Culture Affects The Way We Think

A key understanding I hope to impart through my Sileotherapy spiritual self help course is the extent to which culture affects the way we think. People who have been raised in countries where the state operates through suppression and propaganda and shuns openness – such as the former Soviet bloc, for example – can develop a mechanism of emotional suppression that might carry through generations, even for years after the state has itself changed its modus operandi. In countries blighted with poverty and fear, that same fear and insecurity about the world can continue to pass through family dynamics, even after the family has immigrated away from the region.

All of this is due to the fact that we formulate our ideas about ourselves and the world around us – who we are and how we fit in – from our relationships with our parents in our earliest years. If parents are suffering from the pain of traumas past, that can easily be passed onto the toddlers they nurse and, before they know it, the child will have developed whole ways of thinking and being in the world that has incorporated that pain.

For the first time now, some of this is actually going beyond hypothesis and being proven scientifically. One example of culturally carried differences in self perception is the way in which people in the East see themselves as more closely a part of a wider family unit. In the West there is a greater sense of individual autonomy, while in the East there is a greater sense of kinship with and responsibility for the extended family. This was actually measured in a recent experiment where subjects underwent brain scans that monitored the degree of activity in different parts of the brain. It has been long established that the part of the brain that is activated when we are aware of the concept of “self” is just behind the forehead – an area called the medial prefrontal cortex. Experimenters observed this area in a series of volunteers – some from the West and some from China – as they considered a list of words. Both groups showed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex when words relating to themselves as individuals were shown. The Chinese group, however, also showed increased activity when they were shown words relating to the concept of their mother. In other words, to them the sense of “me” and “mum” overlaps in a substantial way, almost to the point of being indistinguishable. These are very contrasting ways of seeing the world.

As I describe further in my spiritual self help course, more than we previously recognized we are a product of our environment and the culture in which we were raised – all the way to our very core.