While ritualized behavior is not exclusively associated with religious experience, there is clearly a powerful affinity between religion and ritual. A look at the evolutionary roots of human ritual and several of its cognitive and experiential characteristics sheds interesting light on some of the underlying reasons for this affinity.

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

Theorists in the cognitive science of religion have proposed that many religious proclivities are by-products of garden-variety cognitive systems that humans share. This general theoretical proposal has generated a variety of notable experimental findings pertaining to such matters as the character and memorability of religious representations, the failure of religious participants to deploy orthodox beliefs in on-line cognitive processing, and the human penchant for “promiscuous teleology.” Subsequent influences on the cognitive science of religion over the past fifteen years do not differ from those affecting cognitive science more broadly. Perhaps the three most prominent of those influences concern evolutionary considerations, the growing availability of brain imaging tools, and an interest in religious experience and embodiment. Each has inspired experimental studies that have produced comparably significant findings concerning such topics as developmental regularities in reasoning about the afterlife, the impact of public ritual participation and other forms of costly signaling on commitment to religious groups (in particular), neural evidence implicating theory of mind in prayer, the impact of synchronous bodily movements on pain thresholds, and more.

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

A focus on interpretation at the expense of explanation in the humanities, particularly religious studies, an insistence on the autonomy of the social sciences at the cost of underestimating the value of psychology, and an overemphasis on cultural differences while being blind to human commonalities in anthropology all presented obstacles to developing a theoretically sophisticated, empirically tractable science of religion until the cognitive revolution provide the means and methods to do so.

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

Enabling computers to understand images remains one of the hardest open problems in artificial intelligence. No machine vision system comes close to matching human ability at identifying the contents of images or visual scenes or at recognizing similarity between different scenes, even though such abilities pervade human cognition. In this talk I will describe research---currently in early stages---on bridging the gap between low-level perception and higher-level image understanding by integrating a cognitive model of pattern recognition and analogy-making with a neural model of the visual cortex. (April 9, 2014)

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

What can we learn from brain imaging, and what are its limits? Drs. Gregory Berns and Scott Lilienfeld will discuss – and debate – the promise and perils of brain imaging with regard to mind-reading, neuromarketing, lie detection, criminal responsibility, and psychiatric diagnosis. More broadly, they will explore scientific and ethical controversies concerning neuroimaging, and strive to separate fact from fiction in both popular and academic coverage of this technology. (March 27, 2014)

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

Relationships between genes and social behavior have historically been viewed as a one-way street, with genes in control. Recent analyses have challenged this view by discovering broad alterations in the expression of human genes as a function of differing socio-environmental conditions. My talk summarizes the developing field of social genomics, and its efforts to identify the types of genes subject to social regulation, the biological signaling pathways mediating those effects, and the genetic polymorphisms that moderate socio-environmental influences on human gene expression. This approach provides a concrete molecular perspective on how external social conditions interact with our genes to shape the functional characteristics of our bodies, and alter our future biological and behavioral responses based on our personal transcriptional histories. (March 25, 2014)

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

Recent advances in network science have greatly increased our understanding of the structure and function of many networked systems, ranging from transportation networks, to social networks, the internet, ecosystems, and biochemical and gene transcription pathways. Network approaches are also increasingly applied to the brain, at several levels of scale from cells to entire nervous systems. Early studies in this emerging field of brain connectomics have focused on mapping brain network topology and identifying some of its characteristic features, including small world attributes, modularity and hubs. More recently, the emphasis has shifted towards linking brain network topology to brain dynamics, the patterns of functional interactions that emerge from spontaneous and evoked neuronal activity. I will give an overview of recent work characterizing the structure of complex brain networks, with particular emphasis on studies demonstrating how the network topology of the connectome constrains and shapes its capacity to process and integrate information. (Feb. 24, 2014)

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

Critiquing a number of stubborn clichés about autism and embracing the concept of neurodiversity, Savarese presents the work of Tito Mukhopadhyay, a man whom the medical community would describe as “severely autistic” and whom he has been mentoring for the past five years. (Feb. 20, 2014) The author of Reasonable People, which Newsweek called “a real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities” and the co-editor of “Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity,” a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, Ralph James Savarese can be seen in the award-winning documentaryLoving Lampposts: Living Autistic and in a forthcoming documentary about his son, DJ, Oberlin College’s first nonspeaking student with autism. He spent the academic year 2012/2013 as a neurohumanities fellow at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences.

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

This collaborative discussion turns attention to gender in the academy (February 21, 2014). How are academic work and the academic workplace gendered? We approach these broad questions not simply from the perspective of relative numbers, promotion records, pay, etc. of women/men in the ranks of students, staff, faculty and administrators, but by exploring the subtle dimensions and performances of gender that shape the very fabric of academic work and workplace practices.

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.

Emory Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture Lecture (January 31, 2014). The represented face is so ubiquitous and important to narrative film that it deserves separate consideration. In this talk I define and defend what I call a “cognitive cultural” approach to film theory and illustrate its usefulness with an analysis of some key functions of facial representation in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  I begin by arguing that biology and psychology have much to offer film studies, using as an example Steven J. Gould’s “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse.” I go on to summarize the most important research into the uses of the face in narrative film. My analysis of The Silence of the Lambs, finally, is meant to show that cognitive cultural studies of film, by exploring the interface between mind, film, and culture, not only helps us understand the film medium generally, but but also particular films in their broad social and historical context.

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

NOTE:  The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those held by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture or Emory University.