Why do we experience culture shock?
Why do people process the same event so differently?
Why is code-switching so exhausting?
It’s because different people, especially from different cultures, have different minds—and shifting between them is taxing.
This is the main point of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 6th lesson.
I’m continuing with Barrett’s new book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (I’m working through chapters as part of the launch of the Being With podcast on neuroscience and faith).
Previous Posts:
- Your Brain Is Not For Thinking
- You Have One Brain (Not Three)
- Your Brain is a Network
- Your (Social) Brain Wires to the World
- Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything
- Your Brain Works With Other Brains
- Brains Build More Than One Kind of MIND
- Our Brains Create Social Reality
Forming a Mind
This and the next lesson (“Your Brain Creates Reality”) are the culmination of the previous chapters.
If our brains wire to the world through experience and social engagement, and if our brains learn to predict the world through past experience and engagement, and if our brains are secretly working with other brains, then all this will created a particular kind of mind.
“In short, a particular human brain in a particular human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will proceed a particular kind of mind” (100).
A careful reader will see that Barrett moves from talking about a brain to talking about a mind.
So she clarifies what she means.
“A mind is something that emerges from a transaction between your brain and your body while they are surrounded by other brains-in-bodies that are immersed in a physical world and constructing a social world” (100).
Ok, that sounds like a lot.
Basically, as Dan Siegel says, a mind is the physically embedded brain interacting with socially embedded relationships.
Mind = Embodied Brain + Embedded Relationships
What does this mean practically?
Not a Blank Slate
On the one hand, this means we (and our minds) are not “blank slates” that we form as we wish.
In a very real sense we don’t have control of our own minds.
Our minds are connected to our bodies and what is happening to it. And our minds are connected to our relationships and what is happening in them.
That doesn’t mean we have no control or agency. We just don’t have as much as we think and whatever control we have is more indirect than we like.
Not Universal Reason
On the other hand, if we aren’t a blank slate, we also aren’t preprogrammed with universal reason either.
The Enlightenment in the West sought a universal foundation for human thought and action, and proceeded with the assumption that humans had the same basic “reason” or “common sense”, even if they didn’t always choose to use it.
The assumption was (and often is) that we all have the same kind of mind.
But the truth is, humans do have the same kind of brain (roughly).
But not the same kind of mind.
As Barrett says, “We come into the world with a basic brain plan that can be wired in a variety of ways to construct different kinds of mind” (101). “Brains have a lot of common features; minds, less so, because minds depend in part on micro-wiring that is tuned and pruned by culture” (103).
Brains, Minds, and Legos
Basically, our brains are like a lego set.
We all begin with similar pieces. But then we tune and prune to the world (physically and socially), using some pieces but not others (and we eventually lose pieces under the couch and in the closet because we don’t use them).
The thing we build (or is built for us by others) becomes our mind. Our mind is made from similar building blocks. But often is purposes and processes are very different.
Body Budget and Culture Shock
Our brains are for controlling our body budget of energy (not mainly for thinking). And our brains do this through predicting the environment (socially and physically).
So what happens when ALL your predictions are faulty or misleading?
Well, your body budget is taxed…A LOT.
This is what happens in culture shock.
Our predictions and actions about how to respond to people, what food is, how and when to get places, how to find the bathroom, what needs to be cleaned or washed and what doesn’t, and so much more, all these things are WRONG or MISLEADING.
And it is exhausting.
It is exhausting because we brains are using extra energy to figure things out because our typically efficient predictions aren’t working and our body budget is making extra withdrawals.
This is why when you change cultures, or often move between cultures, you are more prone to get sick and/or depressed. This is the physical and emotional result of an overtaxed body budget.
What Does This Mean for Discipleship?
As I’ve said elsewhere, the development of a mind has always been a “brain-filling” or “brain-structuring” process—and this is a good and necessary thing.
In a cosmic-redemptive way, God is offering his mind to us, to restructure our brains to overcome sin and to become healthy and whole again. And this happens over time, through the story of our lives.
As Paul writes (italics added for emphasis):
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing, and perfect will. (Rom. 12:2)
Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters, and just as you have us as a model, keep your eyes on those who live as we do…Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. (Phil. 3:17; 4:9)
Don’t miss any neuroscience and faith summaries of Barrett’s work. Please subscribe to my newsletter (here or above in the sidebar) and/or listen to Being With: On Neuroscience and Faith.