An Oscillomic Approach to the Human Cognitive Phenotype: Philosophical and Empirical Reflections

Exploring recent work in systems neuroscience and comparative biolinguistics, it is argued that only by decomposing the computational operations of language into their generic suboperations will an explanatory neurolinguistics emerge. Methods of investigating the brain mechanisms of language comprehension are discussed, and the prospects for Dynamic Cognomics are explored alongside more fundamental considerations of top-down versus bottom-up studies of cognitive phylogenies. It is shown that the translational approach advocated by Dynamic Cognomics, promoting computational-oscillatory cross-talk, can establish a degree of alignment between core computational properties of the human cognitive phenotype (including the establishment of featural covariance) and a set of generic, domain-general neuronal mechanisms (including phase-amplitude coupling).