Cultural neuroscience: ideas worth knowing.

BACKGROUND

Neuroscience is now promising significant advances in medical practice, such that it can improve the art and science of personalized medicine. A new discipline of cultural neuroscience is now forming, and few clinicians, researchers or educators are aware of it.

AIMS

To set out a brief synopsis of cultural neuroscience.

METHODS

A narrative, nonsystematic, review of experts on cultural psychiatry and cultural neuroscience.

RESULTS

Cultural neuroscience proposes that culture and biology have co-evolved with mutually beneficial affordances inhuman abilities that promote positive selection that help people to flourish. Neuroscience can support and improve cultural interventions when applied in a pan-diagnostic manner to culturally specific groups, ethnic minorities, and migrants.

CONCLUSIONS

Cultural neuroscience is an exciting new discipline with the potential for clinical benefit. Cultural psychiatry can advance in this direction, and at the same time offer a critique of the culture of neuroscience.