The theory of mind myth
Theory of mind is the psychological term for our belief that other people have emotions, beliefs, intentions, logic, and knowledge that may differ from our own.
That we have a folk psychology theory of other minds isn’t surprising. By nature, we are character analysts, behavioural policemen, admirers and haters. We embrace like minds, and go to war against contrarians. Mind-reading is our social glue, guiding virtually all of our daily interpersonal interactions. When trying to decide whether or not a potential gun owner is prone to violence, a mental patient is suicidal, or a presidential candidate is truthful, we are at the mercy of our thoughts about others.
But, argues neurologist Robert Burton, former associate director of the department of neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center at Mount Zion, “Even experts can’t predict violence or suicide. Surely we’re kidding ourselves that we can see inside the minds of others.”
Here’s where psychological thrillers or literature in general comes in.
Conjuring a different view of the world is a rare talent requiring an extraordinary leap of imagination: Hamlet, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are artistic one-offs based not on deep understanding, but yarns we spin about each other’s intentions and motivations. We make up stories about our spouses, our kids, our leaders, and our enemies. Inspiring narratives get us through dark nights and tough times, but we’ll always make better predictions guided by the impersonal analysis of big data than by the erroneous belief that we can read another’s mind.
Sensitivity Readers! What Are They Good For? (A Lot.)
For the uninitiated, sensitivity readers are people from marginalized backgrounds who vet manuscripts to ensure that their representation of underrepresented groups is both accurate and respectful. Unfortunately, these readers, who should be universally celebrated and appreciated, have instead been at the heart of a heated argument …
Does Literature Help Us Live?
Tim Parks, at great length, considers the question of whether literature revolves around this premise:
Generalization is treacherous, but let’s posit that at the center of most modern storytelling, in particular most literary storytelling, lies the struggling self, or selves, individuals seeking some kind of definition or stability in a world that appears hostile to such aspirations: life is precarious, tumultuous, fickle, and the self seeks in vain, or manages only with great effort, to put together a personal narrative that is, even briefly, satisfying.
At Edinburgh Fringe, a Spotlight on Mental Health
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, a sprawl of multidisciplinary entertainment that transforms Scotland’s capital for several weeks every August.
Over the past several years “mental health has emerged as a prominent topic at the Fringe.” But:
The dark paradox is that for all the opportunities the Fringe provides to stage works about mental health, it is taxing for the mental health of its performers. The hours are long and the costs are high.
Meet a new kind of book, designed for the age of Peak TV
Constance Grady describes her encounter with Bookburners:
Bookburners was one of the first works published by Serial Box, a service that aims to become the HBO of serialized fiction; I was reading a novel/TV show hybrid, a book that was designed to read like a season of television. Its very existence displayed a major reversal of how we’ve traditionally thought about these two media: TV once aspired to be called “novelistic,” but now, in an age in which TV is increasingly described as “better than books,” here was a book built to act like a TV show.
© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown
