Author: Bruce E. Wexler
Brain and Culture is in five chapters: Introduction, Transgenerational Shaping of Human Brain Function, Effects of Sensory Deprivation and Sensory Enrichment on Brain Structure and Function, Self-Preservation and the Difficulty of Change in Adulthood, and The Meeting of Cultures. The book integrates research in Neurobiology and Cognition to generate an account of how the cultural environment shapes the brain and implications for social theory of the decrease in neuroplasticity from childhood to adulthood. The five chapters begin with a review of brain research, including both animal and human studies; continue with a review of the social nature of the human brain and the neurological basis of culture; and finish with an interpretation of conflicts from the historic past to the recent past in light of the biological origins of culture.
Wexler explicates two essential points in the book. First, the environment in which a human brain develops exerts important influences on how that brain develops. In particular, Wexler describes the development of young brains, and how parents and the social interactions of the culture create familiar patterns for a young human. Those early experiences create expected patterns of reality as a brain develops. Second, when an incongruity exists between the internal expectations of a brain and the external reality of a new situation conflict can result. For an individual, the conflict can be exhibited as denial of new information, forgetting new information, or interpreting new information in a manner consistent with previous expectations. What important, Wexler claims, is that the incongruities between the environment and the developed brain introduce distress and dysfunction. Wexler explores the incongruities that arise with the death of family members and with immigration including incongruities arising from other cultural changes. In his discussion of these subjects, Wexler explores the relation between the internal structure of the brain and the external environment. For example, human frontal lobes (which, as Wexler points out, are "thought to be closely associated with values, morality, emotion, and other personality traits") are not fully mature until the age of 20 to 25 years. This late maturation may provide an evolutionary advantage, he says, in that it affords more time "to incorporate the growing collective wisdom and latest innovations."
In part II of the book, "The Neurobiology of Ideology", Wexler uses empirical data from the Laboratory experiments, describing, for example, how brain-imaging studies have correlated activation of the amygdale -- induced when people view pictures of ethnically diverse human faces -- with social prejudice. Wexler explains that people develop internal, experience-determined neural structures that "limit, shape, and focus perception" on the aspects of environmental stimulation that they commonly experience. Their external and internal worlds, therefore, act in concordance with each other. Wexler argues that when people are faced with information that does not agree with their internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information. When changes in the environment are great, corresponding internal changes are accompanied by distress and dysfunction. The inability to reconcile differences between strange others and ingrained notions of "humanness" can culminate in violence. The neurobiological imperative to maintain a balance between internal structures and external reality fuels this struggle for control, which contributes to making the contact zone a place of intractable conflict. The result manifests itself in our world today in, to give two examples, racial inequality and intercultural hostility.
Wexler describes how the prejudicial beliefs that lead to cultural clashes derive directly from sociocultural input, beginning with the important adults (parents, for instance) to whom an individual is exposed during childhood. He makes a few other bigger leaps that are less easy to digest, such as when he compares a kitten's experience with unfamiliar oblique lines in a visual-plasticity experiment to that of an immigrant displaced from a village distinguished by flatlands to a city of skyscrapers. But his arguments are provocative and thoughtful nonetheless.
But do the "incongruities" have to lead to "dysfunction"? Might they not instead open up new possibilities for exploration and understanding? That is what the author says might happen in the last chapter of his book. Some unknowns do bring joy. Personality, sense of identity and taste can have a profound effect in determining whether unfamiliar stimuli are perceived as negative or positive. People often have positive reactions to new experiences, such as the sound of an agreeable piece of music never heard before or the smell of a delicious but unfamiliar recipe.
Wexler's position is that familiarity, or "consonance between inner and outer worlds," does generate a pleasurable experience as well. An external event that coincides with a past experience in a person's life, he asserts, is enjoyable "merely on the basis of familiarity and independent of any qualities of the object." But people often express negative reactions too toward familiar stimuli, such as with a job one has been serving in for a long time or when some immigrants avoid moving to familiar social environments that might incite memories of painful or stressful experiences. It is also possible to say, however, that not all goal-directed behavior can be explained by the internal-external dichotomy as Wexler appears to claim, for instance, what Doidge says in "The Brain that Changes Itself" (reviewed in Metapsychology 11: 39)
Bruce Wexler in Brain and Culture explores the socio-cultural implications of the close and changing neurobiological relationship between the individual and the environment. The job is marvelously performed in a readable text.
