Abstract
The mechanisms underlying a reorientation of human neuroscience from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference have long been with us. These revolve around the evolutionary exaptation of the inevitable second-law ‘leakage’ of crosstalk between co-resident cognitive phenomena. Crosstalk characterizes such processes as immune response, wound-healing, gene expression, as so on, up through and including far more rapid neural processes. It is not a great leap-of-faith to infer that similar phenomena affect/afflict social interactions between individuals within and across populations.
People are embedded in social interaction that shapes their brains throughout lifetime. Instead of emerging from lower-level cognitive functions, social interaction could be the default mode via which humans communicate with their environment. — Hari et al. (2015)
The challenge for the study of brain-to-brain coupling is to develop detailed models of the dynamical interaction that can be applied at the behavioural levels and at the neural levels. — Hasson and Frith ( 2016 )
...[A] deeper understanding of inter-brain dynamics may provide unique insight into the neural basis of collective behavior that gives rise to a broad range of economic, political, and sociocultural activities that shape society. — Kingsbury and Hong ( 2020 )
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Wallace, R. (2023). Evolutionary Exaptation: Shared Interbrain Activity in Social Communication. In: Essays on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29879-0_8
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