Culture and the brain: Opportunities and obstacles

A major evolutionary advance of humans is a mind that is capable of constructing, perpetuating, adapting to, and exploiting culture. The birth of cultural neuroscience reflects the growing realization that a full account of the human mind requires understanding of the multiple and reciprocal influences between the biological and the sociocultural. In the present paper, we illustrate how attention to the brain, as exemplified in functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging (fMRI) studies of sociocultural processes, contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the human mind. We end by discussing a set of challenges facing researchers using fMRI and the possible means for dealing with these challenges.