ABSTRACT
Culture, as mental phenomena, comes from meaningful and sustained experience coded in the brain as simplified mental representations that make up a body of shared tacit knowledge. Culture in the form of property rights and patrilineal descent, thus emerges as a communal adaptation to the demands of pastoral ecology. Humans grow and survive and become who they are not only as the result of a genetic program but as part of an ongoing developmental process in which cognitive development is “scaffolded” by its surroundings. In addition to cognitive anthropology, the evidence comes from the fields of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive sociology, and even environmental science. Shared schemas are cultural schemas, or shared dominant logics, the basic units of culture. Organizations develop cultures by doing meaningful and habitual things, like successfully solving a hard problem or meeting a tough challenge deemed important to the collective.
