Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

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.

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.

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 criti

Mathematical Concepts in Humans and Machine Learning ModelsThe 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 p

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 betwee

"Can 'Wild' Sounds Teach Us What it Means to be Human?" David Haskell | Biology & Environmental Sciences | University of the South, Sewanee, TN 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."

The Rational Use of Cognitive ResourcesPsychologists and computer scientists have very different views of the mind. Psychologists tell us that humans are error-prone, using simple heuristics that result in systematic biases. Computer scientists view human intelligence as aspirational, trying to capture it in artificial intelligence systems. How can we reconcile these two perspectives? In this talk, I will argue that we can do so by reconsidering how we think about rational action. Psychologists have long used the standard of rationality from economics, which focuses on choosing the best action without considering the computational difficulty of that choice. By using a standard of rationality inspired by computer science, in which the quality of the outcome trades off with the amount of computation involved, we obtain new models of human behavior that can help us understand the cognitive strategies that people adopt. I will present examples of this approach in the context of human decision-making and planning,

Simple Interactions Construct Complex Communication in Songbirds and Human InfantsDespite 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 interchang

"Widowhood, Archives, and the Musical Work of Mourning in Postwar Europe" Martha Sprigge | Musicology | University of California, Santa Barbara Presented by Dept. of Music with co-sponsorship from Dept. of Philosophy / Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture / Center for Faculty Development and ExcellenceThis 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 funer

Have you thought about applying to the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER)?  These prestigious awards can provide a major boost to your career and require an integration of education and research activities different from more conventional research grant applications.Learn more about this program and how to put together a successful application through this discussion and informal Q&A with two recent Emory awardees, Dr. Joyce Ho (Computer Science) and Dr. John Lindo (Anthropology)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" ass

Keynote Address | The Evolution of Culture and Technology Mini Symposium | Tel Aviv University  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 “Percep

Vernelle A. A. Noel | Architecture & Interactive Computing | Georgia Institute of TechnologyCraft 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

Karen Adolph | Psychology and Neural Science | New York University 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.

Tobias Overath | Psychology and Neuroscience | Duke UniversitySpeech 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.

Andrew Buskell | Public Policy | Georgia Institute of TechonologyThe 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. Look

Robert Liu is the new Associate Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, a Professor of Biology and an Affiliate Scientist at the Emory National Primate Research Center. He is interviewed about his research in his Computational Neuroethology Lab by CMBC Director and Professor of Anthropology, Dietrich Stout.Bio PageRobert Liu Lab WebsiteNational Primate Research Center

Kathryn Kadous, the Schaefer Chaired Professor of Accounting and Director and Associate Dean of PhD Program in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University talks with Lynne Nygaard, the recent past-director of the CMBC and current Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology at Emory, discuss her research into the judgement and decision-making issues in auditing and accounting and spotlights some of her favorite insights. https://goizueta.emory.edu/faculty/profiles/kathryn-kadous

Frans de Waal (Director of the Living Links Center and C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology, Emory University) sits down for a discussion with the CMBC former-Director, Lynne Nygaard (Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, Emory University) and Dietrich Stout (CMBC Director and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Emory University) to discuss his research, career, and recent book, "Different, Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist" (https://bookshop.org/books/different-gender-through-the-eyes-of-a-primatologist/9781324007104)

Humans and Proboscideans (the taxonomic order of elephants as well as several extinct animals such as mammoth) have shared habitats across the Old and New Worlds during the past two million years, starting with the appearance of the Genus Homo in Africa and following the dispersals of humans to other continents. Proboscideans were included in the human diet starting from the Lower Paleolithic and continued until the final stages of the Pleistocene, providing humans with both meat and, especially, fat. Meat eating, large-game hunting and food-sharing appeared in Africa some two million years ago and these practices were accompanied and supported by growing social complexity and cooperation. This argument emphasizes the dependency of early humans on calories derived from mega herbivores through the hunting of large and medium-sized animals as a fundamental and very early adaptation mode of Lower Paleolithic humans, and the possible emergence of social and behavioral mechanisms that appeared at these early times

Drawing upon data from an ongoing ethnographic study of embodiment and emotion in everyday interaction among cohabitating couples in the U.S., this presentation engages with key theoretical and methodological questions involved in conducting ethnographic research at the intersection of linguistic and biocultural anthropology. My discussion, specifically, focuses on video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in couples’ homes alongside time-matched psychophysiological data on moment-to-moment shifts in each partners’ respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) —an aspect of heart rate variability (HRV)—gathered with a mobile impedance cardiography device (Mindware Technologies, Ltd. Westerville, OH). In analyzing video data, I demonstrate how the theories and methods of linguistic anthropology complicate a quantitative approach to emotion-in-interaction that often hinges upon the identification of specific, discrete “emotions” and/or designation of particular interactions as either “conflict” or “agreement” (s