Who You Are by Spivey Michael J.;

Author:Spivey, Michael J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mind; Self; Cognitive Science; Psychology; Philosophy of Mind; Neuroscience; Cognitive Linguistics; Embodied Cognition; Situated Cognition; Cognitive Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience; Social Psychology; Perception; Cognition; Psycholinguistics; Emergence; Self-Organization; Enactivism; Panpsychism; Consciousness; Linguistics; Neuropsychology; General Anthropology; Sociology; Ecology; Political Science; Theory of Economics; Biology; Inspiration & Spirituality; Self-Help; Science & Religion; Spiritual Self-Help; Personal Transformation; Cosmology
Publisher: MIT Press

Who Your Co-workers Are

Of course, there’s more to coordinating with people than simply doing the same things around the same time. Sometimes coordination involves doing the opposite thing at the same time. Think about lifting a large table to move it from one room to another. Usually one person stands at one end of the table and the other person stands at the other end, and they’re facing each other. They synchronize the lifting of the table, but then one person walks backward while the other person walks forward. Their legs are doing the opposite thing at the same time in order to coordinate on this shared task. If both tried to walk forward, no progress would be made. When coordinating with someone at work, you’re sometimes complementing rather than mimicking the other person’s actions.

Importantly, in order to accurately complement another person’s actions, you first need to anticipate that other person’s actions. You have to be mentally simulating their upcoming actions and how those actions will go along with your upcoming actions. Social neuroscientists Natalie Sebanz and Guenther Knoblich were able to show this complementarity that emerges between two minds while two people carried out a shared task on a computer. Their reaction times and their brain activity revealed that even though person 1 was only in charge of response A (with its own button press), they were nonetheless mentally taking into account response B, which was entirely person 2’s responsibility. That’s how teamwork works. You can’t just do your part of the job and nothing else. In order to time it right, you have to anticipate how your part fits in with what other people are doing. Recall how chapter 3 showed us that different parts of the brain can’t function like independent modules and get the job done right. Instead, they have to engage in a back-and-forth sharing of information so that the visual system can help the language system solve its puzzles and vice versa. Thus, those different subsystems begin to function as one system. By the same token, two or more people working together on a shared task have to engage in a back-and-forth sharing of information that forces each of them to understand a little bit about what the others are doing. They become, to some degree, one system.

For example, in a real-world scenario, cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins studied how the crew of a ship worked together, and he determined that each crewmember served a unique cognitive function for the whole. It was almost as if each crewmember was a brain region, and this conglomerate brain was what planned, navigated, and steered the actions of the ship. By complementing each other’s actions and serving as cognitive mechanisms for each other, the crew of a ship is able to make smart decisions and act on them in a timely manner, almost like a single mind. When a group interacts toward a shared goal, that group can be studied with many of the same cognitive analysis tools with which an individual human mind is studied.

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