Want to know a brain? Don't take it out of context

Brains are changing all the time (when I think of neuroplasticity—brain changing—I sometimes imagine the brain as a verb instead of a noun), and that changing is not in isolation.  Brain changes are facilitated by social interactions such as a dispute, as well as by interactions with the non-people environment and the culture. To highlight the fact that the brain is not a lone ranger, I included "Ensemble" ("all the parts of a thing considered together") in my CARVE Disputes Model™. To think of the brain by itself can lead to some conclusions that are not useful.

If you are interested in how the brain dances with its surroundings, you might want to follow the field of cultural neuroscience. I have for you an article that gives an overview of that discipline. From "The cultural neuroscience of person perception" (Progress in Brain Research) [pdf]:

It seems unassailable at this point that the adult human brain is a place where plasticity is the norm, not the exception. This is a point that has startled some neuroscientists and psychologists, who have generally privileged anatomical and functional fixity. As one neuroscientist said, writing in Science: ‘‘If the neural systems used for a given task can change with 15 min of practice ... how can we any longer separate organic structures from their experience in the organism’s history?’’ The field of cultural neuroscience should answer with a resounding: we cannot! [footnotes removed]

The authors go on to mention the lone-ranger versus dancing-with-environment approach to the brain.

The epistemological stripping of the brain from its environment, social context, culture, and ecology — a notion that pervades the fields of psychology and neuroscience — has provided major challenges for the emergence of a research field dedicated to the study of the interactions between brain and culture, between the neural and the ecological. We hope that by studying how the brain and culture interact, the burgeoning field of cultural neuroscience can move beyond these dichotomies and provide novel insights into psychological processes. This is especially true for the cultural neuroscience of social perception, given the dynamic and interactive nature of perceiving and interacting with others.

Certainly cultural neuroscience will give us good information about minds and brains in conflict with other minds and brains. I will be watching.

Bonus: Here's research by the authors of the above article about what happens in our brains when we interact with someone from our outgroup versus our ingroup. This second article "The Neural Origins of Superficial and Individuated Judgments About Ingroup and Outgroup Members" (Human Brain Mapping) [pdf] cites and is consistent with Jason Mitchell's research I posted about in Brains of a feather: What brains do when thinking about someone in the ingroup versus someone in the outgroup.