Neurosemiotics is an area of science which studies the neural aspects of meaning making. It interconnects
neurobiology
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...
,
biosemiotics
Biosemiotics (from the Ancient Greek, Greek βίος ''bios'', "life" and σημειωτικός ''sēmeiōtikos'', "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics (especially Neurosemiotics) and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-makin ...
and
cognitive semiotics.
Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of Nervous system, neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fie ...
,
neuropsychology
Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brai ...
and neurosemantics can be seen as parts of neurosemiotics.
Description
The pioneers of neurosemiotics include
Jakob von Uexküll
Jakob may refer to:
People
* Jakob (given name), including a list of people with the name
* Jakob (surname), including a list of people with the name Other
* Jakob (band), a New Zealand band, and the title of their 1999 EP
* Max Jakob Memorial ...
,
Kurt Goldstein
Kurt Goldstein (November 6, 1878 – September 19, 1965) was a German neurologist and psychiatrist who created a holistic theory of the organism. Educated in medicine, Goldstein studied under Carl Wernicke and Ludwig Edinger where he focused on ...
,
Friedrich Rothschild, and others.
The first graduate courses on neurosemiotics were taught in some American and Canadian universities since 1970s. The term 'neurosemiotics' is also not much older.
Neurosemiotics demonstrates which are the necessary conditions and processes responsible for
semiosis
Semiosis (, ), or sign process, is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. A sign is anything that communicates a meaning, that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sig ...
in the neural tissue. It also describes the differences in the complexity of meaning making in animals of different complexity of the
nervous system
In biology, the nervous system is the complex system, highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its behavior, actions and sense, sensory information by transmitting action potential, signals to and from different parts of its body. Th ...
and the
brain
The brain is an organ (biology), organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It consists of nervous tissue and is typically located in the head (cephalization), usually near organs for ...
.
[Roepstorff, Andreas 2004. Cellular neurosemiotics: Outline of an interpretive framework. In: Schult, Joachim (ed.), ''Biosemiotik – praktische Anwendung und Konsequenzen für die Einzelwissenschaften''. Berlin: VWB Verlag für Wissenschaft, 133–154.]
See also
*
Semiotics
Semiotics ( ) is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter.
Semiosis is a ...
*
Zoosemiotics
Zoosemiotics is the semiotic study of the use of signs among animals, more precisely the study of semiosis among animals, i.e. the study of how something comes to function as a sign to some animal. It is the study of animal forms of knowing.
Cons ...
References
Semiotics
Neuroscience
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