Reply to comment

I think that whether or not culture influnces our brains, there is certainly evidence that certain components of our environment during development, and our actions/abilities during adulthood have affects on the physical formation of the brain. Research has indicated that critical periods exist and are correlated with neuronal development (aka, neurons atrophy or gentrophy in relation to languages a child is exposed to, visual stimuli present in the environment, etc). Studies have also looked at the brain responding to behavior changes in adulthood--people who learned to juggle in an experimental setting developed newly fortified brain regions, all of which atrophied or became smaller after the subjects stopped their juggling.

All of this is to say that each individual experiences a highly unique environment, whcih may very strongly affect the brain. While Sarah Tabi mentioned that "a group of people in the same room with the same set of stimuli display various types of responses, or don't respond at all" as support for the fact that the brain does not follow a simple stimuli-response model, I feel that there may be a lot of stimulus-response reaction to the way the brain works to create and respond to our lives. While the box model may offer some more individuality and more room for a non-brain presence in our thoughts and behaviors, we also cannot ignore the fact that each individual responds to stimuli differently in part due to differences in environmental, developmental conditions.