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Updated: Feb 3, 2026

Perspectives on Neuroscience
Published on: July 31, 2007
Cultural neuroscience: ideas worth knowing
1a Barts & The London School of Medicine and Dentistry , Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary University of London , London , UK.
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.
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