Culture Influences Brain Cells

This is certainly intuitively believable for many of us, and so it's another example of the science confirming what we strongly suspected. And it's down to the mirror neuron system again from an experiment testing responses to people from differing cultures and racial backgrounds gesturing at a USAmerican test audience. The conclusion based on the results is stated in the article in this way: "it appears that neural systems supporting memory, empathy and general cognition encodes information differently depending on who's giving the information--a member of one's own cultural/ethnic in-group, or a member of an out-group, and that ethnic in-group membership and a culturally learned motor repertoire more strongly influence the brain's responses to observed actions, specifically actions used in social communication."
Culture is more deeply embedded in who we are than some might think. Taken with what I picked up and blogged yesterday, it amounts to recognising that different cultures produce different minds and brains. It indicates that in some, perhaps many, areas, culture plays a determinative role in behaviour, even seemingly unreflective behaviour.
ScienceDaily: Culture Influences Brain Cells: Brain's Mirror Neurons Swayed By Ethnicity And Culture: