The Brain, the Mind and the Self by Arnold Goldberg

Author:Arnold Goldberg [Goldberg, Arnold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138788329
Published: 2019-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

Mind reading

Mind reading, along with a host of related terms such as mentalization, belong to a category of cognition that too is often collapsed as being equivalent to empathy. However, it may be useful to see its growth as at times being independent and at times as combined with affect. Michael Lewis reviews the development of “knowing” in children (Lewis, 1993). He lists four levels of what he terms the “knowing,” which prevails from birth to 18 months, followed by the achievement of knowing what others know, up to and including knowing that others know what you know. Many cognitive psychologists have contributed to the study of both how we read our own mind by way of introspection and how we read others’ minds (Carruthers, 2009). At some point in the descriptions and discussions of these topics mention is made of the emotion associated with this knowledge, and often there is a switch in the vocabulary from knowing to empathy. Imagine the following scene of a person descending in an elevator with a glass door and seeing a woman holding a child’s hand with her head down. She is preparing to enter the elevator as soon as it descends and the door opens, but a man inside the elevator sees her and concludes that she will walk right into him unless he alerts her. Now he is clearly reading her mind, but the question arises as to whether he is empathic with her. If he were to know that she was on her way to visit her sick husband in the hospital, he would know more and perhaps be able to “feel” along with his cognition. At least in theory we are able to isolate the knowledge from the affect, and to insist that empathy needs both. One may call both scenarios as indicative of empathy, but they are different appraisals and do need to be distinguished. Indeed some distinguish cognitive empathy from emotional empathy.

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