Center Activities

Being social creatures, humans rely on the nuances of body language to function well in society. Understanding the way body language works could help researchers gain a deeper understanding of neuroscience, improve human-machine interfaces, and develop more efficient ways to train people on the autism spectrum to read social cues.

Prof. Uri Alon of the Department of Molecular Cell Biology investigates the two main theories in the filed: the "Emotional body language" theory, that originates in psychology, and the "Dramatic action theory", that focuses in transitive verbs: to encourage, to comfort, to threaten, to scold, etc.

Testing these theories required a large and unbiased set of body posture stimuli in a social context. While most studies employ pictures of actors or cartoons in a small range of postures, Prof. Alon used a different approach: namely, stick figures.

Since 2011, Prof. Uri Alon’s “Theater Lab” has been integrating ideas from improvisational theater with principles of physics to study human interactions and cognitive processes. In his recent work, he has been using this approach to explore the system-wide biological networks that govern the human search for creativity. Focusing on a sensory mechanism called fold-change detection (FCD), as well as scale invariance—a property that allows sensory systems to adapt to environmental signals at different orders of magnitude—Prof. Alon identified a scale-invariant FCD model that best describes human creative exploration, thereby clarifying the network dynamics behind the creative process.

Using the cultural memory of the Jewish people as a model system, Prof. Yadin Dudai has devised a novel, mechanistic approach to the analysis of cross-generational long-term memory in large human populations. Drawing on cultural memory concepts and experimental approaches used in neurobiology and cognitive science, Prof. Dudai analyzed the encoding, consolidation, persistence over time, transformation, and modification of distinct mnemonic items in Jewish culture that contribute to a “core memory” that has remained essentially unchanged for millennia. Studying both ancient and more recent Jewish textual and archaeological memory elements, Prof. Dudai also performed behavioral recall experiments in extant Jewish populations. This process shed light on the persistence of elements of core memory, the mechanisms of adding to and removing elements from it, and the splitting of cultural memory among selected Jewish populations.

In research that helps clarify the principles of online democracy and offers strategies for protecting and enhancing it in the future, Prof. Ehud Shapiro and his colleagues have presented principles for a decentralized process in which every human being would be able to easily create and own a genuine global identity. Based on a “public key” encrypted system that does not use biometrics and does not store any personal information, the new approach uses distributed ledger/blockchain technology to form a “web of trust” that would close up vulnerabilities—like bot-driven messaging and identity theft—that are associated with today’s online environment.

Prof. Diederik Meijer from the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands was hosted at the Weizmann Institute by Prof. Elisabetta Boaretto, with the support of the Braginsky Center. A leading researcher in Near East Archaeology, Prof. Meijer focuses on the beginning of urbanism and state-formation processes in the Ancient Near East, from the fourth millennium BCE. His major excavation at Tell Hammam in Syria has influenced the understanding of the socioeconomic conditions and increasing role of trade practices in the region during the Early Bronze Age.

During his visit to the Institute, Prof. Meijer delivered a seminar entitled, “Can we harmonize history, archaeology, and the "exact" sciences? The problem of the two rival cities in the third millennium BCE in Mesopotamia.” He also met and discussed archaeology research with students currently engaged in archaeological sciences curricula.

Awareness of the space surrounding the body—the so-called peri-personal space or PPS—is encoded in the brain through a dedicated neural system that maps multisensory stimuli. As neural representation of the space beyond the body is vital for the coordination of goal-directed movement, Prof. Tamar Flash and postdoctoral fellow Dr. France Lerner designed a virtual reality (VR) system for identifying factors that affect this process. Using this system, they are exploring how object depth, as well as temporal and geometric characteristics, affect perception of visual stimuli inside, at the boundary of, and outside the peri-personal space. They are also studying the perception of group motion, versus the motion of a single element, at varying distances from the body.

The Braginsky Center hosted Thomas Murray, a California-based independent researcher, collector, lecturer, and private dealer of Asian and tribal art, who authored a book called C-14 Dating of Dayak Art in 2015. Interacting with Weizmann Institute scientists who specialize in carbon-14 dating, Murray presented a lecture on the use of radiocarbon testing to date artistic artifacts, predominantly those of the Dayak people in Borneo.

Dr. Mario Livio, an Israeli-American author and astrophysicist, was hosted by the Braginsky Center. Dr. Livio, author of Why? What Makes Us Curious, which explores different types of human curiosity and how they activate different parts of the brain, received his master’s degree in theoretical particle physics at the Weizmann Institute in 1972.