Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cultural concepts of mind vary dramatically across societies. In Chinese thought, _ (x_n, "heart-mind") historically served as the seat of cognition and emotion, while _ (n_o, "brain") played minimal role. Modern neuroscience introduced brain-centered models, raising questions about whether scientific concepts replace or coexist with folk theories. How does scientific knowledge reshape traditional mental vocabulary in non-Western contexts? Here we show, through distributional semantic analysis of 3.4 billion Chinese tokens from classical texts to social media, that x_n and n_o function as parallel rather than competing concepts. Contrary to eliminative materialism, x_n maintains its integrated multi-dimensional structure as a living folk concept, while n_o enters as specialized medical terminology. This coexistence varies systematically: encyclopedic texts show convergence in biomedical contexts, while vernacular preserves traditional differentiation. These patterns suggest that folk and scientific frameworks operate as contextually deployed parallel systems rather than successive evolutionary stages. Our approach demonstrates how computational linguistics reveals mechanisms of cultural-cognitive modernization.