Prometheus 6

The Hidden Power of Culture
The society in which we live influences the way our brain perceives the world
By Corey Binns

In one study, psychologists showed people 200 complex scenes, such as an elephant in a jungle or an airplane flying over a city, while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The team, led by Denise C. Park of the University of Illinois, studied young and elderly subjects from the U.S. and Singapore. For Westerners of all ages, the images triggered activity in a part of the brain asso­ciated with object recognition called the lateral occipital region, whereas the same object-associated areas were not activated in the older Asians’ brains.

“An Asian would see a jungle that happened to have an elephant in it,” Park explains. “Meanwhile a Westerner would see the elephant and might notice the jungle.” Because the Asian subjects’ responses differed between the two generations, while the older Americans matched the youths in their interpretation of the landscapes, the researchers concluded that the culture people grow up in plays a role in how they interpret what they see.