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The Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture was created in 2007 and moved into its current location in the new Psychological and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building in 2009. It is funded primarily by a grant to Emory College from the Provost's office.

The Center's mission is to foster inquiry, research, and teaching from multiple explanatory perspectives concerning issues and phenomena associated with mind, brain, and culture and their relations.  The Center's mission rests on the assumption that inter-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration are vital for obtaining richer explanations of the abilities, behaviors, and processes, both cognitive and social, of humans and other species.  Such inter-disciplinary exchange will (1) inform faculty and student research,  (2) contribute to curricula, and  (3) lead to a wide variety of research projects that develop, explore, compare, and, when possible, integrate explanations from multiple analytical levels.  Among those multiple approaches, the Center places particular emphasis on the tools, methods, and findings of the sciences in the study of mind, brain, and culture.  Relevant explanatory perspectives include but are not restricted to neuroscientific, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary, comparative, cultural, social, linguistic, and computational.  The Center's mission also encompasses humanistic perspectives on mind, brain, and culture from such disciplines as philosophy, religion, history, languages, and literature.  In addition, the Center welcomes contributions from scholars who have appointments within the various professional schools. 

The Center holds that successful inter-disciplinary activity is most likely to arise from grass roots cooperation.  The Center will support those with pertinent interests in learning from one another and in working together as researchers and as teachers.  The Center aims to develop programming that will aid its various constituencies to pursue and share their multi-disciplinary projects.  We will also encourage interested persons to interact whose professional work in different fields is concerned with related issues of mind, brain, and culture but who seldom have opportunities to listen to and learn from each other.  The Center's initiatives help to forge a larger community of scholars concerned with mind, brain, and culture at Emory and to highlight and promote the important inquiry on these topics that already occurs at Emory.

The Center sponsors multi-disciplinary graduate seminars and an associated colloquium series. The Center also offers a popular but space-limited lunch series associated with a blog that allows speakers, attendees, and others to discuss inter-disciplinary issues concerning mind, brain, and culture. We also host summer workshops and informational sessions on techniques and tools that will be of use to a broad array of scholars from a variety of disciplines.

We encourage Emory faculty, post docs, and graduate and undergraduate students whose interests coincide with the Center’s mission to become an Affiliate and to participate in the Center’s activities.