By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to catergories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories or on formal logic it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a 'middle way' between opposing thoughts. As a result, East Asian thought is 'holistic' - drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. For, as Professor Nisbett shows in 'The Geography of Thought,' people actually think about - and even see - the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived into the modern world. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment - and the different 'seeings' are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Everyone knows that when a Chinese and an American look at the same painting, they see the same painting.But what if everyone is wrong? Everyone knows that a logically true statement is true in English, German, or Hindi.

Everyone knows that whatever the skin color, nationality, or religion, every human being uses the same tools for perception, for memory, and for reasoning. Everyone knows that while different cultures may think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking.

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