Your Brain on Culture

Student:
Professor:
Course title:
Institution
Date:
Your Brain on Culture
Summary – Cultural Neuroscience
Different people from different cultures across the globe have brains that work differently when considering their traits against those of other people if findings from research that compared Chinese and American brains are anything to go by. Individuals in collectivist cultures generally think that they have a very strong connection with people close to them unlike those in cultures that promote individuality (Azar, 1).
The cultural setting from where an individual grows up may have a very significant impact on things such as the clothing he/she wears, the food he/she eats and even on the functioning of the brain. The main cultures such as the Collectivist of most Asian nations and the Individualist of the Western societies have an impact on an individual’s brain and behavior (Joan 287). There is a difference between people from the West and those from South East Asia with regard to attention, categorization and reasoning. For instance, a study where volunteers watched fish as they swam indicated that the Japanese volunteers were more likely to recall the contextual details of the image compared to volunteers from the USA (Joan 296). A person’s environment as well as beliefs can significantly shape his or her mental function as the field of cultural neuroscience has revealed. People from East Asian countries have the ability to process information in a global manner unlike those from the West who mostly process information on individual objects (Ames and Susan 72). For instance, a study has indicated that Chinese people compared to the Americans, use different sections of the brain in processing numbers when doing math tasks.
A different research found similar results, that there is higher chance of people from collectivist cultures to have a gene that buffers against psychological conditions. For instance, depression is prevalent when compared to people in western individualistic cultures (Azar 2). The field of cultural neuroscience provides us with an opportunity to understand the extent to which beliefs as well as the environment can change the brain. Still on these two Western individualistic and South East collectivist cultures, further research has found that the latter values submissiveness more compared to the former which values dominance. The researchers concluded that the things that are rewarding to the brain reflect the values of the dominant culture. This cultural variation is due to the differences on how the brain responds to image input (Azar 2). Different cultures may have a different view of the world and this impact on cross-cultural communication. A further study on this subject of neuroscience has revealed that native Chinese nationals, unlike people in the USA are very much sensitive to the object’s setting and therefore concentrate mo...