A new book argues that the link between the brain and mind is “mediated through culture.”

Its practical implications extend to rethinking neurodegenerative disease and how we treat it.

The neuroplasticity needed to offset and reverse cognitive decline may be found in nutrition and exercise.

Matthew Schelke has a gift for metaphors. His preferred one for describing how our brains take on the traits of our culture? “‘Clipping on’ to the social wire.”

Anyone who has hurtled down a zip line knows how thrilling the descent is. “You clip your carabiner onto a thin wire,” Schelke writes in Socially Wired: How Culture Shapes Our Brains, published this week, “then fly through the forest or down from a peak to an unfamiliar destination.”

Especially in old age, though, the clip doesn’t always form a snug fit—it can weaken, grow rusty, and stop working entirely. “When the clip is loosened, as happens in neurological illness,” Schelke notes, “it’s not always a matter of staying on or falling off but often about switching to a different trajectory.”

Challenging the Isolated Brain Model in Neurology

Based on patients seen at Columbia University’s Department of Neurology in New York City, where Schelke was chief resident in 2022-23, Socially Wired begins from the premise that neuroanatomy’s focus on “neural wiring” provides at best an “incomplete metaphor” of the brain in isolation.

Instead—and a challenge to isolationists wedded to the brain’s autonomy—“the link between the brain and mind is mediated through culture.” The dynamism that ensues revolutionizes understanding not just of the brain’s evolving relation to itself, but also of its many “shared affordances”—adopted habits and customs—that act on us psychologically and cerebrally as they pull us into something resembling convergence and adaptation.

“Brain health goes far beyond the skull”

Rendering some brain actions partly cultural, Schelke’s exciting shift in perspective raises a host of........

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