The Society of the Brain: An Introduction

The development of neuroscience has advanced importantly in the last decades. It consisted in overcoming the internal physiological brain and the nervous system, to reach a practical application in other sciences. This lead to the appearance of new fields such as neuroeconomy, neuromarketing, neurolinguistics, and also neurosociology.

We part from the knowledge we have reached from the way our brain functions to apply it to other sciences. We also have to bear in mind that we do not have an accepted model of the brain itself.
It is for this, that we suggest what it would be another step forward in the development of neuroscience. Using the knowledge of sociology, we will approach, using its tools and methodology, a new model of the functioning of the human brain. We are talking about social neuroscience.

Some classical authors have defined the object of study of sociology as the search and interpretation of a social fact or a social action. Here, we suggest that is more useful to our purposes to consider communication as a nexus of both fields. This leads us to Luhmann´s theory of social systems. The mind/brain can be observed through complexity perspective. It can be considered as a way of penetration that accompanies the assimilation and accommodation inside the learning process.

In this introduction, some examples will help us in the consideration of the brain as a society. Among them, we will point out the theory of the moral panic of Stanley Cohen and its relation with the investigations of Antonio Damasio about emotions. We will also study the attention process and the options selection in a world of scarce or the framework of conformity and its cognitive aspects.