Culturally Modified Brain

The Culturally Modified Brain

Not only does the brain shape culture, culture shapes the brain.

What is the relationship between the brain and culture?

The conventional answer of scientists has been that the human brain, from which all thought and action emanate, produces culture. Based on what we know about neuroplasticity, this answer is no longer adequate.

Culture is not just produced by the brain; it is also by definition a series of activities that shape the mind. The Oxford English Dictionary gives one important definition of “culture”: “the cultivating or development... of the mind, faculties, manners, etc.... improvement or refinement by education and training... the training, development and refinement of the mind, tastes and manners.” We become cultured through training in various activities, such as customs, arts, ways of interacting with people, and the use of technologies, and the learning of ideas, beliefs, shared philosophies, and religion.

Neuroplastic research has shown us that every sustained activity ever mapped – including physical activities, sensory activities, learning, thinking and imagining – changes the brain as well as the mind. Cultural ideas and activities are no exception. Our brains are modified by the cultural activities we do – be they reading, studying music, or learning new languages. We all have what might be called a culturally modified brain, and as cultures evolve, the continually lead to new changes in the brain.

Our brains are vastly different, in fine detail, from the brains of our ancestors. In each stage of cultural development the average human had to learn complex new skills and abilities that all involve massive brain change. Each one of us cant actually learn in incredibly elaborate set of ancestrally developed skills and abilities in our lifetimes, in a sense generating a re-creation of this history of cultural evolution via brain plasticity.

The many brain modules a child must use for reading, writing, and computer work evolved millenia before literacy, which is only several thousand years old. Illustration by Elena.

So a neuroplastically informed view of culture and the brain implies a two-way street: the brain and genetics produce culture, but culture also shapes the brain. Sometimes these changes can be dramatic.

A popular explanation of how our brain comes to perform cultural activities is proposed by evolutionary psychologists, a group of researchers who argue that all human beings share the same basic brain modules (departments in the brain), or brain hardware, and these modules developed to do specific cultural tasks, some for language, some for mating, some for classifying the world, and so on. These modules evolved in the Pleistocene age, from about 1,8 million to ten thousand years ago, when humanity lived as hunter-gatherers, and the modules have been passed on, essentially unchanged genetically. Because we all share these modules, key aspects of human nature and psychology are fairly universal. Then, in an addendum, these psychologists note that the adult human brain is therefore anatomically unchanged since the Pleistocene. This addendum goes too far, because it doesn't take plasticity, also part of our genetic heritage, into account.

The hunter-gatherer brain was as plastic as our own, and it was not “stuck” in the Pleistocene at all but rather was able to reorganize its structure and functions in order to respond to changing conditions. In fact, it was that ability to modify itself that enabled us to emerge from the Pleistocene, a process that has been called “cognitive fluidity” by the archaeologist Steven Mithen and that, I would argue, probably has its basis in brain plasticity. All our brain modules are plastic to some degree and can be combined and differentiated over the course of our individual lives to perform a number of functions – as in Pascual-Leone's experiment in which he blindfolded people and demonstrated that their occipital lobe, which normally processes vision, could process sound and touch. Modular change is necessary for adaptation to the modern world, which exposes us to things our hunter-gatherer ancestors never had to contend with. An fMRI study shows that we recognize cars and trucks with the same brain module we use to recognize faces. Clearly, the hunter-gatherer brain did not evolve to recognize cars and trucks. It is likely that the face module was most competitively suited to process these shapes – headlights are sufficiently like eyes, the hood like a nose, the grill like a mouth – so that the plastic brain, with a little training and structural alteration, could process a car with the facial recognition system.

(The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

Our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability. Illustration by Elena.