[...]Neuroplasticity on the radio « Neuroanthropology[...]…

By the way, I have titled chapter six of my book, “Spiritual Intelligence and The Neuroplstic Brain” (2010) as “The Culturally Modified Brain and The Spirituality of Different Strokes.”

Charles Mark

When I was reading Dr. Doidge’s “The Brain That Changes Itself,” I felt like I was grasping a profound truth that he captures in those simple few words. When it comes to brain and culture, Dr. Doidge writes, “It implies two-way traffic; the brain and genetics produce culture, but culture also shapes the brain.”

Can we really think of neuroplasticity as different from the culture that initiates changes occuring in our brains? When a generation of people passes language, religious beliefs, educational learning system and the whole lot to its posterity, is this not, in one sense, like transferring the brain and culture as one package? Of course, the generation of people that inherits the old package has the option and ability to making changes in the general culture before it is passed on to the next. This has been an on going thing in human history and civilization through milleniums and centuries?

I think the concept of neuroplasticity is opening the whole “pandora box” of asking age-old questions in a new framework of thinking. Who we are, why we believe what we believe, and why we do what we do, like killing fellow human beings, accumulation of millions of dollars without thinking of other fellow human beings that have to make it through life?

Neuroplasticity is a fascinating subject. My question is a simple one. How can we talk about the brain apart from culture, except as a biological part of the human body. But what good is this brain if this physical entity has to function without a home, family, language, school, community, religion, college, company, corporation, nation, the global community of nations, and the eco system of this Planet Earth that keeps us alive to breathe, eat, sleep and study to make us think and ask such profound questions?

Charles Mark

And those of a younger generation of laymen!

I read the book several months after it came out, as a high school senior. Such implications prompted a dense and impassioned college application essay–though naive and perhaps overly-enthusiastic (looking back, but a year later)–that ultimately served as the key to an education opportunity at my current university.

I both thank you for a more practical presentation of the picture, and give a healthy “Hurrah!” for accessible pop-sci works!

I saw Doidge speak in Melbourne, and your first point was certainly addressed. Hopefully the transcript/audio will be placed online at some point. He essentially blamed the past opposition to plasticity on an obsession with a mechanistic metaphor of the brain. That never gained much traction with me, since I’m of the generation that includes software, biologically-inspired robots and the like under that banner, so never really understood why a machine couldn’t be plastic.

The head of the Howard Florey Institute, Frederick Mendelsohn, and a grad student there, Emma Burrows, also spoke on plasticity. I found their accounts more interesting in the end, if only because they were a little more down-to-earth