Alle Publikationen
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2008
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(2008): Cultural Neuroscience of Consciousness. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11), S. 58-69
Abstract: Philosophical inquiries into the nature of consciousness have long been intrinsically tied to questions regarding the nature of the self. Although philosophers of mind seldom make reference to the role of cultural context in shaping consciousness, since antiquity culture has played a notable role in philosophical conceptions of the self. Western philosophers, from Plato to Locke, have emphasized an individualistic view of the self that is autonomous and consistent across situations, while Eastern philosophers, such as Lao Tzu and Confucius, have argued for a collectivistic view of the self, one that is interconnected to others and embedded within specific social contexts and situations. Here we argue that a comprehensive theory of consciousness needs to account for the role of cultural context and its bidirectional interaction with neural and genetic mechanisms in shaping a variety of conscious phenomena, from visual perception to self-awareness. We review recent evidence of cultural variation in neurobiological mechanisms underlying these phenomena and discuss the implications of these cultural neuroscience findings for the study of consciousness.
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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) 2004
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(2004): The brain as hardware, culture as software. In: Inquiry 47 (3), S. 219-235. DOI: 10.1080/00201740410006348
Abstract: For the last fifty years or so there has been a struggle going on between the heirs of Carnap's 'unified science'movement and the followers of the later Wittgenstein. The differences between these two kinds of philosophers are best grasped, nowadays, by
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(2004): From Sounds To Music. The Contextualizations of Pitch. In: Music Perception 21 (3), S. 431-456. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2004.21.3.431
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2004.21.3.431 Abstract: In this chapter we present a new approach to research in music perception allowing one to investigate how musical sound representations are formed in the human brain. By studying subjects' brain responses to unattended stimuli we can determine, for instance, whether neural circuits are more readily activated by musical sounds implicitly learned than by unfamiliar sounds even in non-musicians. Indeed, neuronal populations seem to respond more efficiently to pitch deviations within sound patterns following the rules of Western scale structure, rather than to deviations inside patterns artificially created. Moreover, neural circuits are selectively activated by mistunings inside tonal melodies or by out-of-key chords inside harmonic cadences even when attention is not directed towards the sounds. These data together suggest that incoming sounds are more efficiently processed when they match the neural templates derived from our musical culture. The existence of 'musical memories' in the auditory cortex that are effortlessly activated enabling us, e.g., to identify and recognize speech vs. music sounds can thus be postulated.
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