Hi to everyone, Sorry for my tardiness (life within a PhD is not very easy!)
First, I am happy that every body has agreed on the conceptual chain genotype-phenotype-sociotype. For me that's important, as it is one of the foundations of my own work and the research project associated. I return to John Collier’s comments on sets of behaviors (praxotype) and cognitive capabilities (cognotype). It calls my attention that the cognotype is defined as a software: something configurable and extendable. This point makes me consider: has our cognition limits? From my point of view, the brain needs to be stimulated in order to be minimally functional, to "feel good". Brain stimulation is needed to fix, maintain and strengthen the whole knowledge architecture, particularly in the social domain. Is there also an upper limit in this cognitive stimulation, or do we have unlimited processing capabilities? Seemingly, over-stimulation is only possible for a while, after which you lose the mental resistance and exhaustion ensues. In general, over-stimulation becomes negative and produces stress (e.g. learning in babies). Therefore, I believe that effective processing capacity does move within certain limits or thresholds. Following the need to distinguish levels, I see our cognitive skills set as the essential element (micro). The behavior of the individual, the adopted roles, and the multiple relational situations are social phenomena studied by social psychology. Ok, but in order to understand the emerging macro-variables of the social structure, one must always take into account the whole cognitive capabilities of the individual. Hence I consider they are closely related levels. Although they may not follow the same laws, I think that they converge in the fact of moving within approximate thresholds, outside of which the system effectiveness is lost. To make it clearer, in the extent to which they are effective, we could explore quantitatively some of these individual/social thresholds. And that's the goal of my PhD Thesis on the sociotype, to try to capture a few of them. How many relationships? How much talk? Thanks to all for the useful comments! Raquel -- --------------------------------------------------------- Raquel del Moral Grupo de Bioinformacion / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Avda. San Juan Bosco 13, 50009 Zaragoza Tfno. +34 976 71 44 76 E-mail. rdelmoral.i...@aragon.es --------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
