The brain is not mental! coupling neuronal and immune cellular processing in human organisms

Biology in the 21st century: Natural selection is cognitive selection

Natural selection has a formal definition as the natural process that results in the survival and reproductive success of individuals or groups best adjusted to their environment, leading to the perpetuation of those genetic qualities best suited to that organism's environmental niche. Within conventional Neo-Darwinism, the largest source of those variations that can be selected is presumed to be secondary to random genetic mutations. As these arise, natural selection sustains adaptive traits in the context of a 'struggle for existence'. Consequently, in the 20th century, natural selection was generally portrayed as the primary evolutionary driver. The 21st century offers a comprehensive alternative to Neo-Darwinian dogma within Cognition-Based Evolution. The substantial differences between these respective evolutionary frameworks have been most recently articulated in a revision of Crick's Central Dogma, a former centerpiece of Neo-Darwinism. The argument is now advanced that the concept of natural selection should also be comprehensively reappraised. Cognitive selection is presented as a more precise term better suited to 21st century biology. Since cognition began with life's origin, natural selection represents cognitive selection.

A systematic review of mobile brain/body imaging studies using the P300 event-related potentials to investigate cognition beyond the laboratory

The P300 ERP component, related to the onset of task-relevant or infrequent stimuli, has been widely used in the Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) literature. This systematic review evaluates the quality and breadth of P300 MoBI studies, revealing a maturing field with well-designed research yet grappling with standardization and global representation challenges. While affirming the reliability of measuring P300 ERP components in mobile settings, the review identifies significant hurdles in standardizing data cleaning and processing techniques, impacting comparability and reproducibility. Geographical disparities emerge, with studies predominantly in the Global North and a dearth of research from the Global South, emphasizing the need for broader inclusivity to counter the WEIRD bias in psychology. Collaborative projects and mobile EEG systems showcase the feasibility of reaching diverse populations, which is essential to advance precision psychiatry and to integrate varied data streams. Methodologically, a trend toward ecological validity is noted, shifting from lab-based to real-world settings with portable EEG system advancements. Future hardware developments are expected to balance signal quality and sensor intrusiveness, enriching data collection in everyday contexts. Innovative methodologies reflect a move toward more natural experimental settings, prompting critical questions about the applicability of traditional ERP markers, such as the P300 outside structured paradigms. The review concludes by highlighting the crucial role of integrating mobile technologies, physiological sensors, and machine learning to advance cognitive neuroscience. It advocates for an operational definition of ecological validity to bridge the gap between controlled experiments and the complexity of embodied cognitive experiences, enhancing both theoretical understanding and practical application in study design.

Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates

A defining feature of biology is the use of a multiscale architecture, ranging from molecular networks to cells, tissues, organs, whole bodies, and swarms. Crucially however, biology is not only nested structurally, but also functionally: each level is able to solve problems in distinct problem spaces, such as physiological, morphological, and behavioral state space. Percolating adaptive functionality from one level of competent subunits to a higher functional level of organization requires collective dynamics: multiple components must work together to achieve specific outcomes. Here we overview a number of biological examples at different scales which highlight the ability of cellular material to make decisions that implement cooperation toward specific homeodynamic endpoints, and implement collective intelligence by solving problems at the cell, tissue, and whole-organism levels. We explore the hypothesis that collective intelligence is not only the province of groups of animals, and that an important symmetry exists between the behavioral science of swarms and the competencies of cells and other biological systems at different scales. We then briefly outline the implications of this approach, and the possible impact of tools from the field of diverse intelligence for regenerative medicine and synthetic bioengineering.

Nested Selves: Self-Organization and Shared Markov Blankets in Prenatal Development in Humans

The immune system is a central component of organismic function in humans. This paper addresses self-organization of biological systems in relation to-and nested within-other biological systems in pregnancy. Pregnancy constitutes a fundamental state for human embodiment and a key step in the evolution and conservation of our species. While not all humans can be pregnant, our initial state of emerging and growing within another person's body is universal. Hence, the pregnant state does not concern some individuals but all individuals. Indeed, the hierarchical relationship in pregnancy reflects an even earlier autopoietic process in the embryo by which the number of individuals in a single blastoderm is dynamically determined by cell- interactions. The relationship and the interactions between the two self-organizing systems during pregnancy may play a pivotal role in understanding the nature of biological self-organization per se in humans. Specifically, we consider the role of the immune system in biological self-organization in addition to neural/brain systems that furnish us with a sense of self. We examine the complex case of pregnancy, whereby two immune systems need to negotiate the exchange of resources and information in order to maintain viable self-regulation of nested systems. We conclude with a proposal for the mechanisms-that scaffold the complex relationship between two self-organising systems in pregnancy-through the lens of the Active Inference, with a focus on shared Markov blankets.