To start with, I think the inclusion of this chapter in this Culture & Psychology book is a mere attempt to connect culture with neuroscience in order to give a biological perspective in this case. I like the concept of biological plasticity but the author failed to connect the idea to culture directly which seemed a little less convincing for me to believe. The author talks about how certain psychological mechanisms are modified by culture but fails to link that to neuroscience which I assume should be the focal point after all. I think it could be more believable if the authors had mentioned evolutionary plasticity – how humans adapt to cultural or environmental changes over generations as part of their survival instincts.
Moving on, the chapter indicates that in the 1950s, cultural neuroscience was made analogous to computer; different cultures use different softwares yet the hardware (the core of the mind) remains the same. The main purpose of doing so was to prove that the mind can be studied the same way as the computer. Yet again, I think it was a desperate attempt to prove cultural psychology is a science and can be studied with logic.
The chapter covers many points and studies to back up cultural neuroscience research but to conclude, I believe that culture has many aspects, prefixed or suffixed, and cannot be studied by simply hypothesizing causations. This is because many implications might be relational, for example, high activity in the forebrain (found by an fMRI) cannot be a direct cause of growing up as a Turkish national. Culture is a whole spectrum. Culture includes ethnicity, race, religion, language, geography, food, history, economics, art, and whatnot and tying it merely to a biological basis would be nonsense. Though, we can say that cultural neuroscience has a future and more thorough longitudinal studies might help explore this topic maybe with the help of archeologists and anthropologists, not just brain scientists.
I may be biased when I say this but again, culture is too broad and too diverse of a topic to just limit it to brain activity for example.
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