© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Editorial
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
One consequence of the intense interest in neuroscience shown by contemporary society is to challenge the strictly neurocentric formulation on how the brain works in health and disease. Once, it was an organ that could be understood by appreciating neuronal activities, scaled up through systems that sense and respond to the internal and external environments. The gathering of higher order behaviours such as emotion and associative memory within this reductionist framework is no longer palatable to those who view social interactions and cultural factors as crucial in shaping the development of the nervous system and in orchestrating its effects on behaviour of the individual and of groups. Thus, ‘neurodeterminism’ bumps up against the analyses of social science and it challenges the assumed ownership of the brain by those trained in neuroscience. Social factors influence the organization of ‘brain and behaviour’, and ‘a vocabulary of genes, neurones and reinforcers’ is no
Cambridge