This at first blush looks like one of those stories that is invented by “patriotic” scientists telling their political bosses what they want to hear. However, in this case I don’t think so.
A very long time ago, in a century far away (when I was still in college, in other words) I read Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan, the man who became famous for his insight that “the medium is the message.” One thing I never forgot was his explanation of the different effects produced by ideograms, on the one hand, and alphabets, on the other. He reminded us that the old myth said (more or less) that when Cadmus sowed letters, they sprang up as armed men. In other words, the process of reading letters instead of symbolic characters had a different and somewhat dehumanizing effect.
This was a decade or more before Julian Jaynes published The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which set people to thinking or at least talking about right brain/left brain. Put the two together, and read this story, and you start to worry about so many Chinese learning English….. And you start to wonder if someone could make the study of Chinese compulsory in Texas.
Chinese use more right brain than westeners
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-21 16:58:04
BEIJING, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) — Chinese scientists have discovered that Chinese use more right brain than Westerners due to the tonetic feature of the Chinese language.
Chinese use tone-sensitive right brains to process the tonetic changes of Chinese words in the early 200 milliseconds before left brain get in to treat the associate meaning, researchers with the University of Science and Technology of China said.
The processing of the Chinese language tones by left brain is similar to the way that music is handled. But most of the western languages, with only one tone for each word, are directly processed by the left brain, the researchers said.
“The study has revealed the work division of the two hemispheres of the human brain in processing languages, which will be conducive to the diagnosis and treatment of the Chinese patients suffering from the right brain damage or deafness,” said Professor Chen Lin, who leads the research team.
The study has also indicated that great attention should be paid to the potential of Chinese people’s right brains.
The result of the study was published on the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Scientists have discovered that each side of the brain has its unique and special abilities. The right side of the brain is intuitive, while the left side of the brain is logical.
Generally, every single Chinese character has four tones, each associate with different meanings. The complicated tonetic change is an important reason that makes Chinese one of the most difficult languages in the world.
April 10th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Interesting article. I wonder if this brain difference may in part be due to reading Chinese characters.
BTW I just read a really good follow up book to Jaynes’s ideas called “Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory Revisted.”