Summary: To fully appreciate how knowledge shapes human intelligence, researchers argue we must look beyond isolated brains and study how knowledge is shared and maintained across communities.
Source: University of Illinois
Researchers propose that to better understand human thought we should expand cognitive neuroscience to include evidence from social sciences, studying not just individual brains but the communities in which knowledge is produced and used.
“A growing body of research shows that memory, reasoning, decision-making and other high-level cognitive functions frequently operate across people,” the authors state in a review published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. “Cognition extends into the physical world and into the minds of others.”
The paper’s co-authors—Aron Barbey, neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Richard Patterson, professor emeritus of philosophy at Emory University; and Steven Sloman, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University—highlight the limits of examining brains in isolation, separated from the social, cultural and material resources that people rely on for thinking and reasoning.
“In cognitive neuroscience, the default assumption is that knowledge is stored in an individual brain and transferred directly between people,” Barbey explains. “But in many important cases that assumption does not hold.”
One common example is the way people routinely outsource understanding to others. Individuals often rely on experts and community consensus rather than possessing complete, detailed knowledge themselves.
“Most people accept that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer without being able to describe all the biological mechanisms involved,” Barbey says. “When physicians diagnose and recommend treatments, they do not pass all of their professional knowledge to each patient. Instead, patients depend on medical expertise to decide what actions to take.”
Without such reliance on specialists and communal expertise, our beliefs would drift away from the scientific evidence and social practices that support them. For example, if individuals had to validate every causal claim by themselves, widely accepted propositions like ‘smoking causes lung cancer’ would lose their grounding in shared scientific processes and communal trust.
The authors therefore argue that understanding the role of knowledge in human intelligence requires shifting focus from the solitary brain to the broader community of knowledge that sustains and distributes information.
“Cognition is, to a substantial degree, a collective activity,” Sloman emphasizes. “People depend on others for reasoning, judgment and decision-making in ways that standard cognitive neuroscience does not readily capture.”
Sloman explored these ideas in his book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, coauthored with Phil Fernbach. The book illustrates how individuals routinely depend on community-level knowledge for understanding and decision-making.
Barbey notes a core challenge: many neuroscience tools were designed to measure the activity of a single brain at a time and are therefore limited in their ability to capture the dynamics of collective cognition.
Yet some neuroscientists are beginning to address this gap. Recent experiments have scanned two people interacting face-to-face, tracking brain activity and eye movements simultaneously. Other teams employ hyperscanning methods to record synchronous neural activity from individuals who are interacting remotely online.
Early findings from these collaborative neuroscience approaches indicate that similar brain regions are often engaged when people communicate effectively or work together on tasks. They also reveal that neural responses vary depending on the interaction type and context, suggesting that brains are dynamically shaped by social exchange.
Other disciplines have long acknowledged the communal basis of knowledge. Patterson points to social epistemology, a field that treats knowledge as fundamentally social—dependent on community norms, shared language, and dependable methods for evaluating who or what to trust.
“Philosophers of language also show how word meanings and correct usage depend on social context,” Patterson notes. “According to externalist accounts, meanings are determined by how words are used and represented within a linguistic community, which means understanding depends on collective knowledge beyond any single person.”
To overcome the limitations of studying cognition in isolation, the authors recommend that neuroscientists integrate insights and methods from social psychology, anthropology and related disciplines that are better equipped to study group-level processes.
“Neuroscience should not stand alone,” Barbey concludes. “We need to combine brain-based evidence with social science research to capture how knowledge is distributed, maintained and used across communities.”
About this neuroscience research news
Author: Diana Yates
Source: University of Illinois
Contact: Diana Yates – University of Illinois
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access. “Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Community of Knowledge” by Aron Barbey et al., Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2021.675127
Abstract
Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Community of Knowledge
Cognitive neuroscience aims to reveal the biological basis of the human mind and to explain how mental operations arise from the brain’s information-processing architecture. This paper questions whether treating cognition as wholly contained within an individual brain is an adequate objective.
The authors argue that an individual’s cognitive processing typically incorporates elements that lie outside that person’s skull—components located in other people’s minds, distributed across the body, and embedded in the physical environment. Their focus is on cognition distributed across individuals, which they call the “community of knowledge,” and on the implications this distribution has for reducing cognition to neurobiology. They also consider how cognitive neuroscience can contribute to understanding communal cognitive processes.