Lecture | Tara Callaghan "Fostering Prosociality in Refugee Children: An Intervention with Rohingya Children"

Héctor Álvarez | Theater Studies, Emory University "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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please let us know.Follow along with us on Instagram | Threads | Facebook

Tara Callaghan |  Professor of Psychology, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada "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  If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please let us know.Follow along with us on Instagram | Threads | Facebook

Alexandra (Sasha) Key | Professor, Marcus Autism Center, Emory University School of Medicine "Building a functional communication system: Does the baby have a say?" For a long time, language development has been framed mainly in the context of nature-nurture interactions. However, research in non-typical development suggests that another critical contributor should be considered. In this talk, I will present findings from neurophysiological studies in infants and children to demonstrate the importance of self-initiated active engagement with spoken communication for supporting more optimal developmental outcomes. Our data will demonstrate that choosing to engage with speech, an indication of social motivation, is an integral part of the previously established associations between the neural systems and the environmental factors contributing to individual differences in language development. Expanding the general conceptual approach to language to include nature-nurture-person will allow us to better understand the sources of variability in functional communication abilities across the full spectrum of developmental outcomes. If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please let us know.Follow along with us on Instagram | Threads | Facebook

Anna Ivanova | Assistant Professor, School of Psychology | Georgia Tech College of Sciences "Dissociating Language and Thought in Humans and in Machines" “What is the relationship between language and thought? This question has long intrigued researchers across scientific fields. In this talk, I will propose a framework for clarifying the language-thought relationship. I will introduce a distinction between formal competence—knowledge of linguistic rules and patterns—and functional competence—understanding and using language in the world. This distinction is grounded in human neuroscience, where a wealth of evidence indicates that formal competence relies on a set of specialized brain regions (“the language network”), whereas functional competence requires the use of multiple non-language-specific neural systems. I will then present a series of case studies illustrating how the formal/functional competence distinction can help (a) delineate the functional architecture of the human brain, providing a framework for studying complex cognitive behaviors, such as computer coding and legal reasoning; (b) understand the capabilities and limitations of today’s large language models, particularly in the realm of general world knowledge.” If you would like to become an AFFILIATE of the Center, please let us know.Follow along with us on Instagram | Threads | Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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