Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Leah Krubitzer | MacArthur Fellow Professor of Psychology | University of California, Davis "Combinatorial Creatures: Cortical Plasticity Within and Across Lifetimes" The neocortex is one of the most distinctive structures of the mammalian brain, yet also one of the most varied in terms of both size and organization. Multiple processes have contributed to this variability including evolutionary mechanisms (i.e., changes in gene sequence) that alter the size, organization and connections of the neocortex, and activity dependent mechanisms that can also modify these same features over shorter time scales. Because the neocortex does not develop or evolve in a vacuum, when considering how different cortical phenotypes emerge within a species and across species over time, it is also important to consider alterations to the body, to behavior, and the environment in which an individual develops. Thus, changes to the neocortex can arise via different mechanisms, and over multiple time scales. Brains can change across large, evolutionary time scales of thousands to millions of years; across shorter time scales such as generations; and across the life of an individual – day-by-day, within hours, minutes and even on a time scale of a second. The combination of genetic and activity dependent mechanisms that create a given cortical phenotype allows the mammalian neocortex to rapidly and flexibly adjust to different body and environmental contexts, and in humans permits culture to impact brain construction during development.

Ivana Ilic | Music Theory, Emory University Jasna Veličković | Composer and Performer "How Do We Know It's Music? On Musical Capacities of the Electromagnetic Field" What happens when the electromagnetic signal is not only deliberately made audible, but also exploited with a specifically musical aim? In this presentation, I investigate the distinctively musical use of electromagnetism in art from the 1960s until the present day. The two case studies include the works by Christina Kubisch (b. 1948) and Jasna Veličković (b. 1974). While the two artists share a commitment to a modernist quest for new sounds, they investigate the musical capacities of the electromagnetic field in distinctive ways. Kubisch operates primarily as a sound artist, within the audio-visual realm. Her installations include induction coils whose sounds are picked up by the visitors through specially designed headphones. The “musicality” of those works arises from the visitors’ movement within the exhibition space and appears as a completely individual and internalized event. As a composer, she also “finds” music in the sounding of electromagnetic fields that she explores in various places throughout the world. Veličković works from a predominantly auditory perspective. Her unambiguously musical creative process assumes both the compositional application of interference and its inclusion in a purposefully musical performance. The two artists’ approaches meet in an embodied reality of an intense and unique musical experience.

Richard Moore | Executive Director, Children in Crossfire "Freedom, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Northern Ireland" Dr. Moore’s talk is part of the CMBC's Spring 2024 sponsored course “Empathy, Theater and Social Change” taught by Dr. Lisa Paulsen and Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva. This lunch talk was Co-sponsored by Emory’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics & Woodward Academy “Freedom, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Northern Ireland” Dr. Richard Moore was blinded at the age of ten by a British soldier during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1972. Despite this horrific experience, Richard chose forgiveness over revenge, and he later befriended the soldier who shot him. In this talk, Dr. Moore will share his powerful story of healing and reconciliation, exploring the various dimensions of forgiveness as an emotion, a disposition, and a decision, and the potential of forgiveness in mending communities torn apart by conflict. He will also discuss the role that “educating the heart” for empathy and compassion can play in overcoming hatred and division, drawing from his work with the nonprofit he founded, Children in Crossfire, and his forthcoming book Freedom in Forgiveness.

Arkarup Banerjee | School of Biological Science / Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY "Neural Circuits for Vocal Communication: Insights from the Singing Mice." My long-standing interest is to understand how circuits of interacting neurons give rise to natural, adaptive behaviors. Using vocal communication behavior across rodent species, my lab at CSHL pursues two complementary questions. How does the auditory system interact with the motor system to generate the fast sensorimotor loop required for vocal communication? What are the neural circuit modifications that allow behavioral novelty to emerge during evolution? In this talk, I will introduce you to the rich vocal life of the Costa-Rican singing mice. Next, I will describe a series of experiments that were performed to demonstrate the role of the motor cortex in controlling vocal flexibility in this species. In closing, I will discuss our ongoing efforts to identify neural circuit differences between singing mice and lab mice using high-throughput connectomics. Together, by combining neural circuit analysis of a natural behavior with comparative evolutionary analyses across species, we stand to gain insight into the function and evolution of neural circuits for social behaviors.

Jack Gallant (Psychology, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science / University of California, Berkeley) "The Distributed Conceptual Network in the Human Brain" Human behavior is based on a complex interaction between perception, stored knowledge, and continuous evaluation of the world relative to plans and goals. Even seemingly simple tasks such as watching a movie or listening to a story involve a range of different perceptual and cognitive processes whose underlying circuitry is broadly distributed across the brain. One important aspect of this system— the representation of conceptual knowledge in the brain—has been an intense topic of research in cognitive neuroscience for the past 40 years. A recent line of neuroimaging research from my lab has produced highly detailed, high-dimensional functional maps of modal and amodal (or multimodal) semantic representations in individual participants. Based on these findings, we propose a new Distributed Conceptual Network (DCN) theory that encompasses previous theories and accounts for recent data. The DCN theory holds that conceptual representations in the human brain are distributed across multiple modal sensory networks and (at least) one distributed amodal (or multimodal) conceptual network. Information from the modal sensory networks interfaces with the amodal network through a set of parallel semantically-selective channels. The amodal network is also influenced by information stored in long-term memory, which enters the network via the ATL. Finally, executive functions such as selective attention modulate conceptual representations depending on current behavioral goals and plans. We propose that the distributed conceptual system may be the scaffold for conscious experience and working memory, and that it subserves many diverse cognitive functions. Jack Gallant is the Class of 1940 Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and is a member of the programs in Neuroscience, Vision Science, Bioengineering and Biophysics. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and served as the 2022 Chair of the IEEE Brain Community. Professor Gallant's research focuses on high-resolution functional mapping and quantitative computational modeling of human brain networks. His lab has created the most detailed current functional maps of human brain networks mediating vision, language comprehension and navigation, and they have used these maps to decode and reconstruct perceptual experiences directly from brain activity. Further information about ongoing work in the Gallant lab, links to talks and papers and links to online interactive brain viewers can be found at http://gallantlab.org.

Charles Nussbaum | Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin "Why Normative Ethics Is Natural and Metaethics Is and Is Not" Morality prescribes privileged standards for action and character. Ethics is the philosophy of morality. Normative ethics codifies the prescriptive principles of morality that justify considered judgments of cases. Metaethics is the second-order study of ethics. It investigates the truth conditions of moral judgments and principles, the ontological commitments of moral principles, and the justification of these principles, as well as related metaphysical issues such as moral property supervenience, reductionism, and eliminativism, among other matters. Normative ethics, I argue, is maturationally natural, practiced natural, and reflectively natural. Metaethical positions, by contrast, range from the strongly natural to the strongly non-natural. Hence, metaethics is both natural and non-natural.

Emma Cohen | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK "From Social Synchrony To Social Energetics. Or, Why There's Plenty Left in the Tank" Thirty years ago, in an article entitled Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity, Bob McCauley and Tom Lawson powerfully critiqued the “hermeneutic exclusivism” that by then prevailed in anthropology and the history of religions. When I read the article as a new doctoral student in anthropology, it blew my mind - and it helped me find my feet. In this talk, I’ll reflect on its seminal influence in my research within and beyond anthropology and religion and summarize some of our work on the causes and consequences of social bonding in a variety of contexts. Bob’s influence, much like the cognition in his accounts of religion and ritual, is by no means confined to the religious domain. Through his championing of an explanatory and naturalistic approach to religion, he has inspired “systematicity, generality, and testability” in accounts spanning human behaviour and culture across a wide range.

Harvey Whitehouse | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK "Against Interpretive Exclusivism" Interpretive exclusivism is the claim that studying cultural systems is exclusively an interpretive exercise, ruling out reductive explanation and scientific methods. Following the lead of Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, I will argue that the costs of interpretive exclusivism are heavy and the benefits illusory. By contrast, the intellectual benefits of combining interpretivist and scientific approaches are striking. By generating rich descriptive accounts of our social and cultural worlds using interpretive methods, we are better able to develop precise and testable hypotheses, increasing the value and relevance of a qualitative approach to the more quantitative branches of social science focusing on causal inference. Interpretive scholarship can also contribute to the design of experiments, surveys, longitudinal studies, and database construction. By helping to strengthen the scientific foundations of social science, the interpretive enterprise can also make itself more relevant to society at large, to the policy community, and to the marginalized and oppressed groups it frequently purports to represent or defend. Since science is an inherently generalizing and inclusive activity, working more closely with the scientific community will help to make the methods of interpretive scholarship more transparent, reproducible, and accessible to all.

E. Thomas Lawson | Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, Western Michigan University

Dimitris Xygalatas | Anthropology, University of Connecticut "Ritual, Embodiment, and Emotional Contagion" While the Cognitive Science of Religion has brought the mind to the forefront of analysis, it has had little to say about the body. As a result, the mechanisms underlying much-discussed and well-documented effects often remain elusive. In this paper, I will discuss ritual’s ability to facilitate the alignment of people’s bodies, actions, and emotions by presenting findings from an interdisciplinary research program that combines laboratory and field methods and discussing the implications of such findings for ritual’s role in promoting social coordination and group cohesion.

Claire White | Religious Studies, California State University, Northridge "An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion" In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understanding, explaining, and predicting many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for understanding religion, including why it appears so easily and why people are willing to fight―and die―for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. This talk provides an accessible overview of CSR, outlining key findings and debates that shape it.

Mark Risjord | Director, Institute for Liberal Arts, Emory University + Kareem Khalifa | Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles pay a unique video tribute to their former mentor and friend, Robert McCauley on the occasion of his retirement.

Bryon Cunningham | Psychology, Occidental College "Evolution, Mood Disorders, and Religious Coping: Interactions Between Explanatory and Interpretive Theories in Clinical Practice" In this talk, I advocate for the view that explanatory and interpretive theories can be mutually enriching in clinical practice. I start with the ecumenical view that the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory are both crucial for explaining human similarities and differences. I propose that developmental adaptations play an important role in understanding how the expression of human instincts is mediated by developmental contingencies. I construct a multi-dimensional conceptualization of mood variation and consider evidence from the emerging field of evolutionary psychopathology that mood variability is a biological adaptation. Next, I review the empirical research demonstrating the moderating effects of religious coping on mood disorders and on health more generally, and I offer some conjectures about ways in which mood variation may contribute to religious credibility-enhancing displays. Lastly, I explore a number of ways that explanatory and interpretive theories interact in clinical practice with patients with mood disorders and those who utilize religious coping.

Pascal Boyer | Psychology & Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis "What Kinds of Religion are "Natural"?" McCauley emphasized that religious representations are “natural”, in contrast to other cultural systems that require systematic training or leaning and institutional scaffolding. Pursuing this line of reasoning, we can see how some limited domains of religion are far more natural than others, in McCauley’s sense of that term. This could lead to a re-evaluation of some common tenets of the cognitive science of religion, propositions that we assume to apply to all forms of religious representations.

Kareem Khalifa | Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles "The Methodenstreit Ain't Right: McCauley on Interpretation and Explanation" Does interpretation distinguish the human sciences from the natural sciences? Or do explanations drive the human sciences in a manner akin to their more venerable natural-scientific cousins? These questions fueled the decades-old Methodenstreit (“methodological dispute”) about the foundations of the social sciences. Rising above the fray, McCauley has long endorsed interactionism, according to which interpretations and explanations of the same cultural-symbolic phenomenon are complements rather than competitors. He contrasts interactionism with exclusivism, which holds that only one of these approaches is applicable to cultural-symbolic phenomena, and inclusivism, which subordinates explanation to interpretation. However, all three of these positions assume that there is a nontrivial distinction between interpretation and explanation. By contrast, I will argue that putative examples of interpretations that defy explanation rely on overly restrictive conceptions of causation, lawlike generalizations, or perspective-taking in the natural sciences. As a result, all cultural-symbolic phenomena should be explained, though different explanations of those phenomena are still mutually beneficial in the ways that interactionism suggests.

Justin Barrett | President, Blueprint 1543 "Bringing Technology to Mind: Cognitive Naturalness and Technological Enthusiasm" Sometimes new technologies spread before society has had sufficient time to evaluate them. Can we make better decisions about whether to be enthusiastic or reticent regarding new tech without waiting for thorough testing or the emergence of unintended negative consequences? In his book Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (Oxford, 2011), Robert McCauley provides heuristic criteria for identifying the relative cognitive naturalness of various cultural forms and then applies these criteria to an analysis of religions and the sciences. I argue that McCauley’s distinction and criteria can also give some guidance regarding how enthusiastic we should be regarding new technologies, including artifacts and systems. The sciences fare well in such an analysis. Many social media platforms and some of newer artificial intelligence programs, however, should give us pause.

Jared Rothstein | Philosophy, Daytona State University "Surfing, Sharks, & The Limits of Reason" Based on personal experience surfing in the “Shark Bite Capital of the World” (Volusia County, Florida) and interdisciplinary research from the fields of behavioral economics, neuropsychology, and philosophy of mind, the author rejects the traditional Rationalist view that ‘future discounting’ is always unreasonable. He argues, on the contrary, that our natural tendency to opt for immediate rewards in the present can be rational, depending on the values and passions of the individual in question. Emotionally laden decisions are not inherently illogical; and when it comes to future discounting dilemmas, reason can furnish neither universal solutions that would apply to everyone nor certainty in advance. Rather, vexing problems of this type require leaps of probabilistic judgment—a major element of surfing—since we can never know exactly what the future holds.

Oliver Rollins | American Ethnic Studies / African American Studies / Sociology, University of Washington "Towards an Anti-Racist Neuroscience: Possibilities and Problematics with Scientific Progress" Alongside the deadly COVID-19 outbreak, the biomedical and health sciences have been altered by the continued challenge of racism. Major academic science journals (e.g., Nature, Science, and JAMA) have responded with calls to better recognize and combat the latent harms of (systemic) racism. Yet, it is still unclear what this new confrontation with scientific racism will look like or accomplish. In this talk, I will try to outline what is at stake; that is, both the social and ethical implications of dealing with the effects of racism in/through the (neuro)sciences. Emphasizing the ways in which racial inequality is reinforced through neuroscientific and technological practices, I hope to show how the haunting presence of race/racism in neuroscience research is a generative manifestation of the routine, obscure, and normative nature of systemic racism in larger US society. My goal is to convince us to think more critically and creatively about how to truly envision and enact an “anti-racist” (neuro)science of the future.

Sashank Varma | Psychology and Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology "Mathematical Concepts in Humans and Machine Learning Models" The nature of mathematical concepts has long been a topic of philosophical debate. Recent theorizing in mathematical cognition has tended towards nativist accounts and postulations of built-in neural circuitry. In this talk, I consider whether this status quo is being challenged by the emergence of machine learning models capable of near-human levels of performance at predicting text and classifying images. Ongoing research in my lab is finding that these models induce latent representations of numerical and geometric concepts that are similar to those found in humans, for example, the mental number line. I will review several of these projects. I will also preview our future work, where we are moving beyond the cognitive alignment of machine learning models to evaluate their developmental alignment by training language models on developmentally calibrated corpora. The goal of this new work is first to model typical numerical development and then to perturb these typical models to shed light on developmental dyscalculia.

Using the Science of Love and Bonding to Bring New Perspectives on Social Relationships, Health, and the Practice of Female Genital Mutilation in East Africa. Larry Young | Center for Translational Social Neuroscience | Psychiatry, Emory University Rev. Patti Ricotta | President, Life Together International Discussants: Kathryn M. Yount | Global Health and Melvin Konner | Anthropology, Emory University Larry Young and Rev. Patti Ricotta will discuss their work in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in which Dr. Young discusses the neurobiology of pair bonding in monogamous voles as well as other research on the biology of healthy social relationships to community leaders, clergy, medical professionals and educators in communities where female genital mutilation is practiced. In areas where spirituality is highly venerated, this approach based on combining scientific research with relevant biblical teaching, is bringing new perspectives on the importance of mutual loving relationships between partners as well as between parent and child. The importance of pleasurable sex in pair bonding brings into question the cultural practice of FGM. Rev. Ricotta shares her biblical perspective which encourages greater equality between men and women, husbands and wives by showing the consistency between biblical messages of love and unity, with Dr. Young's scientific research on the neurobiology of pair bonding. This combination has caused a paradigm shift in the thinking of thousands with regard to FGM and parenting. These presentations will be followed by discussions on ethical and cultural considerations of using this approach to change long standing cultural practices in Africa.