In this chapter, we discuss the hypothesis people help to regulate each other’s bodies (for better or for worse), and this is a main mechanism through which culture wires a human brain. Cultural transmission prepares the developing brain and body to meet recurrent demands within a particular cultural context, thereby supporting the development of an internal model that is sufficiently tuned to specific environments. In this way, a human brain becomes wired to run a model of the world that will control the body in an efficient, predictive manner. Our approach provides an empirically inspired account of how a human brain becomes a cultural artifact.

In this chapter, we review recent research from a variety of disciplines to outline the role that collective rituals and religious beliefs play in fostering and maintaining cooperation. We consider ritual and religion as interactive but separate social technologies. First, with rituals we discuss their importance to social learning processes, examine their ability to bond groups through synchrony and shared emotion, and address their role as costly, persuasive signals of commitment. Second, we explore "religion" in the form of beliefs about supernatural agents and look at how such beliefs can contribute to – or hinder – cooperation. We evaluate long-standing claims that religion is a harmful social virus and contrasting recent theories that argue belief in "Big Gods" and "supernatural punishment" are crucial to enabling the cooperation necessary for large-scale societies.

Agency refers to the human capacity to choose, initiate, and control actions to influence events in the world. The experience of agency is fundamental to our sense of self but may be altered in certain neurological conditions and forms of psychopathology. In this chapter, we review recent work in cognitive neuroscience that shows how agency depends on sensorimotor loops between the body and the environment as well as higher-order processes of attribution and interpretation. The sensorimotor loops that contribute to the sense of agency and ownership of the body and its actions can be manipulated in laboratory experiments to give rise to startling illusions like being out of one’s body, having a rubber hand, or controlling random events. Religious experiences like spirit possession and dissociative symptoms like conversion disorder may depend on attributing action to agencies other than the self. Even everyday actions depend on interpretive processes that draw from cultural affordances and ontologies as well as social and political structures. Embodied experience grounds to the sense of agency, but culturally mediated attributions can alter bodily experience. Far from being simply a consequence of individual cognition or ability, therefore, agency is rooted in ongoing engagement with the social–cultural world.

The neuroimaging era has brought an increasingly refined understanding of adolescent brain maturation, yielding insight into the protracted development of social cognition, learning, and executive function beyond childhood. These data have been applied in multiple domains of everyday life, including education. Adolescent brains have emerged as a theater of moral panic over the implications of social media on the one hand and income inequality on the other for mental health, social cohesion, and individual and community life chances. In this setting, neuroscience has been invoked to account for adolescent vulnerability and to develop interventions to mitigate behavioral problems and mental illness. These include the introduction into school curricula of mindfulness-based stress reduction, resilience training, “brain-based” pedagogy, and a neuroanatomical lexicon of introspection in which kids are encouraged to identify experiential states with brain regions. “Neuroeducation” represents a constellation of fluid alliances between the education profession, Silicon Valley tech solutionists, and the human potential movement. Cognitive neuroscience plays a notional role, chiefly via proponents’ invocation of developmental plasticity as physiological justification for interventions that are often based on preliminary research and remain wanting in clinical support. In this essay we explore neuroeducation through the lens of critical neuroscience.

This chapter surveys guidelines for ethical use of human and nonhuman animals in scientific research.

In this chapter, the reader is given a survey of two basic approaches for statistical analysis, the quantitative approach focused on measures of effect size and confidence intervals, and the qualitative approach based on significance values and null hypothesis significance testing.

In this more advanced chapter, the student is introduced to concerns about misuse of statistical tests and various sources of bias.

This chapter introduces the basic principles of experimental design, covering fundamental control groups,such as approaches of control for subject loss or for order of treatments.

Communication takes many forms. This chapter offers guidance for presenting work in a poster or talk, as well as for writing a research article for publication.

This chapter provides a basic introduction to descriptive statistics in the context of neuroscience experiments.

This chapter introduces several common methods used in neuroscience experiments.