Culture can affect not just language and customs, but also how people experience the world at surprisingly basic levels, new brain research has revealed.

Researchers, with the help of brain scans, have discovered shocking differences in perception between Westerners and Asians — what they see when they look at a city street, for example, or even how they perceive a simple line in a square, according to the findings. published in a leading scientific journal.

In Western countries, culture conditions people to think of themselves as highly independent entities. When looking at scenes, Westerners tend to focus more on the central objects than their surroundings.

East Asian cultures, by contrast, emphasize interdependence. When Orientals look at a scene, they tend to focus on both the context and the object.

Using a camera analogy to explain the research results, Dr. Denise Park, from the University of Texas Center for Brain Health at Dallas, said: “Americans are more zoomed in and East Asians are more panoramic. Orientals probably see more and more”. the westerner probably sees less, but with more detail”.

The research, led by Dr. Trey Hedden and Professor John Gabrieli of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows that these deeply ingrained habits of thought affect the brains of East Asians and Americans even when performing simple tasks that involve estimating the length of A line.

Using an experiment involving two tasks, Dr. Hedden asks subjects to look at a line simply to estimate its length, a task that played to the strengths of the Americans. In another, they estimated the length of the line in relation to the size of a square, an easier task for Asians.

The level of neural activity, by tracking blood flow, was then measured using brain scans. The experiment found that although there was no difference in performance, the tasks were very easy, the level of activity in the subjects’ brains was different. This suggests different levels of effort.

For the Americans, the areas linked to attention lit up the most when they worked on the task they used to find most difficult: estimating the size of the line relative to the square.

For the Asians, the attention areas also lit up more during the more difficult task: estimating the length of the line without comparing it to the square. The findings are a reflection of more than ten years of previous experimental research on East-West differences.

In one study, for example, researchers offered people a choice of five pens; four red and one green. Easterners were more likely to choose a red pen and Westerners were more likely to choose green.

Using experiments to measure how well eight-year-olds could solve puzzles, the American children were better at solving their own chosen puzzles. Interestingly, the Asian children performed better when told that the puzzles they were solving were chosen by their mothers.

And using evidence on recently viewed underwater scenes, Westerners tended to remember more about the biggest fish, while Easterners remembered more about the background of the scene.

The new research promises to add new precision to previous work. In his study, Professor Gabrieli said, the scan not only showed brain differences in the line and square task, but also allowed the researchers to begin to ask how profound those differences are.

Depending on which area of ​​the brain was activated during the tasks, it is believed that everyone sees the same thing, but may filter it differently.

Culture does not affect how you see the world, but how you choose to interpret and internalize it. But those clothes can be changed. Some initial psychological studies suggest that when an Easterner goes to the West or vice versa, habits of thought and perception also begin to change. Such research gives us clues about how our brains work and offers us new promise for developing programs to improve our memory, memory techniques, and improving and accelerating our learning abilities.