If clusters of mushrooms are connected underground, should we think of them as one large individual, or does each mushroom still contain a sense of self?
– Togetherness: Clusters, Cuddles and Dances
These neural findings supplement behavioral findings that culture influences the positive affective states that people ideally want to feel and demonstrate that, indeed, the valuation and reward associated with each culture’s ideal affective state seems to be reflected in the brain.
– An Introduction to Cultural Neuroscience
Learning is closely tied to rewards. We learn to do that which is rewarding. In primary school compositions, especially those written by younger children, the protagonist often saves the day and gets praised by parents, teachers and strangers. The ultimate goal of all endeavour, it would seem in this view of the world, is to get rewarded, in the form of approval from some significant or less significant outside other.
As children grow into adulthood, rewards are still primary drivers of behaviour, except now, the reward mechanism shifts towards being more intrinsic on the extrinsic – intrinsic continuum or the continuum of motivation. They learn some activities are rewarding in and of themselves, independent of external recognition.
This does not mean that intrinsic motivation reflects maturity and extrinsic motivation, vanity. Such binary classification, which “characterises Western thinking” (Mateo et al., 2013) offers an elegant and convenient way of ordering the world but belies a less sharply delineated state of affairs. Practitioners who interact with the ground realise the limitations of such binary models and propose looking at things in terms of continua.
The motivation continuum suggests that the reasons for behaviour can be both intrinsic and extrinsic, perhaps one more than the other for a given actor at a given point in time. “If you are training to compete in a marathon, for example, you might be extrinsically motivated by a desire to gain approval from others as well as intrinsically motivated by the satisfaction you gain from the activity itself” (Cherry, 2019).
Western schools of thought advocate self-determinism or the idea of doing something to elevate the individual and write almost with disdain about maxims which espouse recognition of one’s place in a larger whole. For example, Mateo et al. (2013) state (disapprovingly) that in a westernised world view, orientalism is “undistinguished” and “synthetical” whereas western mental models are, “independent” and “rational”.
A typical refrain in such doctrines would be, we should not bother about what society thinks and that instead we should free ourselves from the constraints of societal expectations and do what we want to do because we feel good doing it. In other words; disavow extrinsic motivation. Taken to an extreme as it usually is in some westernised societies, this results in antisocial behaviour.
The other issue with westernised world views which are binary – something is either this or that, and the resulting absolutism is that such classifications do not stop with mere labelling. There is also an ordering which follows. Once classified, the ‘rational’ mind ranks such classifications on a hierarchy. “We are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy” (Derrida, 1981). The result of westernised modes of neat and convenient organisation has been protracted chaos in many ex colonial regions such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
In sum, those who have westernised world views are individualistic. They have a winner takes all mentality and believe that nothing good can come out of agreement, that glory for self has to be won in an argument (implying a win-lose paradigm) through brilliant rhetoric or eloquence, another western tradition.
Jiazu (2008), in making this point, quotes George Campbell who wrote, “But there is no art whatever that hath so close a connection with all the faculties and powers of the mind, as eloquence, or the art of speaking … Thereby it not only pleases, but by pleasing, commands attention, rouses the passion, and often at last subdues the most stubborn resolution.”
This can be contrasted with non-western cultures, for example, eastern cultures. Of these, Jiazu (2008) quotes philosophers who have advocated a diametrically opposed view of eloquence and rhetoric. For example, he references Zhuangzi who wrote that some “know how to give a good speech and tell appropriate anecdotes in order to attract the crowds, but from the very beginning to the very end, they do not know what it is all about”. An anecdote is a rhetorical device which comprises a short story to convince an audience. It can be distinguished from actual evidence such as qualitative feedback from primary sources.
This stark difference in how eloquence per se is valued, gives reason for pause to educators. When students are encouraged and taught to express themselves articulately, are we inadvertently creating an individualistic culture in which form takes precedence over substance?
One way to avoid applause seeking individualism while developing skills of expression is to be careful about incentive signalling. Expression is a tool and like all tools can be used to advance individual objectives or group goals. In some cultures, it is intrinsically rewarding to have advanced group well-being.
How can we know if something has been intrinsically rewarding? It may be extrinsically rewarding to profess that it was passion and not some less noble driver which led one to do something. Researchers therefore usually take into account the possibility of bias, social desirability and self-consciousness in self-report questionnaires.
To get accurate views on why people really do what they do, neuroscientists have used imaging techniques to study regions of the brain which are activated when subjects perceive rewarding experiences. One such region is the ventral striatum.
It was found that subjects from individualistic cultures exhibited more activity in the ventral striatum when “gaining money for themselves” and those from collectivist cultures did so “when giving to their family” (Telzer et al., 2010 as cited in Lin & Telzer, 2017).
Indeed, this is not the only instance of difference in neural activity between members of individualistic and collectivist cultures. Individualists are quite simply wired differently.
The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is the region which is activated when thinking about the self. Zhu et al. (2007) asked participants of a neuroimaging study to think about themselves, their mother and someone else. They found that individualists had their MPFC activated only when they thought of themselves. Collectivists had theirs activated also when they thought of their mother.
Park et al. (2016) found that individualists displayed higher activity in the ventral striatum and caudate (also involved in reward processing) areas when they saw animated and excited faces whereas collectivists felt it rewarding to see calm faces. This could explain western traditional preference for argumentation or ultimatums and non-western preference for calm, holistic collaboration.
When individualists look around them, they see independent entities in competition for resources and learn to develop skills to stand out. Research on those who prefer to represent themselves even when part of a larger group suggests that there may be an evolutionary purpose of such seemingly antisocial behaviour. For example, Cepelewicz (2020) says those “out of sync” with the group they belong to, may be “strategic” because, “some forms of loner behaviour can lead to the emergence of leaders in groups”. Theirs is a binary, win-lose view of the world.
This representation of how the world works may be more subjective – “present solely in our minds and discourse” (The Problems of Science: What We Do to Things When We Study Them), than real. Ecologists have found evidence that apparently discrete and independent entities are in reality connected beneath the surface in a network of mutual support.
Mushrooms for example are all connected to each other by “thin threads, known as a mycelium” (Fleming, 2014) below the ground. Classen in Collective Consciousness: ants, mushrooms, bees and humans excitedly proclaims, “Mushrooms can help us to think about what it means to be an individual, human or otherwise, and can inspire us to remember that all bodies participate in the macro and the micro”.
Mushrooms are fungi, described as “brainless”. Yet they live both individual and collective lives at once. It could be because they have no MPFC to differentiate self from the whole or a ventral striatum that gets excited when they hear approval.
The Brain Dojo
