 Okay. Thank you so much for having me. I'm extremely happy to be here. Just a brief introduction of myself. I originally came from Japan to Michigan for graduate training and back then cognitive science was at the height, which means that all the human minds are supposed to be like a computer, a Mac computer or IBM or whatever, meaning that you are an internal processor, whatever that is, some machinery of information processing got to be universal. So asking a cross-cultural question was okay for sure, but if you're doing it, you are almost showing that you are dumb because if internal processor, whatever that is, is universal, what's the point of even beginning to examine cultural variation? Just leave it to somebody who have time or who don't have talent, or maybe both. If you're a real social or non-psychologist with some credibility or talent, you really have to investigate the core processing machine. So that was the ideology of the field. Now, field has changed quite a bit. I'm one of those people who really began using method of experimental psychology in trying to demonstrate how deep culture might go under the skin, so to speak. So we wanted to see exactly how much psychological processes might be influenced in some systematic way depending on culture. And again, toward the end, I tried to explain what I mean by culture. And that phase continued maybe for 10, 20 years, and lots of people outside of this small circle of psychologists using experimental method to investigate group differences say that, oh, this research, kind of interesting, but didn't you know all those things? That was a fast reaction. And two, the whole approach was a kind of static and descriptive, just describing group differences. However, well, first of all, field didn't know that those differences exist shortly before we started. And second, science really need to start with description. So while this said, in the recent years, maybe in 10 years or so, lots of people began investigating why those group differences might exist. And so that's one theme. And here, ecology proved to be extremely important. And Carol's talk really resonate what I'm going to say. And two, basically, this question of embranement in the neuroscience, basically, how original question was how deep culture might go. And back then, there was no neuroscience, simply because fMRI and all those stuff in neuroscience were not easily available. But time has changed. And now it's relatively easy to use some cutting edge neuroscience method. So now you can ask this question with the neuroscience method, how deeply culture might go under the skin. And that's embranement. And I was just amazed how much parallel my talk is going to have with Carol's presentation, because one more thing I want to emphasize is embodiment. So basically, you know, culture can influence your brain in some dramatic way, far more dramatic than you imagined before, surely before my PhD, which was a long time ago. But also, culture seemed to influence immune system and all the other stuff in the body. And so today, I'm going to discuss the first two themes, ecology and embranement in the first hour. And then in the second hour, I try to do bitum embodiment. All right. So ecology, culture and the brain. And here's what I want to discuss. So in very early years, in cultural psychology, when I basically finished my PhD in 1987, you know, cognitive psychology was still very strong. Neuroscience had not yet come yet. And I'm a social psychologist by training. And the entire field of social psychology was dominated by social cognition. So you really have to understand the cognitive machineries which are brought to bear in the processing of social stimuli, like race or gender, things like laws. At the time, we began investigating group differences, as I mentioned to you, focusing on East and West. And there's a lot of political, I mean, East and West. You could say distinction itself is political, but just the choice of the topic is both political and economic. Simply, you know, psychology was almost 80% made in USA, 98% made in weird culture, Western civilization. And 20, 30 years ago, you know, only in Asia, people began interested in psychology. You know, just you have to feed yourself well enough before worrying about mental health. That's exactly what happened in Asia. So psychology became a thing to do at the university, for example. So lots of data came in. And one thing that happened is that many things which are demonstrated, presumably with some robustness, do not happen easily in those Asian countries. And of course, Asians are modest, right? Everybody knows that. And initially, we kind of believed that, oh, that's not happening because Asians are kind of, they are doing wrong thing. They didn't do what they are supposed to be doing. This whole thing changed dramatically, at least in my mind, when I went to University of Michigan and witnessed what was going on. You know, just the way in which studies are done was just as good in Japan, you know, back then as how things are at the University of Michigan. So that cannot be the explanation. And that's the very beginning of raising the possibility that there might be something deeper, more profound in the failure to replicate some of the findings in Asian culture context. Now, since then, we proposed this distinction between independent and interdependent self. And, well, you can accuse this of being simplistic, but the thing is that you really have to start with something simple. Otherwise, you'll be overwhelmed. And almost since then, lots of elaboration, lots of qualifications, lots of underlining processes. However, I think some description needs to come first. And this distinction is not that bad, in my opinion. And we'll see. So we all knew that in Western civilization, Western part of Europe, as well, as basically where Anglo-Saxophones went through immigration, United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and so on, there's a strong belief in the self as independent entity. And strong value is placed on distinct individuals. And, you know, basically agency, that is source of action is based on this assumption so that you use your goals and desires and values to organize your behavior. So even your interpersonal relationships are also premised on your preferences. For example, you may choose your boyfriend, girlfriend, or even your friends. And, by the way, that whole notion was a little bit foreign when I came here. You know, I thought I was supposed to be a friend with everybody if those people are in the same lab or same class. That's not true at Michigan anyway. So one way in which we try to conceptualize this whole thing was to say that culture provides the recipe, so to speak, or tasks, or some script, or Carol called practices, which allow you to realize this or that value. So here, general value of independence, autonomy, something like this. And Western culture over the history of many generations prepared a whole bunch of tasks which are thought to accomplish each one of those things. So, for example, you have to be independent. What does it mean? Well, that could be independence by economic meaning. Or you may have to make a choice. You have to choose your friends. Or you have to be unique. You have to be X and Y. There are some, while we do some study, there are several distinct ways in which you can accomplish this value of independence, at least in Western student population. And we call those different ways of accomplishing some value, cultural tasks. Now, Eastern civilization, well, thought by me by this, is essentially Eastern part of Eurasian continent for some evolutionary and historical reasons. And there, interestingly, generally, there's much greater value is placed on some fundamental relatedness. You just cannot dissociate yourself from your group, from your life. You know, your group membership is very important. And of course, you have personal preferences and goals and so on. But those internal attributes are considered to be subordinate to relational concerns. So, agency become we, based. We call it conjoined agency. And just as in Western case, we conceptualized this whole thing in terms of cultural tasks. So, what we meant by this is over many generations, many years, there's a set of tasks designed to achieve some interdependent values, maybe social harmony, maybe social coordination, maybe something else. And some of the tasks include being similar, maybe standing in, working for the collective, while making sacrifice on yourself, and so on. And now, well, I would say in during 1990s, here, well, the decade of 2000, really, lots of people worked on this kind of framework and trying to see if this might be true in some, in some verifiable way. You know, you can always say, oh, look at the Japanese. He doesn't behave in that way. And you can look at me, of course. But the question is, you know, of course, there's always individual difference. Is there, is it really true to make those claims in some general basis? And people came up with many different tasks. Well, somewhat egoistically, I'm emphasizing my own contribution, but that doesn't mean that other people didn't do anything. Just to the contrary, many people worked on it. So, for example, in one line of research, we investigated the basis of happiness, exactly when people report happiness. And Americans are overwhelmingly achievement-based in the domain of happiness. Canadian, I don't have any data. Slightly more sane, probably, I don't know. Asians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, much more social harmony-based or social connection-based, how do I know? Well, we did free response study, daily diary study and so on, and simply to show that correlate of happiness is very different across cultures. Now, we also investigated the domain of motivation. So, one very strong evidence from the United States, from Western psychology, is the power of choice. When you make a choice, you feel motivated. So, which do you like? Psychology, anthropology? Oh, you have to make a choice, right? This is very powerful. And in one study we did, we didn't find anything among Japanese and also Japanese students at UBC. Why is that? That's very interesting. And as it turned out, all the experimental paradigms used in Western culture context is using private choice. You know, that's a wonderful experimental control, bringing subjects individually and have him or her seated in the empty room and then have him make a choice. Nobody's watching. And as it turned out, interdependent folks don't care the choice they make in social vacuum. And we manipulated social context to show that once social context being made available, Asians show very strong motivation effect of choice. And by the way, interestingly, Americans appears to be put off when social context is given. So, that's an interesting way in which individualism can show up. Now, more cognitive domain, lots of studies been done on range of attention. So, if you know what you're going to do, at least your culture tells you that you have to know what you want to do, your attention become more focused. Right? Now, you are living in a culture where other people are very important. There are social duties and obligations. And then your attention may be trained in such a way that it's much broader in scope. And I just cannot go through many studies, but there's now fairly strong evidence indicating that there's very clear, mean-level cultural difference so that attention tend to be more holistic among people with Asian background. And by the way, Asian background, that's really Asian heritage. And all this is changing in the last 10 years or 20 years, probably, in China. Just China is amazing, changing so much. And I don't know exactly why, maybe, extreme competitiveness, you know, at the very high level of achievement, or maybe one child policy, maybe some confluence between those two. But just, you know, I mean, simply I know it, because when we test Asian students coming from China, sometimes they are more American than Americans. I think that's fairly recent phenomenon in the last 10 years, 15 years. That effect didn't exist when I started out. So in any case, and one more cognitive staff, Dick Nisbet, a colleague of mine, proposed that independent individuals tend to be more analytic. You have to focus on one thing and you draw inference from it. So inference tend to be more linear, whereas more interdependent forks tend to be more holistic. And, you know, maybe part of it is to achieve social harmony. You know, Lawrence, you're right. I'm also right. Well, maybe truth is, could be right in between. So Dick called a dialectic thinking. And again, evidence is pretty okay. Now, given all this, well, if you are not satisfied with all this and you can, you've been asking the question, why is that? Maybe that's some kind of artifact or maybe cultural stereotype influencing your behaviors or maybe some kind of priming effects of a sort. Well, you don't know what that is. I can explain in the question Q&A. So where those cultural differences might have come from became a very, very big deal. And well, to understand this, I think we need to get back to history slash evolution at least up to 50,000 years or so. I just don't have any time to go back to, you know, the long path that Carol invited us to go back. But about 50,000 years ago, you know, first amazing thing happened. Anatomically, modern humans somehow began spreading out of Africa. Who knows exactly what happened? Well, actually, anatomically, modern humans, our ancestors, direct ancestors, were nearly extinct back then, presumably because of the change of the climate. And however, at the same time, they must have achieved what we call culture or social coordination, theory of mind, whole bunch of things which create very strong group presence. Presumably, all this enabled them to venture into a whole other part of the globe just to survive. And well, the rest is history, essentially. Over the next 4,000 years or so, I'm sorry, 40,000 years or so, really, our ancestors spread all over the globe. And well, they are really primitive people who don't know anything. Well, that's not true. Well, yesterday, over dinner, I talked about my wonderful trip to south of France, Alaska, and, you know, several, you know, caves where paintings like this have been preserved. And just amazing. Look at this. This is about, I would say, 25,000 years ago. And this is a little bit more recent. And this is very recent and extremely symbolic, extremely symbolic and abstract. And I'm sure Shagar must have got his idea from this. Just amazing. And you can see, you know, how much symbolic capabilities they had, how much differentiation of occupation they had. Well, this is a work of real professional, as opposed to somebody like me and all that. Now, very interestingly, about 10,000 years ago, all this culture disappeared. And again, it's mystery, mystery. I mean, you know, some people say that they became sophisticated enough so that they exterminated all the animals. That's not quite true. You know, animals had been abandoned. But in any case, about 10,000 years ago, humans began sedentary form of existence. So initially, hardening began to happen, domesticating, domestic capable animals. Some animals are just impossible. Some other animals are easy to tame. And they can work for you, right? So those animals happen to be available in the region. And people are willing or capable of knowing how to domesticate those animals. And that happened around this area. That's, you know, eastern part of Turkey today, just above Fatah Krasent. And that's about 10,000 years ago. And shortly afterward, you know, 10 or 20 crops began to be domesticated, you know, just providing the basis for sedentary living and presumably, you know, preserving lots of much important resource and source of care. And that's how human civilization, so-called, began to unfold. Now, what's really interesting about this region is that there are several really prominent crops back then. But one of them that historically proved to be very important was wheat. Some varieties, some various, you know, kinds of wheat. And it's very resilient. And it requires a lot of lands. However, the climate can be quite cold and can be dry. And as a consequence, essentially, wheat spread across all over the Eurasian continent. Horizontally, that helps, too. You know, basically, climate is very similar in horizontal line. And that's really part of the reason why. Now, you can enjoy some wonderful food, beer, Kurasan, and all that in western part of the, well, come to Japan. Even Japanese have those things now, after globalization, but not until a hundred years ago. Now, there was an important exception, which was China. Basically, well, China didn't quite exist back then. Eastern edge of the Eurasian continent where the climate was entirely different, basically extremely hot and humid. It's getting worse in the recent decades. However, even back then, just a rainfall is massive and temperature was very high. And in fact, climate must be warmer back then in upper part of contemporary China. And just very lucky for, you know, human being. Rice was just available as a crop, viable crop to cultivate. And rice cultivation started about supposedly eight or 9,000 years. In this area, Yanxi River and Yellow River are somewhere in between. That's what happened. Now, let me skip this. One really interesting thing about all this, you might wonder why crops might have anything to do with analysis of culture. But just on one day, it occurred to us that, you know, there was a lot of look at those pictures of a party field for rice cultivation and just wheat field. It's very clear that very different things are happening. Wheat is relatively less laborious, less intensive in terms of labor and concentration. In comparison, rice is a different matter. It requires lots of water. And also, it's seasonal. Because you need water, you really need irrigation system. As it turned out, evidently, evidence exists that some systematic irrigation system started once rice got domesticated every place. And this is extremely sophisticated thing, right? There's a slope and all the party must be horizontal so as to keep the water and the water go one by one to every one of those field. And what you just can imagine what kind of social consequence this might have. This is like you cannot drink milk in the middle of the desert. You know, just it's a life or death. You know, very much like lacto-sorcerance is really important if your neighbors or yourself is keeping cows or sheep and so on so that your life is dependent on milk of some kind. In this case, water is your lifeline. And to have access to water, you really have to belong to the tribe or some social unit that's organized under water allocation. So, of course, this is all about simplification. However, we hypothesize that maybe one interesting and potentially powerful source of cultural differentiation between individualism which are not to be relatively dominant in western part of Eurasian continent and collectivism or belief in interdependence which is relatively more dominant in eastern part might have something to do with this. And how can we test this? And, of course, you cannot go back 10,000 years and test this kind of idea. So one, you know, next best thing we try to do was to look into this huge country, China. China is a huge country and, of course, China is not homogeneous. And China is very different in terms of historical level of allocation of agricultural field to rice as opposed to wheat. So we try to see if traditional wheat area and traditional rice area might be systematically different in terms of cognitive style and some other social dimensions like independence or interdependence. And here's one piece of data. Here, those are provinces in China which are different in terms of percent of cultivated land devoted to rice paddies. So more rice field, rice areas are in that way, this is much more wheat. And size of the circle indicate the divorce rate, essentially, contemporary. And, by the way, this rice versus wheat data is coming from in the last 100 years or so. Now, fairly systematic relationship so that divorce rate tend to be higher in wheat region and the divorce rate, of course, but the divorce mean. That's a big question, but one assumption we brought into is that divorce is one indicator of individualism. Now, how about cognitive style? You might remember just a moment ago I said that individuals tend to be more analytic using semantic categories whereas more interdependent people tend to use more holistic social inference rules. So that's what we try to test. So here's a glove and subjects have to choose one or the other as better fit to the target stimulus. If you are analytic, you are supposed to be using semantic categories and therefore, well, glove and scarf must go together. However, you are more relational, of course, you need hand to use glove. Glove is for your hand. So, glove and hand, that's more relational thinking style. And here this is proportion of holistic relational categorization, right, the extent of it. And again, there's what, weak but systematic relations between those two. So more rice regions tend to show stronger evidence of holistic and more relational thinking. Now, rice and wheat is the only thing. And how about harding? We have some evidence indicating that harding lend itself to more independent notion of the self or more analytic mode of thought. And one additional issue we have investigated is potential effects of voluntary settlement. So this obviously came from my own experience in the United States. Eventually, I began asking, well, what kind of Europeans came all the way to the United States? You know, for a variety of reasons. Somebody, some people chose to come here. Lots of people must have followed those leaders and so on. However, there might be some systematic effects of voluntary settlement. After all, you have to choose where to go and what you are going to do. And all those things that you may have to do during the settlement might encourage independent notion of the self. So in order to investigate this, we went back to Japan. And the reason is pretty straightforward. This northern island of Japan is very, very interesting in this context. This was just a wilderness until 150 years ago. And back then, Russia became a major threat in that region. And some people said it continued to be. And around that time, this samurai society was dissolved. So there are lots of samurai warriors who needed a job. So the new government did a, you know, clever thing, essentially creating, you know, 10, 20 settlements in Hokkaido. And then lots of peasants fall the suit so that quite large number of peasants from the main island moved to Hokkaido, back then. That's when Hokkaido, Northern Ireland became, I don't know, I mean, conservative, conservative politicians may disagree. But that's when Hokkaido became territory of Japan. And we investigated whether there might be some systematic difference between Hokkaido and the rest of Japan in terms of independence and interdependence. Because to the extent the settlement might encourage, does encourage independence, Hokkaido people may show some mental characteristics which are in common with what you might see in American undergraduates, or American people in general. Oh, by the way, this is another weird thing in the field. You know, always I hear the criticism that we are testing in undergraduates. So I took it very seriously and we conducted very systematic research randomly sampling residents in Ann Arbor and also Y, that's a, you know, working class city right next to Ann Arbor. And that's a very expensive study. And by the way, we replicated cultural difference when we compared those folks with folks sampled in Tokyo in pretty much the same way. So I don't think this whole thing is limited to college undergraduate. However, when we tried to publish this paper, no reputable journal took it because the finding is no more than replication. I mean, that's, I found just entirely ridiculous. But anyway, so that's a, so still the finding itself is still unpublished. So we did this Hokkaido study and the finding was just so interesting pattern we found in Hokkaido was very similar to Americans. Sometimes this is true for Hokkaido folks who are born and raised in Hokkaido or sometimes true only for those folks who are born in mainland and moved to Hokkaido. But overall, there's very clear evidence that there's a spirit of independence in Hokkaido in this island of collectivism. Now here, one more little study we did along the theme. This is a proportion of very strange weird name given to babies in different states. We identified, well, essentially that's a little ridiculous way of explaining for this much less dramatic. We identified 10 or 20 most common name in each of the years we investigated. And then we counted the number of babies who were given the names which are not, I think. Yeah, that's right, who are given those conventional names. And here, X axis is the date of United States state food. So essentially this is a major of Western frontier. And what you see again is that there's tremendous variation across different states. However, there's fairly systematic relationship so that more frontier you go, the proportion of the most conventional names goes down. And this is what's true for male names and female names. So summary so far, this is a very quick view of somebody's life, many people's lives. Basically, human evolution happened over 700,000 years. And I started out about 50,000 years ago. That's fairly recent. That's when humans spread across the entire globe. Now we focused on Eurasian continent and because of ecological differences, presumably there's systematic differences in social institutions, practices, and supposedly religion and everything else which gave rights to some systematic cultural difference which we witness today between eastern part of Eurasian continent and the western part. And of course, western part spread all over the globe. United States is the most typical Canada, of course. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, those are the most typical places which you can find today, western, independent, you might call culture. And most likely there are many different factors which facilitated this historical slash evolutionary process, but I highlighted those three factors. Now, where are the field go from this point? That was a question I asked myself. So once you get used to something, you feel very secure, very comfortable, and it's like tenure, you can keep doing the same thing for your rest of life, and that's okay. I mean, you need that. However, I'm a little different. Just, you know, east-west difference, fine. We did it. So where do we want to go? That's a kind of question we asked about 10 years ago, and ecology is one. So rice, wheat, and all that is one consequence of that. And lots of people are now studying some ecological factors, temperature, climate, social mobility, those kind of thing. But back then, about 10, 15 years ago, I thought, well, one really interesting question might lie, might, could be found in neuroscience. Why is that? Well, the reason which I didn't articulate back then was, well, what is human nature? Human nature, well, Carol again said wonderful thing, that is, culture is naturalized. Well, what that means is that human nature is not really stable thing. You know, human nature is not anything that you can find in Stone Age, in some museum of Stone Age, you know, primitive men or women. But instead, maybe human nature lies in the fact that humans form themselves in some systematic way by creating social institutions, cultural practices, social relationships, and so on so that they kind of condition their own nature so that they can survive within the niche, which is so constructed. So here's a question I found very fascinating, and that's my rationale of using, well, at least trying to use, many funding agencies refuse to give me money. However, this is a way I found this endeavor most fascinating. So this question, how is nature nurtured? So by nature, I mean very broadly, maybe some kind of, you know, 10,000 year evolution history, as well as generational change, and of course, developmental change. That's really crucial. And so this raises some interesting questions. So, well, some interesting questions about the mechanisms of cultural influence. Okay, we know that culture influence our mind and presumably brain as well. How does this cultural influence happen? Well, some biological anthropologists, Rob Boyd, Pete Richardson, and so on, they emphasize conformity. Sure, conformity is important. And also, mimicry is also very important. And presumably, there's a genetic basis for mimicry for humans, as you can see in the effect of over imitation. You imitate too much than you are supposed to in human babies. But in addition to all this, reinforcement is very important. And well, actually, this morning, this hedonic treadmill is very interesting. And I don't know exactly how to conceptualize all this within the framework I'm going to present. And surely we can go back to it. But in very general level, we do respond to reinforcement. Reinforcement being money, being praise, being compliment, being just social approval, many different sorts. And maybe some reinforcement through more symbolic mean, it's possible. So now, I think this has very important implication for neuroplasticity and change in the brain in some systematic way. Because here culture, cultural meanings and cultural practices, possibly social institutions and so on, which are built up over the years ever since your village started rice cultivation. Who knows? But that has a long history behind it. And this is the way, essentially, reward contingencies. Reward contingencies are inscribed in cultures, practices, and meanings, and so on. And from the very moment of conception, I would say, and surely very moment of childbirth, organism, baby, actively work on this environment, initially actively reaching mom or caretaker initially. But this environment, you know, expand very rapidly. And that environment give you a feedback. And this is one way to conceptualize human development. And even imitation or conformity may not last long unless it comes with some kind of reinforcement. Now, why is this interesting? This is where Donald Hebb can come in. So, essentially, I would argue that once some response is reinforced, the response is reinforced, but also all the brain circuitries which are recruited to produce the response may well be also reinforced, strengthened. So, you know, different neurons fire together, they get wired together. That's what Donald Hebb said. And that's how he tried to conceptualize structural change in the brain. And some basic principle like this might be or could be in operation to produce some very plastic change in the brain. Now, this is very consistent with the literature that, again, Carol mentioned on neuroplasticity. But basically this literature shows that repeated engagement in various different tasks can result in enlargement of relevant brain regions. And one caveat, probably this statement depends on exactly when, in the course of development, you test. Probably when you are testing somebody in puberty age, the effect can go in the opposite way because the effect of practice may involve some cutting out of some noise as opposed to elaborating on some neural structure. So, a lot of this needs to be worked out. But at least in adult, I think evidence is pretty good that once you try working on some tasks, brain regions which are used to perform the task become bigger. How do we know? Initial evidence came from animal study like this, effects of enriched as opposed to impoverished environment. Rats allowed to engage in this extremely wonderful Disneyland-like environment and show evidence of neural growth. Okay? Now, in the last 20 years or so, there are lots of studies on abacus, juggling, lumped on calf driving. Unfortunately, you cannot do this anymore because of this navigation system. And of course, yoga and meditation practices. And all those things can be done and can produce some systematic change in the brain volume. And most likely, a whole bunch of other structural elements like connectivity or, I forgot, some fancy times that I'm forced to learn these days. Just the frontier of neuroscience is just moving so rapidly. So, almost every year, new techniques show up to characterize different structural aspects. But now, if this is the case, how about the culture? Culture, I told you, is a set of tasks which every person born into that culture may be encouraged to carry out. If you are American, you may be encouraged to work out and carry out independent tasks. Probably, you don't have to do everything, but probably, you have to do one or two just to show that you are a decent individual. That may be true for Japanese as well. And does this have any systematic effect on the brain? So, that's the next question we wanted to address. Now, independence involves different tasks, tasks of self-promotion, self-actualization, tasks to be free and to become autonomous, and so on. And, well, it seems to us that many of those tasks, although very variable, when you take each of them separately, requires some recruitment of what you might call prefrontal functions. Prefrontal functions by which I mean base value-based judgment. What do you like? What do you want? Strategizing and forming your own preferences, developing very clear self-concept and decide what you really want. Is he your guy or not? You really have to have clear image of yourself before making this judgment. Now, prefrontal cortex is here. And as I mentioned to you, evidence is emerging that two regions appear to be influenced. Well, I say this causal term with some quotient. Much of the evidence is correlational, but evidence is pretty interesting and intriguing. OFC, that's right above your eyeballs and NPFC, that's here right in the middle of your brain. Now, if you look at interdependent tasks, self-sacrifice, obligation and duty, social harmony, maybe there are some more. Well, it strikes me that these tasks, at least many of them, seem to involve some down-regulation inhibition of the self-regulatory capacities. You know, that's the best way to do something nice to you. You know, best for me to down-regulate what I want. That down-regulation of some prefrontal function. Strategizing, well, you do too much of strategizing by yourself, you may be kicked out from your group. You are too centric. And in the end, you know, going along with the group might require some separation, inhibition, down-regulation of prefrontal cortex. So that's a very vague general idea we started with. And we wanted to see if there might be any merit in this kind of conjecture. So here's a study we did several years ago. We recruited real adults, in this case, in Kyoto, about 130 or 40 Kyoto citizens, both males and female. And we used standard method to measure the volume of gray matter in different regions of the brain. At the same time, we asked them to fill out a questionnaire designed to assess independent and interdependent self-construal. So independence may be like, you know, I always express my opinions even when others are disagreeing with me. Interdependence could be my happiness depends on happiness of other people around me, those different scales, those items. And what we did was to determine which part of the brain, brain volume, might be protected by the response to those questionnaires. Of course, brain is complicated. There are many neurons, many regions. So you really have to do serious control, statistical safeguarding. And after all this is done, one region that survived was here. By the way, we used extremely stringent criteria in this case. And we believe that this is really real. And, you know, you are like me, you say, oh, this is such tiny. Who cares? No, that's not true. These are tiny, but these are really center of gravity. That shows real effects and effects obviously spread across different nearby regions. What you find is that there's systematic relationships between interdependence and volume here so that interdependent people tend to show this volume. On this side, this is right, and this is left. Oh, by the way, this is OFC. This is the view of the brain. If you cut here, cut the brain here, and look it up. Eyes are here, right? And this is right above your eyeballs. So that's orbit of frontal cortex. And there are many functions attributed to this. One is value-based judgment. Another is forming of preferences. So for example, OFC lesion patients can no longer form consistent preferences. That is, you know, if you like spaghetti over pasta sauce, you know, you like pasta salad over something, say, potato soup. You are supposed to love spaghetti over potato soup. Just this transivity will be violated once this region is cut out. Now, this is interesting, and just a fast piece of data. Now, just get back to this, I think, assumption that agents are more interdependent. Now, you combine this assumption with this data. You might expect that there might be some systematic cross-cultural difference in prefrontal brain volume, correct? That seems like a racist claim, but it's not. So don't worry. I'll get back to it, and eventually I'll make a point that probably this is based on this reflect the effects of the experience, not really genetic ancestry, but in the meantime prediction is fairly clear, right? Somewhere in prefrontal region, there might be some systematic cross-cultural difference. And that data that can address this kind of prediction didn't exist. Here's Denise Park, a friend of mine. She was at Michigan some time ago, and she went on, now she's in Texas, and she did a very systematic brain volume research, both in Singapore, and examining Han Chinese, by the way, and white Americans, European Americans in Havana, Champaign, Illinois. And they found fairly diverse areas where they can find, identify brain volume difference. So yellow means that those are the areas where Americans, European Americans, show bigger volume. Well, data is a little bit strange, because total brain volume is entirely controlled, so it's very strange that there's nowhere where Asians, Singaporeans show bigger volume. So the only way I can interpret this strange finding is that whatever cultural difference exists, such that Asians show greater volume, may tend to be more diffused, so that they do not clear the criterion in this particular research. But I can get back to it later. One thing that's very interesting, this is a center cut, so to speak. No, I'm sorry. Well, this is lateral view, and this is center view. This is right hemisphere. This is right. This is left. And this is, this is OFC here. Here's OFC2. And here, NPFC, very strong effect, very strong effect. Now, we also, well, who knows? This is just a single cross-cultural research. So recently, we tried to replicate this, and we recruited 66 Asian-born Asians and 66 European Americans, all students at the University of Michigan, right-handed, majority of women and so on. And simply, we tried to see if this ethnic-slash-cultural difference might duplicate, and here's what we got. Unlike Denise Park at all research, we found some regions that show evidence of greater volume among Asians. That's fine. Now, here, important finding is that those are the regions that are clearly bigger, quote-unquote, among European Americans than among Asians. Here, this is NPFC. This is frontal view. This is NPFC. Here, NPFC spread to lateral side. This is OFC. This is clearly OFC, huge region. All this shows very strong evidence for cultural difference, such that volume is greater for European Americans as compared to Asians. Here, Asians show some interesting effects. I believe that this is Chinese ideograph effect. Probably, there's some evidence indicating that ideograph use may influence this region. And this is fairly close to where I wouldn't speculate too much, TPGA, and that might have something to do with perspective taking and so on. But as it stands, none of this was found in Singaporean research, so I would just leave it like that. Two findings which seem to replicate very well is here, NPFC and OFC. Both regions are greater in volume among Americans of European descent as compared to Asian-born Asians in Michigan as well as Chinese descent Singaporeans in Singapore. Those are exceptions. Well, I would say everybody in between might show some similar effect. Now, by the way, this is a replication of our original finding, which is kind of nice. Now that replication has become a big deal, so every time you collect some additional data, you may have to take a chance of embarrassment, particularly possibly. So I'm very happy to report that more interdependent people are more interdependent. Their OFC volume tend to be smaller, and that appears to be true for the both cultural group. All right. So now, how can we begin explaining brain differences? So today, in this lecture, let me try to finish within 10 minutes. Ecology is very important, and out of which cultural norms and beliefs emerge over the course of about 10,000 years ago, there's very systematic influence on mentality, which may well come with some structural variation as well. And now one really missing link is genes, genetic change, or maybe epigenetic processes, and Michael Meany and some other people will be coming here to give you far greater information about this. But here today, I'd like to discuss this gene stuff just a little bit, just to give you, well, because that gave us a way to address this very interesting and Sony issue of causality. So here there's systematic difference between Asians and European Americans, and we believe that it's because of cultural experience. Is that really true? It's very hard to tell. And in our current research, we try to address this Sony issue by using genes, genes as a means to differentiate between two hypotheses. This is what I mean. Well, Carol already discussed this idea of plasticity allele. There are some select genes whose allele variants are associated with plasticity or sensitivity to environmental influence. So, for example, if you are carrying, was it AA, of serotonin receptor gene, you are more likely to be influenced by your environment, presumably including cultural environment. So, if this effect, you know, brain volume difference between two cultural groups is due to cultural experience, this cultural difference ought to be larger for those folks who carry plasticity allele. Make sense? Now, what kind of plasticity allele would you like to look into? Carol looked into serotonin system. Now, in the case of cultural learning, there's a lot of reason to look into dopamine system. Dopamine system because, you know, you really have to respond and process reward signals. Not only that, just you cannot be sensitive because it requires lots of intellectual work to summarize whole bunch of previous experience, you know, whether this behavior works. Oh, yeah, it worked yesterday. Two or three days ago. No, it didn't. Well, you really have to summarize this entire experience to get some abstract representations about cultural rules, right? So, it's not just reward sensitivity, lots of things which are going on in executive systems to enhance this ability to process reward signals. And there's a lot of reason to believe that dopamine is very important because dopamine is involved in reward processing regions and also prefrontal region in general. And here, this is a very quick summary of what dopamine does. Dopamine, now, there's a lot of neuroscience evidence indicating that dopamine is crucially important in the processing of reward signal, particularly anticipated reward. That's interesting. Anticipated reward. And the rest is a little bit of social science speculation. The point is that lots of motivation come from anticipated rewards in our case. You know, you are motivated to write a paper for a journal. Well, the only thing you can count on is that paper could be published someday. Well, I'm sorry, that may not happen tomorrow. You really have to work hard. How about your job? Education, speaking of education. Education is a prototypical example of delayed reward. You know, having no pay off at all for 10, 20 years in the hope that you can get it sometimes. You know, that's interesting. So education carrier next, JPSB, that's the journal in our field. Redemption salvation, reincarnation. Those are all religious ideas. And here, robot Sapolsky, who's saying that there's no monkey out there willing to lever press because Saint Peter is on the line. So here, there's a lot of reason to speculate that dopamine may be very central in human civilization. Now, here's a dopamine system. Here's a synapse. Lots of things are involved. Here, in a neurotransmitter, dopamine must be crafted, produced, and transmitter send a signal. Signal needs to be received, and then dopamine needs to be recycled and so on. And one particular gene proved to be very important in regulating this particular receptor, dopamine D4 receptor. And that gene is called DRD4, dopamine D4 receptor gene. And this is extremely interesting. I think I'm using up too much time, but I think this detail is both interesting and very important. First of all, this gene has an extremely peculiar structure. In one portion of the gene, there's a polymorphic region that has extremely strange structure. So that polymorphism is defined by repetition of 48 alphabets. And this 48 alphabets are sometimes repeated only once, sometimes twice, all the way up to 11 times. That's extremely unusual. And most common variants are 2, 4, 2 repeat, 7 repeat, and 2 repeat. And you can carry out lab study to show that which ideals are more effective in receiving, in this case, in the processing of dopamine. And as it turns out, 7 repeat and 2 repeat are more effective than 4 repeat. And here's the interesting part. Now you can do this kind of estimation exactly when those gene variants might have been incorporated into the human genome. This really stunned me. So 7 repeat appears to have happened given this available evidence based on this whole gene scan data, which you can find in London somewhere. Right now everybody's computer. About 50,000 years ago, how about 2 repeat? About 20,000 years ago. So there might be something going on in the co-evolution of this particular gene and culture, whatever culture is. And finally, this information. This 7 repeat and 2 repeat have been linked to enhanced processing of reward signal. Well, that's new data, by the way. I can talk about it, but that's new data and not published. And finally, a whole bunch of developmental studies have demonstrated that those two ideals function as plasticity allele. So now, given all this set of facts, we wondered if 7 repeat and 2 repeat allele of DRD4 might modulate cultural influences. So here's a, well, let me skip this. I can get back to it. So here's the data. Remember, we tested OFC and NPFC and Asians are less and Caucasians are more in terms of volume. Question is whether this cultural difference may be modulated by, moderated by DRD4. The idea is that if the cultural difference in brain volume is due to cultural experience, this effect ought to be more pronounced for people who carry 7 repeat or 2 repeat of DRD4. And here's a summary of it. This is OFC and non-carriers, carriers, and Asian folks, European, Caucasians. And there's very clear cultural difference such that OFC is bigger, greater in volume among Caucasian Americans. But this effect is clearly more pronounced among 7 or 2 repeat carriers. Now, there are a few additional data that may be very interesting. Now, we tested Asian born Asians in the United States, in Michigan. So they vary in the amount of experience in the United States. So that's interesting. More years you spend in and out of Michigan, do you show any evidence of expansion of OFC? So we wanted to see if anything like this might happen. And here's data. Interestingly, carrier show statistically can increase OFC volume as a function of number of years in the United States. There was no such effects among non-carriers. So this seems consistent, at least, with the idea that more experience you have, your OFC volume can increase, especially if you are responsive to environmental influences. There's important caveat, caveat being that all those folks was about 20 or 21 years old. So these numbers are entirely confounded with exactly when they came to the United States. So that's unclear, makes sense. You know, when you came to the U.S. before high school, you may be more influenced. That's entirely possible. And another possibility is that OFC is so important in cultural learning so that same effect could happen if we can recruit enough Americans who dare to go to China for extended period of time. So we cannot test that. There are very few people. Can I finish all this? Okay. So let me conclude. Now, culture. You know, I don't know. I always try to do something without thinking too much about what I'm studying in the hope that you can get a better understanding of what you have studied over the years. So now, given all the things we did, I am happy to define culture as a loosely organized complex of values, beliefs, and practices. And I think culture is a significant shaper of agency, you know, how you behave, how you act, how you organize your behavior, as well as cognitive, emotional, motivational processes that constitute the self. Now, east and west, well, again, those are extremely loosely organized, but loose doesn't mean unreal. I think that's real. And that has a long history behind it to the extent that 10,000 years is long enough. And ecology, geography play a major role in forming this cultural difference. And now, we have some initial neural evidence indicating that cultural influence can go really deep. Now, why is this important? I think, you know, if you are animal psychologist, you can study rat in the hope that you can learn something about animal in general. And at least in my mind, Asia, Europe, or east and west, that's very specified specific case, that's very unique and idiosyncratic, but hopefully that provides some interesting model case that can be used to shed light on more general question. So, well, of course, this whole research doesn't preclude any additional studies to be done on other cultural, religious, ethnic traditions which are very important, but hopefully this provide some anchor or some conceptual, source of conceptual ideas for the future work. So, anyway, thank you so much. Thank you. Questions? Are you looking into the divided competition? How do you define east and west, Asia and Asia? What makes someone... Well, Asia, Caucasian, that's based on demographic questionnaire. We had fairly elaborate questionnaire about ethnic heritage of parents and grandparents and themselves, where they are born, and so basically folks who are born in Asia with Asian parents are classified as Asians and the same applies to Caucasians, basically European heritage. And genes, we got saliva and just genotype. Oh, I see. Well, I'm sorry, I didn't say it. We excluded Asian-Americans. Basically, we created a huge subject pool out of which we recruited about, what, 160 or so subjects, 30 or so subjects. So, we recruited subjects on the basis of demographic information and also genotype information. Oh, yeah, carrier or unknown carrier. I mean, that's fairly straightforward as long as... Yeah. Well, we actually... That's interesting. We did an ancestry analysis, like 25, me or 23 me, that kind of thing. And when we did it, simply Europeans are here, Asians are here, no overlap, essentially. Basically, what we did was to pick up ethnicity markers, about 200 of them, to see if we can classify those subjects into different groups and let the computer do the rest of the work. And our subjects are classified into two non-overlapping groups. So, that's genotype-based classification, which entirely get confounded with subjective report, in our case. Now, this may not apply if you include Asian-Americans, for example, or multi-essensity groups, which are increasingly common in many parts of Canada and the United States. But here, we simply didn't do it. We excluded those people for this purpose. This doesn't mean that that's not important. That's important. Well, I mean, we didn't do any historical analysis. We simply used demographic information, right? So, you know where you are born, right? And where your parents are coming from, where your grandparents were. Those are the kind of questions we asked. And we determined a group of people who are born in Asia with Asian parents. Yeah, you mean to demographics. Yeah. But then, you look into genetics. That's why my, I don't understand how you create your groups based on one set of categories that are demographic. And then, you look into something that is genetic. Why don't you look at the genetic position when you draw your groups? Oh, well, that's part of the thing. So, basically, demographic information that carries, you know, kind of cultural heritage. That's the assumption. So, you are born in, say, Caucasian heritage. You are socialized in some way, presumably, reflecting, you know, kind of independent cultural tasks. Asian case, the other way, interdependent. So, that's kind of proxy for kind of cultural information. You may be, you may be exposed. Now, the whole idea is that the effect of this exposure to culture may be magnified by some genetic potential. Some genotype that intensifies or make more effective the processing of reward information. Because this is a very, the category Asian in this study is not a racial category. It's a cultural category. You can construct a racial category if you want. Well, racial, race is a, you know, social construction, clearly. So, this can be race, of course. I mean, there's clearly hundreds and hundreds of ethnic markers in genes. You know, reflecting this differentiation of different groups. So, you can identify some alleles, maybe 200 of them. And then, you know, for 100 percent certainty, you can classify somebody being Asian or being Caucasian. And in this case, this classification, which we didn't use, but we did afterward, just to see, you know, potentially interesting, right? Lots of people are saying that they are Asian, but some Asians are more Asian in terms of this gene. And might there be any effects of this? We explored this. A short answer to it is there's none. There's no effect of this genetic ancestry. So, but you are right. I mean, in this case, genetic classification and demographic information, classification are entirely confounded. So, you know, that's part of the reason that motivated this research, right? So, brain volume is different. And that could be because of this genetic ancestry. You know, maybe Asians are carrying some genes which give rise to smaller prefrontal cortex. Or Caucasians are carrying some genotypes, you know, that may have results. And as it turned out, it's very hard to exclude this kind of possibility without doing some systematic training study, maybe intervention study. In short of doing it, what we try to do was to get some clue to the thrown in question by identifying genetic variants which are known to make you more sensitive to environmental influences. Okay. So, there's a lot of reason to combine gene and the culture. After all, this is gene-by-culture interaction. I hope this makes sense. Yeah, go ahead. So, this isn't really as pertinent to the presentation, but I was curious. In the neighbor culture mind of the brain, I understand the argument for the brain culture and why this process needed necessarily a lot of cognitive communication. But is there, from your perspective, just cognitive communication still occurring in some cases, or is it kind of roughly replaced by an argument or something else that's a whole different experience? You know, that's a very interesting question. Well, I'm sure cognition is very important. And before, well, I used to be very much like Carol. You know, whenever I see any scale, I thought that's garbage. Because none of them worked for me for a long time. What's really interesting in neuroscience work is that neural measures correlate so well with self-report measures. So, my whole attitude to your question has changed quite a bit over the years. I have to conclude that those self-report measures carry some real information under some conditions. So, clearly, that's cognitive mediation. And to me, really interesting question is exactly when, under such circumstances, this evidence for this cognitive mediation might happen. And to be honest, you know, we don't know. And sometimes, you know, cognition may be secondary if not involved at all. But some other times, cognition ought to have some major effects. Okay? Yeah. I was wondering, like, for those studies that have compared the Asian-born Asians and the European-Americans, I think I maybe not understood why, why not Asian-Americans were used. So, this could potentially help disentangle what is genetic effect and what is cultural effect, or maybe to extend the variance explained by, like, so if you see, like, difference in brain volume, how much of it can be explained by American culture or by Asian ancestry? Yeah, well, you know, surely I agree. I agree. You know, this is not cheap study. That's the short answer. You need lots of resource. And, you know, you need lots of money, essentially. And I'm not millionaire or billionaire by any means. So, studying Asian-Americans would be very interesting. And to me, even more interesting could be, you know, Caucasian-Americans who go to Asian countries and spend some extensive period of time. And I wish I could, you know, take note of each individual's life in detail so that we can get some better demographic, socio-ecological information above and beyond any, you know, two or three-item demographic scales or questions. So, all this is on the horizon. And I think some interesting things are going on in Montreal. People are now using wearables to, you know, identify where people are. And you can use demographic information to identify where supermarkets are, where households are, where, you know, some walking class supermarkets are, and so on. And, you know, this kind of information may enable you to pin down more specifically exactly what might be going on. So, clearly, this is a very crude initial attempt. And the only reason why we tested Asian-Americans was to get as big effect as possible. We started this research when we quite didn't know that some Asian-born Asians are not really Asian in stereotypic way. That is, you know, some Chinese folks are extremely individualistic for some reason, which escaped my mind. So, anyway, you're right. I mean, somebody needs to do it. I want to do it. But, you know, you have to find a way to find the research. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. And it seems like, right, even if you look at about 40,000 years ago, he had bigger things because it was much smaller. We had to obtain a lot more information. Now, we can offload a lot of that to these cultural tools. And so, we're kind of engaging this self-domestication where our brains tend to become smaller. It doesn't mean we're as much smarter than we can offload a lot of these tasks and tools, tasks to these tools. And so, do you think at some point that's going to have implications for the cultural tasks that are making a difference in brain volume? And there would be harder to detect the different cultural differences in the brain volume as we sort of offload more and more of our cognitive tasks into these technologies and cultural tools? Yeah. Yeah. That's very interesting. Yeah. Well, humans are extremely creative. So, once new technologies come in, they might offload or, you know, just outsource some capabilities to technologies like, you know, use your calendar to your secretary or to your iPhone or so on. But always, humans find a way to keep them busy, too. Yeah. So, for example, spatial navigation. In the case of driving a car, you don't have to use it. But maybe, you know, now that in the post-modern world where existential crisis become really serious, you know, basically you don't know what you're doing. You know, you don't have to do anything. And then you have to orient yourself in some space, you know, space of maybe meaning or something like this. You know, maybe volunteer work or social justice or, you know, critical psychiatry or some, of course, cultural neuroscience, right? Some moral or, if not moral, value dimensions in which you can, you know, locate yourself. That's as spatial as anything else. And so, something like this could be a new task. Post-modern individuals may have to engage in to show some effects. Well, it's possible. Most of the people lose real estate somewhere in the brain, maybe hippocampi. But some people who, you know, have existential endeavor like this may manage to keep real estate in hippocampus. That's entirely possible. That's the kind of questions that you can begin to ask, so I think you can keep yourself busy.