Sunday, January 11, 2009

Fascination with "The Mind"

It is always interesting for me to think about how we get interested in the things that drive us, particularly the big decisions like where to go to school, what career to take, who to marry, what religion or philosophy to be guided by.

For example, my son Rolf wanted to be something very specific, and to my mind remarkably cool, an ethnomusicologist, from age 12 when he saw some mind blowingly different music in Brazil, to age 22, when he decided that, while that was cool, it wasn't pro-social enough. So he switched his interests to applying anthropology to making non-formal education in developing countries work better. Part of that had to do with confronting poverty as well as cool music in several experiences in Brazil, part of it had to do with what he learned in a very critical development curriculumn in college.

For me, I wanted to be a psychologist for quite a long time, from about age 14, when I read a book called "The Mind," part of a Time-Life series that I found in the high school library, to about 20, when I got terminally disgusted with social pyschology at Stanford University, after being associated with a couple of different experiments conducted by a rock star psychologist there, Phil Zimbardo. I was an undergrad research assistant to him in a couple of very deceptive experiments, then hit the ultimate wall as a volunteer subject in the pre-test to his (in)famous prison experiment. You can see more about the final version at http://www.prisonexp.org/. The pre-test was enough to sour me and send me off to check out more my other interests in international relations and media, which is where I ended up working and studying. Still, that interest in psychology, nourished by a book in the high school library, continues to intrigue. I am very happy that Rolf's wife, Kristy, my new daughter-in-law, is doing a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, so that there is someone around to talk to about it.

So I was very intrigued to read the cover story on today's New York Times' magazine, by Steven Pinker. He dives into the contribution of human genome study to the old question of how much of our nature and interests comes from nature/inherited characteristics and how much from nurture/environment, family, etc.

He notes, "Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question “Who am I?” — to ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.

Over the years I have come to appreciate how elusive the answers to those questions can be. During my first book tour 15 years ago, an interviewer noted that the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had dedicated his first book to his father, who took him to see the dinosaurs when he was 5. What was the event that made me become a cognitive psychologist who studies language? I was dumbstruck. The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But that response would not just have been charmless; it would also have failed to answer the question. Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me?

As I stared blankly, the interviewer suggested that perhaps it was because I grew up in Quebec in the 1970s when language, our pre-eminent cognitive capacity, figured so prominently in debates about the future of the province. I quickly agreed — and silently vowed to come up with something better for the next time. Now I say that my formative years were a time of raging debates about the political implications of human nature, or that my parents subscribed to a Time-Life series of science books, and my eye was caught by the one called “The Mind,” or that one day a friend took me to hear a lecture by the great Canadian psychologist D. O. Hebb, and I was hooked. But it is all humbug. The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/

Interesting that he was guided to his interest in psychology by the same book, only with him it stuck for a career. I think our ruminations about media effects tend to miss the books we read when we are young. I can think of how a number of books affected all sorts of attitudes and interests of mine, from my fascination with other cultures to what I think of the state of Israel. But more about that later.

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