CMB Media Showcase

Video and text summaries are now available of the CMB network meeting on Friday, January 29, 2021, to showcase the work of  CMB members who received honoraria last Summer as part of our Media Competency/Best Practices and Curricular Development Project. Presenters shared demonstrations and lessons learned from: Creating new online course modules; new forms of public outreach; online labs, activities, data analysis; podcasting; and video production.

Focused Discussion: Tanya Luhrmann & Michael Lifshitz (January 15, 2021)

The CMB network met on Friday, January 15, 2021, to discuss on going research by Tanya Luhrmann and Michael Lifshitz.

List of Readings: Hearing Voices

Hearing a voice, feeling the presence of another being, or feeling that another being is present in one’s own body are human experience that are both surprising common, and central to religious practice in many societies. They have been explained, or at least discussed scientifically, in a range of ways—dissociation, hypnosis, absorption, psychosis, reality monitoring and so forth— and there is still no settled consensus about how to make sense of these events or whether they are, in the end, the same kinds of events. All share what a non-faith perspective might call “non-agency”: a person experiences a thought or sensation, but attributes the thought or sensation to a source not themselves. We’ll talk about our work on this topic as a means of generating discussion.

Focused Discussion: Dietrich Stout (December 11, 2020)

The CMB network met on Friday, December 11, 2020 (“Technology and the Evolution of Human Culture, Mind, and Brain”). Dietrich Stout provided an overview of his research and its relevance for the evolution of language and human cognition.