1. THINKING PATTERN EAST AND WEST
Do people from the West think differently than people from the East?
The difference in thinking pattern between people from the East and the West was
intuited for a long time. The British writer Rudyard Kipling thought that the Eastern and
Western mind could not be reconciled. According to Jung, the Asian mind is more
introverted, collectivist and mystical. The West believes "in doing" while the East in
"impassive being" (Jung, 1958, p. 560). The West has consequently developed a
materialist science that is focused on the outer world--which it endeavors to control and
exploit. In Asia, where most religions have arisen, consciousness has been directed
inwardly to understand the essential nature of life.
Recently a new branch of science, cultural neuroscience, took shape. In his book “The
Geography of Thought”, Richard Nisbett, a social psychologist from the University of
Michigan, conducted an experiment. The test subjects of the experiment were 25
American and 27 Chinese students. Each of them was shown 36 photos, and they were
allowed to see each photo for 3 seconds. Each photo depicted a single subject against a
realistic and complex background. For example, one photo showed a tiger (the single
subject) in a forest (the complex background).
Nisbett's experiment shows that it takes a shorter amount of time for the American test
subjects to focus their attention on the foreground image of each photo, and they also
spent a longer time looking at the foreground image than the Chinese test subjects did.
On the other hand, the Chinese test subjects spent more time looking at the background
images and less time on the foreground images. When the test subjects were given
memory tests afterwards, the Chinese test subjects could remember the background
images more clearly and the American test subjects could remember the foreground
images more clearly.
Another similar experiment was completed at the University of British Columbia by
Steven Heine. He and three colleagues recruited two groups of students—one Euro-
Canadian and the second Japanese—and he gave them a bogus “creativity” task. The test
was graded, and the students were told they had done well on some parts and poorly on
others. Heine was interested in what would come next. The students were given a second,
similar test, and the psychologist and his colleagues secretly watched how the subjects
tackled it. Turned out there was a glaring difference. The Westerners worked longer on
the stuff they were told they had aced the first time. The Easterners concentrated on the
areas they thought they had botched. Students from the West—where the cult of self-
esteem reigns supreme—wanted a tummy rub. Students from the East were more
concerned with fixing their blind spots, becoming well-rounded. The Westerners polished
up their strengths while the Easterners addressed their weaknesses. If you show an
“Easterner” (someone of East Asian extraction) and a “Westerner” (of European lineage)
a photograph, says Heine, and you track their eye movements, you notice something
curious. Both subjects fix on some focal point in the picture for about a second. After
that, things change. The Westerner continues to gaze at that spot, on that central tree in
the forest of possible places to look. The Eastern eye, however, is all over the place,

2. scanning hither-thither, trying to take in the whole forest. Even if the subjects are
instructed to focus on a dot in the middle of a screen, University of Alberta psychologist
Taka Masuda found, East Asians continually scan the void around that dot, pumping for
context, for linkages.
Trey Hedden, PhD, from Stanford and his colleagues used fMRI to look at these
findings. Participants see a square with a line drawn partway down the middle. They then
see a larger box and either have to draw a line the same absolute length as the first line or
a line the same relative length compared with the bigger size of the new box. Americans
did better on the absolute test and Japanese did better on the relative test. It turns out that
both Americans and Japanese use the same brain areas for both tests, but when they’re
doing the test that is more difficult for them, they also engage an area of the brain
associated with increased attention.
“This finding shows that the brain compensates for tasks that we’re not typically exposed
to through our culture by turning on an attention circuit to help us,” says Hedden. In
contrast, tasks that are commonplace become automatic and don’t require extra
concentration.
While cultural neuroscience has mostly shown how culture shapes biology, researchers
are also beginning to examine how biology shapes culture.
Northwestern University’s Joan Chiao, PhD, for example, has found that people who live
in collectivist cultures are more likely than those in individualistic cultures to have a form
of the serotonin transporter gene — the S-allele — that correlates with higher rates of
negative affect, anxiety and depression.
In contrast to what you might expect from the genes alone, she also found that people
from collectivist societies are less likely to be depressed. This suggests that collectivism,
which tends to produce lower levels of negative affect, may have co-evolved with the S-
allele, says Chiao, who published her findings in the Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Biological Science (Vol. 277, No. 1,681).
In the end, cultural neuroscience could usher in an era of greater understanding between
people from different cultures.
ADONIS SFERA, MD