Cultural neuroscience of the self: understanding the social grounding of the brain

Abstract

Cultural neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field of research that investigates interrelations among culture, mind and the brain. Drawing on both the growing body of scientific evidence on cultural variation in psychological processes and the recent development of social and cognitive neuroscience, this emerging field of research aspires to understand how culture as an amalgam of values, meanings, conventions, and artifacts that constitute daily social realities might interact with the mind and its underlying brain pathways of each individual member of the culture. In this article, following a brief review of studies that demonstrate the surprising degree to which brain processes are malleably shaped by cultural tools and practices, the authors discuss cultural variation in brain processes involved in self-representations, cognition, emotion and motivation. They then propose (i) that primary values of culture such as independence and interdependence are reflected in the compositions of cultural tasks (i.e. daily routines designed to accomplish the cultural values) and further (ii) that active and sustained engagement in these tasks yields culturally patterned neural activities of the brain, thereby laying the ground for the embodied construction of the self and identity. Implications for research on culture and the brain are discussed.

Fig. 1

The theoretical framework proposed here is designed to understand how culture and the brain might influence one another in dynamic fashion. The key idea is that the influence of culture on brain activities is mediated by repeated long-term engagement in a select set of cultural tasks (scripted behaviors designed to accomplish the primary cultural values such as independence and interdependence). Behavioral responses produced by the culturally patterned neural activities facilitate cultural and biological adaptation by enabling the person to seamlessly perform the cultural tasks of his or her own choosing. Each stage involved in the core process of the culture-mind interaction (depicted on the left) is influenced by a set of factors described on the right.