Columbia University Press Socially Wired: How Culture Shapes Our Brains

From birth, our brains are shaped by other people―in our families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, countries, and cultures. These social worlds make us who we are, but how this process works remains mysterious on a neural level. In Socially Wired, Matthew W. Schelke uses the stories of patients with neurological illness to show how social and cultural environments transform the brain. In the neurology clinic, the experiences of patients with the same illness can vary tremendously depending on their backgrounds, providing a window onto the complex interactions between brain and culture. Through cases ranging from an amateur chef who suddenly stopped cooking to an art lover who was removed from a gallery for touching the art, Schelke explores what neurological injury can reveal about social and cultural behavior. He demonstrates how specific practices―shared emotion, apprenticeship learning, imagination, language, art, and collective memory―shape neural networks, the experiences of patients, and ultimately our encultured minds. Going beyond neuroscience, Socially Wired integrates insights from anthropology to philosophy to ecological psychology. Highlighting patient stories, this book illuminates how the brain wires us to participate in culture and how, in turn, culture rewires the brain.