> Scientific Evidence Regarding the Stupidity of Beijing Olympics -- "One
> World One Dream" Could be Nightmares for Many -- East and West: Seeing
> the world through different lenses/IHT
>
> International Herald Tribune
>
> East and West: Seeing the world through different lenses
>
> By Carey Goldberg
> The Boston Globe
> Tuesday, March 4, 2008
>
> BOSTON: East is East and West is West, and the difference between them
> is starting to turn up even on brain scanners.
>
> New brain research is adding high-tech evidence to what lower-tech
> psychology experiments have found for years: Culture can affect not just
> language and custom, but how people experience the world at stunningly
> basic levels - what they see when they look at a city street, for
> example, or even how they perceive a simple line in a square.
>
> Western culture, they have found, conditions people to think of
> themselves as highly independent entities. And when looking at scenes,
> Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings.
>
> In contrast, East Asian cultures stress interdependence. When Easterners
> take in a scene, they tend to focus more on the context as well as the
> object: the whole block, say, rather than the BMW parked in the foreground.
>
> To use a camera analogy, "the Americans are more zoom and the East
> Asians are more panoramic," said Dr. Denise Park of the Center for Brain
> Health at the University of Texas in Dallas. "The Easterner probably
> sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail."
>
> In January, researchers led by Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli at the
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that such deeply ingrained
> habits of thought affect the brains of East Asians and Americans even as
> they perform simple tasks that involve estimating the length of a line.
>
> Hedden's experiment involved two tasks. In one, subjects eyeballed a
> line simply to estimate its length - a task that played to American
> strengths. In another, they estimated the line's length relative to the
> size of a square - an easier task for the Asians.
>
> Brain scanners measure levels of neural activity by tracking blood flow.
> The experiment found that though there was no difference in performance
> - the tasks were very easy - the level of activity in the subjects'
> brains differed, suggesting different levels of effort.
>
> Areas linked to attention lit up more in the Americans' brains when they
> worked on the task they tend to find harder, estimating the line's size
> relative to the square. In Asians, too, the attention areas lit up more
> during the harder task, estimating the line's length without comparing
> it to the square.
>
> Those findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, echo
> more than a decade of previous experimental research into East-West
> differences that are so fundamental that people tend not to be
> consciously aware of them. A University of Michigan professor, Richard
> Nisbett, even wrote a 2003 book about it, "The Geography of Thought."
>
> But brain scan data add new heft to such findings, said Hazel Rose
> Markus, a psychology professor at Stanford University who collaborated
> on the Gabrieli paper. Brain findings may help people become aware of
> deep cultural differences that are normally "so much part of the water
> that we don't see them," she said.
>
> Such differences have turned up in experiment after experiment. For
> example: In one study, researchers offered people a choice among five
> pens: four red and one green. Easterners are likelier to choose a red
> pen, while Westerners more often choose the green.
>
> In an experiment measuring how well 8-year-olds could solve puzzles,
> American children performed best when solving puzzles they had chosen
> themselves, while Asian children performed best when solving puzzles
> they were told their mothers had chosen for them, Markus said. American
> children brought up in an independence-minded culture felt best when
> they were exercising free choice, she said; while the Asian children
> assumed that their mothers had their best interests at heart.
>
> When they are tested on details of an underwater scene they recently
> viewed, Westerners tend to remember more about the biggest fish, while
> Easterners remember more about the scene's background.
>
> "Literally, our data suggest that people see different elements of
> pictures," Park said. "If you're looking at an elephant in the jungle,
> the Westerner will focus on the elephant and the Easterner is going to
> be more thinking about the jungle scene that has the elephant in it."
>
> Researchers use the terms East and West very roughly. West tends to mean
> Americans and people from independence-oriented European countries or
> Australia. East means East Asians - mainly Japanese, Koreans, and
> Chinese in research so far - as well as much of the rest of the world.
>
> Researchers point out that the differences detected by psychological
> experiments and brain scans are not glaring; they are subtle but
> detectable trends. Also, individuals within cultures vary greatly, and
> gender differences can arise as well.
>
> The brain research promises to add new precision to the earlier work. In
> January's study, Gabrieli said, the scanning not only showed brain
> differences on the line-and-square task, it allowed researchers to begin
> to ask how deep those differences go.
>
> Did Easterners actually see differently, at the level of perception, or
> just think differently? Based on what parts of the brain were activated
> during the tasks, Gabrieli believes everyone sees the same thing, but
> may filter it differently.
>
> "Culture is not changing how you see the world, but rather how you think
> and interpret."
>
> And that could be good news: "If it changed how you saw the world, it
> would make the barrier higher for people to agree on what they are
> seeing and talk with each other," he said. "If it's in the thinking
> stage, even though our work suggests it's harder work to see things from
> a different perspective, it's much more within your reach."
>
> The older people get, it seems, the more pronounced those cultural
> differences become, as if the older you are, "the more you're steeped in
> your own cultural mode of processing," Park said. But that does not mean
> such habits are immutable. Some initial psychological studies suggest
> that when an Easterner goes West or vice versa, habits of thought and
> perception quickly begin to change.
>
> So beyond perhaps helping to defuse tensions a bit between
> cross-cultural roommates or spouses, does East-West brain research have
> applications for the real world?
>
> It could have implications for, say, Western mental health care workers
> trying to help Easterners. On a broader scale, researchers say, it might
> be useful in business schools for students preparing to work in
> East-West trade, to help clarify culture gaps.
>
> "Understanding cultural differences in the mind is really important as
> the world globalizes," Park said. "There can be a lot of breakdowns in
> communication."
>
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