The Neurology of Culture

Lobo, Gregory

Abstract

The lack of anatomical evolution contrasted with an evident behavioral change in humans during their natural history, from about 200,000 to 700,000 years ago, constitutes something of a puzzle. What explains the behavioral change, a change which is commonly understood as cultural? Against the surprisingly widespread but tautological response that the change was driven by culture – which amounts to the unsatisfying argument that culture drives culture, all the way down, or back – this paper presents a theory developed by Andrey Vyshedskiy, whose work on autism and language therapies has led him to an account of the neurobiological basis of voluntary imagination, which here I redescribe as an account of the evolution of the neurology of culture.

Citation

Lobo, G. (2025). The Neurology of Culture. *Journal not in list, 25(1-2), 64-75. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340200

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 18, 2024
• Publication Date: Feb 12, 2025
• Deposit Date: Mar 1, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 1, 2025
• Journal: Journal of Cognition and Culture
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 64-75
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340200
• Keywords: neurology – culture – prefrontal synthesis – imagination – prefrontal cortex – recursion – evolution
• Publisher URL: https://brill.com/view/journals/jocc/25/1-2/article-p64_4.xml