Perhaps the Government has a secret mind-boosting agenda behind its proposal
this week to add Mandarin to secondary schools’ curriculums. The Education
Secretary, Alan Johnson, says his move to bring Chinese lessons to
class-rooms “could give pupils an economic advantage” (it might indeed get
them work in cheap call centres when China takes over the world economy),
but scientific research shows that the language may also help British
students to think quicker. It’s just one of the many fascinating differences
between Chinese and Western minds that appear to be caused by the fact that
our cultures are so fundamentally different.
As China expands its global influence, more and more British schools and
businesses are becoming interested in working more closely with the
mysterious country that calls itself The Middle Kingdom. But it is not only
language that divides us. Millennia of mutual isolation, of disparate
histories, beliefs and attitudes mean that, in computer terms, the two
cultures tend to load the hardware of their brains with different software.
To enable us to click, we will have to learn a lot more about what makes
each other tick.
The language difference, for starters, is much more than a simple problem of
comprehension. A six-year joint German-Chinese research project has
discovered that Chinese brains work faster than those of their European
counterparts. And it suggests that the tortuous Chinese lingo may make all
the difference. For more than six years, researchers from the German
University of Goettingen and the East China Normal University in Shanghai
puzzled over the influence of language on information processing by the
human brain.
Their experiments in 1996, with about 200 European and Chinese students of
equal education levels, asked them to recall a series of numbers, letters
and colours. They found that the Chinese consistently beat the Europeans in
the memory tests. The Chinese students, it appears, are significantly better
at processing information intellectually. When it came to simple
but-ton-hitting reaction tests, though, the Europeans beat them hands-down.
But why? The project researchers believe that written Chinese allows faster
recognition and articulation than languages that use the Roman alphabet.
Quick articulation is key for the rapid processing of information, they say.
But it also requires readers of Mandarin and Cantonese to achieve a highly
challenging intellectual task in the first place: to understand the tens of
thousands of characters in everyday use in China. There are about 50,000
characters in all, and a reasonably well-educated person ought to know about
5,000. It takes 2,000-3,000 to read a newspaper. Chinese children have to
spend hour after hour copying out characters. Homework is perpetual; extra
tuition common.
To add to the Chinese puzzle, Mandarin and Cantonese are phonic languages:
just a different vocal tone changes the meaning of words, which can cause
severe embarrassment. For example, the syllable “Maa” means “mother”, but if
it is pronounced with another tone it means “horse”. Mandarin has four
tones; Cantonese eight (some say nine).
There is even evidence that the language difference causes Chinese and
European brains to be organised in different ways. Dr Michael Wong Tak-hing,
of Hong Kong University, says his EEG studies in 1991 of Caucasian and
Chinese patients indicate that the differences between left and right-handed
Chinese people’s brains are significantly smaller than those between left
and right-handed Europeans. He speculates that this could be because Chinese
people are brought up reading an image-based language rather than the
alphabetic languages of the West, and this may exercise both sides of the
brain more.
This seems to be supported by an MRI brain study in Neuroimage, by
Richmond University in America. The 2004 report said that while in English
and other Indo-European languages, verbs light up the left prefrontal cortex
and nouns light up regions at the back of the brain, “nouns and verbs in
Chinese activate a wide range of overlapping brain areas in distributed
networks, in the left and the right hemispheres”.
But Chinese education does not have it all its own way. A study last November
by the Chinese Academy of Sciences cautioned that several surveys have found
that young people tend to be perilously overconfident, compared with
Europeans. The study, in the Journal of Psychology, speculated that
differences in national educational approaches mean that Europeans tend to
consider many more pros and cons when pondering a decision than Chinese
people. And the more you consider, the less confident you are of your
correctness. The researchers set confidence tests to 316 Chinese people
having a Westernised education in Singapore and 340 students in China having
a traditional education, and say the results supported their hypothesis.
However, cultures can also have a strong influence on the way that deep
psychological stress and psychosomatic illnesses manifest themselves.
Shen-k’uei, for example, is a form of depression-related anxiety among
Chinese men who come to believe that they are suffering a “life-threatening”
loss of semen leaking out in their urine, or are losing it because of
excessive masturbation or intercourse. Such beliefs are culturally deeply
ingrained. Traditional Chinese medicine teaches that semen contains vital
male energy, and losing too much of it can result in severe physical
depletion. Young people who think they are suffering from Shen-k’uei
complain of somatic symptoms, such as dizziness, backache, fatigue, insomnia
and physical thinness. Another anxiety-based disorder that derives from
Chinese ideas of chi energy is called Qi-gong psychotic reaction. It is
characterised by acute paranoid symptoms after overindulging in qi-gong, the
system of exercise that forms the basis of t’ai chi.
And California University researchers report in The Lancet the
appearance of a phenomenon called harvest moon syndrome. The Chinese harvest
moon festival, like Christmas, Passover and other big cultural and religious
ceremonies, involves an annual family get-together. The researchers found
that older Chinese people’s deaths fall by a third in the weeks before the
festival, and rise by a compensatory third in the weeks after. The biggest
dip in deaths is from strokes, followed by heart attacks and tumours.
Other days also carry such culturally based import that they can prove fatal.
Research in the British Medical Journalin 2001 examined the impact of
the number four on Chinese people’s health. It is an ill omen in Chinese and
Japanese culture, particularly because it is close in sound to “death” in
some SouthEast Asian languages. The study examined mortality rates on the
fourth day of each month and discovered that these are the peak days for
Chinese and Japanese cardiac fatalities in hospitals. The researchers at
California University, San Diego, called the phenomenon “the Hound of the
Baskervilles Effect”, after the fatally frightening dog from the Sherlock
Holmes book. The peak-death effect on the fourth of the month was not
followed by a compensatory dip in heart deaths on subsequent days among
Japanese and Chinese patients. So the effect might not simply hit people who
were going to have a heart attack anyway. It may prey on those who would
never have died around that time had they not been scared to death by
superstition.
We Westerners might look smugly at all of this. But Dr Ste-fan Cembrowicz, in
the medical newspaper Pulse, points out that we seem to have our own
culturally bound psychological illnesses. Intentional drug overdoses are
rare in some cultures, for instance among Africans in the Caribbean, but
they are very common in Europe. Likewise with anorexia, which appears to be
a profoundly Western problem. Unfortunately, however, some of our culturally
based problems are leaking eastwards. Reports of obesity in China are
rising, and last September, Wei Hao, a leading Chinese psychiatrist,
cautioned that China’s economic boom and increased Westernisation are
fuelling a rise in alcohol abuse.
He told the World Congress on Alcohol Research in Sydney that a WHO-sponsored
study of 27,000 people in the past two decades has seen a 10 per cent annual
rise in drinking rates, which has been accompanied by a steady increase in
alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver. China’s traditional emphasis on
moderate drinking accompanied by food is undergoing some big changes, with
young people learning from Western culture to drink alcohol on its own
without food, he said. And economic development is causing cultural changes:
“In business, alcohol can be used to improve the relationship; so it forces
you to drink a lot.”
Health in numbers
22% of the world’s population lives in China
72 years: Chinese life expectancy, compared with British life
expectancy of 76 years
30% of the world’s smokers are in China
3.4% of Chinese women smoke, compared with 34.4% of British women
50% of deaths in China are due to stroke, heart disease or cancer
$22 the amount the Chinese government spent per capita on health in
2003, compared to $2,081 in the UK
20% of the world’s obese people are Chinese
SOURCE: WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION, BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL, OFFICE FOR
NATIONAL STATISTICS
