Social norms are informal rules for behavior, and are fundamental to all societies. Recently, cultural neuroscience investigating the relation between culture, the brain, and behavior has begun to provide unique insights into the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying social norms and their cultural variations. This chapter offers an integrative review of the literature addressing a number of key questions: Are social norms unique to humans? How do people detect norm violations, punish violators, and comply with norms, and what are the brain functions that support such processes? We also explore what might be culturally universal and culturally specific for each of these processes, and how culture and genes might interact to impact norm-related psychological and neural processes. We conclude with a discussion of exciting frontiers that await investigation in the cultural neuroscience of social norms.

The neurodiversity movement argues that certain diagnoses implicating the brain, most notably autism, do not reflect neurological disorders but rather neurological diversity. Neurodiversity movements lie at the intersection of culture, mind, and brain as mind/brain discourses are taken up as cultural practice used in individual and collective identity formation as well as social and political action. Neurodiversity perspectives intersect with important considerations in bioethics, particularly around questions of respect and justice for autistic people. This chapter describes neurodiversity and related concepts, discusses the way neurodiversity can inform bioethics as a conceptual lens, and summarizes cross-cultural research on neurodiversity movements that can help address neurodiversity-informed bioethics questions. It concludes with proposed directions for future research.

This chapter explores dual senses of “being there,” as existential fact and corollary method, and suggests some reasons why and how an ecological framework provides an effective approach to unpacking the culture–mind–brain nexus. First, an ecological analysis brings the lens of evolutionary design to bear on human biology (brain), function (mind), and behavior (culture). Second, it taps reliance of developmental processes on nested timelines of interaction with context that drive physical (body/brain), functional (mind), and behavioral (enculturation) development across the life course. Third, it hones in on conditions created by humans’ reliance on culture, thereby creating their own ecologies that, in turn, generate tremendous human diversity. Being there can also play a valuable research role. Three case studies explore that role in interaction with existing bodies of knowledge, major societal and scientific questions, and studies with novel human cultures and ecologies. They also sketch an arc of inquiry that integrates biomarkers and health outcomes with measures of psychosocial dynamics and life course development into population research embedded in community and cultural settings. A dialectical ecologically informed approach that fluidly deploys diverse modes of research may be particularly effective for tackling the large questions and challenges that humans confront.

In low- and middle-income countries, the number of people with mental illness receiving minimally adequate care ranges from 1 out of 25 to 1 out of a 100. Given this major treatment gap, the World Health Organization and other institutions advocate provision of mental health care by primary care workers. However, there has been limited delivery of services after primary care workers are trained in mental health. One reason is that training programs have focused on increasing knowledge while not addressing attitudes. Social neuroscience theories can improve mental health training by addressing affect and motivation of health workers. Social neuroscience highlights the need to reduce between-group identity distinctions and threat while fostering empathy. Promoting health worker self-efficacy and therapeutic allegiance also benefits service delivery. Ultimately, social neuroscience theories can strengthen strategies to increase mental health services for persons living in low resource settings around the world.

In cultural anthropology, ethnographic film is useful for documenting diverse cultural practices and presenting research. Film’s ability to capture behavior in its holistic context is a key contribution to interests of cultural neuroscience, which has been challenged to better illustrate the impact of its findings outside the laboratory. Still, ethnographic film might go further by accounting for the interaction of culture, mind, and brain in the embodied aspects of the film experience. Neuroscientific inquiry into various storytelling genres reveals the embodied effects of storytelling, which activates neural mechanisms putatively evolved to strengthen social and cultural bonds. In this, storytelling strategy and structure are important; effective stories both engage sustained attention and elicit empathetic response. Character-driven emotional stories following a dramatic arc have greater impact than dispassionate ones. This translates directly to film, which also affords opportunities for emotional attunement and sensory-motor resonance with characters onscreen. Ethnographic film conventions have not adequately developed a methodology responsive to this nuanced understanding, despite anthropology’s long-standing investment in the power of storytelling. A “visual psychological anthropology” approach produces emotionally resonant, character-driven film stories in a dramatic narrative structure. Such films can convey cultural information and impart key concepts in a more immersive way.

This chapter examines some conceptual problems that arise when we apply new embodied theories of mind in literary analysis. Critics have used affordance theory and models of predictive processing to reflect on narrative and genre, the literary devices and codes that shape our expectations about how a text will unfold. Instead of reinforcing the functionalist assumptions that guide cognitive scientists, including the effort to treat reading literature as just another cognitive task that is directed toward problem solving, this chapter proposes to view it instead as an emotionally engaging or ethically challenging way of reconstructing the ecology in which we think. This approach helps theorists honor the conceptual resources that the 4Es offer by giving more heed to individualized and culturally specific encounters with literary texts. I end by examining a poem that demands that we alter prevailing interpretive practices, thus exposing the way literature reorganizes emotional responses and value schemes.

Ancient stone tools provide a unique source of empirical evidence for reconstructing the evolutionary origins of human culture, mind, and brain. As a key component of hominid adaptations throughout the Paleolithic, stone tools not only document human evolution but likely helped to shape it. Properly interpreting this evidence requires both “middle-range” theory linking archaeologically observable material remains to the behaviors that created them and high-level theory appropriate for placing these reconstructed behaviors in a broader evolutionary framework. An extended evolutionary perspective on Paleolithic toolmaking as embodied practice integrates levels of analysis by emphasizing the interaction of evolutionary and behavioral processes unfolding on multiple spatiotemporal scales. Although much work remains to be done, initial efforts toward an integrated evolutionary neuroscience of toolmaking are beginning to trace the evolution of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.

Life experiences have been associated with significant changes in brain structure and functioning. This experience-dependent plasticity is thought to reflect the capacity of our nervous systems to adapt to environmental demands, and ultimately shape cognition. This chapter focuses on how such experiences and environment can specifically impact the hippocampus, a structure important for learning, memory, and healthy cognition. The hippocampal memory system maintains a competitive relationship with other memory systems, in particular the caudate nucleus of the striatum, part of the basal ganglia. Specific types of behavior, such as spatial-based vs. response-based navigational strategies, can influence these memory systems both positively and negatively and lead to long-term neuroplastic changes. Overreliance on non-hippocampus dependent navigational strategies is associated with a reduction in hippocampus volume and activity across the lifespan. Emerging research is now pointing to the wide use of electronic devices – GPS, smartphones, and video games – as a contributing factor to greater reliance on non-hippocampus dependent memory. Given the limited, but concerning, evidence that reliance on electronic devices can interact with already established factors related to underuse of the hippocampal memory system, further study is needed to better understand how these imbalances occur and how they can be mitigated.

Neuroanthropology is an interdisciplinary approach to studying human variation that integrates brain and cognitive sciences with anthropology and uses theoretically and biologically informed ethnography to examine specific problems at the intersection of brain and culture. This chapter shows how, for instance, the theoretical construct, habitus, can be integrated with accounts of human development and brain enculturation to better understand the internalization of social structures, including how socialization produces both diversity as well as shared outcomes. We also show how ideas from computational neuroscience, such as work on prediction errors and the free energy principle, can augment the understanding of cultural consensus and consonance, or how culture is at once shared and individual. The overarching goal of neuroanthropology is to bolster biocultural exploration of individual enculturation and ground social theory in a more accurate account of individual neurobiology in order to encourage a broader, multidisciplinary study of human cultural variation.

Music exists in all cultures and appears to elicit intense emotions and pleasure in the vast majority of people. Recent scientific advances have linked the pleasure of music listening to biological mechanisms associated with rewarding or reinforcing stimuli, including the activation of the brain’s reward system. Specifically, we and others have shown that the neurotransmitter dopamine is central to this phenomenon, and that it engages one subregion of the reward system in anticipation of pleasurable musical events and another during its realization. This dissociation implies that musical pleasure operates via some predictive mechanism that creates expectations, which the music then either fulfills or not. Accordingly, a growing body of evidence highlights the prevalence of prediction-based neural processing and its importance for learning about and adapting to one’s environment. Drawing on these findings and on related research into the optimization of learning, we propose that musical structures recruit neural systems of reward and emotion by evoking sufficiently uncertain expectations to build anticipation, and sufficiently surprising events to foster learning, reward, and pleasure. We explore the role that musical experience and culture play in engendering expectations, and offer suggestions for future research into the neuroscience of musical aesthetics and reward.

In this chapter, we discuss the hypothesis people help to regulate each other’s bodies (for better or for worse), and this is a main mechanism through which culture wires a human brain. Cultural transmission prepares the developing brain and body to meet recurrent demands within a particular cultural context, thereby supporting the development of an internal model that is sufficiently tuned to specific environments. In this way, a human brain becomes wired to run a model of the world that will control the body in an efficient, predictive manner. Our approach provides an empirically inspired account of how a human brain becomes a cultural artifact.

In this chapter, we review recent research from a variety of disciplines to outline the role that collective rituals and religious beliefs play in fostering and maintaining cooperation. We consider ritual and religion as interactive but separate social technologies. First, with rituals we discuss their importance to social learning processes, examine their ability to bond groups through synchrony and shared emotion, and address their role as costly, persuasive signals of commitment. Second, we explore "religion" in the form of beliefs about supernatural agents and look at how such beliefs can contribute to – or hinder – cooperation. We evaluate long-standing claims that religion is a harmful social virus and contrasting recent theories that argue belief in "Big Gods" and "supernatural punishment" are crucial to enabling the cooperation necessary for large-scale societies.

Agency refers to the human capacity to choose, initiate, and control actions to influence events in the world. The experience of agency is fundamental to our sense of self but may be altered in certain neurological conditions and forms of psychopathology. In this chapter, we review recent work in cognitive neuroscience that shows how agency depends on sensorimotor loops between the body and the environment as well as higher-order processes of attribution and interpretation. The sensorimotor loops that contribute to the sense of agency and ownership of the body and its actions can be manipulated in laboratory experiments to give rise to startling illusions like being out of one’s body, having a rubber hand, or controlling random events. Religious experiences like spirit possession and dissociative symptoms like conversion disorder may depend on attributing action to agencies other than the self. Even everyday actions depend on interpretive processes that draw from cultural affordances and ontologies as well as social and political structures. Embodied experience grounds to the sense of agency, but culturally mediated attributions can alter bodily experience. Far from being simply a consequence of individual cognition or ability, therefore, agency is rooted in ongoing engagement with the social–cultural world.