Understanding the Human Mind

Why you shouldn’t trust what your brain is telling you

John Terrell, Gabriel Terrell, John Edward Terrell, Gabriel Stowe Terrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367855789
• eBook ISBN: 9781000093568
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Drawing on current research in anthropology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities, Understanding the Human Mind explores how and why we, as humans, find it so easy to believe we are right—even when we are outright wrong.

Humans live out their own lives effectively trapped in their own mind and, despite being exceptional survivors and a highly social species, our inner mental world is often misaligned with reality. In order to understand why, John Edward Terrell and Gabriel Stowe Terrell suggest current dual-process models of the mind overlook our mind's most decisive and unpredictable mode: creativity. Using a three-dimensional model of the mind, the authors examine the human struggle to stay in touch with reality—how we succeed, how we fail, and how winning this struggle is key to our survival in an age of mounting social problems of our own making.

Using news stories of logic-defying behavior, analogies to famous fictitious characters, and analysis of evolutionary and cognitive psychology theory, this fascinating account of how the mind works is a must-read for all interested in anthropology and cognitive psychology.

1

How Your Mind Works

Travels in Wonderland

As we have often done, the two of us were having breakfast on Saturday at our favorite morning place on Williamson (“Willy”) Street in Madison, Wisconsin. It was the middle of March several years ago. Our conversation went something like this, although we won’t swear we can remember it now, word for word.

“But, Pop, do you think I should trust him?”

“How should I know, Gabe? Isn’t this the question we all struggle with every time we have to work with anybody to get something done?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s face it: we may be the smartest animals in the world, but evolution hasn’t made us mind-readers. Like every other creature on Earth, however intelligent or not, all that any of us can do when we want to know for sure if others are telling us the truth is watch and listen to them. We can try to make an educated guess about what they are really thinking and intending to do. But that’s as far as it goes.”

“Yeah, I agree. But I think there’s more to it than that.”

“I think you just lost me, Gabe.”

“Don’t you recall that last week, you were telling me how hard it is, even for someone like you, who trained as an anthropologist, to feel confident that they have learned enough about the ways of people born and raised in another society to start seeing the world the way they do?”

“I stand by that.”

“You quoted what one of your professors back in graduate school said about what anthropologists do to decide if they should trust their insights into how other people see the world. They ask themselves two questions. Can you finally explain things and events the way they do? Can you act in ways those people see as right and proper?”

“Yes, that was Ward Goodenough at the University of Pennsylvania, and yes, that’s basically what he said” (Goodenough 1967; Terrell 2000).

“O.K., then here’s my point. If trusting other people is not about the truth of what they are thinking and saying, but instead only about whether we believe what they are saying and doing, what about ourselves? Should we even trust what our own brains are telling us?” (Carruthers 2017).

“Well, we know Freud didn’t seem to think so. Yet maybe the better question is can we trust ourselves? Is there anything about human nature and the brain that we should be worried about?”

That was back then. This is now. Both of us have since learned that the right answer to this last question is decidedly “yes.” We have written this book because the more we explored this timeless question, the more we saw that there are indeed good reasons not to trust even what your own brain is telling you about the world around you and about your travels through it from birth to death.

One reason is obvious once you hear it.

We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

A scull is a type of oar used to propel a boat through the water. The same word can also mean the boat itself, either a rowing boat designed for one person or a light racing boat, or shell, with one, two, or four rowers, each with two oars, one in each hand. Alternatively, of course, a skull is the bony casing surrounding the brain that guides its owner through life.

Although these two words—scull and skull—sound the same while obviously meaning two quite different things, we find it hard not to think of them both when we are thinking about what it means to be human. We have come to see the human skull, the cranium, as like a classic Old Town 3-person touring canoe, or perhaps the gondola of a hot air balloon floating through the air a thousand feet off the ground. Or more realistically, not as a touring canoe or a balloon’s basket but rather as a small yellow submarine with a crew of three inside named Sherlock, George, and Alice (we will have more to say about these three before we end this chapter).

Why a submarine? Because this select crew of three is hidden away and largely cut off from the world. Locked inside the confines of the human skull, they can only learn about what is happening outside their submarine from what is being piped in through their body’s senses, serving, figuratively speaking, as their periscope, sonar equipment, and radio transceiver.

Why are we telling you this? Because we are willing to bet you have never thought about your brain this way. We want to change that. Why? Because this is a book about human nature and the brain. History shows that what humans are like—or should be like—as a species has always been controversial. At times, disagreements about human nature have developed into deadly conflicts, lynchings, and tragic episodes of mass genocide. We do not think we need to argue that the human brain has more than a little to do with what makes us not only one of the Earth’s most successful species but perhaps also one of its most deadly. But what exactly is it about that juicy mass of brain tissue up there on top of our shoulders that lets us behave in such conflicting ways? And more to the point, why are the two of us so convinced that you should not trust even what your own brain is telling you?

Know Thyself

There is nothing new about asking what it means to be human. Consider the Ancient Greek aphorism γνῶθι σεαυτόν, “Know thyself.” This sounds like wise advice, but what, pray tell, is a self? How do you get to know it?

Similarly, in 1637, the great French philosopher René Descartes famously observed je pense, donc je suis, “I think, therefore I am” (Birhane 2017). This is one of the foundational ideas of modern Western philosophy, although it is usually rendered not in French but rather in Latin as cogito, ergo sum. It is comforting to be told in any language that we actually exist, and we are not merely a figment of someone else’s frenzied imagination. Yet what does this famous Frenchman’s observation tell us? Aren’t we left wondering what it means to think?

Scientists in recent decades have constructed laboratory machines that are nearly magical in how well they help us see past all the flesh and bone tissues surrounding the living human brain to discover what is happening physiologically therein when someone is asleep, awake, or daydreaming. These machines are a lot better than prying open a skull to take a look inside (Godwin et al. 2017), but it is not enough to see what is going on up there, however you decide to do it. The challenge lies in making sense of what you are seeing.¹

Questions and concerns such as these are what got both of us engaged in writing this book. We are convinced that nobody can understand how and why we behave the way we do as individuals and societies without knowing how the human brain works. Furthermore, nobody can understand how their brain works without also understanding how humans evolved biologically to become a strikingly social species (most species on earth are not social at all beyond getting together at least long enough to reproduce and, if need be, raise their young). Finally, and most important, nobody can understand why we humans are so often our own worst enemies without also understanding how evolution has inadvertently set out a dangerous trap that all of us can easily fall into.

What trap is this? Evolution has given us the brain power to see in our mind’s eye what may be “out there in the real world” at any given moment of the day or night that we need to be aware of. We are also smart enough to imagine what we could create out there if we put our talents and social skills as human beings together to reshape the world to suit our individual and collective needs and whims. This rosy picture, however, hides a trap: a substantial Catch-22 to all this evolved human cleverness.

What’s the catch? Endowing us with the talents—and hence, the freedom—to remake the world around us in the way we want it to be has also made it possible for each of us to overreach, stumble, ignore the warning signs of pending troubles, and ultimately fail. Furthermore, our biologically evolved ability to imagine in our mind’s eye what is not yet out there in the world but could be there if we made it happen means that evolution has also given us the ability to argue and even fight with one another, not only about how things could be but also about how they should be. Human history is full of arguments of this destructive kind, some of which have been deadly indeed. Arguments not about what is but about what ought to be.

Three Propositions

There is a saying in Latin, dating back at least to the mid-seventeenth century, that by now may sound clichéd but is true, nonetheless. Scientia potentia est, “knowledge is power.” The chances are good that nobody in their right mind easily accepts the possibly disturbing fact that their brain is so well sealed within a hard bony vault called the skull that they have no direct knowledge of the outside world. Yet, however hard this is to believe, what each of us knows about the world around us gets into our brain solely and simply in the form of electrical impulses filtering in through our bodily senses, those neural pathways that are popularly, although somewhat inaccurately, said to be five in number: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch (Reber et al. 2017). Or, said more graphically perhaps, like that crew of three traveling within our imaginary yellow submarine, the human brain learns about the outside world through impulses that have to be converted into useful information before they can be of any true value.

How this happens—how the brain transforms impulses into meaningful information—is still mostly a mystery even nowadays, despite the substantial advances that have been made in recent years in our scientific understanding of how the brain works as a biologically constructed thinking machine (Lupyan and Clark 2015). This is not, however, a book about the intricacies of modern neuroscience and its technological wizardry. Instead, we want to put on the table three basic propositions about what it means to be human. We will be using these propositions in the chapters ahead to explore both the strengths and the dangers of how the human brain engages with the world around us and with others of our kind.

First proposition. The most fundamental of our three propositions follows directly from our saying that the human skull is like a yellow submarine (or the small gondola of a hot air balloon). This first proposition may come across to you as little more than good old-fashioned common sense (Kandel 2019; Simon 1986).

We live in two different worlds at the same time.

One of these is the world outside of us that is tangible, risky, and demanding. The other world exists only in the brain’s private kingdom between our ears. This is a place where we spend much of our time, awake or asleep. Here, we form our opinions, however wise or silly. Reach conclusions sound or foolish. Imagine even impossible things and events. Decide on what, if any, actions to take that may knowingly or not impinge upon our safety, sanity, and survival.

Second proposition. The late Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon made major contributions to an astonishing range of academic fields, including economics, management theory, artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science, and philosophy. Half a century ago, he wrote insightfully about how the world we humans live in “is much more a man-made, or artificial, world than it is a natural world” (Simon 1969, 3). To use our own words rather than his, what all of us see around us may not be a figment of the human imagination, but it is largely a product of our own fertile imaginations, nonetheless. An obvious example would be what the island of Manhattan at the heart of New York City is like today and what it was like back in 1626, when, according to legend and maybe history, too, the Dutchman Peter Minuit purchased this now famous piece of real estate for 60 guilders worth of trade ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements: The Powers of More than Two
• Getting Started
• 1 How Your Mind Works: Travels in Wonderland
• 2 Models of the Human Mind: How Do We Think About Thinking?
• 3 Human Failings in Reasoning: Why Do You Trust Yourself?
• 4 The Great Human High-Five Advantage: What Makes Us Human?
• 5 The Brain As a Pattern Recognition Device: How Do You Know That?
• 6 The Brain As a Pattern Learning Device: Why Do We Have Habits?
• 7 The Brain As a Pattern Making Device: What Makes Us Creative?
• 8 The Impact of Creativity: How Did You Learn That?
• 9 Lies, Deceit, and Self-Deception: How Gullible Are You?
• 10 Human Isolation and Loneliness: Private Lives and Public Duties
• 11 Pros and Cons of Being Human: The War of the Worlds
• 12 Making Sense of Our Future Prospects: Are We an Endangered Species?
• Index