Neuroscience Project

Members of the Institute are working on a proposal for a collaborative study with neuroscientists to develop a new synthetic approach to the study of the human mind.

The purpose of the project is to explore the influence of culture – in particular, the anomic modern culture – on normal cognitive (including neurocognitive) and emotional processes and on mental disorders, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and suicidal behavior, as well as to explore the possibility of devising a new approach to treatment, symbolic psychiatry, based on the understanding of such cultural influence. The exploration presupposes the creation of a transdisciplinary framework allowing for the investigation of insights into the workings of the human mind, arrived at in comparative sociological, anthropological, and socio-historical studies of culture, by the methods of experimental neuroscience, and the formulation of a long-term research agenda in specifically human neuroscience, namely one focusing on mental processes unique to the human beings, and therefore by definition influenced by culture, such as identity-formation, symbolic imagination, and thinking.