A Remarkable Combination

It has been some time since I last posted. I've been on holidays from uni after a busy semester. Three subjects and a well earned 5.667 GPA in my masters of education course, no less. I am so proud of this achievement that it could take up the rest of this post, but on to more pressing matters. Another reason I've been M.I.A. is that I've been trying to annotate an article, Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychology Review, 108(2), pp.291-310. It may be the most important article for my future work, or at least an important base from which to start. Whilst moving in another direction, I obtained a copy of A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. It is a little bit scary how this book and this article complement each other and show a truely amazing way foward for everyone.
I will try to keep things as clear as possible as I write. At the end of my course I wrote to my lectures and thank them for their advice and asked for any hints I could use to improve my writing. I know, a bit of a sycophantic thing to do. The odd thing is that I really do want to improve my writing. I realized this when I discovered that I had gotten a 6 for my last assignment and I was disappointed. I only got one 6 (my highest score) in the three years of my undergraduate course, and now I'm disappointed with that grade. Anyway, Dr. Annette Woods, my excellent lecturer at QUT said that I think as I write, and this may happen here, and I'm not about to do the editing require to make it more understandable. I might do that if anyone reads this site.
Anyway, back to the action. As I was saying these two resources, the book and the article are trongly related to each other, without any explicit links between the two ideas. I also have Nisbett's (an author of the article mentioned above) book The Geography of Thought on order and will see how that ties in. Having read only a little of Nisbett's book, he does call for a combination of the thinking styles of East Asian and Westerners.
To explain myself a little bit. As you know, I am a teacher in Taiwan. Studying education has made me see that for the benefit of everyone, developing a "better" education system in Taiwan is advisable. The trouble is, as Nisbett et. al. described, people from different cultures may be disposed to deploying different cognitive and perceptual functions to the same stimulus. East Asians and Westerners possible differ more than an other two cultures.
My second area of interest is in the field of creativity. The need for education to embrace creativity at its core now is acute. See the lecture by Sir Ken Robinson and the presentation Did You Know? on the right. Pink's book is about embracing creativity (or right brain thinking), but not just in education (I believe, I'm only at page 20).
The points to be made from the first 20 pages, he talks about using the right side of one's brain. Western civilization has been "narrowly-reductive and deeply analytical," left-brain activities. Nisbett showed that Westerners are reductive and analytical and East Asians are more holistic. Pink sees holistic thinking as a characteristic of right brained thinking. Pink also states that the dominance of left brain thinking has been reinforced by our writing system, which requires our left hemisphere to move our eyes to read the words. East Asian writing systems go up and down and to the left (employing the right hemisphere). Pink also describes how the left hemisphere specializes in text, the right in context. Nisbett showed how East Asians consider the field (the context) before (or instead of) the object (the text).
I would love to know what your thoughts on this are.