Cultural neuroscience: ideas worth knowing

Abstract

Background: Neuroscience is now promising significant advances in medical practice, such that it can improve the art and science of personalized medicine. A new discipline of cultural neuroscience is now forming, and few clinicians, researchers or educators are aware of it.

Aims: To set out a brief synopsis of cultural neuroscience.

Methods: A narrative, nonsystematic, review of experts on cultural psychiatry and cultural neuroscience.

Results: Cultural neuroscience proposes that culture and biology have co-evolved with mutually beneficial affordances inhuman abilities that promote positive selection that help people to flourish. Neuroscience can support and improve cultural interventions when applied in a pan-diagnostic manner to culturally specific groups, ethnic minorities, and migrants.

Conclusions: Cultural neuroscience is an exciting new discipline with the potential for clinical benefit. Cultural psychiatry can advance in this direction, and at the same time offer a critique of the culture of neuroscience.

Keywords: Culture; innovations; neuroscience; psychiatry.