Passage 2Scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture--the language we speak, the values weabsorb--shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To takeone recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedlyrepresents the self: it is active when we ( "we" being the Americans in the study) think of our ownidentity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The "me"circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, butalso when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no suchoverlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self asautonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes onquite different functions."Cultural neuroscience," as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Someof the findings, as with the "me/mom" circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences.For instance, it is a cultural cliche that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians payattention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism-collectivism split).Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non-Asian-Americansrecruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that processfigure-ground relations--holistic context--while the Americans showed more activity in regions thatrecognize objects.Psychologist Nalini Ambady of Tufts found something similar when she and colleagues showeddrawings of people in a submissive pose (head down, shoulders hunched) or a dominant one (armscrossed, face forward) to Japanese and Americans. The brain′s dopamine-fueled reward circuitbecame most active at the sight of the stance--dominant for Americans, submissive for Japanese--that each volunteer′s culture most values, they reported in 2009. This raises an obviouschicken-and-egg question, but the smart money is on culture shaping the brain, not vice versa.Cultural neuroscience wouldn′t be making waves if it found neurobiological bases only forwell-known cultural differences. It is also uncovering the unexpected. For instance, a 2006 studyfound that native Chinese speakers use a different region of the brain to do simple arithmetic (3 + 4)or decide which number is larger than native English speakers do, even though both use Arabicnumerals. The Chinese use the circuits that process visual and spatial information and planmovements (the latter may be related to the use of the abacus). But English speakers use languagecircuits. It is as if the West conceives numbers as just words, but the East imbues them withsymbolic, spatial freight. (Insert cliche about Asian math geniuses.) "One would think that neuralprocesses involving basic mathematical computations are universal," says Ambady, but they "seemto be culture-specific."Not to be the skunk at this party, but I think it′ s important to ask whether neuroscience revealsanything more than we already know from, say, anthropology. For instance, it′s well known thatEast Asian cultures prize the collective over the individual, and that Americans do the opposite.Does identifying brain correlates of those values offer any extra insight After all, it′s not as ifanyone thought those values are the result of something in the liver.Ambady thinks cultural neuro-science does advance understanding. Take the me/mom finding,which, she argues, "attests to the strength of the overlap between self and people close to you incollectivistic cultures and the separation in individualistic cultures. It is important to push theanalysis to the level of the brain." Especially when it shows how fundamental cultural differencesare--so fundamental, perhaps, that "universal" notions such as human rights, democracy, and thelike may be no such thing.which of the following is a significant breakthrough achieved by cultural neuroscienceaccording to the passage