The Brain is not Mental! Coupling Neuronal and Immune Cellular Processing in Human Organisms

Abstract

Significant efforts have been made in the past decades to understand how mental and cognitive processes are underpinned by neural mechanisms in the brain. This paper argues 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. We overview theoretical work and empirical evidence on ‘basal cognition’ challenging the idea that only the neuronal cells in the brain have the exclusive ability to ‘learn’ or ‘cognize’. The focus on cellular rather than neural, brain processing underscores the idea that adaptive responses to fluctuations in the environment requires 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 the radical claim that cognition should not be confined to one system alone, namely the neural system in the brain, not matter how sophisticated the latter notoriously is.

Is Complexity an Illusion?

“…More generally natural selection favours adaptation, which means generalisation, which is maximised by preferring weaker policies [17]. Biological cognition is not limited to the brain [25], meaning the mind is not neatly confined within a well defined neurological abstraction layer. Instead the multiscale competency architectures observed in living organisms [26] amount to self organising abstraction layers.…”

Is Complexity an Illusion?

“…More generally natural selection favours adaptation, which means generalisation, which is maximised by preferring weaker policies [17]. Biological cognition is not limited to the brain [26], meaning the mind is not neatly confined within a well defined neurological abstraction layer. Instead the multiscale competency architectures observed in living organisms [27] amount to self organising abstraction layers.…”

A Systematic Review of Mobile Brain/Body Imaging Studies Using the P300 Event-Related Potentials to Investigate Cognition Beyond the Laboratory

“…Furthermore, our understanding of human cognition has been shifting from a purely neuronal perspective to one that also considers the role of the environment (Karakas & Yildiz, 2020) as well as other complex biological systems (e.g., microbiome; Cryan & Dinan, 2012) and types of cells (e.g., immune; Ciaunica et al, 2023). Thus, the question of how to integrate robust screen-based oddball paradigms with more natural behavior scenarios is a relevant challenge for future research within a comprehensive human neuroscience to understand the mechanisms of brain/body/environment couplings (e.g., Hölle & Bleichner, 2023).…”