Cultural Patterns and Neurocognitive Circuits

The following sections are included:

• Contents
• Introduction

This is the transcribe of Prof John H. Holland lecture “Cycles and Hierarchies” given at the conference “East West connections, cultural circuits in the brain”.

To honor him we have transcribed the videotape we made of his lecture and included the text, together with the figures he presented during his lecture, in this volume.

The epigenesis theory of development can be traced back to William Harvey (1651), who stated, in contrast to contemporary preformation views, that the embryo arises by “the addition of parts budding out from one another.” The word epigenesis was subsequently used by Conrad Waddington (Nature 150:563–565, 1942) to specify how genes might interact with their surroundings to produce a phenotype. This is also the meaning we adopted in our paper, Theory of the Epigenesis of Neuronal Networks by Selective Stabilization of Synapses (Changeux et al. Proc Nat Acad Sci U S A 70:2974–2978, 1973), according to which the environment affects the organization of connections in an evolving neuronal network through the stabilization or degeneration (pruning) of labile synapses associated with the state of activity of the network. This definition contrasts with the recent and more restricted sense of the status of DNA methylation and histone modification in a particular genomic region. The synapse selection theory was introduced to deal with two major features regarding the genetic evolution of the human brain: (1) the non-linear increase in the organizational complexity of the brain despite a nearly constant number of genes; and (2) the long postnatal period of brain maturation (ca. 15 years in humans), during which critical and reciprocal interactions take place between the brain and its physical, social and cultural environment. This theory will be evaluated and updated in the framework of the recent human/primate genome data, analysis of gene expression patterns during postnatal development, brain imaging of cultural pathways, such as those for language learning, and current views about the neural bases of higher brain function, in particular the global neuronal workspace architectures for access to consciousness (see Dehaene and Changeux Neuron 70:200–227, 2011).

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Historical Consideration Regarding a “Good Life” in East and West
• Learning, Adaptation and Self-Organization in the Human Brain
• Summary
• References

The following sections are included:

• What Kind of Vat is Designed for the Brain by Plato and Zhōngyī?
• Change the Mind if You Cannot Change the World: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Approaches
• A Special Vat for the Brain: The Human Microbiota – Gut – Brain Axis and the Stress Response
• Restoring the Vat via the Brain: Can Psychotherapy Change the Microbiota-Stress Response Activation?
• Changes in the Vat, Changes in the Brain
• Basic Brain Train when Life is not Bright
• What have We Learnt about the Brain in its Vat?
• References

I shall start off from three approaches to the thought/culture relations. One is unconstrained universalism, the other is the assumption of qualitative differences between types of thoughts that would by some interpretations correspond to patterns of culture and finally, the third approach allows a multiplicity of styles of thought that can be combined in flexible ways…

The following sections are included:

• A Personal Remark about an Exploratory Frame
• The Double Language Trap
• “Monocausalities” as a Disease, and “Complementarity” as a Therapy
• Unicellular Organisms as Models for Higher Cognition
• Is Visual Space Homogeneous or Segmented?
• Is Time Discrete, or is Time Continuous?
• Searching for a Taxonomy of Functions
• Acknowledgments
• References

The following sections are included:

• East-West Connections
• A Good Life
• Sacred Spaces
• Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and the Understanding of the Processes of Architecture
• Three Ways to Link Architecture and Neuroscience
• Libraries
• Wayfinding
• Neuroscience of the Design Process
• Meanwhile, Back in Singapore
• A Good Life, Revisited
• References

The following sections are included:

• Conditions for a Good Life
• Homecoming
• Cultural Patterns of Identity
• Coping Between the Universal and the Local
• The Historical Context
• Homecoming: Mission Impossible?
• East-West Perspectives
• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Premise of a Death Denying Ethos
• Evolving Attitudes toward Death and Dying
• The Rise of Public Health Palliative Care
• The Way Forward
• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Qualia, Linguistics and Science
• Neurobiology and Qualia
• Mysterianism: McGinn's Answer to the Mind-Body Problem
• Consciousness, Information and Incompleteness
• Conclusion: Consciousness and East-West Self-Imagery
• References

The following sections is included:

• Appendix: The Video and Presentation links