ReviewCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2019
The hierarchically mechanistic mind: an evolutionary systems theory of the human brain, cognition, and behavior.
Review in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Game of Self: Identity and Experience as Active Inference.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Article
- Gut Microbiota Dysbiosis in Depression: Pathological Correlations, Molecular Pathways, and Therapeutic Interventions.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Thoughtseeds: A Hierarchical and Agentic Framework for Investigating Thought Dynamics in Meditative States.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Multimodal neurophenomenology of advanced concentration absorption meditation: An intensively sampled case study of Jhana.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Analysis of argument structure constructions in a deep recurrent language model.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2025Article
- Affixation patterns in native language and sequence processing by statistical learning mechanisms.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Synthesizing the temporal self: robotic models of episodic and autobiographical memory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Why the Fermi paradox may not be well explained by Wong and Bartlett's theory of civilization collapse. A Comment on: 'Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?' (2022) by Wong and Bartlett.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Active Inference in Psychology and Psychiatry: Progress to Date?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Feasibility of a Personal Neuromorphic Emulation.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates.Communications biology · 2024Review
- The Constrained Disorder Principle May Account for Consciousness.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- I like therefore I can, and I can therefore I like: the role of self-efficacy and affect in active inference of allostasis.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2024Article
- Investigation of advanced mindfulness meditation "cessation" experiences using EEG spectral analysis in an intensively sampled case study.Neuropsychologia · 2023Article
- Phi fluctuates with surprisal: An empirical pre-study for the synthesis of the free energy principle and integrated information theory.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Investigating predictive coding in younger and older children using MEG and a multi-feature auditory oddball paradigm.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2023Review
- A cultural-ecosocial systems view for psychiatry.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Article
- Restoring the missing person to personalized medicine and precision psychiatry.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The purpose of this review was to integrate leading paradigms in psychology and neuroscience with a theory of the embodied, situated human brain, called the Hierarchically Mechanistic Mind (HMM). The HMM describes the brain as a complex adaptive system that functions to minimize the entropy of our sensory and physical states via action-perception cycles generated by hierarchical neural dynamics. First, we review the extant literature on the hierarchical structure of the brain. Next, we derive the HMM from a broader evolutionary systems theory that explains neural structure and function in terms of dynamic interactions across four nested levels of biological causation (i.e., adaptation, phylogeny, ontogeny, and mechanism). We then describe how the HMM aligns with a global brain theory in neuroscience called the free-energy principle, leveraging this theory to mathematically formulate neural dynamics across hierarchical spatiotemporal scales. We conclude by exploring the implications of the HMM for psychological inquiry.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.