Neuroscience Blog

Harvard researchers propose a complementary relationship between culture, shaped by traditions and the creative arts, and the brain’s optimization of predictive models for the social world.

Highlights

• Harvard researchers use the predictive coding framework from cognitive science, where the brain serves as a predictor of social phenomena that constantly updates its predictions based on inputs from the senses.
• In their proposal, traditions, norms, laws, and customs serve as a foundational framework for social predictions passed down through centuries of human experience.
• The creative arts, on the other hand, expose us to simulated social events, allowing the refinement of the brain’s predictive skills through the exploration of alternative social realities.

Published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Sacco and colleagues from Harvard University propose that two principal facets of human culture, the arts and social traditions, complement one another in the brain’s attempts at modeling and predicting social outcomes. Essentially, the researchers believe that the brain works to predict the outcomes of social events and updates its predictions based on mental models of the social world that are either confirmed or refuted based on sensory information. This predictive capacity and ability to update models of the social world within the brain serve to minimize uncertainty and enhance our abilities to behave in ways that optimize social outcomes.

In this regard, culture, split into social tradition and the creative arts, constitutes the collective data sets and training environments for updating the brain’s models of the social world. In light of the predictive nature of the brain, as proposed in the predictive coding framework, these two facets of culture complement one another and may have evolved to refine the brain’s inferences and predictions of the social aspect of human life.

Traditions Reduce Uncertainty While the Arts Enhance Adaptability

Traditions and the arts, according to the Harvard-based cognitive scientists, fulfill evolutionarily complementary learning needs of the brain that predicts social outcomes based on internal models. Breaking down how these two aspects of culture are immersed into our daily lives may provide a better understanding of what Sacco and colleagues mean when referring to traditions and the arts. Accordingly, culture’s dual nature is entrenched in the rhythms of weekly schedules observed in many societies throughout world history.

In that sense, during the five-day work week, social norms and conventions predominantly occupy our time. Norms and traditions conserve successful patterns of prediction and pass down wisdom that has proven adaptive to people of a given social niche over the course of multiple generations. In this way, traditions and norms reduce uncertainty in social environments through shared cultural conventions.

Artistic culture, typically reserved for weekend festivities, provides social settings with more flexible simulations of social experiences. In doing so, artistic culture actively pushes beyond existing social patterns and rooted ideas to explore new perspectives and models.

While norms and traditions contribute to social cognition with wisdom passed down through shared experiences over multiple generations to reduce uncertainty, the cognitive utility of the arts presents a more complex function. Accordingly, Sacco and colleagues posit that through participation in fictional and imaginative psychological spaces with artistic expression, people can improve the flexibility of their ideas and frameworks for social modeling. This helps to broaden the adaptive brain’s cognitive capacity when predicting social outcomes.

Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Neuroscience

In their paper, Sacco and colleagues propose that two principal facets of human culture — tradition and the arts— complement one another in refining our modeling and predictions of the social world. In that sense, the traditions and arts may have culturally evolved to allow people to improve cognitive capacities as they apply to socialization.

What’s more, this idea may help to bridge gaps between the humanities — academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture — and neuroscience. As such, relating the evolution of human culture to our needs for social risk minimization and social adaptation — through traditions and the arts, respectively — make the humanities and neuroscience closely intertwined.

Story Source

Bortolotti A, Conti A, Romagnoli A, Sacco PL. Imagination vs. routines: festive time, weekly time, and the predictive brain. Front Hum Neurosci. 2024 Apr 26;18:1357354. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1357354. PMID: 38736532; PMCID: PMC11082368.