Current Political Research:

Since 2008, George has been working on a wide range of framing issues — on the environment, health care, and many, many more. He has also been analyzing the communication problems of the Obama administration.

Current Academic Research:

Beginning in 2009, George started a new NTL initiative: Neural Linguistics. Updating the notations for cognitive linguistics used in ECG research, George realized that there seems to be a simple collection of types of functional neural circuitry, taking neuronal groups as “nodes,” which can map from the conceptual and linguistic notation to the circuitry and from the circuitry to Narayanan’s neural computational models characterizing how the circuitry works. He and the members of his lab — Srini Narayanan, Eve Sweetser, Jenny Lederer, Elisabeth Wehling, and Sarah Berson — are currently working out the details.

In the fall of 2010, George gave a seminar on Linguistic Neuroscience, bringing together contemporary experimental neuroscience and neural linguistics. George is now working with Robert Knight, Director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley, to form a new Berkeley Center for Social and Linguistic Neuroscience, which would bring together Berkeley faculty in disparate fields working on related problems. The Center would integrate experimental neuroscience, experimental psychology, and other social science research with neural linguistics and studies of social issues and politics from a neural linguistics perspective.