The Element (21 page)

In the last few years there has been a series of fascinating studies into differences in visual perception between people from the West and from East Asia. These studies suggest that the cultures we grow up in affect the basic processes by which we see the world around us. In one such study, Westerners and Asians were asked to look at a series of photographs and to describe what they saw. A number of marked differences emerged. In essence, Westerners tend to focus more on the foreground of the pictures and on what they consider the subject. Asians focus more on the whole image, including the relationships between the different elements. For example, one photograph showed a jungle scene with a tiger. Typically, the Western observers, when asked what they saw, said, “A tiger.” To Western readers of this book, that may seem reasonable enough. However, Asian observers typically said, “It’s a jungle with a tiger in it,” or “It’s a tiger in a jungle.” The difference is significant, and it relates to larger cultural differences in the Western and Asian worldviews.

In Asian art there is often much less emphasis on portraiture and the individual subject of the sort that is common in Western art. In Asian cultures, there is less emphasis on the individual and more on the collective. Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks has emphasized the importance of critical reasoning, logical analysis, and the separation of ideas and things into categories. Chinese philosophy is not based as much on logic and deductive reasoning and tends to emphasize relationships and holism. These differences in perception may lead to differences in memory and judgment. At least one study suggests that over time they may also lead to structural differences in the brain.

Researchers in Illinois and Singapore monitored brain activity in young and elderly volunteers as they looked at a series of images with different subjects and backgrounds. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they focused on the part of the brain known as the lateral occipital complex, which processes visual information about objects. All the younger participants showed similar brain activity, but there were marked differences in neural responses between the older Western and Asian observers. In the Westerners, the lateral occipital complex remained active, while in the Asian participants it responded only minimally.

Dr. Michael Chee is a professor with the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in Singapore and coauthor of the study. He concluded, “The parts of the brain involved in processing background and objects are engaged differently across the two sets of elderly people coming from different geographical and—by inference—cultural backgrounds.” Dr. Denise Park is professor of psychology at the University of Illinois and a senior researcher on the project. In her view, these different results may be because East Asian cultures “are more interdependent and individuals spend more time monitoring the environment and others. Westerners focus on individuals and central objects because these cultures tend to be independent and focused more on the self than others.” She says that these studies show that culture can sculpt the brain.

Whether and to what extent this happens is now attracting a wider field of researchers. What is already clear is that what we actually see of the world is affected by culture, not only what we think of what we see. Culture conditions all of us in ways that are imperceptible.

All cultures have an unwritten “survival manual” for success, to quote cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille. The rules and guidelines are transparent to most of us (if not to the thong man), and those who move from one culture to another can gain insight into the different rules and guidelines relatively easily. This survival manual comes from generations of adaptation to the particular climate in which the culture resides. But in addition to helping those within the culture thrive, it also sets out a series of constraints. Such constraints can inhibit us from reaching our Element because our passions seem inconsistent with the culture.

The great social movements are those that are stimulated when the boundaries are broken. Rock music, punk, hip-hop, and other great shifts in the social culture usually derive their energy from young people looking for some alternative way of being. Youthful rebellion often expresses itself through distinctive styles of speech and dress codes, which usually turn out to be just as conformist and orthodox within their subculture as they are at odds with the dominant culture they’re trying to escape. It’s very hard to pass as a hippie if you’re wearing an Armani suit.

All cultures—and subcultures—also embody systems of constraints that can inhibit individuals from reaching their Element if their passions are in conflict with their context. Some people born in one culture end up adopting another because they prefer its sensibilities and ways of life, like cultural cross-dressers; a French person may become an Anglophile, or an American a Francophile. Like people who change religions, they can become more zealous about their adopted culture than those who were born into it.

The urban culture may not be best for someone who wants to run a small shop where he knows everyone’s name. Parts of heart-land American culture are not prime territory for those who want careers as scathing political comics. This is why Bob Dylan had to get out of Hibbing, and why Arianna Stasinopoulos wanted to leave Greece. Finding your Element sometimes requires breaking away from your native culture in order to achieve your goals.

Zaha Hadid, the first woman ever to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, grew up in Baghdad in the 1950s. Iraq was a different place then, much more secular and more open to Western thought. During this time, there were many women in Iraq developing ambitious careers. But Hadid wanted to be an architect, and she found no female role models of this sort in her homeland. Driven by her passions, Hadid moved first to London and then to America, where she studied with the greatest architects of her time, honed a revolutionary style, and, after a rocky start—her work requires considerable risky conceptual leaps, which many clients were loath to make at first—built some of the most distinctive structures in the world.

Her work includes the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, which the
New York Times
called “the most important new building in America since the Cold War.” Moving out of her culture and into a milieu that celebrated invention gave Hadid the opportunity to soar. If she’d stayed in Iraq, she might have had a good career, at least until political circumstances changed for women. But she would not have found her Element in architecture, because her native culture simply didn’t afford women that option.

The contagious behavior of schools of fish, insect swarms, and crowds of people is generated by close physical proximity. For most of human history, cultural identities have also been formed through direct contact with the people who are physically nearest to us: small villages, the local community. Large movements of people once were limited to invasions, military conquests, and trade, and these were the main ways in which cultural ideas were disseminated and different languages and ways of life imposed on other communities.

All of this has changed irreversibly in the last two hundred years or so with the growth of global communications. We now have patterns of contagious behavior being generated on a massive scale through the Web. Second Life has millions of people online from different parts of the world potentially affecting how they each think and taking on new virtual identities and roles.

Many of us now live like Russian dolls nestled in multiple layers of cultural identity. I was amused to read recently, for example, that nowadays being British “means driving home in a German car, stopping off to pick up some Belgian beer and a Turkish kebab or an Indian takeaway, to spend the evening on Swedish furniture, watching American programs on a Japanese TV.” And the most British thing of all? “Suspicion of anything foreign.”

The complexities and fluidity of contemporary cultures can make it easier to change context and break away from the pressures of groupthink and feeling stereotyped. They can also make for a profound sense of confusion and insecurity. The message here isn’t as simplistic as “Don’t let anything get in your way.” Our families, friends, culture, and place in the human community are all important to our sense of fulfillment, and we have certain responsibilities to all of them. The real message here is that, in seeking your Element, you’re likely to face one or more of the three levels of constraint—personal, social, and cultural.

Sometimes, as Chuck Close found, reaching your Element requires devising creative solutions to strong limitations. Sometimes, as we learned from Paulo Coelho, it means maintaining a vision in the face of vicious resistance. And sometimes, as Zaha Hadid showed us, it means walking away from the life you’ve known to find an environment more suited to your growth.

Ultimately, the question is always going to be, “What price are you willing to pay?” The rewards of the Element are considerable, but reaping these rewards may mean pushing back against some stiff opposition.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Do You Feel Lucky?

BEING GOOD AT SOMETHING and having a passion for it are essential to finding the Element. But they are not enough. Getting there depends fundamentally on our view of ourselves and of the events in our lives. The Element is also a matter of attitude.

When twelve-year-old John Wilson walked into his chemistry class at Scarborough High School for Boys on a rainy day in late October 1931, he had no way of knowing that his life was about to change completely. The class experiment that day was to show how heating a container of water would bring oxygen bubbling to the surface, something students at this school and at schools all around the world had been doing for a very long time. The container the teacher gave John to heat, however, was not like the containers students everywhere had used. Somehow, this container mistakenly held something more volatile than water. It turned out that the container had the wrong solution because a laboratory assistant had been distracted and put the wrong label on the bottle. And when John heated it with a Bunsen burner, the container exploded, shattering glass bottles in the vicinity, destroying a portion of the classroom, and pelting the students with razor-edged shards. Several students came away from this accident bleeding.

John Wilson came away from it blinded in both eyes.

Wilson spent the next two months in the hospital. When he returned home, his parents attempted to find a way to deal with the catastrophe that had befallen their lives. But Wilson did not regard the accident as catastrophic. “It did not strike me even then as a tragedy,” he said once in an interview with the
Times
of London. He knew he had the rest of his life to live, and he did not intend to live it in an understated way. He learned braille quickly and continued his education at the esteemed Worcester College for the Blind. There, he not only excelled as a student but also became an accomplished rower, swimmer, actor, musician, and orator.

From Worcester, Wilson studied law at Oxford. Away from the protected environs of a school set up for blind students, he needed to contend with a busy campus and the very active streets in the vicinity. Rather than relying on a walking stick, though, he relied on an acute sense of hearing and what he called his “obstacle sense” to keep him out of harm’s way. At Oxford, he received his law degree and set out to work for the National Institute for the Blind. His real calling, however, was still waiting for him.

In 1946, Wilson went on a fact-finding tour of British territories in Africa and the Middle East. What he found there was rampant blindness. And unlike the accident that cost him his eyesight, the diseases that affected so many of these people were preventable with the proper medical attention. For Wilson, it was one thing to accept his own fate and quite another to allow something to continue when it could be fixed so easily. This moved him to action.

The report Wilson delivered upon his return led to the formation of the British Empire Society for the Blind, now called Sight Savers International. Wilson himself served as the director of the organization for more than thirty years and accomplished remarkable things during his tenure.

His work often led him to travel more than fifty thousand miles a year, but he considered this an essential part of the job, believing that he needed to be present in the places where his organization’s work was being done. In 1950, he and his wife lived in a mud hut in a part of Ghana known as “the country of the blind” because a disease that came from insect bites had blinded 10 percent of the population. He set his team to work on developing a preventative treatment for the disease, commonly known as “river blindness.” Using the drug Mectizan, the organization inoculated the children in the seven African countries stricken with the disease and all but eradicated it. By the early 1960s, river blindness was overwhelmingly under control. It is no exaggeration to say that generations of African children can thank the efforts of John Wilson for their sight.