Why Asians and Westerners See Things Differently

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 uncovered 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 findings published in a leading science journal.

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

East Asian cultures, in contrast, stress interdependence. When Easterners look at a scene, they tend to focus on the context as well as the object.

Using a camera analogy to explain the results of the research, Dr Denise Park of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas said, “The Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic, The Easterners probably sees more and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail.”

The research, led by Dr Trey Hedden and Professor John Gabrieli of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demonstrates 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.

Using an experiment involving two tasks, Dr Hedden ask subjects to look at 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.

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

For the Americans, areas linked to attention lit up more, when they worked on the task they tended to find more difficult – estimating the line’s size relative to the square.

For the Asians, the attention areas lit up more during the harder task also – estimating the line’s length without comparing it to the square.

The findings are a reflection of more than ten years of previous experimental research into East-West differences.

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

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

And using tests on underwater scenes they recently viewed, Westerners tended to remember more about the biggest fish, while Easterners remembered more about the scene’s background.

The new research promises to add new precision to the earlier work. In their study, Professor Gabrieli said, the scanning not only showed brain differences in the line-and-square task, it also allowed researchers to begin to ask how deep those differences go.

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

Culture is not affecting how you see the world, but how you choose to interpret and internalize it. But such habits 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 on how our brain works and holds new promises for us to develop programs to improve our memory, memory techniques and enhance and accelerate our learning skills.