Cultural Imprinting on Brain Architecture Sample Clauses

Cultural Imprinting on Brain Architecture. The human brain is an evaluative organ with reward systems engaged in learning, memory, and higher evaluative tendencies. It is our innate species-specific neuronal identity, which causes us to develop universal evaluative tendencies. These include self-interest, control- orientation, dissociation, selective sympathy, empathy, and xenophobia, some combinations of which can cause problems. As previously mentioned, our neuronal identity makes us social, but also individualistic and self-projective. However, synaptic epigenetic theories of cultural and social imprinting on our brain architecture suggest the possibility of culturally influencing these predispositions. In an analysis of epigenesis by selective stabilisation of synapses, we discussed the relationships between genotype and brain phenotype. These include the paradox of non-linear evolution between genome and brain complexity, the selection of cultural circuits in the brain during development, and the genesis and epigenetic transmission of cultural imprints. WP12.2 analysed the combinatorial explosion of brain representations, and the channelling of behaviour through "epigenetic rules" and top-down control of decision-making. In neurobiological terms, these rules are viewed as acquired patterns of connections (scaffoldings), hypothetically stored in frontal cortex long-term memory, which frame the genesis of novel representations and regulate decision-making in a top-down manner. Against that background, WP12.2 has proposed being "epigenetically proactive" [11, 12], and adapting our social structures in both the short and the long term, to benefit, influence and constructively interact with the ever developing neuronal architecture of our brains.