Development of a thermodynamics of human cognition and human culture.

Inspired by foundational studies in classical and quantum physics, and by information retrieval studies in quantum information theory, we prove that the notions of 'energy' and 'entropy' can be consistently introduced in human language and, more generally, in human culture. More explicitly, if energy is attributed to words according to their frequency of appearance in a text, then the ensuing energy levels are distributed non-classically, namely, they obey Bose-Einstein, rather than Maxwell-Boltzmann, statistics, as a consequence of the genuinely 'quantum indistinguishability' of the words that appear in the text. Secondly, the 'quantum entanglement' due to the way meaning is carried by a text reduces the (von Neumann) entropy of the words that appear in the text, a behaviour which cannot be explained within classical (thermodynamic or information) entropy.

Human Perception as a Phenomenon of Quantization.

For two decades, the formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully used to describe human decision processes, situations of heuristic reasoning, and the contextuality of concepts and their combinations. The phenomenon of 'categorical perception' has put us on track to find a possible deeper cause of the presence of this quantum structure in human cognition. Thus, we show that in an archetype of human perception consisting of the reconciliation of a bottom up stimulus with a top down cognitive expectation pattern, there arises the typical warping of categorical perception, where groups of stimuli clump together to form quanta, which move away from each other and lead to a discretization of a dimension.

A Planck Radiation and Quantization Scheme for Human Cognition and Language.

As a result of the identification of "identity" and "indistinguishability" and strong experimental evidence for the presence of the associated Bose-Einstein statistics in human cognition and language, we argued in previous work for an extension of the research domain of quantum cognition. In addition to quantum complex vector spaces and quantum probability models, we showed that quantization itself, with words as quanta, is relevant and potentially important to human cognition. In the present work, we build on this result, and introduce a powerful radiation quantization scheme for human cognition.

Are Words the Quanta of Human Language? Extending the Domain of Quantum Cognition.

In previous research, we showed that 'texts that tell a story' exhibit a statistical structure that is not Maxwell-Boltzmann but Bose-Einstein. Our explanation is that this is due to the presence of 'indistinguishability' in human language as a result of the same words in different parts of the story being indistinguishable from one another, in much the same way that 'indistinguishability' occurs in quantum mechanics, also there leading to the presence of Bose-Einstein rather than Maxwell-Boltzmann as a statistical structure. In the current article, we set out to provide an explanation for this Bose-Einstein statistics in human language.

Spatial induction of genes encoding secreted proteins in micro-colonies of Aspergillus niger.

Aspergillus niger is used by the industry to produce enzymes and metabolites such as citric acid. In liquid cultures, it can grow as a dispersed mycelium or as micro-colonies with a width in the micrometer to millimeter range. Here, it was assessed whether expression of genes encoding secreted enzymes depends on mycelium morphology.