Do Nuerons Dictate Behavior

Contemporary behavioral endocrinology and biological neuron psychology claim that neurons play an important role in the production of behavioral differences in human and other animal behaviors. This paper critically examines these claims, which range from simple biologically determinist arguments through to more complex attempts to theorize the connected roles of the hormonal and the social.

Behavioral neurons

Sciences rely on a social/biological distinction. Analyzing contemporary feminist work on the body as lived, and innovative scientific views of biology's "coaction" with the behavior, it is suggested that this distinction is limiting and requires rethinking. Rather than accusing science of essentialism and rejecting the role of the biological neuron outright, it may prove more fruitful for neurological biology to theorize the "interimplication" of the biological and the social in attempts to understand sex differences in behavior. (Lavie, 2001)

In spite of the ubiquitous periodic nature of change of behaviors, recognition of the behavior as a biological and neurological rhythm controlled by brain oscillators has been slow to come. Until the 1960s, human behavior was mostly conceptualized within the framework of homeostatic principles.

Another impediment to the recognition of the sleep-wake cycle as an endogenous biological rhythm was Nathaniel Kleitman's firm conviction that bodily rhythms were extrinsic in nature. Researchers believe that to satisfy the definition of a rhythm, a periodic "regularly recurring" change in a biological process should be "extrinsic in origin, depending upon a regular change in the environment, such as light or temperature," and that "when fully established, it must persist for some time, even when the environmental changes are absent". Thus, Kleitman considered biological rhythms to be conditioned responses. This explained, in his opinion, their continuation for some time after the extrinsic influences ceased. An expert on neurological functions of human behavior has pointed out in his observation on the biological and neurological functions in human behaviors by saying, The development and maintenance of behavior among human beings stems from being born into, and living in, a family and community run according to alterations of light and darkness, resulting from the period of rotation of the earth around its axis. (Lavie, 2001)

These accumulated findings linking melatonin secretion with increased sleep propensity have led to the suggestion that the endogenous cycle of melatonin is involved in the regulation of the sleep-wake cycle not by actively promoting sleep, but by inhibiting the SCN wakefulness-producing mechanism (Lavie 1997). Thus, the evening onset of melatonin secretion, which coincides with the crest of the SCN-driven arousal cycle, inhibits the wakefulness-generating mechanisms, thereby enabling the brain's sleep-related structures to be activated unopposed by the drive for wakefulness. Recent evidence demonstrating that in addition to its well-known phase-shifting effects on SCN neuronal activity, melatonin also exerts acute inhibition of behavioral neurons, provides support for this hypothesis.