Program Development

Sadly, racism has again become a pressing national and international issue.  Although racism has always plagued human social systems, in this increasingly divided political and cultural world we now live in, the fight against racism takes on new urgency. The Center for Integrative Research has therefore created a course that approaches the issue of racism from a new angle—the perspective and analytical tools of brain systems science. Broken down into the key components of racist beliefs and behavior, the course demonstrates how perfectly natural brain processes and cognitive functions can become distorted or highjacked toward racist ends. The course takes pains to demonstrate how such natural brain functions can be directed toward beneficial rather than malevolent strategies and unravels some of the cultural complexities surrounding racism, while providing a methodology for combatting it.

As our global population expands and our sociocultural systems become increasingly complex, the challenge of communicating effectively with those we live and work with can become overwhelming. As the paper details, each of us is unique in the ways our brains and minds form, develop, and respond to the ever-changing conditions of our respective environments. Accordingly, each of us perceives those environmental conditions differently, including what is communicated by others. And if each of us both generates our unique ways of communicating and encounters a wide variety of understandings or interpretations of such communications from every person we encounter, effective communication often becomes quire a challenge. The paper both explains how these fundamental differences of communication and interpretation manifest and identifies the most effective means of addressing them, using tools from the Center for Integrative Research’s proprietary work in brain systems science.