And that brings us back to the Chinese mother. Not only can people see events in these two different ways – they also see themselves differently. I can see me as a central, single ego, controlling my destiny and my environment. Or I can see me as a sort of node in a network – as a me which exists in a context, not independently of it. When Westerners think about their selves and their mothers, there is no overlap in the parts of the brain they use, but for the Chinese, their individual self is physically embedded in their brains’ representation of their mothers. The Chinese self, then, is part of a greater whole, not a clear and distinct entity: this is a collectivist psychology. Neurologically speaking, a collectivist view of the self is probably a more accurate picture than the Western individual notion. While in the West, thanks to St Bernard and his followers, we have come to give the self an almost religious significance and value, in Buddhist and Confucian thinking the self is rather a transient and changing phenomenon – in some respects it is an illusion. At the very least, ‘I’ do not exist outside of the network of relationships that I have with other people and if I had been brought up as a feral child with no contact with other people I would probably not have much of a ‘self’: ‘I’ exist in the reflections of the minds of the people, particularly of those who raised me.
The Winner Effect: The Neuroscience of Success and Failure