Carolyn Parkinson and Thalia Wheatley, ‘The Repurposed Social Brain’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 133-41.

This paper has a premise with broad implications. Parkinson and Wheatley argue that the subtleties of human social intelligence must result from the ‘evolutionary repurposing’ of neural circuits that perform different functions (either non-social, or social in a much more rudimentary way) in other species. This repurposing could occur over an evolutionary timescale or it could occur within a lifetime as a result of cultural training. Identifying and understanding such repurposings could offer a lot of insight into human cognition.
      My first thought was about embodied metaphor: as this post discusses, metaphorical language and the brain’s motor and sensory circuits appear to be connected. So it was helpful that Parkinson and Wheatley discuss the matter: as they see it, such connections may, but need not, suggest the repurposing of neural circuits. (Actually, has another, sceptical look at the ’embodied simulation’ field that underlies some of the metaphor work; debates continue…)
      A better example, in their view, is imaging evidence that assessments of space, and assessments of social ties, involve activation of the same neural areas, and may thus suggest the social repurposing of more basic mechanisms. Their favoured instances of possible cultural repurposing relate to literacy: learning to read seems to make one less good at certain visual tasks, because those mental circuits have been turned to other use.

*

      My attention was caught by one of their ‘Outstanding Questions’: ‘How are sociocultural inventions (e.g. stratified hierarchies in social organizations, musical forms) constrained by the neural niches that they co-opt?’ Poems are sociocultural inventions, and how wonderful it would be to find evidence that our poetic experiences result from the repurposing of circuits that otherwise help us do specific sorts of seeing, hearing, feeling, measuring, etc.
      I suppose one limitation is the inevitable multiplicity in the cognitive processes relating to literature, whereas their examples might be more easily abstracted. probably engages quite a lot of circuits. Music, though, makes us move as well as hear, and does things with time as well, and so on, so perhaps the thing that matters is identifying a specific repurposing, gaining an insight (say) into whether certain identifiable neural areas have been repurposed to get the spring of the .

*

If repurposing is a thing you like, try this:

I rather wish I hadn’t thought of it. I’ve had a couple of years off from watching OK Go videos, but I seem to be falling back into it again. One is never enough. The marching band one is great too.