Culture Fundamentally Alters the Brain

Here below are exerts from an article describing a study that confirms or agrees with what I have been stating on these Forums for quite some time, which is:

"You are what you are nurtured to be."

And I didn't need any MRI scans to figure it out.

Friday, January 18, 2008

fMRI Scans Show Culture Fundamentally Alters the Brain

It's no secret that culture influences your food preferences and taste in music.

But now scientists say it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain. (Well "DUH", now who would have thunk that. )

New research shows that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual tasks.

(snip)

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.

(snip)

"But how deep does this go?" Gabrieli said. "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."

(snip)

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.

(snip)

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," he said. "In parts of the brain that are involved in early vision, we didn't see a difference. Rather we saw a difference in higher-processing brain areas. People from different cultures don't see the world differently, but they think differently about what they see."

Gabrieli 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."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,323928,00.html

And I also previously stated that everyone "sees the world the same, but each one thinks differently about what they see". And that is I reasoned, because one's eyes are akin to video cameras whose only function is to transmit "streaming video" to some area within their brain (memory) where it is "processed" in accordance with the "hard wired instructiion" that their brain was nurtured to perform.

And that is "the way" it has to be, ........ otherwise humans would be unable to experience "dreaming".

And to answer that above question, ....... "NO, one is not creating a big differences between people, ...... each culture and/or person creates that difference themselves via their nurturing."

cheers

.