Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett;

Author:Lisa Feldman Barrett;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358157120
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Published: 2020-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Lesson No.

6

Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind

WHEN PEOPLE FROM the island of Bali in Indonesia are afraid, they fall asleep. Or at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do.

Falling asleep might seem like a strange thing to do when you’re afraid. If you’re from a Western culture, you’re supposed to freeze on the spot, widen your eyes, and gasp. You can also squeeze your eyes shut and scream, like a teenage babysitter in a bad horror movie. Or you can run away from whatever is scaring you. These behaviors are Western stereotypes for proper fear behavior. In Bali, the stereotype is to fall asleep.

What kind of mind snoozes out of fear? A kind of mind that’s different from yours.

Human brains make many different kinds of minds. I don’t just mean that your mind is different from your friends’ and neighbors’. I’m talking about minds that have different basic features. For example, if you are from a Western culture, like I am, your mind has features called thoughts and emotions, and the two feel fundamentally different from each other. But people who grow up in Balinese culture, as well as in the Ilongot culture in the Philippines, do not experience what we Westerners call cognition and emotion as different kinds of events. They experience what we would call a blend of thinking and feeling, but to them it’s a single thing. If you find this kind of mental feature hard to imagine, that’s okay. You don’t have a Balinese kind of mind.

As another example, Western minds often try to guess what other people are thinking or feeling. This mental inference is such a basic and valuable skill in our culture that when we encounter people who are not so good at it, we may see them as abnormal instead of merely different. But in some other cultures, attempts to peer into another person’s mind are considered unnecessary. The Himba people of Namibia often figure each other out by observing each other’s behavior, not by inferring a mental life behind that behavior. If you smile at an American, his brain might guess that you’re happy to see him and predict that you’ll say hello. If you smile at a Himba, his brain might predict only the hello (moro, in their language).

Even within a single culture, we find different kinds of minds. Think about the minds of great mathematicians who can conceive of calculations that other minds cannot. Or think about the mind of Greta Thunberg, a teenager who has sailed around the world offering tough talk about climate change. Thunberg’s mind is on the autism spectrum, and she says things that others aren’t willing to say. She calls her condition a “superpower” that helps her continue her mission when people criticize her efforts.

Think also about people who suffer from schizophrenia and experience severe, ongoing hallucinations. Today, people with this kind of mind are considered mentally ill, but centuries ago, they might have been called prophets or saints. Hildegard of Bingen,

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