Culture and Cognition

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That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically. That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.

It really is fascinating. This excerpt may be relevent to the high incidence of autism in industrialized countries:



Based on that paragraph I am tempted to call autism "extreme Western brain" rather than the "extreme male brain" that some researchers have called it. I am just being silly (I am not about to launch into a theory) but it does bring up some interesting things for discussion.

Is neurodiversity as much geographically enviromental as it is genetic? Two people in the exact same enviroment can have wildly different neurologies, as everyone with siblings knows, but even so there may be differences cross culturally that we aren't even aware of. I did not realize how much my brain is affected by a lifetime spent living amongst right angles and flat planes until I read this article.

Other currently active threads are wrestling with the question of why sub-Saharan Africans don't have much autism reported. Here is a list of reasons being discussed:

-it isn't being reported even though it is there because it isn't on the radar there and/or the people who have it are likely to have other things as well to which it will be attributed and/or it is the least of anyone's problems(infectious disease and war being a bigger problem)

-it is less prevalent because everybody there gets enough vitamin D from the sun

-it is not prevalent there because none of the indigenous people have Neanderthal DNA

To this list I guess I could add that maybe it isn't prevalent there because people spend a lot of time in an uncornered enviroment and this affects their brain wiring since their brain doesn't need to change to adapt to ubiquitous right angles. I am not going to defend that theory because I'm not sure about it at all. It's just something that popped into my head upon reading the article. But there is food for thought in that article. Thanks for linking.

I've heard of that research before, but that article you shared was very good and got me thinking about the history and implications of that area of study.

However, I am reluctant to draw parallels between WEIRD and autism. I think autistic-like behaviour can be culturally conditioned but there IS a neurological difference there that is cross-cultural. Also, the characteristics of WEIRD don't even begin to cover all the characteristics of autism. Some autistic people may even behave in a collectively-focused way sometimes because they come from a more collective culture (like I do - compared to middle-class North Americans, anyway). I would have the same response to the money dilemma as the people in the rainforest tribe for instance, probably because of my socioeconomic background.