The Center for Mind and Culture promotes research, training, and outreach in six thematic emphases. These Focus Areas all fall into the mind-culture nexus, in that they involve both culture-level circumstances (politics, economics, ecology) and mind-level realities (emotions, worldviews, cognitive…
Dreams are a universal and critical human experience. In the far past of our species right up to the present day, dreams and nightmares have been associated with profound meaning. Some dreams seem to convey religious revelations while others express…
ASPECT Hub Artificial Intelligence is beginning to revolutionize the way we interact with the world. But this technology – and the power it brings – is not available to everyone, including those who struggle with communication skills like children with…
CMAC houses the flagship journal for the biocultural study of religion, Religion, Brain, & Behavior. As an academic journal deeply invested in approaches to understanding religion that combine biological and cultural modes of analysis, RBB is a source of scholarship from and…
2023 “How Do Our Dreams Evolve As We Age?” Discover Magazine, September 20, 2023. “BU creates standards for chatbots in the classroom,” Boston Globe, April 4, 2023. “The neuroscience of spiritual experiences,” Big Think, April 3, 2023. 2022 “Pandemic visions:…
What is the mind-culture nexus? At CMAC, the mind-culture nexus denotes the phenomena that occur at the intersection and interaction of individuals with their environments. CMAC studies the mind-culture nexus because it encompasses much of the way that people operate…
Luca del Deo Research Assistant, 2022-Present Luca received his Masters of Theological Studies at the Harvard Divinity School, specializing in topics related to meditative practices in America and related inquiries in psychology, anthropology, and religious studies. He graduated Magna Cum…
Rachel Bacon Research Associate, 2024-PresentPostdoctoral Fellow, 2020-2024Rachel Bacon is a sociologist and demographer. She graduated with a Ph.D. from the Sociology and Demography dual-degree program at Penn State University. She worked on the Modeling Religious Change Project as a postdoctoral fellow at…
CMAC is dedicated to a non-partisan, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research approach. Our research teams employ computational models, data analytics, historical interpretation, philosophical analysis of concepts and other methods to generate practical answers to the challenges confronting us. CMAC researchers rely on…
Post-Doctoral Fellow Justin Lane and Co-Author Chapter in Religion: Mental Religion August 12, 2016 Book Summary: Religion: Mental Religion is part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series dedicated to the study of religion. Composed of twenty-two thematic chapters, this volume highlights religion,…