The brain is not mental! coupling neuronal and immune cellular processing in human organisms

We build upon the key fact that the brain is (part of) the body and as such, like any other bodily organ, the brain is made of cells. The focus on cellular rather than neural, brain processing allows us to underscore the idea that flexible responses to changes in the environments requires flexible adjustments not only through neural, but also throu... See more

Neuroscience now recognizes that the brain and the body are so intimately intertwined that they cannot be thought of separately.

Cognition, in this view, is a dynamical process that happens not only within and between brains, but across a variety of biological, behavioural and social levels of organisation.

Collective neuroscience offers a different way of seeing neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, for example – not as instances of individual ‘dysfunctions’ in the brain, but as phenomena that emerge from multiple dynamic physiological and social processes. How does one get to the bottom of human cognition if we are intrin... See more

collective neuroscience involves reckoning with the science of complex systems, where causation is not linear but looping, and social and neuronal structures mesh in unpredictable ways.

the brain likely evolved to deal with the informational complexity of navigating and coordinating social relationships. If that’s true, she said, cognitive neuroscience that ignores sociality is probably pointless.