The Brain That Changes Itself. Norman Doidge, MD. New York, Penguin Books: 2007.
Use for GATESOL Presentation
p 308: “Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does. A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper.”
298: He writes of “the culturally modified brain”: “When the Brain Is Caught Between Two Cultures.”
p 299: “Immigration is usually an unending, brutal workout for the adult brain, requiring a massive rewiring of vast amounts of our cortical real estate. It is far more difficult than simply learning new things, because the new culture is in plastic competition with neural networks that had their critical period of development in the native land. Successful assimilation, with few exceptions, requires at least a generation. Only immigrant children who pass through their critical period in the new culture can hope to find immigration less disorienting and traumatizing. For most, culture shock is brain shock.
“Cultural differences are so persistent because when our native culture is learned and wired into our brains, it becomes ‘second nature,’ seemingly as ‘natural’ as many of the instincts we were born with. The tastes our culture creates—in foods, in type of family, in love, in music—often seem ‘natural,’ even though they may be acquired tastes. The ways we conduct nonverbal communication—how close we stand to people, the rhythms and volumes of our speech, how long we wait before interrupting a conversation—all seem ‘natural’ to us, because they are so deeply wired into our brains. When we change cultures, we are shocked to learn that these customs are not natural at all. Indeed, even when we make a modest change, such as moving to a new house, we discover something as basic as our sense of space, which seems so natural to us, and numerous routines we were not even aware we had, must slowly be altered while the brain rewires itself.”
300: It has long been assumed that we absorb culture through universally shared, standard-issue, human perceptual equipment, but perceptual learning shows us that this assumption is not completely accurate. To a larger degree than we suspected, culture determines what we can and cannot perceive.
He describes an experiment to study perception, in which Asian and Western students observed animations of fish swimming under water. Each scene had eight fish, with one brighter and larger: the focal point. Students then described what they saw. Americans usually talked about the focal fish, while Asians took notice of the less prominent fish and the background elements—70 percent more than the Westerners.
p 302: “…Easterners perceive holistically, viewing objects as they are related to each other or in a context, whereas Westerners perceive them in isolation. Easterners see through a wide angle lens; Westerners use a narrow one with a sharper focus.” And this, repeated thousands of times daily, changes the wiring in our brain.
p 294–5: “Up until the discovery of neuroplasticity, scientists believed that the only way the brain changes its structure is through evolution of the species, which in most cases takes thousands of years. (…)
“But plasticity creates a new way—beyond genetic mutation and variation—of introducing new biological brain structures in individuals by non-Darwinian means. When a parent reads, the microscopic structure of his or her own brain is changed. Reading can be taught to children, and it changes the biological structure of their brains.”
He describes the Sea Gypsies of the islands in Burma, nomadic people who learn to swim before they can walk, and who have learned to change their brains and nervous systems, and thus their ocular lenses so they can swim for an extended time—and see—underwater. It’s because they are sub-oceanic hunter-gatherers. The author says it’s an “example of how cultural activities can change brain circuits.”
“In all cultures members tend to share certain common activities, the ‘signature activities of a culture.’ For Sea Gypsies it is seeing under water. For those of us living in the information age, signature activities include reading, writing, computer literacy, and using electronic media. Signature activities differ from such universal activities as seeing, hearing, and walking, which develop with minimal prompting and are shared by all humanity, even those rare people who have been raised outside culture. Signature activities require training and cultural experience and lead to the development of a new, specially wired brain. Human beings did not evolve to see clearly under water—we left our ‘aquatic eyes’ behind with scales and fins, when our ancestors emerged from the sea and evolved to see on land. Underwater sight is not the gift of evolution; the gift is brain plasticity, which allows us to adapt to a wide range of environments.”