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Culturing
the adolescent brain: what can
neuroscience learn from anthropology?
Suparna Choudhury
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 22 Boltzmannstrasse, Dahlem, D-14195, Berlin, Germany
Cultural neuroscience is set to flourish in the next few years. As the field develops, it is necessary to reflect on what is meant
by ’culture’ and how this can be translated for the laboratory context. This article uses the example of the adolescent brain to
discuss three aspects of culture that may help us to shape and reframe questions, interpretations and applications in cultural
neuroscience: cultural contingencies of categories, cultural differences in experience and cultural context of neuroscience
research. The last few years have seen a sudden increase in the study
of adolescence as a period of both structural and functional
plasticity, with new brain-based explanations of teenage behaviour being taken up in education, policy and medicine.
However,
the concept of adolescence, as an object of behavioural science, took shape relatively recently, not much more than a hundred
years ago and was shaped by a number of cultural and historical factors. Moreover, research in anthropology and cross-cultural
psychology has shown that the experience of adolescence, as a period of the lifespan, is variable and contingent upon culture.
The emerging field of cultural neuroscience has begun to tackle the question of cultural differences in social cognitive processing
in adults. In this article, I explore what a cultural neuroscience can mean in the case of adolescence. I consider how to integrate
perspectives from social neuroscience and anthropology to conceptualize, and to empirically study, adolescence as a culturally
variable phenomenon, which, itself, has been culturally constructed.
Keywords: adolescence; culture; context; brain development; neuroscience; anthropology
INTRODUCTION
The recent emergence of cultural neuroscience represents
an important challenge to the assumption of universality
of the neural mechanisms associated with perceptual,
attentional and social interaction processes. 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
adult individuals of different cultural groups engaged in
a variety of cognitive tasks (see Han & Northoff, 2008 for
a review). Certainly, with the advancement of neuroimaging
technologies, and the formation of new interdisciplinary
fields such as social neuroscience, neuroethics and most
recently cultural neuroscience, there has been a renewed
interest in ‘neural underpinnings’ of categories, or kinds,
of people. The possibility of seeing the living brain in
action has stimulated a drive to characterize these categories
of people�for example, male and female, Republican
and Democrat, prosocial and antisocial, Eastern and
Western�in terms of neural signatures. Such categories,
however, are not natural kinds; they are often culturally
constructed, rather than rooted solely in the body or the
brain. Cultural neuroscience holds much promise for
furthering our insights into the meaning of the differences
it finds, and has the potential to shed light on how social and
cultural contexts interact with brain development. To do
this, however, as this new subfield unfolds, it is crucial to
attend to how culture is conceptualized in the design and
interpretation of experiments. Drawing on insights from
psychology, sociology and especially anthropology will no
doubt prove increasingly valuable.
In this article, I use the example of the adolescent brain to
discuss three challenges for cultural neuroscience concerning
categories, meaning and scientific context, which require
careful consideration to ‘culture’ in different ways. First,
I suggest that an imperative for cultural neuroscience
ought to include an inquiry into historical background of
the phenomenon under study and the assumptions under-
lying it. This would involve an awareness of how a scientific
category, such as a particular distinction between people, was
shaped, with what goals and imbued with which views of the
person or the mind/brain. Culture in this case, therefore,
refers to the values and assumptions embedded in the
category of adolescence when it was originally conceptua-
lized as an object of scientific study (Daston, 2000).
Secondly, I consider how cultural neuroscience can benefit
from anthropology in understanding how a given category
or experience under study in the lab may have different
meanings in different cultures. Here, culture refers to the
way in which the developmental environment�the system
of beliefs, values, languages and social setting�of the indi-
vidual is organized. Developmental histories may vary
Received 9 February 2009; Accepted 16 July 2009
Advance Access publication 2 December 2009
I am grateful to Max Stadler, Kelly McKinney and anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and
suggestions during the development of this manuscript.
Correspondence should be addressed to Suparna Choudhury, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
22 Boltzmannstrasse, Dahlem, D-14195, Berlin, Germany. Email: schoudhury@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.
doi:10.1093/scan/nsp030 SCAN (2010) 5,159–167
� The Author (2009).Published by Oxford University Press.For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
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according to differences in, for example, historical customs,
child-rearing practices and aspects of physical settings (Super
& Harkness, 2002). Thirdly, and related to the first point
about history, I briefly discuss the need to be mindful of
the broader context in which current scientific knowledge
about neuroscience is generated to suggest that culture at
large may influence the questions we pose in the laboratory
and the applications of the data. Culture in this case refers
to the larger contemporary social institutions and practices
that influence, and maintain, our ways of knowing as
scientists (Hacking, 2002).
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ADOLESCENT BRAIN:
STATE OF THE NEUROSCIENCE
Thirty years ago, the brain was understood to be fixed and
immutable in its final structure by early childhood. During
the last decade, however brain imaging studies have sug-
gested that cortical development is much more protracted
than previously thought, and that beyond childhood the
brain manifests significant degrees of malleability, peaking
during adolescence and continuing during early adulthood
(Gogtay et al., 2004; Paus, 2005; Toga et al., 2006). This may
reflect human biological attunement to acquire and transmit
elements of culture (Fiske, 2009). Adolescent plasticity, then,
might be a period of development of cultural niches and the
reciprocal shaping of the brain.
The last few years have seen a sudden increase in the study
of adolescence as a period of both structural and functional
plasticity (Burnett & Blakemore, 2009; Güroǧlu et al., 2009;
Paus, 2005). One reason for this heightened interest in the
adolescent brain is probably the recent availability of
extensive new data sets about brain development. In the
last decade, results from structural neuroimaging studies
involving large samples of children and adolescents have
given weight to previous smaller scale histological studies
that used postmortem samples to demonstrate considerable
neuroanatomical developments at puberty and beyond this
stage, into early adulthood. Specifically, the neuroimaging
data�from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion
tensor imaging (DTI) studies�coupled with the earlier
cellular findings (Huttenlocher, 1979) 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 (see Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006,
for a review). The evidence that the most pronounced
developments are in brain regions associated with ‘higher’
executive functions and social cognition has inspired
numerous studies investigating the cognitive correlates of
the anatomical developments.
Data gleaned from functional MRI (fMRI) experiments
suggest that the development of social emotional processing
(Burnett et al., 2008), regulation of emotions (Hare et al.,
2008), understanding of intentions (Blakemore et al., 2007),
assessment of risk (Bjork et al., 2007), decision-making
(Eshel et al., 2007), cognitive flexibility (Crone et al., 2006)
and inhibition of impulses (Casey et al., 1997; Luna &
Sweeney, 2004) correlate with maturation of the brain
during adolescence. Among these, risk-taking and impulsiv-
ity are two sets of behaviours that have received considerable
attention in adolescent brain research. Drawing on data from
in vivo structural and functional studies of the developing
human brain, and building on animal models, this research
has suggested that heterochronous development of nucleus
accumbens, associated with reward prediction, and prefron-
tal cortex, which subserves inhibition of impulses, account
for risky behaviour (Casey et al., 2008). In light of the
burgeoning field of social neuroscience and evidence of
structural changes in the ‘social brain’ after childhood,
the neural bases of social–emotional functioning during
adolescence have recently become a new focus of research
(Blakemore, 2008). Data demonstrating structural matura-
tion in medial prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex and superior
temporal cortex during adolescence correspond to develop-
mental shifts in functional activation in these brain areas
during tasks requiring self-processing, and the understand-
ing of intentions and emotions of others. Such studies tend
to suggest that the brain has a role to play in the ‘turbulence’
and ‘storm and stress’ (Hall, 1904) that typically characterize
teenage life in psychological theories. The model of
the maturing brain has thus served as an explanation for
many teenage behaviours reported anecdotally with
a number of implications for education, social and health
policy.
Another reason for the focus on the adolescent brain often
stated in neuroscience studies is the concern about adoles-
cent mental health as a ‘public health problem’ (Steinberg,
2008). While most adolescents do not suffer from mental
health problems, youth is the stage in life in which mental
disorders are often thought to begin. It is increasingly
speculated that the maturing brain may be of causal
significance. Paus and colleagues, for example, suggest that
developmental events during the maturation of frontotem-
poral pathways may have an important role to play in the
development of schizophrenia during late adolescence (Paus
et al., 2008). In a recent review, Patel and colleagues have
argued that in order to meet the challenge of improving
mental health of young people, researchers need to take a
global perspective and to pay close attention to culture in
terms of both risk factors and protective factors. Cross-
national epidemiological studies comparing prevalence of
mental disorders in young people aged 12–24 years reveal
that rates vary significantly from one country to another,
from 8% in the Netherlands to 57% in the USA
(Patel et al., 2007). Moreover, within one country, cultural
background has important influences on mental health.
For example, in the UK, young people of English origin
in the UK are four times more likely to suffer mental
illness compared to those of Indian origin (Green et al.,
2005; Liem et al., 2000). These cultural differences in
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incidence of psychiatric disorders are relevant for
cultural neuroscience. Insights from social and cultural
neuroscience�with their emphases on the study of
self-concept, understanding of others and emotion
regulation�are frequently used to investigate the neural
bases of psychiatric disorders. If a major objective of cogni-
tive neuroscience of adolescence is to further insights into
mental health (Cody & Hynd, 1999; Nelson et al., 2005),
studies in neuroscience that investigate cognition in typically
developing adolescents need to engage with the question
of culture (Choudhury & Kirmayer, in press). If cultural
neuroscience is to contribute to this project, it must
acknowledge and incorporate findings from anthropology
that show considerable cultural variation in the transition
from childhood to adulthood and, first of all, unpack the
very category of ‘adolescence’ as we commonly know it in
cognitive neuroscience.
THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF ADOLESCENCE
AS A CATEGORY
In searching for biologically based explanations, scientific
research has made important efforts in removing what
have sometimes been insidious moral interpretations
surrounding certain behavioural phenomena.
1
However,
given that normative conclusions are often drawn from
biological theories, thoughtful scientific inquiry into aspects
of personhood, identities, life stages and cultures, specifically
efforts to find their functional or anatomical correlates,
requires critical reflection about the origins of the categories.
There are several sociological and historical theories about
the ‘cultural invention of adolescence’ as a category of
the lifespan that emerged as a product of modernization
and industrialization (Ariès, 1962; Bucholtz, 2002;
Coleman, 1961). Here, I will not enter into a discussion
about the many social, cultural and economic factors such
as shifting patterns of family life, urbanization, changes in
employment and the introduction of full-time schooling,
thought to have shaped the lived experience and categoriza-
tion of adolescence. Rather, in this section, I will focus on
describing one major historical influence on the contempor-
ary scientific characterization of the features and duration
of adolescence, established at the turn of the twentieth
century in psychology.
Popular narratives and scholarly discourses are replete
with conceptions of adolescent nature, as a troubled
transitional period. Most of the available theories about,
and definitions of, adolescence as a time of turmoil can be
traced back to psychological theories from the late 19th
century, developed in Western Europe and the USA. These
notions of adolescence stem from the work of the American
psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who was steeped in a nativist
view of development and concerned with the primacy of
nature over nurture, and who was foundational in defining
adolescence in modern, scientific terms. While some
contemporary researchers challenge Hall’s theories, many
of the research questions including the recent focus on
risk-taking in psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience
reflect the legacy of Hall’s view in terms of the notions of,
and hypotheses about, adolescence. In his two volumes,
Adolescence: Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology,
Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education
(1904), Hall laid the ground for new rigorous scientific
observation and description of ‘adolescence . . . a new birth’
(pp. xiii) and a ‘transition stage [of] the soul’ (pp. vii).
The scientific category of ‘adolescence’ was developed in a
particular historical moment, in which particular cultural
concerns were influential in shaping it. Hall was profoundly
influenced by evolutionary theory, especially, German
zoologist Ernst Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation (Haeckel,
1866), which proposed that individual development parallels
the historical record of species development (‘ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny’), a theory upon which Social
Darwinism was predicated. Hall believed that ‘the child
and the race are key to each other’ (Hall, 1904, pp. viii).
This view reflected American and European sociological
and scientific discourses of the time which linked the
individual to society and which were deeply concerned
with the progress and decline of mankind (Kaufmann,
2008). In these evolutionary terms, Hall likened children to
‘savages’ and adolescents to nomadic wanderers. As such,
evolutionary ladders of individual psychological develop-
ment from child to adult could be used to calibrate stages
of development of cultures in terms of their intellectual and
moral evolution. For example, in Adolescence, he described
African, Indian and Chinese cultures as ‘adolescent races’,
suggesting that the behaviour of these cultural groups
represented arrested development. Adolescence, therefore,
represented the transition from the primitive to the civilized.
This recapitulative theory resonated with the nineteenth
century view of the brain as an archive of the evolutionary
past, in which ‘primitive’ limbic parts of the brain that
develop first are controlled by ‘higher’ frontal areas that
are later to develop. In all of these evolutionary theories,
amongst which the scientific category of adolescence was
developed, metaphors of hierarchy, ladders and transitions
into civilization�of the brain, the individual, society and the
human race�abounded (Gould, 1977; Smith, 1992; Young,
1990). Hall, along with other ‘boyologists’ and social refor-
mers, was concerned with the transition from ‘the traits of
savagery’ (pp. vii) during boyhood to the civilized modern
man�a loyal, courageous and patriotic nation-builder. It has
been argued that, at the turn of the twentieth century,
a period of dramatic social change, the category of adoles-
cence was invested with ideas that reflected preoccupations
with nation building and imperialism (Lesko, 2001).
Historicizing the category of adolescence that is now used
1
For example, research in neuroscience has led to the shift towards the widely accepted explanation of
autism as an organic developmental disorder, from previous psychoanalytic views that held the mother
accountable.
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widely to refer to an age bound period often associated with
‘psychological turmoil’ provides an insight into the cultural
concerns that influenced its development. The category of
adolescence, formed in the early twentieth century is deeply
entangled with the normative and socio-economic
dimensions of Western industrial societies.
While much research demonstrates that adolescence is
a historical product, a recent large-scale ethnographic
study has suggested that a ‘social stage intervening between
childhood and adulthood in the passage through life’ exists
across most cultures (Schlegel & Barry, 1991, p. 8). At the
same time, increasing evidence from neuroscience is point-
ing to structural and functional changes in the brain during
this period. What then does the historical construction of a
scientific category mean for experimental investigation?
Adolescence is of course ‘real’ in the sense that the category
is used to organize many aspects of social life from the level
of healthcare and education down to individual experiences.
However, the facts about adolescence�its duration and
its features�are also bound up with the social and cultural
conditions in which it is experienced, studied and under-
stood. Cultural neuroscience is well placed to deal with
such contingencies by bringing an awareness of how the
defining features of a category may differ depending on
context, to the experimental design. It can, for example,
use ethnographic data about child development, socializa-
tion processes and emotions to investigate the relationships
between these culturally shaped processes and neural
processes, as well as to guide the design of appropriate
experimental stimuli.
COMING OF AGE: A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
Research suggests that in many contemporary cultures,
development does not correspond neatly with adolescence
as a distinct category of the lifespan bound by ages 10 and
19.
2
For example, research carried out in Bangladesh,
showed that childhood can extend up to puberty for those
children attending school and without economic responsi-
bilities, while those who enter employment are not consid-
ered children as soon as they begin to work, even if this is at
the age of six (Blanchett, 1996). Other research has suggested
that among the Hmong people, there is no middle transition
stage between childhood and adulthood; instead at ages
11 or 12, adulthood begins as childhood ends (Tobin &
Friedman, 1984). Currently, most of the data in neu-
roscience experiments are drawn from groups of individuals
enrolled in particular schools and universities in the UK
and USA, most likely representative of only certain
socioeconomic status. Given the cultural differences in tran-
sitional periods between childhood and adulthood, age
alone, as the defining markers of this category can therefore
be inaccurate and seem arbitrary. The task of cultural
neuroscience in this respect would be to investigate how
neurocognitive developments interact with particular
proxies of the cultural environment, and to consider when
‘adolescence’ as a category is useful to account for a
particular cognitive difference, and if not, to conceptualize
alternative variables that may relate to the cognitive process
being studied.
If we assume that a transitional period of the life cycle,
akin to adolescence, organized around puberty and of
variable length, exists almost universally, the next question
is what forms it takes and whether its features, too, are
universal. Ethnographic research in Somoa conducted by
anthropologist Margaret Mead brought the issue of cultural
difference in the experience of adolescence to the fore.
Her book, Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, 1928) famously
challenged Hall’s ‘storm and stress’ model and argued that
Samoan culture influenced psychological development of
girls in such a way that the transition from childhood to
adulthood was smooth and lacked the ‘natural’ turbulence
with which it had been characterized by the evolutionary
view. Unlike American culture, Samoan culture, she
argued, did not place judgements and pressures on adoles-
cents and was more relaxed, for example, in its views about
sexuality. All of these factors were thought to make Samoan
adolescence relatively tranquil and enjoyable and led to
Mead’s assertion of the primacy of nurture over nature.
While Derek Freeman later critiqued Mead’s culturally deter-
ministic approach for a number of methodological reasons
(Freeman, 1983), her ethnographic approach has been
important for subsequent cross-cultural approaches to
adolescence. Since then, a sizeable literature in psychology
and anthropology has developed which has addressed
cross-cultural differences in adolescence.
Schlegel and Barry’s cross-cultural study of adolescents in
tribal and traditional societies using data collected from
over 175 societies around the world demonstrated that
adolescence as a distinctive, socially marked stage of life is
ubiquitous. These researchers put forward a biosocial theory,
arguing that the social stage of adolescence is a response to
the development of the reproductive capacity (Schlegel &
Barry, 1991; Schlegel, 1995). Most notably, however, these
cross-cultural studies challenge the notion that features of
‘storm and stress’ and a period of psychological crisis are
universal inevitabilities in adolescence. For example, while
mild forms of antisocial behaviour were present in some
societies, it was certainly not generalizable as a feature.
Similarly, aggressive and violent behaviour occurred in a
minority of cultures and when present was heavily gendered
with aggression in girls being particularly low. Cross-cultural
researchers stress that the meanings of developmental tasks
associated with adolescence such as the establishment of
independence or autonomy may differ according to culture,
and may be subject to change over time. For example, devel-
oping independence in some cultures may mean taking on
duties to care for siblings or elders, and not necessarily2WHO (2005).
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separating from adults and orienting towards peers (Chen &
Farrugia, 2002; Trommsdorff, 2002). Based on a study com-
paring five cultures that could be contrasted as
‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ or ‘collectivistic’ and ‘individua-
listic’, Trommsdorff suggested that ‘turbulent’ features such
as intergenerational conflict stem from the focus on attaining
independence from parents during this period and are linked
to cultural values of individualism in Western societies
(Trommsdorff, 1995). Certainly, in many cultures, particu-
larly in pre-industrial societies, adolescence is not marked by
such a characterization or psychological turmoil, and thus,
both the characterization and length of this life stage vary
according to culture. Puberty, too, which is clearly grounded
in biology across cultures, interacts with the local environ-
ment. Menarche, which marks the beginning of puberty in
girls, is occurring increasingly early in industrialized
countries such as Japan or the USA. This finding may be
connected to changes in dietary intake (Berkey et al., 2000).
Even if puberty could be the biological marker of the start of
adolescence in every culture, the end point is less clear.
In summary, adolescence conceptualized as a prolonged
period of identity development linked to increased
autonomy, intergenerational conflict, peer-relatedness and
social psychological anxieties, is not the norm across
cultures. Indeed, these features seem to depend on degrees
of individualism, social/economic role expectations, gender
and class (Dasen, 2000; Saraswathi, 1999). A historical
appreciation of adolescence as a category of science as well
as cross-cultural investigations of the experience of adoles-
cence demonstrates that characteristics associated with this
developmental stage may not only have biological bases
but also social and cultural origins. Neural differences
between ages could then lead us to examine the quality of
the differences in terms of the associated experience and
cultural meanings.
Culture is of course a heavily contested concept.
Therefore, careful conceptualization and appropriation of
culture and its proxies are crucial. It is important that
geography, culture, ethnicity and race are not conflated, in
order to avoid cultural essentialism. Within a country and an
ethnicity, there is enormous intracultural variation
(Gibbons, 1998) of ways of living and thinking, while
others may be shared across countries or ethnicities. The
construct of race, for instance, has a political history and,
as a reference to skin pigmentation, is a generally unhelpful
measure of difference where neuroscience is concerned.
The use of race in the brain sciences has historically been
coloured by ideological motivations related to racism and
colonialism. All of these, conceptualized as categories of
self-contained cultures that can be used to compare groups
of people in scientific experiments, are challenged by globa-
lization. The movement of people, of ideas about ways of
living and ways of being and the transmission of knowledge
through various media mean that most cultural commu-
nities are increasingly heterogeneous and give rise to
hybrid identities (Kirmayer, 2006). Cultural neuroscience
must acknowledge these changes and look for meaningful
and measurable proxies of culture that cut across fixed,
geographically bound conceptions of culture, and bear
relevance to young people in increasingly fluid and diverse
contexts. Such proxies may, for example, relate to measures
of individualism/collectivism, interaction patterns with
others, family size, diet, aspects of personality, caregiving,
life stresses, or school settings. For example, a number of
studies among Argentinian infants, US American children
and adolescents, British and Finish adults using both
behavioural and neuroimaging methods indicate that
poverty�indexed by various measures such as personal and
family income�is negatively correlated with performance on
executive function and memory tasks (see Hackman &
Farah, 2009 for a review). The causal relationship between
socioeconomic status and differences in neurocognitive
function is an important topic for future research.
Anthropology has generated a very complex discourse
of culture, and it is exactly such complications cultural
neuroscience needs to consider when designing and
interpreting experiments that investigate the interaction
between brain function and (some aspect of) culture.
Super and Harkness (2002), for example, propose that
culture ‘is usefully conceived . . . as the organization of the
developmental environment’ (p. 270). They conceptualize
culture as operational in three subsystems�(a) physical and
social settings, (b) historically constituted customs and
practices and (c) child rearing and the psychology of care-
takers. The physical and social settings are the settings of
daily life for example patterns of sleep and wakefulness,
degree of early gender segregation, the amount/type of
verbal interaction directed towards infants by caregivers.
Historically constituted customs can be construed as com-
munity-wide solutions to child rearing, for example adult
circumcision rituals in certain African cultures, or more
routine, how to carry babies to keep them out of danger.
The final subsystem is the psychology of the caregivers
including beliefs concerning the needs of children and the
community goals of child rearing. All of these aspects of
culture are likely to influence cognitive development in ado-
lescents. Indeed contemporary cross-cultural psychology
research demonstrates that emotional understanding (e.g.
Liem et al., 2000), moral reasoning (e.g. Skoe et al., 1999),
behavioural inhibition (e.g. Rubin, 1998) and self-concept
(e.g. Kuebli et al., 1998; Offer et al., 1988) in adolescence
vary in different cultures.
More recent neuroimaging studies have shown that the
neural structures supporting self-processing develop during
adolescence, and their maturation may reflect different
cognitive strategies in self-related judgments (Pfeifer et al.,
2007; for a review see Sebastian et al., 2008). However,
self-construal is strongly contingent upon culture with
varying emphases placed, for example, on individuality,
social, environmental and spiritual connectedness with
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styles of child-rearing having a strong role in shaping
‘cultural selves’ (Quinn, 2003). For example, Japanese infants
are born into a culture where the self in a social matrix
frequently comes before the self as an individual.
Accordingly, naturalistic behaviour studies have shown
that American children at 2.5 and 6 years exhibit more
independence-related behaviour than their Japanese coun-
terparts, who exhibit more interdependent behaviour
(Caudill & Schooler, 1973). Neuroimaging studies have
shown that in adults, the neural systems associated with
representations of the self, relative to others, are modulated
by culture (Chiao et al., 2009; Han & Northoff, 2008;
Kobayashi et al., 2007; Zhu et al., 2007). The cultural
differences in brain activation were interpreted in light of
differences in individualist and collectivist cultures and
their constructions of the self. Specifically, in individualists
(as indexed by a questionnaire) the neural activation pattern
was more distinct for the self and other, and in collectivists
the activation patterns overlapped. It is also likely that
culturally shaped ideas of the person influence the develop-
ment of cognitive and neural processing of self during
adolescence. One task for cultural neuroscience to avoid
reifying cultural stereotypes in the lab, is to recognize the
heterogeneity of cultural values within groups, for example
within ‘Western’ and ‘East Asian’ groups as have been
compared in recent studies.
In addition, cultural neuroscience needs to unpack
concepts such as ‘self’ and ‘moral reasoning’ and acknowl-
edge cultural differences in their very construal and in the
way that they may be experienced. Designing paradigms that
tap culturally relevant meanings of the concept under study
is an important challenge for future studies. As some
researchers have pointed out, ‘to explain what is going on
in the black box is not to explain what is happening for
the black box’ (Zahavi, 2004). Experiments in cultural
neuroscience focusing on adolescence would benefit from
additional methods to incorporate the structure of
first person experience in ways that can be categorized and
validated to understand how neurophysiological processes in
the brain relate to what is happening for the adolescent
(Gallagher, 2003). Triangulating on complex cognitive
processes such as those involved in social cognition, by
bringing together multiple levels including functional and
structural MRI data, behavioural data as well as introspective
reports, may provide richer insights into the meaning of
differences in brain structure or function during develop-
ment, and indeed in studies aiming to compare groups in
cultural neuroscience studies. Retrospective reports can
gauge several aspects of the task not captured by standard
reaction time or BOLD responses to stimuli, such as the
participant’s understanding of the task, strategies employed,
and a broad picture of the subjective experience of perform-
ing the task (Jack & Roepstorff, 2002). Such introspective
reports might be especially helpful in making sense of
group differences when performance levels are comparable,
for example between age groups in developmental studies,
but when neural activity differs.
BIO-LOOPING AND NEUROSCIENCE IN CONTEXT
Biological approaches to culture are certainly not new,
and the field is marred by a difficult history. Scientific
approaches to culture are clearly shaped by culture at
large, and have in the past depended on ideological and
practical motivations. A critical, that is, reflexive, cultural
neuroscience, must acknowledge and examine the links
between the cultural context in which neuroscience is
practiced and the object of neuroscientific inquiry, itself
(Choudhury et al., 2009). Cross-cultural psychology has
already shown us that cognitive phenomena are shaped by
social and cultural contexts of the person (Nisbett &
Miyamoto, 2005). Cultural neuroscience has corroborated
this in showing that the functional activation of neural struc-
tures supporting these cognitive processes is also modulated
by cultural context (Han & Northoff, 2008). Scientific
inquiry, including the making of neuroscientific knowledge,
is itself a cultural activity, shaped by a number of social,
economic and political factors, including the concepts
employed in experiments, as described above.
Neurocognitive phenomena, that is, the brain-based expla-
nation as well as the actual observed neural processes and
corresponding behaviour, are therefore shaped by systems of
neuroscientific reasoning and methods of observation at any
given moment. The epistemic culture of neuroscience in this
way influences both the hypotheses and interpretations
(Knor-Cettina, 1999; Young, 1995). From the research ques-
tions thought to be interesting, useful and worthy of fund-
ing, the assumptions about concepts and categories scientists
work with, to what technologies are considered more
objective and the potential applications of the findings,
neuroscientific phenomena are subject to a range of cultural
determinants beyond the laboratory.
Objectifying an identity, stage of life, culture or behaviour
in terms of the brain interacts with the experience (and
likely, the neural correlates) of that which is classified.
Philosopher of science, Ian Hacking has called this kind of
interaction between classification of people and their ways of
being the ‘looping effect of human kinds’ (Hacking, 1995).
Here, this idea of looping by no means aims to pit a
constructivist argument against a realist science. Rather, it
holds that while neuroscience reveals real phenomena about
behaviour and its instantiation in the brain, the cultural
context of neuroscience interacts with scientific knowledge
claims and influences the experience of the people to which
they pertain (Hacking, 2002). To give a concrete example of
bio-looping, in psychiatry, the interaction of social and
cultural processes that shape an individual’s understanding
of, and attention to, the body directly interacts with the
experience of (and possibly biological reflections of) parti-
cular symptoms in psychopathological phenomena
(Kirmayer et al., 2004; Kirmayer, 2005). In the case of
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adolescents, it is possible that culturally and historically
shaped concepts of normal adolescence used in science,
defined as a transition period of emotionality, risk taking
and so on, create a space of possibilities of how to be, with
which young people can constitute themselves, and which
may in turn be encoded in the brain. Characterizing these
behaviours in terms of the brain has the effect of reifying the
classification, stabilizing it both as a neuroscientific phe-
nomenon and a way to be an adolescent (Males, 2009).
Recognizing that neuroscience itself is a cultural activity
that may influence those under study by utilizing concepts
and ways of seeing that are culturally and historically
contingent reminds us that culture is not a ‘thing’ or
an essence located in the brain that can be ‘revealed’ by
neuroscience. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that
adolescents are also producers of youth cultures, whose
behaviours are not simply a consequence of being positioned
within culturally or biologically sanctioned life stages
(Wulff, 1995).
THE FUTURE: THE ENCULTURED BRAIN
In this article I have drawn together insights from multiple
disciplines to propose initial ideas about how cultural
neuroscience can approach the subject of adolescence.
Such an approach would recognize the many origins of
adolescent behaviour, from the historical roots of ‘adoles-
cence’ to the plastic nature of the brain, the dynamic social
environment and the cultural scripts of adolescence, all of
which shape subjective experiences of adolescence as well
as knowledge about adolescence.
I have suggested, using available data from psychology and
anthropology, that psychological turmoil is not an inevitable
aspect of adolescence driven by the brain, across cultures.
Rather, historical and ethnographic research demonstrates
that the duration and characterization of adolescence are
culturally contingent. Features such as risk-taking and
increased incidence of psychopathology are certainly thought
to be associated with adolescence in many cultural contexts.
While existing neuroimaging studies of brain development
in Euro-American contexts may demonstrate biological
reflections of developing cognitive skills pertaining to
these features, these differences do not demonstrate neuro-
biological causes of universal problem behaviours. The
differences found in these studies can instead open up
new questions and lead us to study more closely the
contextual and experiential correlates�including socializa-
tion processes, economic roles, family roles, social and
economic disparities�of these neural differences, by break-
ing down ‘culture’ into a number of possible indices, beyond
just ethnicity or geography. Nuanced conceptualizations
of culture will help to develop our understanding of the
knowledge, schemas and practices associated with neural
differences.
How can cultural neuroscience work within a framework
that does not give primacy to either the brain or culture?
One possible way is to blur the common distinction between
‘nature and culture’, or the brain and culture, and integrate
an understanding of neurocognitive mechanisms with the
social and cultural practices in which they are embedded.
If the brain is in constant interaction with its context, then
such dichotomies are untenable. Certainly, recent advances
in genetics demonstrate clear bidirectional interactions
between the brain and environment during development
(e.g. McGowan et al., 2009). Cultural neuroscience must
work towards developing an integrative explanation of how
‘meaning and mechanism’ intersect via the brain (Seligman
& Kirmayer, 2008), and how this subsequently shapes beha-
viour. This echoes the social ontology of neuroarchaeology
(Gosden, 2008; Renfrew et al., 2008), an interdisciplinary
approach that emphasizes a ‘brain-body-world’ interaction
in which none is causally determinant, but rather holds that
human experience unfolds through an equal input from
materials in the world and people. With respect to adoles-
cent cognitive development, the corresponding developmen-
tal view of ‘bio-cultural co-constructivism’ (Li, 2006)
usefully captures the interaction between the brain and cul-
ture in guiding cognitive development. Social neuroscience
demonstrates that humans are endowed with certain neural
dispositions to social stimuli and that the functional activity
of the associated brain areas may shift during development.
Cultural neuroscience might take this further to examine the
interaction, reinforcement or ‘looping’ between processes
that are neurally instantiated and those that are culturally
scripted, during development.
The idea of studying brain–world interactions is certainly
not new to neuroscience�there is, for example, a wealth
of data demonstrating the interaction between the visual
cortex and the environment, pointing to the role of the
environment in shaping brain structure and perception.
In this case, however, culture, arguably the most important
part of the human environment, is particularly complex,
especially in a globalized world. The way in which culture
is measured and understood in the lab, therefore, requires
careful scrutiny. Studying (the development of) the ‘encul-
tured brain’ (Lende, 2008) requires a genuinely interdisci-
plinary approach. Cultural neuroscience is already building
on findings from cross-cultural psychology. Bringing
together methods and theory from anthropology promises
to enrich experimental design and interpretations in cultural
neuroscience. Transcultural brain imaging provides useful
information about how individual brain function may be
modulated depending on an aspect of culture. However,
what are the real world thoughts, events, meanings and
experiences that correspond to these neurophysiological
processes? Pursuing the answers to this question requires a
cultural neuroscience that incorporates insights from multi-
ple disciplines to investigate the way in which behavioural
phenomena are connected across many levels�neural pro-
cesses, cognitive phenomena, culturally shaped behaviours
and expressions�and recognizes the many locations of
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culture that shape the cognitive processes we study, and the
way in which we study them.
Conflict of Interest
None declared.
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