Emory College announces the creation of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture. The Center’s mission is to explore issues and phenomena associated with mind, brain, and culture from an inter-disciplinary perspective. The Center’s mission rests on the assumption that multiple explanatory perspectives are essential for explaining the cognitive and social abilities of humans and other species. The aim is for inter-disciplinary exchange to inform faculty and student research, contribute to undergraduate and graduate curricula, and lead to a wide variety of inter-disciplinary research projects that establish multi-perspective explanations. Relevant explanatory perspectives include but are not restricted to evolution, cross-species comparison, culture, social interaction, development, cognition, neuroscience, and computational modeling. We also welcome perspectives from the humanities, including philosophy, linguistics, religion, and literature, and from the professions, including psychology, medicine, public health, business, and law.

The Center rests on a further assumption that successful inter-disciplinary activity is more likely to result from grass roots coalitions than from top-down directives. Rather than trying to organize specific groups of inter-disciplinary researchers itself, the Center will encourage researchers who have natural affinities to find each other and work together.

The primary activity of the Center currently is to sponsor multi-disciplinary workshops and an associated colloquium series. The Center will also sponsor a lunch series associated with a blog that allows participants and others to discuss inter-disciplinary issues associated with mind, brain, and culture. Should additional resources become available, the Center may extend its activities further.

We welcome Emory faculty, staff, post docs, and graduate students who resonate with the Center’s mission to become an Affiliate and to participate in the Center’s activities.