Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "Embodiment of Thinking" a musical interlude/lesson sung by Dr. Ken Cheng.

Robert Hampton introduces Ken Cheng: Ants as a group feature especially small brains even for their small size, and yet many species are expert navigators forging learned routes about their habitat. Working to bring food to their next, they make excellent research animals for navigational research because they do not satiate when given food repeatedly. I review briefly ants' navigational tool kit, with part integration, view-based navigation (and to some extent cues of other modalities), and systematic search being chief components. Then I describe some evidence on two major themes. First, ants integrate cues from multiple navigational systems that are processed in parallel. In some cases, they even integrate in an optimal (Bayesian) fashion. Second, how ants learn to use views for navigation and how they modify view-based navigation on the basis of experience (learning) has recently been investigated. I highlight some recent work on this experimental ethology of learning to navigate.

All biological sounds originate with body movements. However, theories of speech production and perception have not generally been grounded in models of how bodies move. In this talk, I will argue that the body has been a crucial missing link in theories of speech, and will show how a deeper – and less culturally biased – understanding of the body’s role in speech, gained partly through advances in biomechanical simulation, can help us to make sense of how sounds are produced for communication. I will show how this framework sheds light on such wide-ranging issues as: why languages universally use similar movement inventories, how movement variation becomes speech variation and sound change, links between speech and non-speech functions such as digestion, respiration and emotion expression, whether spoken and signed language follow similar principles, the role of sensory feedback in speech, and how innate infant behaviors bootstrap speech.

High Church evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts - organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts. Research in psychology and neuroscience - involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans - now suggests that genetic evolution has merely tweaked the human mind, making us more friendly than our pre-human ancestors, more attentive to other agents, and giving us souped-up, general-purpose mechanisms of learning, memory and cognitive control. Using these resources, our special-purpose organs of thought are built in the course of development through social interaction. They are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution, cognitive gadgets rather than cognitive instincts. In making the case for cognitive gadgets, I’ll suggest that experimental evidence from computational cognitive science is an important and neglected r

A striking feature of the real world is that there is too much to think about. This feature is remarkably understudied in laboratory contexts, where the study of decision-making is typically limited to small “choice sets” defined by an experimenter. In such cases an individual may devote considerable attention to each item in the choice set. But in everyday life we are often not presented with defined choice sets; rather, we must construct a viable set of alternatives to consider. I will present several recent and ongoing research projects that each aim to understand how humans spontaneously decide what actions to consider—in other words, how we construct choice sets. A common theme among these studies is a key role for cached value representations. Additionally, I will present some evidence that moral norms play a surprisingly and uniquely large role in constraining choice sets and, more broadly, in modal cognition. This suggests a new avenue for understanding the specific manner in which morality i

I outline a computational theory of phenomenal conscious experience, that is, of the basic awareness and its obligatory attendant feelings, involving neither the awareness of awareness nor a sense of self. This Dynamical Emergence Theory (DET) identifies phenomenality with certain intrinsic properties of the dynamics of the system in question. More specifically, it aims to explain the structure, the quantity, and the quality of phenomenal experience in terms of trajectories through the space of the system's emergent metastable macrostates and their intrinsic (that is, observer-independent) topology and geometry. Joint work with Roy Moyal and Tomer Fekete.

What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an approximation to such a grammar, for any language, has been formulated; the idea that grammar is universal and innately specified has proved barren; and attempts to show how it could be learned from experience invariably come up short. To move on from this impasse, we must rediscover the extent to which language is like any other human behavior: dynamic, social, multimodal, patterned, and purposive, its purpose being to promote desirable actions (or thoughts) in others and self. Recent psychological, computational, neurobiological, and evolutionary insights into the shaping and structure of behavior may then point us toward a new, viable account of language.

What are the components of musical ability, and to what extent are they shared with spoken language processing? Both music and language are composed of sounds combined into complex sequences. Both also exhibit tonality, pitch, and rhythmic grouping and convey emotional meaning. Drs. Laura Emmery (Department of Music) and Christina Tzeng (Department of Psychology) will explore the intersections between these two phenomena. Dr Emmery will address some of the mental processes that underlie music behaviors—how emotion, environment, individual preferences, and other factors influence how we perceive music. Dr. Tzeng will share insights into the extent to which the cognitive and perceptual abilities that enable human language might also be shared with music. Drawing from music theory and psychology, we will discuss the functional significance of music and language in the human experience.

How your digital footprint can improve your life, advance science, and harm you

To make sense of sound, there is a wide activation of sensorimotor, cognitive, and reward circuitry in the brain. Active and repeated engagement with sounds that activate all these circuits, therefore, is a route to honing our brain function. Playing music is like hitting the jackpot for the brain because it requires the motor system, deeply engages our emotions, and absolutely gives us a cognitive workout. We have employed a biological approach, the frequency-following response (FFR), to reveal the integrity of sound processing in the brain and how these brain processes are shaped by music training. We have found that music works in synergistic partnerships with language skills and the ability to make sense of speech in noisy, everyday listening environments. We have found that music brings about a “speeding” of auditory system development, and a tendency toward a reversal of the biological impact of poverty-induced linguistic deprivation. The generalization from music to everyday communication illustrates b

Cultural traits—behaviors that are learned from others—can change more rapidly than genes and can be inherited not only from parents but also from teachers and peers. How does this complex process of cultural evolution differ from and interact with genetic evolution? In this talk, I will discuss the dynamics of culturally transmitted behaviors on dramatically different evolutionary timescales: the learned songs of a family of songbirds and the spoken languages of modern human populations. Both of these behaviors enable communication between individuals and facilitate complex social interactions that can affect genetic evolution. My analyses of these two systems demonstrate that learned behaviors, while less conserved than genetic traits, can retain evolutionary information across great distances and over long timescales.

Which Way to the Dawn of Speech?      (click for link to PowerPoint)Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech scienceLouis-Jean Boë  & Thomas R. Sawallis 1 GIPSA-lab, CNRS, Grenoble Alpes University, France2 New College, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USAIn 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