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From Cells to Selves: Coupling Neuronal and Immune Cellular Processing in Biological self-Organising Systems| title | From Cells to Selves: Coupling Neuronal and Immune Cellular Processing in Biological self-Organising Systems |
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| start_date | 2023/11/27 |
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| schedule | 13h30-15h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | / |
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| summary | Significant efforts have been made in the past decades to understand how mental and cognitive processes are underpinned by neural mechanisms in the human brain and biological systems. Here I argue that a promising way forward in understanding the nature of human cognition is to zoom out from the prevailing picture focusing on its neural basis. It considers instead how neurons work in tandem with other type of cells (e.g. immune) to subserve biological self-organisation and adaptive behaviour of the human organism as a whole. We focus specifically on the immune cellular processing as key actor in complementing neuronal processing in achieving successful self-organisation and adaptation of the human body in an ever-changing environment. The focus on cellular rather than neural, brain processing underscores the idea that adaptive responses to fluctuations in the environment require a carefully crafted orchestration of multiple cellular and bodily systems at multiple organisational levels of the biological organism. Hence cognition can be seen as a multiscale web of dynamic information processing distributed across a vast array of complex cellular (e.g. neuronal, immune, and others) and network systems, operating across the entire body, and not just in the brain. Ultimately, this paper builds up towards two radical claims. First, there is the idea that cognition should not be confined to one system alone, namely the neural system in the brain, no matter how sophisticated the latter notoriously is. Second, I outline the role of co-embodiment – i.e. human bodies and brains developing within another human body, in utero – as a key factor in scaling up cognitive processing across the lifespan. Ultimately, the aim is to show that paradoxically, in order to understand what makes cognition uniquely human, we need to focus on what we have in common with other biological systems. |
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| responsibles | Burle, Blouin |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2023/11/23 15:44 UTC |
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