Faculty Activities

EUEC member Jim Flannery was one of the driving forces behind the Atlanta Celtic Christmas concert that took place for many years at Emory. The Emmy Award-winning film of the Southern Celtic Christmas Concert is being featured nationally on PBS as a Christmas special for the second year in a row. Here in Georgia, GPB is carrying the program for the fourth year in a row, with the broadcasts scheduled on Sunday December 21st at 4:00 pm and December 22nd at 11:00 pm. You can see a flyer describing the program by clicking here.

The Concert was for many years one of the most beloved and popular events of the Holiday Season among the Emory and Greater Atlanta communities. Called by the Atlanta Journal Constitution a "rollicking yet reverent occasion," in poetry, music, song, dance and story, the program celebrates the connections between the Christmas traditions of Ireland and the other Celtic lands with those of the American South. Performers in the program include three Grammy Award-winners along with a number of Emory faculty members and students. In addition, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney makes a rare television appearance talking about the inspiration for his beautiful poem, "St. Kevin and the Blackbird," which Jim then has the honor of performing.

Compass Records has released a beautiful DVD of the Concert that includes several bonus tracks, including a seventeen-minute interview with Seamus Heaney in which he talks about the reverence for nature at the heart of Medieval Celtic Christianity and the influence this had on his writing. Jim has been able to arrange for Compass to make the recording available to EUEC members at $15.00, including the cost of shipping (a $10.00 savings off the list price). Jim says these DVDs would make lovely Christmas gifts!

This special offer may be accessed by members of the Emeritus College through the following link:

http://compassrecords.com/album.php?id=1070 

Creative Aging

A Persistent Scholar

On November 24, the Chronicle of Higher Education had a lengthy and entertaining article about one of our own "persistent scholars," Ron Schuchard. You can read the entire article by clicking here. Persistent in this case refers to the first letter that Ron wrote to Mrs. T. S. Eliot in 1970 (click here to read that letter) that did not bear fruit until 1987! Ron continues to work very actively on this project. You may remember the articles celebrating the launch of his first two volumes of Eliot prose in Issue 5 of this newsletter.

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 How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog  

Decode the Canine Brain

Do you have a dog? Have you ever had a dog? Do you even just like dogs? If you answer "Yes" to any of these questions then you have looked into a dog's eyes and thought "I wonder what you are thinking?" Of course, if you are like most of us dog owners, you are sure you know. Well, the good news according to Professor Gregory Berns, Distinguished Professor of Neuroeconomics, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine, is that you are right! At least partially.

Professor Berns, author of How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and his Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain, spoke to a standing room only crowd at the Emeritus College luncheon on December 1. Professor Berns specializes in the use of MRIs in understanding cognition. He has gone from research in humans to research in dogs seeking to answer that age old question "What do dogs think?" Of course, all dog owners project their own emotions on their dogs. Yes, my dog shows remorse when he gets into the garbage or digs a hole in the couch, and yes, my dog shows happiness when I go for his food dish or produce a special treat. As dogs have no verbal language, traditional research into canine behavior has always been in the behaviorist tradition. Charles Darwin first described animal emotions seeing in them the evolutionary root of human emotion. Before Professor Berns' research, our judgment of a dog's understanding and emotions was based solely on how a dog acted.

Professor Berns, however, has devised a way to study their brains. Thanks to his partnership with an expert dog trainer, Mark Spivak of Comprehensive Pet Therapy, dogs are trained to hold still in an MRI machine, an unfamiliar and noisy environment, for up to 30 seconds at a time while their brains are scanned. Once a trained dog is in the machine, the activity in its brain can be monitored. For example, Professor Berns was able to see the differential response of the brain to hand signals for hot dog or no hot dog. Dogs with different personalities do react differently to some of his experiments, but his overall conclusion is that dogs do form bonds with their human companions and prefer their human to others. Yes, your dog loves you BEST! Future study will focus on impulse control and as some dogs in the study age, he will be able to study decline in cognition in the older dogs.

Not surprisingly, Professor Berns was peppered with questions. He emphasized that no dogs are harmed in his research. He uses only positive reinforcement in the training. When asked about whether he would consider studying cats, he replied that he did not think they would "enjoy" the MRI experience!

Thank you to Professor Berns for a really interesting and fun program and thanks to the Emeritus College for bringing him to us!

Your faithful reporter, Lois Lane (AKA Jan Pratt).

Click here to see How Dogs Love Us video

Click here to see What is your dog thinking?

EUEC Interdisciplinary Seminars

For active faculty, it is all too easy to think about what one would lose in retirement, rather than what one could gain. As much as Emory as an institution talks about interdisciplinarity, the reality is that it is very difficult to accomplish what one needs to in one's own discipline, much less to reach across discipline and school boundaries. Consequently there are many faculty in our own schools we don't know, and it is all too seldom that we have opportunities to get to know faculty outside of our own school.

I hope that many of you have discovered that EUEC represents a place where you can interact with faculty from across all of Emory's schools and enjoy the different perspectives that people bring from their disciplinary backgrounds. The Interdisciplinary Seminars represent an ideal way in which to explore that interaction. John Bugge is willing to lead another seminar next semester. Read his invitation and description of the Interdisciplinary Seminars by clicking here. However, he invites you also to consider leading such a seminar yourself. There is no reason we could not have more than one seminar, and anyone would be able to participate in more than one at a time.

 If you are interested in participating in (or leading) an Emeritus College Seminar, please send an email to John ( engjmb@emory.edu) with answers to the following questions:

1. Which TWO of the suggested topics in the attachment (if any) would you be most interested in pursuing, in order of preference (first choice, second choice)?

    

2. What is your academic field or specialty?

    

3. Is there another topic not listed here that you would suggest as appropriate for an Emeritus College Interdisciplinary Seminar? (Please name it, and if you like, add the title and author of one or more books or other sources that you think would serve as a resource for the topic.)

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