perception from their users. Videogames provide perhaps the most obvious example of this; in order to perceive the world of a videogame, a user must play the game, negotiating its spaces and manipulating its objects. While perception of cinema may be less obviously active, it is in fact no less active than is perception of games. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, the emergence of film established new modes of experience for viewers, and perception of films remains a skill that cinema-goers continually develop and refine. Perception of media has often been treated as an exception to the operations of perception in general. Reflecting on the twin examples of the 2011 videogame The Unfinished Swan and the 1900 film How it Feels to be Run Over, I propose that active perception in media use might be seen as exemplary of, rather than exceptional to, the work we do every day in order to perceive the world around us.

Tool making and use are often considered a hallmark of intelligence: the discovery that New Caledonian crows made tools caused a flurry of excitement in the world of animal cognition with much talk of 'feathered apes’.  Of the explanations for the rarity of tool making across the animal kingdom (e.g. brain size, group size, sociality), none appear satisfactory.  The rarity of the behaviour makes it difficult to study in an evolutionary context, but a phenotypically similar behaviour, nest building, is not at all rare. And it is increasingly amenable to investigation: I will present evidence of decision making with regard to appropriate materials and local environmental conditions, associating building decisions with reproductive success and the possibility of cultural evolution of built structures.

To start with, the talk will review and update the hypothesis (How the Brain Got Language, Oxford University Press, 2012) that early Homo sapiens were language-ready in the sense that they had brains that could have supported language had it already been developed – but they were not language-using. The approach sees protolanguage emerging from complex recognition and imitation of manual skills via biocultural evolution, while cultural evolution alone supported the emergence of language from protolanguage. The key innovation in this talk is the argument that this approach supports the view that the H. sapiens language-ready brain had the more general property of being construction-ready. This notion will be illustrated with data from monkey and human tool use and bird nest construction (introducing the word becculation, manipulation with a beak, into the English language) as well as data and speculations on symbols and symbolism in the protohistory of human architecture.

Although using tools is a central feature of human biology, the lack of biologically-grounded theory in this domain limits our ability to study the phenomenon to relate it to human evolution. To begin to fill this gap, I present a theory of tooling applicable to individuals of all species. The theory draws on (a) ecological (perception–action) theory in psychology, that links an animal’s behavior to its perception of affordances, (b) psychological theories about how animals perceive space and move themselves in space, and (c) the biomechanical approach to the study of body movement and the development of coordination of movement.  Tooling theory supports testable hypotheses concerning a) the forms of tooling present in diverse taxa with varying perceptual and motor systems and bodies, b) the effects of specific environmental, individual, and task features on a specific performance, and c) the development of tooling. The determination that an action is or is not tooling has no bearing on a judgment about the i

Jumping spiders (family Salticidae) have unique, complex eyes and a capacity for spatial vision exceeding that for any other animals of similar size. Most salticid species prey on insects but some species from a subfamily, Spartaeinae, are known to express an active preference for other spiders as prey (‘araneophagy’). We can gain important insights into animal cognition by exploring how these species use strategies for targeting this dangerous type of prey. For instance, studies using expectancy violation methods have shown that one of these spartaeine species, Portia africana, works with representations of different types of prey spiders. It also plans detours for reaching vantage points for capturing prey, and can decide ahead of time whether a detour is necessary. Moreover, new expectancy-violation experiments have shown that Portia africana represents the number of prey in a scene; P. africana becomes less inclined to complete a detour path if it encounters a different number of prey from what it had see

Introduction by Laura Emmery, Emory University, Department of Music Emory Music Department's McDowell Lecture Series withCo-Sponsored by CMBC, The Hightower Fund, and the Program in Linguisticspresents:Lawrence Zbikowski, Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago"Music and the Language of Emotions" His research focuses on the application of recent work in cognitive science to a range of problems confronted by music scholars, including the nature of musical grammar, the relationship between music and movement, text-music relations, and the structure of theories of music. He is the author of Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (2002) and Foundations of Musical Grammar (2017). He has recently contributed chapters to Music and Consciousness 2, Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse, The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition, Music in Time: Phenomenology, Perception, Performance, and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. During 2010–11 he held a fell

Contemporary psychology and neuroscience have shed little light on mental states associated with enhanced cognitive capacities. We report the existence of enhanced cognitive states, in which dramatic temporary enhancements in focused attention were observed in participants, engaged in high-arousal activities (playing action videogames, solving physical puzzle games in escape rooms, or performing Himalayan yoga visualization practices), whose skills matched the difficulty of the activity. Using EKG methodology, we showed that arousal, indicated by withdrawal from parasympathetic activity and activation of the sympathetic nervous system is a necessary physiological condition underlying these states. The EEG data demonstrated significant centro-parietal alpha and beta rhythm desynchronization, suggesting active mental states, in which participants are preparing for execution of a motor act or imagining such movement. The findings provide the first scientific evidence for the existence of unique mental states re

MARIEKE VAN VUGT Neuroscience, University of Groningen, NL From Tibetan monks to dancers and back: trying to understand the role of inter-brain synchrony in human connection While laboratory research can tell us many interesting things, there are many situations that are not captured by existing paradigms. In this talk, I will share my experience investigating the practice of monastic debate, a reasoning-based meditation practice that is a core component of life at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. One of the notable features of this practice is that it is a dyadic practice, and for this reason we decided to investigate it using EEG hyperscanning. We observed increases in the synchrony between the brains of the two debaters when they were agreeing with each other compared to what they were disagreeing. One of the interesting features of debate is that it is not only a challenging mental practice, but it also has a strong physical component. In some sense, it almost looks like a choreography. To disentangle whethe

LENA TING Biomedical Engineering , Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University Neuromechanics of balance: from flamingos to dancers Our ability to move in the world, and even to stand upright depend on complex and flexible neuromechanical interactions. Our experimental and computational studies of balance in one-, two-, and four-legged standing have revealed many ways that the brain and body interact and influence each other in the control of movement. I will demonstrate how the neural and mechanical computations used for balance are shaped by evolutionary, learning, and disease processes as well as behavioral context. Despite our individual differences in balance control, the same neuromechanical principles can be used to understand and model balance in health and disease.

AUDREY DUARTE Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology How measuring the sleeping brain at home can help us understand aging and Alzheimer’s disease One of the most common and arguably most distressing cognitive declines in aging, in large part because it is also an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, is in episodic memory. As people age, they report more everyday difficulties in, for example, remembering someone’s name or the location of a placed item. More serious memory failures include forgetting that one has already taken her medication that day. Although there is a general pattern of memory decline and related changes in underlying brain structure and function, there are substantial inter-individual differences in memory decline with some people aging better than others. It is of great importance to understand the factors, particularly malleable ones, that contribute to these individual differences. One such factor is sleep. Sleep stabilizes episodic memories, protecting them from decay, and sleep qua

KAREN ROMMELFANGER Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine Challenges in digital phenotyping: predicting brain health with phones, social media, and beyond The landscape of healthcare is changing worldwide and in no small part due to the transformation to early detection and intervention and digital technologies in health. Digital phenotyping research and the insights that will be revealed for improving human health are unprecedented. Combined brain and behavior quantification could allow us to gain deeper insight than ever before of the basic mechanisms of human behavior and brain health. In this talk, we will explore the aspirations and value conflicts in research and future clinical implementation in brain health.

KATHY TRANG Anthropology, Emory University Coloring perception: Neurocognitive predictors of real-time mental health vulnerability among highly traumatized men. Attending to the everyday life-worlds of vulnerable populations has been a key manifest of biocultural anthropology. Ecological momentary assessments and neurocognitive methods play a critical role in illuminating not only the differential resources available to people, but also the differential ability with which they are able to perceive, prioritize, and utilize such resources. This paper aims to open a discussion of the potential values, limitations, and drawbacks of these technologies for advancing person-centered inquiry into human experience in limited-resource settings through specific examples from work among young men who have sex with men (YMSM) in Hanoi, Vietnam. Globally, trauma exposure is elevated among this population and may contribute towards their development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A debilitating psychiatric condi

SUZANNE DIKKER Neuroscience, Utrech University, NL and New York University Brains in harmony: Connecting art, neuroscience and education outside of the laboratory. Neuroscience research has produced tremendous insight into how the human brain supports dynamic social interactions. Still, laboratory-generated findings do not always straightforwardly generalize to real-world environments. To fill this gap, I collaborate with scientists, artists, and educators to take neuroscience out of the laboratory, into schools, museums, and underserved neighborhoods. In one series of studies, we partnered with New York City high schools to collect brain data during class. We find that brain-to-brain synchrony among students predicts classroom social dynamics and student engagement, two factors that have been found critical for student learning. In another project, we recorded brain data from thousands of museum visitors as they engaged in face-to-face interactions and find that empathy, social closeness and mood predict br

The notion that cognition comprises more than computations of a central nervous system operating on representations has gained a foothold in human cognitive science for a few decades now. Various brands of embodied, extended, and enactive cognition, some more conservative and some more liberal, have paraded in philosophy and cognitive science. I call the genus including all such species situated cognition, and go on to depict selected cases in non-human comparative cognition. The octopus displays embodied cognition, with some of the computational work offloaded to the periphery. Web-building spiders showcase extended cognition, in which objects external to the animal—the web in the case of spiders—play a crucial causal role in cognition. A criterion of mutual manipulability, in which causal influence flows both ways between organism and extended object, serves to delimit the scope of extended cognition. Play in dogs features intelligence on-the-run, arising out of action, a key characteristic of enactive cogn