Memory Key Newsletter

In February I reported on a couple of studies showing that students who were taught that intelligence wasn’t a fixed trait performed better academically than those who believed it was (see http://www.memory-key.com/news/2007/news_2007Feb.htm#intelligence ). Interestingly, especially for those who believe the higher average IQ of Asians compared to Caucasians signals a biological advantage, there is a cultural component to this belief: "In the West, a child who performs poorly in mathematics is likely to be regarded as having little math ability or perhaps even as being "learning disabled." In the East, such a child is viewed as needing to work harder, or perhaps her teacher should work harder, or maybe the setting for learning should be changed."

This quote comes from The Geography of Thought, by Richard E. Nisbett. Professor Nisbett has a number of fascinating things to say about how and why Asians and Westerners think — and perceive, and remember — differently, and I want to share some of these. But first, we should dwell a moment on the concept, because it’s quite a revolutionary one.

When psychology was born as a science, the so-called ‘father’ of experimental psychology started off with one subject: himself. It was assumed, and reasonably enough, that finding out how one human mind worked would tell us something about how all human minds work. Of course, it was understood that this would need to be verified with other individuals, and so it was. But the diversity of those individuals has only very recently become an issue. It has often been remarked that, because of the exigencies of finding willing volunteers, most of what we think we know about the human mind is based on American college students! This is an exaggeration, of course, but not as much of one as we would like.

In more recent times, age and gender have become an issue, and thus the search for subjects has been expanded. But there are certain fundamental principles of cognition, of how minds work, that have been assumed to be … well, fundamental. Things like the way in which we categorize objects, and how these categories affect the way we perceive and remember the world.

This is a topic that has a very particular resonance with me, as it was the subject of my doctoral thesis. Imagine then my surprise, when I read that this absolute primacy of categorization is not, apparently, a universal. That Asians "have relatively little interest in categories, find it hard to learn new categories by applying rules about properties, and make little spontaneous use of them for purposes of induction".

And this is related to another fundamental difference. For Westerners, nouns are most important — we see the world in terms of objects, with attributes (fixed attributes — hence our belief in intelligence as a fixed attribute). Listen to a Western parent with a small child and you will hear an emphasis on objects and their properties ("The sky is blue. What color is the grass?" "Is this block round or square? Show me the round hole.") But an Asian parent is more likely to emphasize relationships and actions ("The cow is eating the grass." "I am giving you the block. Now you give me the block.").

It’s understood that nouns are easier to learn and remember, and studies have shown that children acquire nouns much faster than verbs. Western studies. It turns out that East Asian children learn verbs as fast or faster (depending on your definition of a noun) than they do nouns.

Western parents also tend to detach words from their context when talking to small children. We do this without thinking; it’s part of the way we simplify language for them. But the Asian way is to see things in their context; they don’t have the Platonic belief in abstractions. This emphasis on relationships and context is reflected in a greater social awareness, which in turn affects perception and memory. A study found that words presented on pictures of people were remembered better by Chinese participants than Americans, but there was no difference in recall of words presented against no background or a ‘non-social’ one (such as flowers).

Now there are advantages and disadvantages to both the Asian and Western ways of approaching the world (clearly the best way is to master both, and be able to flexibly use whichever is appropriate for the situation), but the point of this discussion is not to pick the ‘right’ way. Nor is the point to destroy any faith you may have that we know how the human mind works; we do indeed know an incredible amount more than we used to, and these findings don’t invalidate that, although they do mark out some limitations. The point is that all this emphasizes yet again how malleable the human mind is. Some of the studies have demonstrated how Asians living in Western society absorb the Western way of looking at things, as do Westerners living in Asian societies.

It also underlines the cascade effect, between perception and thought and memory. What we remember is governed very much by how we organize information and how we perceive the world. And none of these are written in stone.

[You can also read about a very recent study looking at different brain activity patterns in Westerners and Asians in Scientific American, at http://tinyurl.com/2n5ko4 ]

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NEW STORE & NEW PRODUCT

As those of you who get the News Digest know, I now have the new MemoryKey Store live. There you can purchase, through Paypal (who take credit cards if you don’t have a Paypal account), the digital books on Remembering intentions and Taking effective notes. And now, I am pleased to announce that a digital version of the original Memory Key book is now available! I know some of you have had trouble getting this in your countries, and have asked about the availability of this as an e-book. So I’m very excited to be able to offer that. You can also read the first chapter for free, at: http://www.memory-key.com/shop/MemKey_extract.pdf .

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APOLOGIES

My apologies for the absence of the Memory Key Newsletter for a while. As you know, my website redesign has been dragging on and on, and I got to the point where I just had to let nearly everything go and focus on completing it. As you can see, if you go to the website, I have now done so.

Not in the sense of absolute completion, of course. For a start, a website is always a work in progress, and secondly, I still have a number of details to polish. But enough of the work has been done to enable the new version to go live, and I hope you will find it an improvement (and more so, when I have finished the crucial organizational aspects of getting all the "Related" links properly done).

Do let me know if you notice any glaring errors. I’d especially like to hear from anyone who uses a browser other than Internet Explorer or Mozilla, because those were the only two I tested it on.

Although I still have a number of details to polish, as I say, I will now be able to delegate that to a much smaller part of my time. Look to see my blogging resume, and the newsletters to come out on time!

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The Memory Key website is named after my book "The Memory Key", a
practical user-friendly handbook designed to help people achieve
genuine, long-lasting memory improvement.

http://www.memory-key.com/AboutTheSite/about_book.htm

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