And so, the refugee, or the displaced person, loses the power to recreate their former status; misunderstood by their new society, they retreat into themselves, adopting a lower status. They work hard but are prevented from achieving past glories by unthinking discrimination from those in their new country.
Dr. Suparna Choudhury, a National Institutes of Health researcher, predicts that cultural neuroscience will rapidly develop in the next few years: “New data from functional neuroimaging studies mirror findings from cross-cultural psychology research, by showing differential brain activation patterns, in terms of degree and location, among individuals of different cultural groups engaged in cognitive tasks. The formation of new interdisciplinary fields such as social neuroscience, neuroethics, and cultural neuroscience, has seen new interest in ‘neural underpinnings’ of categories, or kinds, of people in terms of neural signatures.”
Professor Joseph Dumit, an interdisciplinary ethnographer at the University of California, Davis, says that, “Brain-imaging technologies like PET (positron emission tomography) offer researchers the potential to ask a question about almost any aspect of human nature, human behavior, or human kinds and design an experiment to look for the answer in the brain. An ethnographic approach to the virtual community of PET scans has the potential to bring different perspectives into conversation, and it can highlight some of the unintended effects of cultural equations and scientific practices.”
Whereas the dictionary definition of culture is: “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively,” neuroscientists are looking at the deepest manifestations of culture: the shared ways of living that bind people and give a sense of identity with a group. Choudhury states that in the past we believed the brain was set in its patterns within the first seven years of life.
She explains, “During the last decade, however brain imaging studies have suggested that cortical development is protracted, and that beyond childhood the brain manifests significant degrees of malleability, peaking during adolescence and continuing during early adulthood. This may reflect human biological attunement to acquire and transmit elements of culture.”
Choudhury notes that, “the neuroimaging data — from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies — coupled with earlier cellular findings point to experience-dependent rewiring, most likely in terms of synaptic reorganization and increased axonal myelination of evolutionarily ‘newer’ parts of the brain, especially prefrontal and parietal cortex … Data demonstrating structural maturation in medial prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex and superior temporal cortex during adolescence correspond to developmental shifts in functional activation in these brain areas during tasks requiring self-processing, and the understanding of intentions and emotions of others.”
However, we need to be careful how we interpret such data, because neuroscience itself is a cultural act, and the nation in which studies are undertaken, and by whom, can see cultural bias distort results.
As an example, cross-national epidemiological studies comparing the prevalence of mental disorders in young people, aged 12 to 24 years, reveal rates that vary significantly from say, 8 percent in the Netherlands to 57 percent in the U.S. In the United Kingdom, young people of English origin are four times more likely to experience mental illness than those of Indian origin.
Is this the difference between cultures that mediate instead of medicate? Do Americans or Britons have greater mental health issues, or are they more likely to seek medical help when they experience distress, while people from other nations may work through issues with elders, religious groups, or other ways?
Ethnographic research in Samoa by anthropologist Margaret Mead in the 1920s raised some of these issues. Her 1928 book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” said that looser sexual mores in Samoan culture made adolescence for girls less stormy than in developed countries, like the U.S. Studies of adolescence in more than 175 societies indicate that turbulent teens are a Western challenge linked to cultural values of individualism in Western societies, while in those where communal responsibility is inculcated, teenage tantrums are rare.
Those with greater access to mass publication and a wide public audience have tended to argue the superiority of their own cultures over those of others. Neuroscience may challenge those precepts and force us all to greater humility — and a rethinking of shared and unique cultural identities.
This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 issue of Brain World Magazine.
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