The Neurology of Culture

Abstract The lack of anatomical evolution contrasted with an evident behavioral change in humans during their natural history, from about 200,000 to 700,000 years ago, constitutes something of a puzzle. What explains the behavioral change, a change which is commonly understood as cultural ? Against the surprisingly widespread but tautological response that the change was driven by culture – which amounts to the unsatisfying argument that culture drives culture, all the way down, or back – this paper presents a theory developed by Andrey Vyshedskiy, whose work on autism and language therapies has led him to an account of the neurobiological basis of voluntary imagination, which here I redescribe as an account of the evolution of the neurology of culture.