If we are to truly understand consciousness, I fundamentally believe that we must not be solely investigating the cellular and molecular physiology of the brain but ought to also look outside of the brain, to the social and cultural forces which shape and maintain it across the human lifespan.

Connections and Collisions within the Cerebrocortical-Cultural Matrix of Human Thought

At the biochemical level, I am extremely interested in the cellular and molecular physiology of the mammalian cerebral cortical layers. My primary goal is to understand how cultural manipulation of physiological regulation across cerebrocortical evolution and during cortical development influences cortical plasticity and psychopharmacology. Moreover, how the connections and collisions within this experiential matrix of signal transduction reflect consciousness, neurological diseaseselaborated cognitive abilities, such as language and behavior.

Moving to a higher level of analysis, I am also interested in utilizing knowledge and techniques from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities in order to investigate the ways in which various factors of human cultures, around the world and across time, influence an individual’s cognitive processes and behavior. As illustrated within The Dialectical Model of Human Nature, I currently believe that culture can be broken down into Politics, Economics, Language, Technology, Science, Religion and the Arts. When paired with the biological elements of Age, Sex, Pharmakon and Vices I believe a truly comprehensive model of human nature emerges.

Visualizing the Zeitgeist

Whereas the Genographic Project is progressing our understanding of human evolution by visualizing genomic evolution, consider what it would be like to visualize the history or evolution of human culture, or human knowledge. Imagine looking down on the African continent as the first hominids evolved. The emergent patterns of the dialectical dance between culture, biology, landscape and time are made strikingly evident by visualizing scientific data already available. By asking questions such as – What did they know? What did they innovate? And how did this knowledge effect their conception of the external world and ultimately their culture? – The visualization would reflect intense times and geographic regions where different cultures traded knowledge, productions and genes with each other, typically leading to the production of novel, innovative knowledge.These examples all suggest that there is something very important about the process of interacting diversity, through the exchange of knowledge and experience, leading to innovation and resulting in demand; while also implicitly reflecting the philosophy of Neuroscience, embracing interdisciplinary exchange and research across multiple levels of analysis. Visualizing the Zeitgeist; Native American Cultures from 20,000 BC to 1500 AD is my current progress on this project.

Taken together, these research themes reflect my ultimate desire to investigate the ways in which each project can be synthesized and shared in order to answer some of the most important questions regarding brain evolution, consciousness and human nature.