Yoon Won Chang | PhD Candidate Department of Anthropology, Emory University 

This talk is an excerpt from an ethnography that documents the making of a theater performance about grief after suicide in contemporary South Korea. I analyze how the actors and the director interpret and embody the real-life stories collected through interviews with suicide loss survivors. The creative team experiences the inevitable failures in interpreting the grief, yet attempts to embody the already fractured self-narratives of pain and healing provided by the survivors. I ask how grief becomes a collective experience and how the language and the body are negotiated in this process. 

"I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Emory University. For the past seven years, I have closely accompanied suicide loss survivors in Korea by organizing grief groups and other cultural events. In my Doctoral dissertation, I explore how suicide loss survivors' experience of grief is sculpted, negotiated, and refracted within the stat suicide prevention policies, the psychiatric intervention, self-narratives, and collective practices of healing."

Intro music: Scream Villian - The Fable - Bensound

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"The Creative Engine and the Sense of Rightness" 

My research operates at the intersection of anthropology, the psychology of creativity, and micro-phenomenology. It is driven by a central question: in the uncertainty of the creative act, how do creators know when it works? While traditional approaches often rely on retrospective reconstruction, my work focuses on the "creative engine": the real-time feedback loop between Action (what the maker does) and Affect (how the emerging form acts back upon the maker). I posit that creativity is not a cognitive planning process, but a navigational skill steered by a pre-reflective affective criterion—a felt sense of fitness we conceptualize as "Rightness"—guiding the artist between the risks. To study this, I have moved from historical analysis to experimental ethnography, developing a novel methodology—The Researcher-As-Obstacle (RAO)—designed to investigate the creative mind in action. My goal is to establish a rigorous anthropology of this navigational competence, specifically addressing how subjects maintain agency and a path toward Rightness within the flow of creation. 

Links to referenced texts: Julliard, R. (2025). Action and affect: Ritual dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s creative process. Journal of Material Culture, 30(2), 171-190. → https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xpbcw_v1 Julliard, R., Roy, D., & Botella, M. (2026). 

The Researcher-As-Obstacle: A methodology for the study of creativity while it happens. Qualitative Research, 26(1), 3-22. → https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/shnax_v3 

“The Feeling of Life”: Creative Dynamics Captured in Real Time → https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/92fxy_v1

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"The Social Minds of Humans and Other Apes" 

Humans are defined in no small part by the complexity of our social lives, and the cognitive mechanisms we possess for making sense of our social worlds. These capacities support unique forms of communication, cooperation, and culture. But how did they evolve, and to what extent do they rely on language or other uniquely human representational machinery? To address these questions, I will explore the social lives of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, and present a number of controlled experiments probing their cognition. These studies reveal that other apes gather a diversity of knowledge about their social worlds, and share with humans numerous capacities for tracking and predicting the behavior of their groupmates. These rich foundations of human social intelligence therefore can operate in the absence of language, and very likely evolved at least 6-9 million years ago in the ancestors we share with other apes.

00:00 CMBC Introduction by Dietrich Stout 
04:11 Speaker Introduction by Dietrich Stout 
05:44 Lecture by Chris Krupenye 
01:00:11 Q&A session

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"Sleep-based Memory Reactivation and Opportunities for Better Benefits from Sleep" 

"Sleep is critical not only for its restorative benefits but also for its contributions to memory function. Memory reactivation occurs covertly during sleep. Corresponding changes in the brain move memory consolidation forward, enhancing the likelihood of later remembering and stoking creativity. Our habits of overnight memory reactivation—and the specific memories we reactivate each night—influence our daytime psychological well-being. What transpires in our brains after we fall asleep may seem beyond volitional control. To the contrary, it can be strategically modified to seek various benefits. We have developed methods to modify sleep-based memory reactivation using sensory stimulation, and studies with these methods have uncovered various facets of this covert processing, including dreaming. We’ve also sought insights through studies of the well-documented methods of contemplative sleep practices from Tibetan-Buddhist traditions going back many hundreds of years. We are now seeking to apply this knowledge through new health-related applications to make sleep better and help people with sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea, and nightmares."

00:00 CMBC Introduction by Dietrich Stout 
04:20 Speaker Introduction by Stephan Hamann 
06:35 Lecture by Ken Paller 
54:58 Q&A session

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Masaki Matsubara | Center for Contemplative Sciences, Keio University + University of Tsukuba, Japan
"Exploring the transition from the cognitive “Mind” to the phenomenological “Soma,” I will examine whether humans and AI can truly “dance” together through empathy as embodied joint action. I raise the fundamental question of whether a resonant “Field” (Ba) can emerge without the shared vulnerability inherent to biological life. Using the framework of Ki, Do, and Ma (Timing, Intensity, and Space), will discuss how these principles can inform experimental designs for social robots to foster our shared humanity."

Dr. Matsubara is an Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba and leads the Laboratory for Somatic Intelligence and Artistic Expression. His research integrates contemplative education, embodied cognition, and human-AI collaboration. He utilizes first-person approach and arts-based research to explore the emergence of awareness and compassion. 

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"Interdisciplinary Performance in Immersive & Interactive Environments" 

In this lecture, Vincze explores how contemporary artistic practices move beyond single disciplines to create experiences that are immersive, interactive, and integrative. Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Janet Murray (immersion and the fourth wall), Ronald Rowe (interactive systems), and Julie Thompson Klein (interdisciplinarity), he examines how these concepts operate in practice through three recent projects: Freedom Collective, an immersive and smartphone-interactive music theatre work; manτεία, a multisensory, AI-driven guided exhibition where artworks interact with one another; and On the Other Earth, a large-scale stereoscopic choreographic installation that redefines the boundaries between dance, cinema, sound, and architecture. Together, these case studies show how composers and artists can design environments that balance structure and emergence, agency and framing, inviting audiences not only to observe but to inhabit and co-shape contemporary artworks. 

Davor Vincze is a Croatian composer, sound artist, and curator whose work explores the intersections of music, technology, and interdisciplinary performance. His compositions span immersive opera, interactive installation, AI-generated media, and electroacoustic chamber music. He has collaborated with leading ensembles such as Ensemble Modern and JACK Quartet, and his works have been featured at festivals IRCAM and Music Biennale Zagreb, where he currently serves as Artistic Director. A recipient of the 2025 Giga-Hertz Production Award from ZKM Karlsruhe, Vincze is also a postdoctoral researcher at Hong Kong Baptist University, focusing on audience interactivity and the role of machine learning in composition. He studied at Stanford University, IRCAM, and the music universities in Stuttgart and Graz. His artistic language reflects a keen interest in glitch, hybridity, and meta-reality, and collective experience.

00:00 Introduction of series by Dietrich Stout, Director CMBC 
01:47 Introduction of Vincze by Laura Emmery, Associate Professor of Music Theory 
04:35 Davor Vincze presentation 
39:15 Q&A

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"The Travelling Salesperson Problem: How Humans 'Efficiently' Solve a Problem Which is 'Hard' for Computers"

“The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is an important problem in mathematics and computer science. A TSP instance is a set of points. To solve it is to produce a ‘tour’ that starts at one point and returns to it after visiting all other points exactly once, and to solve it optimally is to produce a tour of minimum length. As far as we know, computers cannot solve this problem optimally. It is therefore surprising that, for small instances, people produce tours that are near-optimal (i.e., within 10% of the minimal length), and they do so in time linear in the number of points. To accomplish this remarkable feat, we propose that they adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy: first visually clustering the points, then solving each cluster as a smaller TSP instance, and finally joining together these solutions to solve the overall problem. We provide evidence for this proposal in three behavioral experiments and one computational experiment. These findings establish the psychological viability of the divide-and-conquer strategy for solving the TSP, and they set the stage for future studies of how people tame the complexity of computationally ‘hard’ problems.”

00:00 Lecture by Sashank Varma 
54:22 Q&A session

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"Compassion: Real and Artificial"

I’ve proposed a pattern theory of compassion. On this view, compassion is a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include physiological, cognitive, and affective processes, relational/intersubjective processes, and motivational/action tendencies (Gallagher, Raffone, Aglioti 2024). The idea of compassion as a dynamical pattern is reflected in neuroscientific findings, as well as in compassion practice. This view also allows for a clear distinction between compassion, empathy, and sympathy. Following Dennett’s conception of “real pattern,” compassion can be said to have a pragmatic reality. After summarizing this view I’ll address a question (raised by both computer scientists and Buddhist scholars) about the possibility of creating a compassionate AI system. Can there be such a thing as artificial compassion?

00:00 Introduction of Dr. Gallagher by Dietrich Stout, CMBC Director 
01:53 Lecture by Shaun Gallagher 
59:31 Q&A session

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"Understanding, Remembering, and Communicating Threatening Events"

Threat alters how we represent information. Under threat, individuals tend to prioritize central details at the expense of surrounding contextual information—a shift that reflects and drives changes in medial temporal lobe (MTL) and cortical network dynamics. This talk will explore how threat reshapes the neural architecture supporting event comprehension, which has downstream consequences on how this information is stored in long-term memory. Moreover, we will show how these shifts in brain networks change how threatening experiences are communicated to others. By examining the interplay between emotion, memory, and social dynamics, we highlight mechanisms through which threat can distort shared understanding and social transmission of information. These findings have broad implications for domains ranging from eyewitness testimony to psychotherapy, which both rely on the accurate communication of threatening events.

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"Mind, Brain and Culture from a Generalized Darwinian Perspective" 

Generalized Darwinism refers to any process combining the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication (VSR). It is both old and new: Old, because all the insights associated with Darwinism during its first few decades were in ignorance of the proximate mechanisms of VSR. New, because with the advent of Mendelian genetics, the entire study of evolution became focused on genes, to the exclusion of other VSR processes. A return to generalized Darwinism didn’t commence until the closing decades of the 20th century and is now in full swing, with profound implications for our understanding of mind, brain, and culture.    

Link to ProSocial World website: https://www.prosocial.world/

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Jared Medina | Associate Professor, Psychology | Emory University 

"To Predict or To Explain" 

What is even the point of our science? Is it to build models that predict what brains and minds will do even if we don’t fully understand how, or is it to explain the inner workings of the mind and brain, even if our models fall short of accurate predictions or practical mental health benefits. 

In this debate-styled meeting, Jared Medina will argue for explanation as the soul of science. Without causal, interpretable, mechanistic accounts, we’re just playing with high-tech models and curve-fitting. For him the goal of our science is about generating understanding in human interpretable terms. 

On the opposing side, Apurva Ratan Murty will champion prediction as the only reliable test of scientific understanding. If your theory can’t predict new data, it has limited value. Models that generalize, however messy or uninterpretable, are the real engines of discovery and measure of progress. 

This brings us to the core of the conflict. Is prediction sufficient for explanation, or even preferable? Can we trust models we do not understand, or does demand for interpretability needlessly limit our predictive power? Should we be architects of models as tools to describe, anticipate, and control brain behavior, or storytellers who illuminate the architecture of the mind? 

Join us as we debate these foundational questions and consider what our field should value most and how these seemingly opposing frameworks co-exist.

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Gil Weinberg :: https://www.gilweinberg.com/

SEE BELOW FOR SOME OF THE VIDEOS PREVIEWED IN PRESENTATION. 
THE AGE OF AI :: https://youtu.be/UwsrzCVZAb8?si=9rfi3NSCwIe1n0NR&t=863 
SHIMON IN CONCERT :: https://youtu.be/zG8VWPL35qI?si=54IKr0E8ax26x9Jc 
BRAINWAVES / “FISH AND CHIPS” :: https://www.gilweinberg.com/brainwaves?pgid=m2acvhzk1-f5d71d01-9eb3-4cae-a336-1dbf7f335ade
EYEDRUM EXHIBITION :: https://www.gilweinberg.com/brainwaves?pgid=m2acvhzk1-c6092737-f02b-4a58-942b-42e685ea9595
NERVE BEATBUGS :: https://youtu.be/B7WlkVGH1fs?si=I2xWeoqUOWVCPBkc
HAILE :: https://youtu.be/OT2Lp00ib1Y?si=jPupqd-Qb9gCYuHE
THREE-ARMED DRUMMING :: https://youtu.be/fKryPingtww?si=U7SrChs-n-5ctTZW 
DRUMMING PROSTHETIC CONCERT @ KSU :: https://youtu.be/6xc2_p-q9tU?si=I7tnesxJyhQUpNAn 
JASON BARNES EMG PROSTHETIC ARM SHOWCASE :: https://youtu.be/4rakPJHH7KU?si=sUrBc2zlTiCYvhSy 
JASON BARNES - GUINESS WORLD RECORDS :: https://youtu.be/cVFcJ3TMrok?si=C104ssuxrU6Hn_SK 
WORLD’S FIRST BIONIC DRUMMER :: https://youtu.be/GKW7cg45EwY?si=1jBmN1ABFXiP-lxb 
SKYWALKER HAND :: https://youtu.be/8t8p43m1Iuw?si=SKhs2BTMX6qP-GXz 
GIL WEINBERG: LUKE SKYWALKER PROSTHESIS CONTROLS FINGERS AND PLAYS PIANO :: https://youtu.be/HjW1kIt5iQg?si=kHcuIHgsLnAWJvMy

 

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"Dilating Time: Tempo as Contemplative Tool in Ota Shogo’s Poetics of Deceleration" 

This talk explores Ota Shogo's groundbreaking wordless play "The Water Station" as a paradigm of temporal expansion in contemporary theater, examining how extreme deceleration creates unique spaces for audience reflection and embodied awareness. Together we'll investigate how slowed theatrical time functions not merely as stylistic choice but as philosophical intervention—challenging our accelerated cultural rhythms and opening possibilities for deeper environmental and existential awareness. 

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Héctor Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar working in performance, theater, film, and contemporary opera, who has recently joined the faculty at Emory in Theater Studies. This event marks the first in a planned series of dialogues between the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture and the Keio University Centre for Contemplative Studies in Tokyo, Japan, an interdisciplinary group of contemplative scholars, cognitive scientists and artists.

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"The Bio-Psycho-Social Affect Loop, HyperSensitivity, and Radical Embodied Cognition"

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"Fostering Prosociality in Refugee Children: An Intervention with Rohingya Children" 

Prosocial behavior is a distinguishing characteristic of human nature. Although prosocial behaviors emerge early in development, contextual factors play an important role in how these behaviors are manifested over development. A large body of research focuses on the trajectory of prosocial development across diverse cultures and investigating contexts that foster it. Against this backdrop of developmental research endeavoring to understand and enhance the cooperative side of humanity, is the catastrophic impact of profoundly negative forces on social-emotional development for children forced to flee from violent conflict. Close to half a million Rohingya children, whose families were forced to flee genocide in Myanmar, now live in the largest refugee camp in the world. To examine the resilience of human prosociality in the face of extreme adversity, we documented initial levels of prosociality in Rohingya refugee children living in a mega-camp (Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh) and the extent to which those levels were improved following a multifaceted intervention designed to foster prosociality. The research was a partnership between Rohingya community members with lived experience, humanitarian practitioners, and developmental researchers. (Continued - for the full ABSTRACT follow this link: https://bit.ly/cmbclecturecallaghan ) 

00:00 Intro by Philippe Rochet, Professor of Psychology, Emory University 

03:52 Lecture 

46:38 Q&A Session 

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"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."

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 
 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Presented by hosts Laura Emmery (Department of Music / Emory University) and Cynthia Willett (Department of Philosophy / Emory University) Co-sponsored by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and The Department of Psychology. 

"I will use examples from the history of sound on Earth to argue that the world’s sonic diversity – both human and nonhuman – undermines ideas of human exceptionalism. Turning our ears toward these sounds also provides a useful foundation for ethical discernment. Listening to insects, birds, and trees, then, is a radical (from the root, radix) act because it places us in relationship with other species and with processes that transcend human concerns. We hear these connections in human sound, too, especially in instrumental music which, from the start, has been an ecologically immersive art."

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Despite the immense variety of sounds we associate with the animal world, the ability to learn a vocal repertoire is a rare phenomenon, emerging in only a handful of groups, including humans. To gain a better understanding of the development and evolution of vocal learning, we will examine the processes by which birds learn to sing and human infants learn to talk. A key parallel in the vocal development of birds and babies is the social function of immature vocalizations. The responses of adults to the plastic song of birds and the babbling of babies create social feedback that guides the young towards mature vocalizations. I will present experiments demonstrating how the immature sounds of young birds and babies regulate and are regulated by social interactions. The form and timing of these interactions have strong influences on the development of mature birdsong and language. The difficulty of measuring rapid social interchanges organized by immature vocalizing has led many to overlook their importance and assume that young songbirds and human infants learn by passive exposure followed by motor practice. My data indicate that vocal learning is an active, socially-embedded process. By creating feedback that is both inherently informative and socially relevant, structured social interaction boosts the salience of acoustic patterns in the input and facilitates learning of speech and song.

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Presented by Dept. of Music with co-sponsorship from Dept. of Philosophy / Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture / Center for Faculty Development and Excellence

This 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 funerals, because the East Germany’s memorial culture was masculine, stoic, and militarized. Yet the labor of mourning was feminized through archival practice, as widows tended to their husband’s material traces. In this way, women played a critical role in establishing the collections that consecrated their spouses in a national artistic canon. By examining their labors of mourning in depth, this presentation not only reframes the history of postwar German art music around women, but also demonstrates how longstanding cross-cultural feminine mourning customs were adapted to suit new socio-political contexts in the East German state.

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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" assessed? 
28:55 How much should you budget for education? Budget discussion 
31:50 What kind of feedback do you get? How to revise for resubmission 
33:37 Who should target a CAREER vs. other grant mechanisms? For what? 
39:45 How to develop a five year plan?

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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 “Perceptual Motor Hypothesis” proposing that human technological cognition has been evolutionarily and developmentally constructed from ancient primate perceptual-motor systems for body awareness and engagement with the world.  

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Craft 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 new computational tools, research frameworks, and expressions that address problems in this context, and reveal new dimensions and possibilities for how we think about craft, computation, and culture. 

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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.

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Speech 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.

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The 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. Looking at the margin reveals some surprises. One recent result suggests that Guinea baboons (Papio papio) display characteristic features of CCE in laboratory environments. This is surprising given the lack of anecdotal evidence about baboon culture in the wild, and how such a claim would force a revision in current narratives about the hominin cognitive evolution. I’ll be suggesting that these claims have some truth to them—but don’t carry any radical implications. To show this, I’ll be distinguishing between three kinds of cumulative cultural change: (i) socially scaffolded task optimization, (ii) domain parsing and organization, and (iii) technological recombination and affordance matching. Using these distinctions, I argue the work on Guinea baboons is meant to show their capacity for domain parsing. Yet I’ll also be arguing that the evidence is much more indicative of the less cognitively demanding socially scaffolded task optimization.

 

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• Bio Page
• Robert Liu Lab Website
• National Primate Research Center

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https://goizueta.emory.edu/faculty/profiles/kathryn-kadous

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http://psychology.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/kelly-aubrey.html

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We recently proposed a brain model that characterizes how empathic reactions alleviate the distress of a target. In a series of experiments, we examined brain-to-brain coupling during empathic interactions. We show that, brain-to-brain coupling in the observation-execution (mirror) brain network increases in empathic interactions. Critically we found that brain-to-brain coupling predicts distress regulation in the target. We conclude that employing this multi-brain approach may provide a highly controlled setting in which to study social behavior in health and disease.

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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 voice challenges the white narrative, efforts to stifle that voice are swift and sever, and all too often whiteness will accuse nonwhiteness of “storytelling,” a common critique of Critical Race Theory these days. In short, white persons write histories, while nonwhite persons tell stories. In this talk I’ll expand on music’s histories and stories, and explain why, in fact, the common American music curriculum is still quite segregated along racial lines, like much of the country writ large, mostly because of the distinction between history and story. I’ll then suggest that we don’t need to “decolonize” the music curriculum—that’s too vague—but, rather, that we need to desegregate it and foreground race in our discussions so that all racial musics, and musical races, have a seat at the table and a voice in the conversation. 

PHILIP EWELL is Professor Music Theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York. His specialties include Russian music theory, Russian opera, modal theory, and race studies. His work has been featured in news outlets such as the BBC, Die Zeit, NPR, and the New Yorker. He received the 2019–2020 “Presidential Award for Excellence in Creative Work” at Hunter College, and he was the “Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow” of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2020–2021. He recently finished a monograph combining race studies with music and music theory and is working on a forthcoming book (at W.W. Norton) as coauthor of a new music theory textbook that will be a modernized, reframed, and inclusive textbook based on recent developments in music theory pedagogy.

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The Anatomy of Loneliness: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Loneliness-Contemporary-Ethnographic-Subjectivity/dp/0520383494/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=chikako+ozawa+de+silva+the+anatomy+of+loneliness&qid=1632521910&sr=8-1

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RELATED: Ken Carter Interview "Inside the Lab" 

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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Panel Discussion with Daphna Joel and Lise Eliot | moderated by Donna Maney and Katrina Karkazis.  
Click here to start video at Panel Discussion 

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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Co-sponsored by The Hightower Fund and  Emory Department of Psychology

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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He was a R&D team lead of the Amelia project, the next generation machine reading system developed at IPsoft Inc. He is the founder of the Natural Language Processing Research lab at Emory University.

Jinho Choi has been active in research on natural language processing; especially, on the optimization of low-level NLP (e.g., dependency parsing, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis) for robustness on various data and scalability on large data.

He has developed an open source project called NLP4J, providing NLP components with state-of-the-art accuracy and speed, which has been widely used for both academic and industrial research.

His current research focuses on the development of NLP components for different domains (e.g., social media, radiology reports, dialogs) and the applications of these NLP components for end-user systems such as question-answering, character mining, text generation, etc. He is also interested in interdisciplinary research where NLP can enhance researches in other areas.

EDUCATION
Ph.D., Joint Degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2012

• M.S.E., Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2003
• B.A., Dual Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, Coe College, 2001
  
  RESEARCH
  
  My research focuses on the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for "robustness" on diverse data and "scalability" on large data. The goal is to develop NLP models that are readily available for interdisciplinary research. I believe that NLP models we develop will open up many new opportunities to conduct innovative research. All our models are publicly available through our open-source project.
• In 2019, I started a new project, Emora, to develop a chatbot that aims to be a social companion who cares about you, learns from you, and shares thoughts and feelings with you. Our team has been selected as one of the 10 participants of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3. The goal is to develop a chatbot that helps people with mental illness such as depression or Alzheimer's Disease through natural conversations.
• In 2018, we started developing a cloud-based NLP platform called ELIT, Evolution of Language and Information Technology, that brings the latest NLP technology into the cloud. Researchers can take advantage of the ELIT platform through web-APIs, which requires no installation on local machines and minimum knowledge in any programming language, while developers can contribute to the platform by deploying their own models.
• In 2015, I started a new project, Character Mining, aiming to extract implicit and explicit information about individual characters in multiparty dialogue. The goal is to develop a machine comprehension system that understands entity-centric contexts from human conversations and helps us reason better about those contexts. This project has many novel tasks such as character identification, emotion detection, reading comprehension, question answering, and personality detection.

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BIO
Benjamin Wilson received his BSc in Psychology from the University of York, UK, in 2005, before completing an MSc in Evolutionary Psychology from the University of Liverpool, UK, in 2008. In 2014, he completed his PhD in Neuroscience at Newcastle University, using behavioral and neuroimaging approaches to directly compare artificial grammar learning in humans and macaque and marmoset monkeys. After a short postdoctoral position, he was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellowship to study the cognitive and neural systems supporting language-relevant processes in humans and monkeys. He joined Emory University in 2020, where his lab takes a comparative approach, studying humans and nonhuman primates to explore the evolution of cognition and communication, and the origins of human language.

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Comparative cognition, cross-species neuroimaging, language evolution, communication, cooperation, implicit learning, statistical learning. 

RESEARCH AREAS
As a comparative cognitive scientist, my research focuses on questions about what makes humans unique in the animal kingdom, and conversely, where might we have more in common with nonhuman primates than we might expect? I am particularly interested in the evolution of language, which is a human ability that appears remarkably different to forms of communication available to other nonhuman animals. However, my research asks whether some aspects of language may be supported by domain-general systems that might also exist in other species. My previous research has shown that some of the cognitive mechanisms and neural systems that support and underpin human linguistic abilities may be shared with closely related nonhuman animals.

Research in the Wilson lab has a number of key goals. Firstly, we aim to identify core cognitive computations that support aspects of language learning and processing (using statistical learning, sequence processing, implicit learning and memory tasks). These can then be directly related to linguistic abilities in healthy populations of human adults and children, as well as clinical and subclinical populations (e.g., aphasia, dyslexia, etc.). The lab uses a range of experimental paradigms to test humans and nonhuman primates using the same behavioral methods (e.g., habituation/dishabituation paradigms, eye tracking, testing with touchscreen computers). These studies aim to help us understand which cognitive abilities might be evolutionarily conserved across species, and which might represent unique human specializations.

Finally, we use neuroscientific approaches (including neuroimaging such as fMRI, DTI and EEG, and brain stimulation like TMS or TUS) to directly compare brain responses in humans and monkeys, to identify whether similar behaviors in these species are supported by the same or different neural systems. This work has the potential not only to provide insights about human evolution and the origins of language, but identifying evolutionarily conserved abilities is also critical to develop nonhuman primates as an animal model system in which to better understand these shared cognitive and neural systems.

 

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Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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VIDEO LINK

CLICK HERE FOR LINKS TO RELATED PAPERS:  http://cmbc.emory.edu/events/lectures/index.html
 

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VIDEO LINK

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Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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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

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Before joining the Oxford College faculty in 1994, Carter served as a senior assistant research scientist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s prestigious Epidemic Intelligence Service, with a research focus on smoking as a risk marker for suicidal behaviors in adolescents.

Carter has published extensively in both academic and lay publications, actively engaging in the translation of research in psychology into everyday language. His articles have been published in magazines such as mental_floss, and has appeared on news programs such as Connect With Kids and NBC’s Today show

He is the co-author of Learn Psychology (Jones and Bartlett), a textbook now in its second edition, and he is currently at work on an introductory psychology textbook for SAGE publications as well as a psychopathology textbook for Cambridge University Press. He is the designer and instructor of a course on the psychology of thrill-seeking now offered by Emory University and Coursera as a MOOC (massive online open course). Canadian museum Science North has launched an exhibit on sensation-seeking that was informed by Carter’s work that is currently traveling in North America.  His most recent book is Buzz!: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies (Cambridge University Press).

A graduate of Oxford College and Emory University, Carter received an MA and PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan. After completion of his doctoral work he also earned an MS in psychopharmacology from Fairleigh Dickinson University and gained board certification as a clinical psychologist.

You can find him on Twitter @drkencarter

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Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include digital humanities, data science, data studies, and early American literature. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed.

Klein is currently at work on two major projects: the first, Data by Design, is an interactive book on the history of data visualization. Awarded an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, Data by Design emphasizes how the modern visualizing impulse emerged from a set of complex intellectually and politically-charged contexts in the United States and across the Atlantic.

The second project, tentatively titled Vectors of Freedom, employs a range of quantitative methods in order to surface the otherwise invisible forms of labor, agency, and action involved in the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century United States.

Klein is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). This book shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation’s first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. Klein is also the co-author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), a trade book that explores the intersection of feminist thinking and data science. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The most recent book in this series is Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.

Before arriving at Emory, Klein taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She also directed the Digital Humanities Lab there.

More information on her research and teaching can be found on her website: www.lklein.com.

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BIO
Dr. Arber Tasimi received his B.A. in Psychology with Honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 where he graduated summa cum laude. He then attended Yale University, earning his Ph.D. in 2017. Dr. Tasimi held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University from 2017-2020 and joined the Department of Psychology at Emory University as an Assistant Professor in 2020.

RESEARCH
Dr. Tasimi is a developmental psychologist with broad interests in cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics, and affective science. His research aims to uncover the emergence of moral decision-making and to discover how and why people differ in their moral thinking of behavior. To approach these issues, his lab studies how moral decision-making unfolds over real time and developmental time. By illuminating how moral decision-making emerges as motivated behavior that reflects the interaction of developmental, cognitive, social, and affective processes, the ultimate promise of his research program is to inform practices––at the level of parents, teachers, and institutions––aimed at encouraging goodness and discouraging badness.

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• Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago, 2015-2017
• PhD, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 2015
• MA, University of Pennsylvania, 2010

RESEARCH

• Ancient DNA
• Population Genetics
• Pathogen-Host Interactions
• Canine Social Evolution
• Human Adaptation to Changing Environments
• The Biological Effects of Colonization
• The Americas 

My lab specializes in both the molecular and computational aspects of Ancient DNA research. By utilizing an integrative approach, including ancient whole genomes, statistical modeling, and functional methods, the lab examines genetic fluctuations that have occurred in different environments over time, thereby pointing to genetic traits that can inform more fine-grained hypotheses of adaptation. Current research is focused on identifying temporally-extended sets of molecular traits relevant to changes in human population density, changes in social stratification, the adoption of agriculture, local pathogens, high altitude adaptation, and environmental changes caused by European contact (e.g., disease, warfare, and social alterations). The lab is also focused on uncovering regional human population history in the Americas and linking individuals and communities to the multi-faceted ancient civilizations that existed before the colonial era.

 

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BIO
As a broadly trained primatologist, I am interested in the evolution of primate social cognition, the mechanisms that influence social choices, and under what context these decisions are adaptive. I received a joint Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and Biopsychology from the University of Michigan in 2016 and recently completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University (GSU). My research program focuses on social cognition and the mechanisms driving social behavior in nonhuman primates. My current research examines how conflict influences cooperative decisions (i.e., parochial altruism) in capuchin monkeys, and the roles of testosterone and oxytocin in promoting cooperation during conflict. I am the co-director of a long-term field project, Capuchins de Taboga, examining the cognition and behavior of wild white-faced capuchins in the Guanacaste Region of Costa Rica. When not following monkeys through the forest, I work to increase visibility and opportunities for minority and queer students interested in Anthropology and STEM fields. 

RESEARCH
My research program focuses on social cognition and the mechanisms driving social behavior in nonhuman primates. Specifically, I’m interested in how primates make important social decisions, what underlying factors impact these choices, and why these decisions are adaptive. I approach these questions from an evolutionary and comparative perspective while utilizing a mechanistic approach, through the integration of experimental paradigms in the wild, and the assessment and manipulation of hormones. My current research examines how conflict influences cooperative decisions (i.e., parochial altruism) in capuchin monkeys, and the roles of testosterone and oxytocin in promoting cooperation during conflict. My long-term objective is to examine the evolutionary roots and biological underpinnings of parochial altruism by comparing decision-making during conflict across the primate taxa in both captivity and in the wild.  

I conduct this work on wild white-faced capuchins at my research station, Capuchinos de Taboga, in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica, and with captive tufted capuchins at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. Capuchins are an ideal model system for these questions as they are highly intelligent, social, and cooperative primates. In the lab, capuchins routinely work together to achieve a common goal, and in the wild capuchins regularly form coalitions to intimidate rivals. By combining wild and captive work, as well an integrating experimental paradigm in these monkey’s natural habitats, my work is uniquely suited to unpack both proximate and ultimate mechanisms of social decision-making in primates, offering a promising avenue for understanding the importance of sociality, cooperation, and conflict on primate cognitive evolution. 

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• PhD, Harvard University, 1973
• MD, Harvard Medical School, 1985
• A.B. , Anthropology, CUNY, Brooklyn College, 1966

BIO
Melvin (Mel) Konner came to Emory in 1983 as the first Chair of the newly-created Department of Anthropology. He co-founded the Anthropology & Human Biology major and has been a core member of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology faculty since that program was founded. He is also affiliated with the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies.

Long committed to fostering the public understanding of anthropology and evolution, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Salon.com, and many other publications both academic and general. He has testified twice at U.S. Senate hearings related to health care.

Konner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, and received fellowships from the John Simon Guggheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and others. He was a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation (2000-2010) and received the John McGovern Award in Medical Humanities from the Yale School of Medicine. He was Creative Loafing’s Best Local Intellectual of 2004 and has been listed in “Who’s Who in Hell.”

RESEARCH
Specializations

* Hunting-gathering peoples

* Evolutionary anthropology

* Evolution of childhood

* Hunter-gatherer (“Paleolithic”) diets

* Human behavioral biology

* Medical anthropology

* Gender in evolutionary perspective

* Anthropology of the Jews

* Evolution of Religion

Konner did the first in-depth study of infancy among Kalahari hunter-gatherers when they were still living and raising children traditionally, probably partly reflecting conditions among our early modern human ancestors. In works such as The Evolution of Childhood (2010), Konner traces psychosocial development from birth to adulthood through neuroendocrine maturation and environmental influence, situating these complex processes in comparative, cross-cultural, and phylogenetic perspective.

Konner's years in the Kalahari also led him to help develop the "Paleolithic Diet" and to understand the health consequences of modern changes. His book The Tangled Wing was called by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr "a beautifully written, well-balanced interpretation of human nature" and a "classic." Robert Sapolsky has called Konner "the nearest thing we have to a poet laureate of behavioral biology." The last of his eleven books, Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, is an attempt at a 21st-century version of Ashley Montagu’s classic The Natural Superiority of Women, and argues that male supremacy as we know it is in evolutionary perspective temporary and destined to end soon. He is currently working on a book on the nature of faith.

www.melvinkonner.com.

www.jewsandothers.com

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• Faculty, Program in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (NBB)
• Member, HERCULES Exposome Research Center, Emory University
• Investigator, Emory Eye Center, Emory Healthcare
• Member, Center for Visual & Neurocognitive Rehabilitation, Atlanta VA Medical Center

RESEARCH
INTERESTS - The functional organization of human visual cortex and its origins. Cortical plasticity in adult human vision.
AREAS - Face, place, and object processing, from infancy to adulthood. Reorganization of adult human primary visual cortex, and its perceptual consequences.

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Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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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 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and was also Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at McGill University.

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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 whether the inter-brain synchrony was mainly driven by the mental processes or the movement, we decided to study dancers. The dancers we are working with are not only movement experts but also are able to generate a large spectrum of mental states that explore different facets of human connection. In a tour through the Netherlands, we have been collecting EEG data while the dancers are exploring human connectedness through movement. I will discuss challenges and opportunities involved in this method of data collection.

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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.

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1 GIPSA-lab, CNRS, Grenoble Alpes University, France
2 New College, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA

In the weeks around New Years, 2017, two complementary articles discussing speech evolution appeared in respected general science journals: Fitch et al., 2016, in Science Advances and Boë et al., 2017, in PLOSOne. These two articles announced the final failure of a theory that had been widely propagated and broadly accepted for half a century, despite numerous critiques and partial falsifications: the laryngeal descent theory (LDT) of Lieberman and colleagues (Lieberman, 1968; Lieberman et al., 1969; Lieberman & Crelin, 1971). Taken together, those studies represented – and continue to represent – an extremely powerful research paradigm, drawn directly from the core understanding of speech science, that the acoustic speech signal transmits articulatory information. Specifically the authors: (i) used recorded calls of live primates to make anatomical inferences about vocal tracts (VTs), (ii) used either VT casts of extant primates or reconstructions of fossil species’ VTs to make acoustic inferences, and (iii) by appropriate comparisons of anatomy and acoustics, drew conclusions regarding both the ontogeny and the phylogeny of speech.
Their conclusions, later termed LDT, were: that fully human speech, in particular the full human vowel inventory, was made possible by the large pharyngeal cavity resulting from laryngeal descent, which occurs over the lifespan of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (AMHS) only; that living primates, pre-modern humans (including Neanderthals), and modern human toddlers were restricted to schwa-like vowels; and that speech could only have developed after the emergence of AMHS some 200,000 years ago, and language more recently still.
Controversy in speech evolution research is inevitable, due to lack of fossil evidence, difficulty of experimental design and data collection, absence of general paradigms, and especially, the need for multidisciplinary cooperation among otherwise compartmentalized fields. We will give some taste of that controversy as we trace 3 decades of difficult work showing that a large pharynx from laryngeal descent is not necessary to produce the full inventory of vowels. Theoretical arguments claimed that infants, Neanderthals, and primates were anatomically able to produce contrasting vowels, and recorded evidence accumulated that infants could as well, and finally, the articles noted above presented MRIs of macaque VTs and especially recorded calls from baboons showing both produce contrasting vowels, all without the large pharynx required by LDT. If we think of this evidence as in some sense “fossils” of early speech emergence, this pushes the “dawn of speech” 100 times further back in our history, to our last common ancestor with old world monkeys, over 20 million years ago.
We will present new evidence we have recently developed further reinforcing that claim, and will outline certain implications for language evolution theory & research more generally.
 

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The Ternes lived in NYC and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. During Dr. Mead’s last days, she lived with Barbara Ternes, at the DeMenille estate on Long Island.

Currently, Ms. Ternes lives in Bellows Falls, VT, spends time with her adult children in NYC and frequented Atlanta, GA, spending time with Emory graduate (50C) and friend, the late Father Austin Ford, founder of Emmaus House, an Episcopal outreach in the Peoplestown community of Atlanta. http://www.emoryhistory.emory.edu/facts-figures/people/makers-history/profiles/ford.html
(https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/fall95/austinford.html)

Ms. Ternes stopped in for a CMBC Lunch to relay some personal stories from her days working with Dr. Mead.
A YouTube version can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/E5geVXHsDWQ?t=1

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Although great apes collaborate for some purposes, recent studies comparing chimpanzees and human children suggest that human collaboration is unique both cognitively and motivationally. In particular humans seem adapted for collaborative foraging, as even young children display numerous relevant mechanisms, from special ways of coordinating and communicating to special ways of sharing food to special forms of social evaluation. The Shared Intentionality hypothesis specifies the ontogeny of these underlying mechanisms and their consequences for both human cognition and human social life.

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A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).
Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).
Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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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 collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).
Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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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 collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).
Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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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 collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).
Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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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 collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).
Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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Proponents of Predictive Processing (PP) describe it as a grand unifying theory of the mind (Hohwy 2014, Clark 2015). However, the relationship between PP and its closest rival, reinforcement learning (RL), is controversial. Unificationists about PP sometimes argue that active inference can account for core features of RL (Friston et al. 2009). Anti-unificationists reject this and defend explanatory pluralism as the most promising avenue for scientific progress (Colombo and Wright 2016). I argue for an intermediate position: even if RL is a special case of Bayes-optimal inference, it remains better suited to explaining motivation – and failures of motivation – than its more abstract counterpart (Dayan and Abbott 2001, Trappenberg 2002, Woodward 2014, Klein 2016).

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I investigate human language viewed as a species-typical aspect of our biology, and attempt to understand it via comparison with other species’ cognition and communication systems (the comparative approach). The first step in doing so is to break language down to its components (the multi-component approach) and then ask which components are shared with which other species (or not). I present evidence for continuity in speech perception, most aspects of speech production, and of human conceptual semantics with animal cognition, and evidence for discontinuity when it comes to organizing principles of syntax (hierarchical structure) and potentially some aspects of semantics (pragmatic, theory-of-mind based production). I conclude that comparative research, guided by specific computational and mechanistic models deriving from linguistics and cognitive science, must play a central role in future attempts to understand language evolution.

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