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2008
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(2008): How Collective Representations Can Change the Structure of the Brain. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11), S. 43-57
Abstract: Culture not only influences human psychology and perceptions of self, others and reality, it also, in certain contexts, influences the quality and degree of consciousness itself. If the brain gives shape to consciousness, then we would expect culture to have a corresponding impact on the functional anatomy and microstructure of the brain. The concept of ‘collective representations’, as developed by Durkheim, refers to the often crucial components of human life that have meaningful existence only because we agree that they do — such as customs, money, religion, cosmology, language, games, laws, power structures and artistic genres. We present recent imaging research which illuminates the feedback relationship between these two types of representation — the collective and the cortical — and which demonstrates that collective representations can have well-defined cortical representations.
Keywords: Bewusstsein, Culture, Durkheim, Erkenntnistheorie, Gehirnstruktur, Kognitionswissenschaft/Social Sciences/Humanities, Kultur, kulturspezifisch, microstructure of the brain, Neurologie, Neuroscience, Neurowissenschaften, Plastizität des Gehirns in Bezug auf Kulturvarianz, Psychologie, Theorie der Normen und Kollektive Repräsentationen (Durkheim) 2002
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(2002): A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation. In: Neuron 35 (2), S. 395-405. DOI: 10.1016/S0896-6273(02)00755-9
Abstract: Cooperation based on reciprocal altruism has evolved in only a small number of species, yet it constitutes the core behavioral principle of human social life. The iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game has been used to model this form of cooperation. We used fMRI to scan 36 women as they played an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game with another woman to investigate the neurobiological basis of cooperative social behavior. Mutual cooperation was associated with consistent activation in brain areas that have been linked with reward processing: nucleus accumbens, the caudate nucleus, ventromedial frontal/orbitofrontal cortex, and rostral anterior cingulate cortex. We propose that activation of this neural network positively reinforces reciprocal altruism, thereby motivating subjects to resist the temptation to selfishly accept but not reciprocate favors.
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