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Culture Fundamentally Alters the Brain
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 18 January 2008 12:44 pm ET
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It's no secret culture influences your food
preferences and taste in music. But now scientists say
it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain.
New research shows that people from different cultures
use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual
tasks.
Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT's
McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans
and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in
a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
scanner. They found that both groups could
successfully complete the tasks, but American brains
had to work harder at relative judgments, while East
Asian brains found absolute judgments more
challenging.
Previous psychology research has shown that American
culture focuses on the individual and values
independence, while East Asian culture is more
community-focused and emphasizes seeing people and
objects in context. This study provides the first
neurological evidence that these cultural differences
extend to brain activity patterns.
"It's kind of obvious if you look at ads and movies,"
Gabrieli told LiveScience. "You can tell that East
Asian cultures emphasize interdependence and the U.S.
ads all say things like, 'Be yourself, you're number
one, pursue your goals.' But how deep does this go?
Does it really influence the way you perceive the
world in the most basic way? It's very striking that
what seems to be a social perspective within the
culture drives all the way to perceptual judgment."
The results of the study were published in the January
issue of the journal Psychological Science.
Hard work
The scientists asked 10 Americans and 10 East Asians
who had recently arrived in the U.S. to look at
pictures of lines within squares.
In some trials, subjects decided whether the lines
were the same length, regardless of the surrounding
squares, requiring them to judge individual objects
independent of context. In others, participants judged
whether different sets of lines and squares were in
the same proportion, regardless of their absolute
sizes, a task that requires comparing objects relative
to each other.
The fMRI revealed that Americans' brains worked harder
while making relative judgments, because brain regions
that reflect mentally demanding tasks lit up.
Conversely, East Asians activated the brain's system
for difficult jobs while making absolute judgments.
Both groups showed less activation in those brain
areas while doing tasks that researchers believe are
in their cultural comfort zones.
"For the kind of thinking that was thought to be
culturally unpreferred, this system gets turned on,"
Gabrieli said. "The harder you have to think about
something, the more it will be activated."
Individual flexibility
The researchers were surprised to see so strong an
effect, Gabrieli said, and interested in the reasons
for individual variations within a culture.
So they surveyed subjects to find out how strongly
they identified with their culture by asking questions
about social attitudes, such as whether a person is
responsible for the failure of a family member.
In both groups, participants whose views were most
aligned with their culture's values showed stronger
brain effects.
Gabrieli said he is interested in testing whether
brain patterns change if a person immigrates.
"There's a hint that six months in a culture already
changes you," he said, referring to psychological,
rather than neurological, research. "It suggests that
there's a lot of flexibility."
The big divide
Scientists have long wondered about the biological
root of cultural differences.
"One question was, when people see the line and box,
do they look different all the way, starting at your
retina?" Gabrieli said. "Or do you see the same thing
to start with but then your mind focuses on one
dimension or another. These data indicate that it's at
that later stage. In parts of the brain that are
involved in early vision, we didnt see a difference.
Rather we saw a difference in higher-processing brain
areas. People from different cultures dont see the
world differently, but they think differently about
what they see."
Gabireli said he does worry about unintended
consequences of his research.
"The downside of these cultural studies is that one
ends up stereotyping a culture," he said. "Are you
creating big differences between people? I like to
think the more you understand different cultures, the
better you understand their perspectives."
---------------
Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
Allah yang disembah orang Islam tipikal dan yang digambarkan oleh al-Mushaf itu
dungu, buas, kejam, keji, ganas, zalim lagi biadab hanyalah Allah fiktif.
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