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MRIs Show Culture Influences Brain Functions

Where you were raised can affect the parts of your brain used to perform different tasks.

Researchers at MIT studied 10 American and 10 East Asian patients using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to find out whether their respective cultures affected the areas of their brains used to solve simple visual task:

Subjects were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one. In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context). In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (a relative judgment of interdependent objects).

Participants also completed surveys on cultural values to assess how closely they identified with their respective cultures.

Researchers found that American subjects had an easier time making absolute judgments while East Asian subjects had greater ease making relative judgments. When making harder judgments -- relative ones for Americans and absolute ones for East Asians -- subjects showed great activity in the frontal and parietal brain regions involved in attentional control. This level of activity was found to directly correlate with how closely subjects identified with their native culture, based on questionnaire responses.

According to lead researcher John Gabrieli:

"Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training...It's fascinating that the way in which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships."

ABSTRACT: Cultural Influences on Neural Substrates of Attentional Control