Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters (...) survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing MemoryLaurence J. Kirmayer*, MD (bio)In this far-reaching essay, Emily Walsh explores the significance of memory for coming to grips with the enduring legacy of colonialism in psychiatry. She argues that "for reasons of self-preservation, racialized individuals should reject collective memories underwritten by colonialism." Psychiatry can enable this process or collude with the structures of domination to silence and disable those who bear the brunt of the colonialist (...) history of violence and its current global incarnations. In this brief commentary, I want to underscore the importance of Walsh's argument, link it to contemporary work in cognitive and social science on the dynamics of memory, and point to some resources for implementing these insights in health services and clinical practice.Memory as Psychological Process, Social Practice and Cultural InstitutionMemory is not simply an individual psychological process of accessing images, stories, and knowledge of the past, but a reconstructive process of building a narrative (Kirmayer, 1996). This narrative is profoundly shaped by available templates, metaphors and models that are provided by the tacit, normative and official histories of society (Hirst, Yamashiro & Coman, 2018). But memory is also shaped by cultural affordances that guide attention and by narrative practices, which depend on other people (Ramstead, Veissière, & Kirmayer, 2017). In effect, remembering is not a matter of reaching down into one's memory archive or sedimented experience, but an embodied and enactive process of thinking with and through others (Laanes & Meretoja, 2021; Veissière, Constant, Ramstead, Friston, & Kirmayer, 2020). Memory then depends on community and on a shared understanding of history and of possible futures through which one can anchor and elaborate one's individual story.A direct consequence is that disconnecting a person from others, disembedding them from their social milieu, will lead to disruptions in memory and in the continuity of self. When the environment is toxic, this severance may sometimes be (partly) beneficial—but it always comes at a cost. Figuring out those costs, making them explicit, and ensuring that those whose history is being suppressed or overwritten by others have a chance to reclaim and write their own, is an ethical and pragmatic imperative.The denial of vital memories (recent or remote, personal or collective) causes fractures in the self that may disorganize the individual, install false consciousness, and cement the exclusionary and disvalued position of colonized, racialized, and [End Page 243] marginalized subjects. This process is not only—or even primarily—about memory. It is part of the structure of everyday life, inscribed in institutions and practices where colonial histories, racism, and economic exploitation are deeply entangled. Representations of the past are part of the way we construe the present and anticipate the future—but not every interpretive frame is a memory; there are structures in and of the moment that condition how we think about ourselves in health and illness and these too convey interests and biases disguised as "just the way things are."Fanon's Politics of Postcolonial Memory and IdentityWalsh offers a reading of aspects of Fanon's philosophy to reveal the workings of colonialism in and through memory. She is concerned with specific subsets of collective memories that are affectively charged and related to the identity of a group (Wertsch & Roediger, 2008). These memories are collective not simply they are shared by or distributed among the members of a group but because they define or constitute the collective itself.History is written largely by the powerful who create dominant or 'master' narratives that serve their own projects of legitimation and self-mystification (Trouillot, 2015; Lindqvist, 2021). But the creation of dominant narratives is not solely the province of those in power. There are many kinds of self-serving collective memory (Baumeister & Hastings, 2013)—from those related to the creation of nation states, which may ignore not only colonized peoples, but all ethnicities, religions or linguistic groups subordinated to the ideals of the dominant group (Anderson, 2006; Gunew, 2013; van Alphen & Carretero, 2015), to other forms of collective identity, even to those created by liberatory movements. These are maintained by institutionalization, ceremonial repetition and reenactment... (shrink)

Psychopathology can render people strange and difficult to understand. Communication can lead to empathic understanding, which in turn can guide compassionate action. But communication depends on a shared conceptual world. How can language convey meanings that are not shared, that mark a divide between human beings or whole communities? A consideration of the poetics of Paul Celan sheds light on the power of language to bridge disparate worlds and on the ethical stance needed when empathy fails. Celan’s poetics of alterity (...) has implications for our efforts to understand individuals’ illness experience as a grounding for the ethics of the clinical encounter. (shrink)

In a provocative essay, Sarah Kamens recommends the literature of postcolonial theory as a remedy for some of the limitations of current psychiatric theory and practice. Her provocation lies not advocating engagement with this literature, which certainly has much to offer psychiatry, but in the way she chooses to energize her argument by contrasting two very different phenomena: the experience of hearing voices and the use of ghost-writing in the psychiatric literature. Although Ka-mens acknowledges these phenomena come from “distant teleological (...) and experiential realms,” in both cases, she suggests, there are hidden authors who may be experienced or understood as hauntings. In this brief commentary, I will... (shrink)

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater (...) specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” (TTOM) – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism. (shrink)

The target article “Thinking Through Other Minds” (TTOM) offered an account of the distinctively human capacity to acquire cultural knowledge, norms, and practices. To this end, we leveraged recent ideas from theoretical neurobiology to understand the human mind in social and cultural contexts. Our aim was bothsynthetic– building an integrative model adequate to account for key features of cultural learning and adaptation; andprescriptive– showing how the tools developed to explain brain dynamics can be applied to the emergence of social and (...) cultural ecologies of mind. In this reply to commentators, we address key issues, including: (1) refining the concept of culture to show how TTOM and the free-energy principle (FEP) can capture essential elements of human adaptation and functioning; (2) addressing cognition as an embodied, enactive, affective process involving cultural affordances; (3) clarifying the significance of the FEP formalism related to entropy minimization, Bayesian inference, Markov blankets, and enactivist views; (4) developing empirical tests and applications of the TTOM model; (5) incorporating cultural diversity and context at the level of intra-cultural variation, individual differences, and the transition to digital niches; and (6) considering some implications for psychiatry. The commentators’ critiques and suggestions point to useful refinements and applications of the model. In ongoing collaborations, we are exploring how to augment the theory with affective valence, take into account individual differences and historicity, and apply the model to specific domains including epistemic bias. (shrink)

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made it clear that understanding the historical, social, cultural, and political landscape that shapes the relationships between Indigenous peoples and social institutions, including the health care system, is crucial to achieving social justice. How to translate this recognition into more equitable health policy and practice remains a challenge. In particular, there is limited understanding of ways to respond to situations in which conventional practices mandated by the state and regulated by its legal apparatus (...) come into direct conflict with the values and autonomy of Indigenous individuals, communities, and nations. In this paper, we consider two cases of conflict between Indigenous and biomedical perspectives to clarify some of the competing values. We argue for the importance of person‐ and people‐centered approaches to health care. These value conflicts must be understood at multiple levels to clarify their personal, social, cultural, and political dimensions. Taking into account the divergence between epistemic cultures and communities allows us to understand the multiple narratives deployed in decision‐making processes in clinical, community, and juridical contexts. Recognizing the knowledge claims of Indigenous peoples in health care can help clinicians avoid reinforcing the divides created by the structural and institutional legacy of colonialism. This analysis also provides ways to adjudicate conflicts in health care decision‐making by disentangling cultural, political, medical, and pragmatic issues to allow for respectful dialogue. Insofar as the engagement with cultural pluralism in health care rights is conducted with reciprocal recognition, the medical community and Indigenous peoples can address together the difficult question of how to integrate different epistemic cultures in the health care system. (shrink)

La présente contribution propose une étude de la périphérie gauche au sein d’un corpus oral multigenres, représentant douze activités de communication orale, annoté syntaxiquement et prosodiquement. La segmentation discursive du corpus en unités de base du discours (BDU) résulte d’une coïncidence entre unités syntaxiques et prosodiques, correspondant à des encodages linguistiques distincts mais complémentaires. Partant du postulat selon lequel ces unités discursives remplissent une fonction cognitive dans la planification et l’interprétation du discours, nous nous intéressons à l’étude de leur périphérie (...) gauche. Ce lieu, qui constitue le point d’ancrage du message, joue en effet un rôle important dans la négociation de la structure discursive. Dans l’objectif d’étudier les stratégies discursives à l’œuvre dans les différents genres du corpus, nous faisons l’inventaire des types formels observés et étudions finalement les fonctions discursives que ces éléments périphériques peuvent revêtir. (shrink)

Speculations of this last type have existed from a much earlier period in the Eastern civilizations, particularly in those areas affected by Hindu philosophy. For example, in the Sánkhya or Yoga-Sútras by Patánjali, we find a very radical distinction between the external world and the individual soul or self. But for Sánkhya, the "external world" includes everything that could possibly be an object of consciousness--physical objects and their relationships, sensations and imaginations, dreams, memories, expectations, etc. In other words, for Sánkhya, (...) our thoughts or desires, far from being the "cause" of the external world as in some forms of Western idealism, are simply other aspects of the external world itself, that is, merely particular items in the totality of our consciousness. On the other hand, the individual soul or self is only the spectator of this consciousness and not ordinarily conscious of itself. If the self were to become conscious of "itself" in the same way that it was conscious of all other objects, all that it would really be aware of would be another object of consciousness---the mere idea of itself, while it would remain the unknown knower. Nevertheless, realizing that a completely "unconscious self" would be simply a postulate of thought and therefore part of the external world, the Sánkhya-Sútras emphasize that the self can become aware of itself by another and more intuitive means. (shrink)

McNamara, Laurence J Person-centred care is the mantra of contemporary health and aged care. Delivering such care effectively is an enormous challenge. Much effort goes into the basics of care delivery. In an era of limited resources and financial constraints the temptation arises for aged care in particular to ignore some of the non-measurable dimensions of care. This paper puts forward a range of issues that merit greater attention as we reflect on the realities of human ageing in Australia (...) today. If taken seriously, I suggest, they will contribute to the delivery and quality of person-centred care. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest are common and exist in academia, government, and many industries, including pharmaceutical development. Medical journal editors and others have recently criticized “the pharmaceutical industry,” citing concerns over investigator access to data, approaches to analysis of clinical trial data, and publication practices. Merck & Co., Inc. is a global, research-driven pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, manufactures, and markets a broad range of human and animal health products, directly and through its joint ventures. Although part of its mission is (...) to provide a superior rate of return to its investors, Merck does not believe this creates an irreconcilable conflict of interest, particularly in activities concerning clinical drug development. We employ rigorous scientific methods to design, conduct, analyze, and report results of clinical trials in the development of innovative drugs and vaccines, with a focus on meeting unmet medical needs and with an ethic that puts the interests of the patient first. This article describes Merck’s approaches to potential conflicts of interest in drug development, particularly with regard to clinical trials. We believe that proprietary interests of the Company can be respected while observing objectivity and transparency in communicating clinical research results. The standards for the review of manuscripts reporting such trials for peer-reviewed publication should be the same, whether they are from Merck or elsewhere. (shrink)

The papers in this book address the broad issues of authority, leadership and organizational culture, whilst concentrating on other issues in-depth, such as inter-group conflict, and gender and race relations in the workplace.

The task of being oneself lies at the heart of human existence and entails the possibility of not being oneself. In the case of schizophrenia, this possibility may come to the fore in a disturbing way. Patients often report that they feel alienated from themselves. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that schizophrenia sometimes has been described with the heideggerian notion of inauthenticity. The aim of this paper is to explore if this description is adequate. We discuss two phenomenological accounts of (...) schizophrenia: Binswanger’s account of schizophrenia as a form of inauthenticity and Blankenburg’s account of schizophrenia as a loss of common sense, which seems construable as a loss of inauthenticity. We argue that the accounts are highlighting aspects of the same underlying phenomenon, viz. schizophrenic autism. Moreover, we argue that Binswanger’s description of schizophrenia as a form of inauthenticity is inadequate and we discuss experiences of self-alienation in schizophrenia. (shrink)

What does a Utilitarian mean by happiness when he says that it is the good? Specifically, pleasure. But how many different kinds of experiences are included under this term? It appears that as the word was used by Bentham, and indeed by almost all other hedonists, it had so wide an extension that it included all experiences not properly termed "unhappiness." Partly, however, because of the identification of happiness with pleasure and the absence of pain, and partly because of a (...) failure to emphasize by frequent explanation the difference between the meanings of terms as used by hedonists and the same terms in common usage, there has existed at all times a disposition to assume that hedonists intended a narrower meaning than they actually did. Even in hedonistic writings there has been a tendency to make a distinction between the usages accorded "pleasure" and "happiness," the former as used more frequently to refer to pleasures of the moment, and the latter to a long continued state of felicific feeling; or a distinction is made between "pleasure" as used when referring to happiness which has an immediately obvious physiological origin and "happiness" to felicific feeling of all types. Nevertheless, the terms are not used consistently in this way, and on the whole it would be better to think of "pleasure" and "happiness" as interchangeable in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and many others. (shrink)

Das allgemeine Prinzip der „Relativität der Begriffe” — vom Verfasser a. a. O. dargelegt — behauptet, dass ein und dieselbe Situation der Wirklichkeit auf verschiedene Weisen beschrieben werden kann, die sprachlich und begrifflich zwar verschieden sein mögen, doch grundsätzlich die gleichen bleiben. Die verbalen oder begrifflichen Unterschiede führen uns zu der falschen Annahme, dass den Elementen, welchen im Denken oder im sprachlichen Ausdruck weniger Bedeutung zugemessen wird, auch weniger Bedeuten in Wirklichkeit zukommen, oder dass sie weniger real sind.Die bedeutendste Anwendung (...) dieser Lehre auf die Biologie betrifft die Interpretation des „Individuellen”. Soll man das Individuum als eine Einheit verstehen, oder kommt der Begriff der Einheit einerseits den Teilen zu, wie z. B. Zellen, Molekülen und Atomen, oder andererseits höheren und synthetischen Einheiten wie z.B. Klassen, Arten, dem „élan vital”, u.s.w. ? Alle diese drei Ansichten haben etwas für sich, doch stehen auch jeder entscheidende Gegengründe gegenüber, so dass die einzig-mögliche Schlussfolgerung die Annahme der Begriffsrelativität ist. Jeder der drei Standpunkte ist nur in so weit wahr, als er etwas Positives beibringt, falsch jedoch solange er nur die beiden andern leugnet.Le principe de la relativité des concepts, ayant une application générale dans toutes: parties de la philosophie et de la science, est développé ailleurs par l'auteur. Ce principe propose qu'une situation quelconque peut être discutée dans plusieurs manières, se différant entre elles dans le choix des mots ou des concepts, tout en étant au fond indentiques. Les differences linguistiques ou conceptuelles nous mènent à l'assomption fausse que les éléments moins importants dans la pensée ou dans le langage sont moins importants dans la nature, ou même que ces éléments sont moins réels.En biologie, ce principe a une importance notable en ce qui concerne l'interprétation de l'individu. Doit-on entendre par l'individu les cellules, les molécules, les atomes, et les autres éléments qui le composent; ou bien l'individu même; ou encore doit-on oublier et l'individu et les éléments qui le composent, et baser sa philosophie sur les entités synthétiques telles que les espèces, les genres, et l'élan vital ? Chacune de ces trois opinions a des considérations en sa faveur; mais chacune d'elles se bute à des objections plus considérables encore qui l'empêchent d'être acceptée. La seule conclusion qui semble être possible est l'adoption du principe de la relativité des concepts, et l'assomption que chaque manière d'envisager l'individu est valide tant qu'elle a quelque chose de positif à dire; chaque manière est fausse quand elle nie Ja validité des autres points de vue. (shrink)

Every man experiences dreams and imaginations, the nature of which is admittedly subjective. It is perfectly possible for me to propose that this same lack of objectivity may characterize all experience. I may conceive that I am a god making the world for my own amusement, being real beyond the reality of this my dream. But this imagined god-head is merely the dream of an idle moment, for I cannot seriously suppose that were I to dream I would dream in (...) exactly this way. Had I the making of this world, it would be a braver, better world than it is. Braver? Better? On second thought, I am not so sure. I would want it to be a better world, but could I make it a better world? Could I spin from my imagination the grandeur and beauty of the universe of stars, the wealth and complexity of the invisibly minute, the beauties of nature, the truths of mathematics, the harmonies of music, the world of meaning everywhere? Could I? I doubt it. For I fail to understand even trivial things: I find myself failing even in unimportant projects. And if I fail in these, the least parts of my universe, could I so ably create the whole? There are, thus, two ways in which this doctrine fails to do more than amuse me for the moment. Did I create this dream, I would aim higher and achieve less. (shrink)