Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture is the recorded output of an Emory center whose stated remit covers the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts. The episode titles sort the feed into three kinds of event: Lecture, Lunch, and the Seminar Series - Keio+Emory. That last strand runs with the Center for Contemplative Studies at Keio University. At its opening it is described as an informal series on cognitive science, empathy and contemplative science. Dietrich Stout, the center's director, opens several recordings with a short account of the remit before handing over to the speaker. After that, the range is wide. In 'The Social Minds of Humans and Other Apes', Chris Krupenye traces theory-of-mind research to a 1978 paper and sets out lines of evidence on whether apes share the capacity, a question the talk calls still contentious. His closing argues for testing precise intermediate hypotheses about mechanism rather than waiting for a yes-or-no verdict. Ken Paller's lecture on sleep-based memory reactivation puts weight on replication. He describes a coordinated study across 13 labs that would grow a small experiment to a few hundred participants. It ends with a call for more psychology departments to study sleep. The Keio-Emory dialogue with Jared Medina and Masaki Matsubara brings in the body: a mirror setup and fingers tapped in sync leave roughly nine in ten test subjects convinced they have a sixth finger. The talks on art and performance are just as concrete. In 'Performing for Failure: Embodying Grief on Stage Through Ethnodrama', Yunhuan, an Emory PhD student, presents research from South Korea, including a rehearsal clip and an actor's memory of feeling a grieving mother character tremble in an embrace. She also recalls telling the cast that grief comes in many shades, an answer they later remembered as freeing. Davor Vincze's lunch talk walks through an interactive production where audience members scan QR codes, join a web app and meet the characters through dating-style profiles on their phones. In 'The Creative Engine and the Sense of Rightness', Raphaël Julliard describes questioning artists while they work, reasoning that even a creative process that collapses under interruption shows how it runs. What connects all of this is attention to method: how a memory effect is measured, how an illusion is built, how a rehearsal room is observed. The recordings keep the event around each talk, down to a reminder to watch for an email about the next date and a greeting to people joining from East Asia in their morning. For lab science, the sleep and ape-cognition lectures are a natural place to begin. For the center's reach into the arts, the ethnodrama and interactive-performance talks are the way in, and a sizable archive sits behind the recent window.