Cultural Relativism and the Brain

Cultural Relativism plays an important role in understanding our brain. Within a span of ten cultures, there are a number of common denominators that make these cultures similar to one another. For example, burping after a meal is polite in one culture while saying "your meal was very tasty" is polite in another. The common denominator of these two cultures is politeness which is an extension of a survival technique in the human brain. Cultural Relativism tells us as humans what our common forms of behavior are which can be physiologically explained due to various portions of the brain along with hormones.

Amongst a variety of cultures, there are various methods to signify respective messages amongst one another. Output through gestures, language, and limb movement are how all these messages are carried out exemplifying a commonality in terms of a physiological explanation. One might consider a form of saying "Hello" in Chinese much differently than saying "Hello" in Arabic but both must share common neural structure in the brain. A cultural and social aspect of a simple thing like saying "Hello" is a form of survival in the modern world. Social behavior such as greeting, thanking, or loving are all examples of human survival and each is carried out differently in differing cultures. These behaviors are tied to the limbic system which is responsible for emotion. Because messages are carried out to one another in society for a purpose, what gives each message a purpose is an emotional response that is tied to survival. It is in the limbic system where we learn to cry, laugh, love, and fight for different reasons amongst different cultures.

Cultures contain different mental and physical skills for survival. It is because of our memory that we are able to learn and repeat these skills on a day to day basis. Short term memory recites immediate sensory input while long term memory recalls sensory input from weeks or even years of previously learned knowledge. The brain distinguishes between facts and skill memorization such as the difference between shooting a basketball and memorizing a phone number. For factual memorization, sensory information is transmitted from the sensory regions of the cerebral cortex to the hippocampus and amygdala, two components of the limbic system which also function in emotions. Learning skills according one hypothesis states that it is due to changes in the structure of dendrites. Neural input causes a postsynaptic cell in the brain to take up calcium, which in turn activates enzymes that alter the cytoskeleton and change the shape of the dendrite in such a way that future transmission across that synapse is enhanced. This might occur when a young tribesman in Africa learns to weave a basket or kill prey, a skill as daunting to the mind as figuring out an algebra problem for a child in the U.S.