Dr. Mario E. Martinez, a clinical neuropsychologist, established the Institute of Biocognitive Psychology in 1998. He developed a theory of mind-body-culture called biocognition that suggests how cognition and biology coemerge with their historical culture in a bioinformational field that seeks maximum contextual relevance.

The Biocognitive model evolved from research in the interdisciplinary field of psychoneuroimmunology and in cultural anthropology. It proposes that cognitive interpretations are communicated linearly and locally through the immune, nervous and endocrine pathways and are expressed in manifest portals throughout the body. At the same time, the biocognitive communication is impressed non-linearly and non-locally in the totality of the bioinformational field (all cells). This concept of developmental biocognition, assumes that our thoughts and our biology are dynamically interwoven with our historical culture and cannot be reduced to their components.

Consciousness is viewed as a coherent expression of inseparable cognitive, biological and historical culture parameters that coemerge in a bioinformational field. In this model, disease is defined as a dire conflict between our bioethical codes (belief templates) and our behavior. When a bioethical conflict remains unresolved, it triggers a chronic stress response that compromises our biological functions at their most genetically vulnerable levels. Biocognitive theory refutes the concept that divides disease into organic and mental pathology. It proposes instead that both components are inseparable from their contextual relevance.

Biocognition argues that the life sciences must transcend Newtonian reductionism and Cartesian dualism, as well as their consequent upward and downward causalities where mind and body remain divided and one entity originates from the other. Biocognitive theory offers the model of contextual coemergence as an alternative to attributing cause to the simplest level of the organism where cognition is explained microbiologically, or to the most complex where organic processes are attributed cause at the level of consciousness.

Contextual coemergence attributes cause to the biocultural histories that are simultaneously exchanged between communicators in a shared bioinformational field that seeks maximun contextual relevance. This process of communication decontextualizes bioinformation into unstable traces fractals (non-linear) during storage and recontextualizes the traces into biocognitions (linear) during retrieval based on the contextual relevance demanded by the bioinformational field.

Contextual Coemergence requires linear and non-linear processes as well as local and non-local events. Consequently, Biocognition embraces non-linearity and non-locality concepts that, although well established in complexity and quantum theories respectively, are only beginning to be explored in the cognitive and biological sciences.