Perspectivas para la biopsicología de la sprimeras décadas del siglo XXI

Abstract

The paper sketches the potential developments of biopsychology during the beginning of the 21st century from the perspective of the senior author who started his career as a bsiologist and is ending it as a psychologist. The projections are developed along the concept that any act of behaviour or conscience shown by any organism is always the final product of three historical processes: phylogeny, ontogeny and physiogeny. It is argued that the theory of biological evolution, supplemented by the newer theory of cultural evolution, will gain un increasing explanatory role in psychology. Genes, the molecular condensates of phylogeny, will be increasingly recognised as the most important determinant of neural ontogeny. The improved understanding of their action will allow a more precise characterisation of the influence that experience has upon behaviour. The physiogenic accounts of behaviour and conscience will be increasingly based on the description of thefunctioning of neural nets. The complexity of natural neural nets will in turn encourage the study of artificial neural net models. It is recommended that academic psychology should not estrange itself institutionally from what increasingly will be its most important scientific root, biopsychology.