Z!MMERLY

“The sum effect of participation in such services as Google Buzz, Twitter and Facebook is to increase the rate at which we believe their is important news about ourselves to share. It is not sufficient to update our status once and leave it for days. The formal qualities of these services help persuade us that we have something new and important to say about ourselves every hour, or every 15 minutes, or every other minute.”

“Scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we (“we” being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The “me” circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.”