Although I am currently in the field, I hope to check-in frequently through the ever-slow Sumateran internet to see the exciting developments of the neuroanthropology blog!

It will be great to see some discussion about the co-developmental and co-evolutionary relationship between brains and culture!

I share some of Dr Downey’s hesitation in using the term neuroanthropology, though maybe for slightly different reasons. The term neuroanthropology for me is an aspiration. In practice, my research is probably closer to psychophysical ethnography. My long-term desire is to couple cognitive ethnographic fieldwork with context-driven neuroscientific experiments.

It is after having worked in several neuroscience laboratories, (gaining some experience and familiarity with areas including neuroimaging, neuroinformatics, neurobiology, neurochemistry, neurophysiology, psychophysics and psychology), as well as having had the opportunity to converse with brilliant scholars from a number of fields, that I have come to an understanding that brain research can be greatly complemented by the anthropological.

The merging of neuroscience and anthropology is not, as Dr Downey points out, altogether new. Paul Broca, a 19th century neurologist, famous for the discovery of Broca’s area of speech production in the brain, was also an anthropologist. Since the time of Broca, the disciplines of academia have become increasingly specialised and somewhat increasingly embedded in their respective approaches. However, certain respected contemporary researchers, such as fellow countryman to Paul Broca, Jean-Pierre Changeux, have advocated the unification of neuroscience with anthropology (e.g. Changeux, JP. L’homme Neuronal, 1983).