Brain and culture

[Skybird]

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/psychology-0111.html

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/p...-enlarged.html

The researchers went on to show that the effect was greater in those individuals who identified more closely with their culture. They used questionnaires of preferences and values in social relations, such as whether an individual is responsible for the failure of a family member, to gauge cultural identification. Within both groups, stronger identification with their respective cultures was associated with a stronger culture-specific pattern of brain-activation.

How do these differences come about? "Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training," Gabrieli says. "It's fascinating that the way in which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships."

I am not surprised, and waited for such findings coming from brain research.

Note that the more activity is shown in the brain scans, it means the more "problems" the individual had with solving the task.

I hope it is clear by itself that this does not mean that americans are more intelligent than Asians, or Asians more intelligent than Americans. Both think different, and are reversed to the other in strengths and weaknesses regarding relative and absolute judgements, americans and american culture tending to think more in absolutes, Asians and asian culture more in relative relations. That itself is not surprising - only the fact, maybe, that you can even show this difference in brain activity scans.

Maybe it is worth to take such differences into account next time there is some mutual political yelling between nations from both spheres.