Mental Disorders

At the “age of the brain,” one would expect the public to view psychiatric disorders as “diseases like all others.” But mental illness still carries a significant social stigma that deprives them of employment, housing, and social opportunities. Invoking the brain as the source of disease helps reduce stigma, but it elicits curious fatalistic reactions. People believe that if the disease is “in the brain,” then it is more severe, incurable, and resistant to psychotherapy. And it is not only the general public that is taken by such misconceptions. Patients believe the same, and so do even trained clinicians. Why do psychiatric disorders elicit such persistent misconceptions? No one would shun a cancer patient because she has a tumor in her breast. Why shun the sufferer of a disorder that ravages the brain? And why believe brain diseases are incurable? This chapter traces the misconceptions of brain disorders to the core knowledge of Dualism and Essentialism. Dualism prompts us to presume that the mind and matter don’t mix and match; if the disease is “in your brain matter,” then, in our intuitive psychology, ephemeral “talk therapy” won’t do. Essentialism further compels us to believe that what’s “in” our material body is innate, hence, immutable, so biology is truly destiny. Thus, the same core knowledge principles that plague our self-understanding in health also derail our reasoning about psychiatric disease.

Our Big Hearts

Can you tell what a stranger feels just by looking at their face? Could you distinguish fear from anger even in a person from an entirely unfamiliar culture (without having the opportunity to learn about it from experience)? Laypeople assume they can, because they believe that emotions are inborn, and they are universally imprinted on the body, both externally, on the face, and internally (I sense anxiety in the rumbling of my gut). In fact, people believe that emotions are innate precisely because they believe that emotions are “in the body.” So strong is their conviction that they will insist on their belief even when told that the emotions in question are in fact acquired. Our tendency to view “warm” feelings as embodied and innate is the exact mirror image of our tendency to view “cold” concepts as ephemeral and disembodied. A review of the scientific literature reveals that similar presumptions also plague the debate on universal emotions in affective science. Chapter 10 shows how Essentialism (a principle invoked to explain our aversion to innate ideas) also promotes the promiscuous presumption of innate emotions by laypeople and scientists alike.

The Social World

This chapter provides a very brief overview of the social capacities of young infants. Specifically, we the author ask whether infants instinctively know that (human) agents are distinct from objects. new see that newborn infants spontaneously imitate agents; they follow their gaze, and they selectively respond to human faces, but not objects. A few months later, infants also seem to know that (unlike objects), the behavior of agents is driven by their beliefs and goals, and they spontaneously prefer “good” agents (those that help others) to “bad” ones (those that hinder others from attaining their goals). These results suggest that young infants possess intuitive knowledge of psychology, distinct from their naïve physics.

It’s in My Bones

When I point to an object, you and I can agree on what it is (a red, round cup). How does our brain (matter) represent such notions? And how do we (distinct material bodies) apparently converge so we can talk about the same things? Cognitive scientists and philosophers have long assumed that people share abstract concepts (e.g., a cup); to explain how such abstract concepts can give rise to thinking, they further proposed the computational theory of mind. But theories of “embodied cognition” assert that cognition is all “in people’s bones.” What we know as a cup is not an abstract notion but rather the bodily experiences of our sensory and motor interactions with a cup—its shiny color, how it feels in our hands, the smoothness of its surface, its weight, and shape. I suggest that “Embodiment” is alluring because it promises to resolve the mysteries of Dualism (how can material bodies encode the immaterial notion of a cup?) and the origins of ideas (how do we all converge on an understanding that allows us to talk about the same things?). The solution is strikingly simple—just remove the “mind” from the equation. If there is no (immaterial) knowledge, then we no longer need to worry about how knowledge arises from the body and how knowledge can be learned. As discussed in the previous chapter, people erroneously believe that “if it’s in my body” then “it’s inborn.” Dualism and essentialism thus explain some of the lure of embodied cognition.

A Perfect Storm

Having named the storm makers (the twin principles of Dualism and Essentialism) and described their distractive potential, Chapter 8 moves to track the two forces in action in a laboratory setting. The first set of experiments tests the effects of Dualism, showing that people do, in fact, believe that traits that are considered “ideas” must be immaterial. The second examines whether participants believe that immaterial traits cannot be innate, as would be required by Essentialism. Next, we chase the storm itself. As a proof of our forecasting skills, we demonstrate that it is possible to change the storm’s course (people’s intuitions about nativism) by tweaking its ingredients. The antinativist bias can be heightened in a laboratory setting by increasing the perceived distance between mind and body (as in Dualism), and it can be lessened by suggesting that innate biological traits have a material basis in the human body (as in Essentialism). Together, these experiments demonstrate that antinativism is an inevitable byproduct of the clash between these two principles of core knowledge. Having exposed our blindness to what we know, the second part of the book proceeds to explore the implications of this thesis to who we think we are. We consider a vast number of social and personal matters, including our thoughts and feelings, our reasoning about the brain in health and disease, what happens when we die, and our free will.

Know Thyself

Remy, the Harvard Humanities cat, spends his days amidst Harvard’s academic towers, blissfully oblivious to his intellectual surroundings. It is obvious to us that Remy suffers certain cognitive limitations of which he is entirely unaware. After all, we are humans, whereas Remy was born a cat. That a pet might experience a certain level of cognitive blindness is an idea we accept with equanimity. But we are far less comfortable with the thought that we might suffer from similar cognitive limitations ourselves. Logic, however, compels us to entertain this as a distinct possibility. Having recognized that biology can innately limit other species’ cognitions and that we too are biological kinds, blindness could very well obscure human minds. Fear of blindness goes throughout our intellectual history all the way to the ancient Greeks. In this book, we see that, just as the Greek feared, we are oblivion to our own human nature, and our blindness is in our fate. It emanates from human nature itself.

Once We’re No More

Woody Allen has famously said he is not afraid of dying; he just doesn’t want to be there when it happens. It’s no wonder his words struck a chord—“not being” is a scary proposition. Yet many Americans believe that their psyches will persist after the demise of their bodies. And it’s not only religious devotees who believe in the afterlife; young children say the same, and so do adults and children in other societies, including even those who are self-described “extinctivists.” Our afterlife beliefs, however, are remarkably inconsistent. On the one hand, we state that some aspects of our minds are immaterial, inasmuch as they survive our bodies. But on the other hand, we believe that some of these seemingly immaterial properties of the dead act like matter; for example, they are contagious, much like germs or excrement. Chapter 14 considers our views of what happens once we are no more. We will see that the collision between Dualism and Essentialism—the twin forces that stir up our misconceptions about our origins—are also responsible for these mistaken beliefs about our demise.

Innateness Stories

Innate knowledge—the possibility that certain notions might be inborn in us simply because we are humans—has been the topic of endless controversy throughout our intellectual history. This chapter reviews some of these exchanges in philosophy and in modern cognitive and brain sciences. But these discussions are not the sole purview of academia. Laypeople also have some strong opinions on such matters. This chapter thus begins by describing some of our nativist intuitions. We next contrast these views with science. While laypeople maintain that knowledge cannot be innate, the results emerging from science suggest that innateness is a viable possibility. What is the source of our antinativist intuitions? We explore several explanations, and in short order, the conclusions point back right at innate knowledge itself. We see that the very principles that make the human mind tick (principles that are likely innate) can explain why people are reluctant to accept that knowledge can be innate.

Land of the Free

Having seen how Dualism and Essentialism toy with our understanding of our beginning and end, health and disease, Chapter 15 turns to examine how these colored lenses distort our view of our free will and the self. Whether free will truly exists is not a matter I will decide here, but whether we think it does is entirely within this chapter’s purview. When I believe I have freely chosen to lift my finger, I essentially believe in three things: first, that I can tell whether I did it; second, that I can tell whether I consciously willed the act; and third, that there is a single, unitary, willing ”me.” All three beliefs are demonstrably wrong. Dualism and Essentialism are again to blame.

Insane About the Brain

As the discoveries from neuroscience pour in, the newspaper headlines capture our imagination. They announce that “Musicians’ Brains Really Work Differently” and promise to tell us “How Learning a New Language Actually Rewires the Brain.” What is this hype all about? Do you really need a brain scan to tell that a musician’s brain is different than a nonmusician’s? Cann’t you hear the difference right from the first sound? And don’t we all know that learning a language happens “up north”? It is not the science or technology that attracts our attention, nor is it their aesthetics. Images of genes, proteins, and viruses have no less scientific significance and visual appeal, but they don’t mesmerize us in the same way. Yet we incorrectly believe that evidence from neuroscience is stronger than the results from cognitive experiments. In fact, people fall for “brain stories” even when these accounts are clearly fallacious. Why do we blindly follow the brain? This chapter traces the allure of neuroscience to Dualism. The Dualist view condemns us to an eternal state of wonder because we fail to grasp how “thinking” (e.g., of a cup) can command changes in our material body (e.g., I move my hand to grab it)—how the immaterial mind can effect change in matter. Brain scans alleviate the dissonance by presenting us with tangible proof that thinking is material. The mind–body dissonance that plagues our reasoning about our healthy selves also derails our reasoning about a number of psychiatric conditions, discussed in the next chapters.