Question: Does the Behavior of the brain in Britain differ from the brain in other countries

Joseph Devlin answered on 17 Mar 2010:

Interesting question. The short answer is “no” — pretty much all human brains are anatomically and physiologically similar. There are, however, definite cultural influences on brains that come from the different experiences people have. So, for instance, I was involved in some research showing that learning to read has profound effects on brain structure. And depending on what language you learn to read, the brain solves the problem in slightly different ways.

Take English and Italian as an example. In English we have tons of words with crazy, inconsistent spellings (why don’t pint and hint rhyme?) whereas Italian has only a single, consistent system. If you know how letters relate to sounds in Italian, you can correctly pronounce Italian words. In English, though, sounding things out only works sometimes. So when Italians read written words, they rely much more heavily on the links between spelling and sound than English readers do. The differences are fairly subtle, but if you look for them you can find them.

So in short, there are no (meaningful) differences between brains at birth between people in different countries, but different experiences leave subtly different traces on the brain and some of these will be systematically different across countries, at least in adults.