Thursday, March 13, 2008

Neurosociology or Social Neurology

So I wrote the following for a sociology paper the other day:

"The human mind processes experiences in terms of contrast. Comparison is a systemic part of the way we understand the world, and novel experiences because they are by their very nature highly contastive then become more accentuated. It is in this process that our collective consciousness tends to continually grade status in terms of novelty. The newness of a field of study or of undertaking tends to affect the way we view its importance and so its relative economic value. The relation of opposite, this systemic force of the human brain, also plies spectrumal understanding into more rigid categorization. The outcomes of these processes when not recognized and overcome are a continuing devaluation of the more ancient aspects of human endeavor."-Me; Hope, Status, Achievement: Classic Problems of the American Dream (Deferred).

Yes, I'm like a proud papa when it comes to my scholastic prose, but then again I've been writing them for over ten years now, so I ought to be at least okay by now, but that's another story. And, yes, spectrumal is not technically a word, but if I don't get outside the bounds of dictionary sanctioned signifiers at least once a paper, I just don't feel like I'm doing my job.
Anyway, it struck me while I was proofreading this material that this was essentially neurosociology. The understanding of social forces and contexts through the functions and design of the human brain seemed like it would be what neurosociology should be all about. I didn't actually know if the field existed, but I've studied neuroeconomics and neuropychology, so why not neurosociology. I hit up the old wiki for some answers just a second ago, and they claim that neurosociology is the study of how the internal functions of a brain require social interaction for the robust expression of various of these functions (see mirror neurons).
To me that seems like it should be classified as social neuroscience: the social aspects of neurological development. What I've written seems to be a more accurately termed neurosociology, but the article did say the article needed to be wikified (I love that), so maybe I'll do some more outside research to see what the academic community has to say on the subject.

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