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Culture, Mind, and Brain

Emerging Concepts, Models, and Applications

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology – we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behaviour and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.

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CMB Book Launch: Co-Constructing Culture, Mind and BrainĚý| Laurence Kirmayer, Carol Worthman and Shinobu Kitayama

In this introductory chapter, we outline some conceptual building blocks for an ecosocial view of the co-construction of mind, brain, and culture. The brain is the organ of culture; mind and experience are processes located in loops of active engagement of brain and body with the social world. This engagement occurs on multiple time scales, from evolution and co-evolutionary adaptation to humanly designed niches, through the cultural history of populations and communities, to individual developmental trajectories, narratives of the self, and moment-to-moment engagements with social contexts. We are born biologically equipped to acquire culture and, across our lifespan, we become attuned to particular social and cultural environments. The niches we inhabit are cooperatively constructed and presented to us as cultural affordances that enable our cognitive capacities, sense of self, adaptive skills, and meaning-making capacity. The rewiring of brain circuits, synaptic plasticity, and underlying changes in gene regulation only make sense in relation to the particular resources, affordances, and adaptive tasks presented to us by specific cultural environments. Answering the question of what makes us human then turns out to involve not just an evolutionary story in deep time, but also cultural and individual stories in historical, developmental, and biographical time.

Culture, Mind, and Brain in Human Evolution |ĚýDietrich Stout

Ancient stone tools provide a unique source of empirical evidence for reconstructing the evolutionary origins of human culture, mind, and brain. As a key component of hominid adaptations throughout the Paleolithic, stone tools not only document human evolution but likely helped to shape it. Properly interpreting this evidence requires both “middle-range” theory linking archaeologically observable material remains to the behaviors that created them and high-level theory appropriate for placing these reconstructed behaviors in a broader evolutionary framework. An extended evolutionary perspective on Paleolithic toolmaking as embodied practice integrates levels of analysis by emphasizing the interaction of evolutionary and behavioral processes unfolding on multiple spatiotemporal scales. Although much work remains to be done, initial efforts toward an integrated evolutionary neuroscience of toolmaking are beginning to trace the evolution of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.

Mutual Constitution of Culture & the Mind: Insights from Cultural Neuroscience |ĚýShinobu Kitayama

Culture is composed of meanings (e.g., values, beliefs, and norms) and practices (e.g., conventions, scripts, and routines) that are shared, albeit unevenly, in a given community and group. Culture is integral to biological adaptation, not an overlay to the human mind but part and parcel of how the human mind functions. Since the mind is shaped through culture, it also contributes to the reproduction of culture. This chapter highlights a broad contrast thought to separate the West from the “rest,” with Westerners being more independent or less interdependent than non-Westerners, although non-Western regions themselves are highly variable, reflecting diverse adaptive strategies for achieving interdependence under varying socio-ecological conditions. We review existing behavioral and neuroscience evidence to support a broad distinction between the West and the non-West based on three core features of interdependence: predictors of happiness, holistic attention, and holistic social cognition. We also summarize recent evidence suggesting that culture influences cortical volume in specific brain regions. We conclude by pointing out that while cultural shaping of mentality is highly idiosyncratic at the individual level, it can nonetheless be systematic at the collective level, enabling faithful reproduction of the cultural system by which individuals have been trained and shaped.

Being There: Human Ecology, Diversity, & the Vicissitudes of Empathy |ĚýCarol Worthman

This chapter explores dual senses of “being there,” as existential fact and corollary method, and suggests some reasons why and how an ecological framework provides an effective approach to unpacking the culture-mind-brain nexus. First, an ecological analysis brings the lens of evolutionary design to bear on human biology (brain), function (mind), and behavior (culture). Second, it taps reliance of developmental processes on nested timelines of interaction with context that drive physical (body/brain), functional (mind), and behavioral (enculturation) development across the life course. Third, it hones in on conditions created by humans’ reliance on culture, thereby creating their own ecologies that in turn, generate tremendous human diversity. Being there can also play a valuable research role. Three case studies explore that role in interaction with existing bodies of knowledge, major societal and scientific questions, and studies with novel human cultures and ecologies. They also sketch an arc of inquiry that integrates biomarkers and health outcomes with measures of psychosocial dynamics and life course development into population research embedded in community and cultural settings. A dialectical ecologically informed approach that fluidly deploys diverse modes of research may be particularly effective for tackling the large questions and challenges that humans confront.

Enculturated Minds and Brains: Questioning a Familiar Philosophical Picture |ĚýDaniel Hutto

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, this chapter argues for the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors in lieu of there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. We review the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition in addition to a revisionary new order variant of cognitivism – a predictive processing account of cognition (PPC). We argue that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. Instead, we offer a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, we promote the possibility that culture permeates cognition.

The Cultural Construction of Emotions |ĚýMaria Gendron

In this chapter, we discuss the hypothesis people help to regulate each other’s bodies (for better or for worse), and this is a main mechanism through which culture wires a human brain. Cultural transmission prepares the developing brain and body to meet recurrent demands within a particular cultural context, thereby supporting the development of an internal model that is sufficiently tuned to specific environments. In this way, a human brain becomes wired to run a model of the world that will control the body in an efficient, predictive manner. Our approach provides an empirically inspired account of how a human brain becomes a cultural artifact.

Cultural Similarity and Differences Between Selves and Brains: AĚýNovel Approach |ĚýGeorg Northoff

Culture as shared values/beliefs and behavioral scripts not only influences human behavior and cognition but modulates the underlying brain activity as well. Cultural impacts on the human brain have been investigated by cultural neuroscience research that examines cultural group differences in brain activities involved in specific cognitive/affective processes. The findings, however, do not allow inference of causal relationships between specific cultural values/beliefs and brain activity. Cultural priming approach tests how brain activities underlying various cognitive/affective processes are modulated by recent exposure to specific cultural symbols or activation of specific cultural values/beliefs. Increasing evidence indicates that cultural priming leads to subsequent changes of brain activities in response to perception, attention, reward, self-reflection, etc. The findings suggest that culture provides a key frame in which the human brain develops and functions to mediate multiple cognitive and affective processes.

Historical Experience and the Biocultural Brain |ĚýRob Boddice

It has become manifest across the biological sciences that culture is a dynamic component of human brain-body formation and experience. Culture is essential to understanding questions of neuroplasticity, emotional development, interoception, epigenetics, predictive coding, facial recognition, empathy, and so on, yet culture itself is often reduced by those sciences that have come to depend on it. It is "the exterior," or it is "input." The "world," insofar as it introduces contingency to what it is to be human, is not in itself understood as contingent. What happens when culture – both a cause and an effect of human formation – is itself situated, disrupted, historicized? Historians hold the keys to a radical interdisciplinary engagement that complicates the question of culture in ways complementary to the biological disruption of interiority. The cultural brain is an historical artefact. Acknowledging this should change the kinds of questions asked by those who study the brain.

Internet Sociality |ĚýSamuel Veissière

This chapter offers a cultural epidemiology of digital communities, describing how these groups emerge, bond, and come to develop shared embodied experiences. We argue that online communities, while seemingly novel and often “strange," can offer insights into fundamental mechanisms of human sociality albeit on an unprecedented speed and scale due to specific affordances of cyberspace. After framing this argument, we outline a non-comprehensive anthropological survey of online communities of interest. Our hope is to provide a model for how online communities grow to share inter-phenomenal experiences despite lack of face-to-face interaction, and how this might inform our understanding of ordinary social cognition.

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