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Encyclopedia of Neuroscience pp 2830–2833Cite as

Neurosemiotics

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Definition

Neurosemiotics is about the sign or signal related aspects of synapses, neurons and neural nets [20,29]. Because neurons are the physiological tissue within which the brain or mind resides, neurosemiotics is also about cognition or about humans as information processing and connectionist systems [30].

Description of the Theory

To understand the complex relationships between signs, signals and semiosis as aspects of semiotics on the one hand and brain and cognition on the other hand, an aid for understanding the distinction in various (ontological) levels of description [5,26,23] is used. The explanation of this conceptual help is followed (Neuro-psychological consequences) by a description of its neuropsychological implications and after that (Neurosemiotics) by an analysis of various categorizations of signs. The article ends (The role of Neurosemiotics) with a determination of the role of neurosemiotics.

Levels of Description

The intriguing intangible phenomenon of the...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Professor of Knowledge Management & Cognition Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    René J. Jorna

Authors
  1. René J. Jorna
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physiology & Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Marc D. Binder

  2. Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Graduate School of Medicine University of Tokyo Hongo, Bunkyo‐ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Nobutaka Hirokawa

  3. Göttingen, Germany

    Uwe Windhorst

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Jorna, R.J. (2009). Neurosemiotics. In: Binder, M.D., Hirokawa, N., Windhorst, U. (eds) Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_3946

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