Junior Symposium

The Mind/Brain/Behavior Symposium offers students a chance to investigate, both in both theoretical and concrete ways, how creative new research possibilities may emerge at the frontiers of the different fields concerned with mind, brain, and behavior. It is a midway fulcrum in your education, following up on your disciplinary training in your specific track and your exposure to a range of MBB issues through Psychology 1 and Neuroscience 80.

The symposium develops out of the perspective that animates MBB: we cannot adequately address the great intellectual questions and social challenges we confront with a single approach; rather, we must consider them from multiple perspectives. Scholarly disciplines emerge, evolve, converge, merge, and disappear as the problems that motivate them change. Each discipline is a kind of toolbox that provides a unique theoretical orientation, language, and methodology for generating and solving problems. One of the most exciting moments in the life of a discipline happens when boundaries become more porous or shift to make room for ideas and techniques from other fields, and we begin to see new ways to tackle old problems. Each symposium models this interdisciplinary enterprise through exploring a topic that currently engages a broad range of mind brain behavior researchers.

Each year's symposium examines a different theme.

2022-2023: Two Brains, One Organism: Gut and Brain

2021-2022: COVID-19 and Mind Brain Behavior

2019-2020: How the Brain is Shaped by Experience

2018-2019: Hatred and Aggression: An MBB Perspective

2017-2018: Sex, Mind, and Brain

2016-2017: Measuring, Explaining, and Creating Cognition

2015-2016: What Makes Human Cognition Powerful?

2014-2015: Mind, Brain, and the Wonderful World of Animal Behavior

2013-2014: New Methods in Brain Science: Optogenetics, the Connectome, and Functional Imaging 2.0

2012-2013: What is Reality? Perception in Wake, Sleep, and Psychosis

2011-2012: Social Vision

2010-2011: Concepts and Conceptualization

2009-2010: Aggression