Towards a cognitive media genetics

Abstract

The cognitive sciences have provided crucial insights into several fields of cultural sciences. In particular, the faculty of language has been the area of spectacular advances which have produced arguments in favor of a naturalized vision of linguistic artifacts. It is now the turn of writing, the first complex medium of the human being to seal the union of verbal language with a system of graphic signs, to be subjected to the application of biological epistemology and thereby to confirm the existence of bridges between the genetics of the brain substrate, epigenetics, behavioral mimicry and finally cultural learning. The cerebral localization of the scriptural abilities, recently discovered in the area known as the Exner area, argues for this body/culture circularity and makes it possible to imagine new research programs covering all the media. The diffusion of digital multisensory media brings a new element to this perspective. Indeed, the intensive use of these media causes an ultrafast impact on the functional architecture of the human brain. This new situation, in which the learning of a new medium and the cognitive impact that its use arouses, coincides with the process of its conception and circulation, confers on designers the role pro-geneticists.