Mind Hacks

Chapter 10. Other People: Hacks 93–100

We don’t live in a lifeless world—we live in a world of other people. It’s other people, not rocks or trees, that have minds of their own, minds just as capable as ours. It’s other people with whom we gang together to fight off threats, build knowledge, build cities, and sustain life. It’s other people we need to fit in with.

A good deal of this book has been about the patterns of the world as they’re reflected in our minds, as assumptions and expectations. Assumptions like the direction of sunlight, as comes through in our specialized routines for processing shadows on objects [[Hack #20]]. And, to pick another example, our observation and subsequent assumption that cause and effect tend to sit together in both time and space [[Hack #79]], which we use as a heuristic to make sense out of the universe. These are good assumptions to make. It’s their very robustness that has lodged them in the functioning of the brain itself.

So how do our assumptions about other people, as constituents of our universe, manifest themselves in the deep operations of the mind? We’ll look at how we have a dedicated module for processing faces [[Hack #93]] and how eye gaze tugs at our reaching response [[Hack #97]] just like any physical location Simon Effect task [[Hack #56]].

We’ll look at how we signal emotion, how emotion is induced, and how we use it to develop common feeling in a group [[Hack #94] and [Hack #95]].

And, speaking of fitting in, we’ll finish by seeing ...