When psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese observers instead commented on the background environment -- and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Nisbett shows in <I>The Geography of Thought,</I> people 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. <I>The Geography of Thought</I> documents Professor Nisbett's groundbreaking research in cultural psychology, addressing questions such as:<P><UL TYPE=DISC><LI>Why did the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and arithmetic, but not geometry, the brilliant achievement of such Greeks as Euclid?<LI>Why do East Asians find it so difficult to disentangle an object from its surroundings?<LI>Why do Western infants learn nouns more rapidly than verbs, when it is the other way around in East Asia?</UL><P>At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, <I>The Geography of Thought</I> offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that might be able to span it.