The culture in which you live helps to sculpt your brain. I have blogged about that sculpting before because of its importance to conflict resolution. From A key to cross-cultural conflict resolution: Around the world in almost 80 (0,000,000) brains:
Also see What's universal about mediaton? Confidentiality? Ownership of the dispute? Anything?.
When I observe cross-cultural conflict, I remind myself often (and still forget) that brains and the ways they perceive are not universal. To assume homogeneity can be foolish.
The field that researches differences in brains across cultures is cultural neuroscience. The author of an article in Tufts Magazine describes some of the research in this new field. I urge you to read the article because the research is extremely interesting, and highlights some of these brain differences.
The author also interviews researchers about how brains differ from culture to culture. From "The Brain in the World":
While it makes sense to think that people from different parts of the world will think about the world differently, we are only beginning to understand how deeply entrenched those differences are—right down to the way our brains themselves function.
Barely two years old, the field of cultural neuroscience is transforming the way scientists think about the brain. “Some of our most basic understandings of the mind and the brain might be really about Western industrialized minds and brains,” says Jon Freeman, a doctoral student in Tufts’ psychology department and the lead author of a chapter on cultural neuroscience for the annual journal Progress in Brain Research. After all, he notes, the vast majority of psychological research has been done in Western
