The Power of the Context
The Power of the Context
This chapter discusses contextual constraints on brain profiles. The laboratories that measure brain activity contain uncommon combinations of physical features and incentives that prime some brain sites and suppress others. Despite these possibilities, neuroscientists continue to speculate about the implications of the brain patterns they record as if the context has a minimal influence on their observations. This position is difficult to defend given the fact that the parahippocampal cortex binds objects and events to the context in which they appear. Adults lying supine and still in the narrow tube of a magnetic scanner in an unfamiliar room are in an unusual psychological and bodily state. The compromised sense of agency, awareness of being evaluated, confinement in a narrow space, and the demand to suppress all movement affect brain and psychological processes.
Keywords: context, brain profiles, brain activity, neuroscientists, brain patterns, parahippocampal cortex, psychological processes
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