The author of this book is psychologist Paul Bloom (Quebec, 1963). For years he has been a professor of Introduction to Psychology and this book is the fruit of his knowledge and teaching of the history of this science as well as of his reflection on questions that have troubled humanity since, perhaps, always. He defines himself as a researcher, especially interested in the human mind, ultimately, what makes us human.
He recalls that a specific trigger for his fascination with research and these topics was reading “The Origin of the Universe” (1997) by theoretical physicist John Barrow, referring to events that occurred more than fourteen billion years ago. Although humans were not present at that origin, we are part of that universe.
Our origins, who we are, who we have become, continue to be recurring themes in the development of human thought itself and this question may have already been asked by our Neanderthal ancestors, present in Europe 400,000 years ago.
In its more than 400 pages, it condenses and analyzes in five parts the structuring themes of what it defines, but does not exhaust: what is proper to the human mind. The parts have their own chapters, each numbered in a correlative sequence from 1 to 15, clearly forming a continuum. Thus, they are links in the same chain and, as readers, they frequently alert us not to expect anything very definitive, but to move forward with partial answers that require new questions.
Specifically, in this book I thought it was important to point out that the index is different from the usual, as it is a kind of route to follow “to read it better”, understanding that the definitive answers are few and that the new questions are those that allow us to deepen our knowledge. That is the reason for transcribing it.
Part 1, The Foundations (pp. 15-104). 1) The brain creates thought; 2) Consciousness; 3) Freud and the subconscious; 4) Skinner’s revolution.
Part 2, Thought (pp. 105-226). 5) Piaget’s project; 6) The talking ape; 7) The world in your head; 8) The rational animal.
Part 3, The appetites (pp. 227-268). 9) The mind and the heart.
Part 4, Bonds (pp. 269-322). 10) A Brief Note on a Crisis; 11) Gregarious Animals; 12) Are We All a Little Racist?
Part 5, The Differences (pp. 323-411). 13) What Makes Us Unique; 14) The Troubled Mind); 15) The Good Life.
Human development has undoubtedly occurred in changing contexts that require adaptations and, therefore, diverse responses, and in which beliefs, ideologies, social changes, values, accumulated knowledge, traditions and transformations, culture, time and space, and daily needs are intertwined. And all of this shapes what we are, although in reality it is more like “what we are being.”
It is a book that illuminates, challenges, astonishes, and raises more doubts than certainties, because the subject requires it: to unravel something of what we call ‘the human mind’. I want to highlight some points, references, quotes, that I consider especially significant, and where the role of the brain, being a mass of flesh and fat – as the author says – generates something so different from that unpleasant materiality to see, and that although we cannot see or touch that something different, we can talk about it.
A quote from The Merchant of Venice, “Tell me where passion is born, / In the head or in the heart?” (1, p. 24). Even today, several centuries later, we can still ask ourselves the same question, because we do not have a definitive answer.
On our relationships with others, what we call conscience: “The exercise of putting ourselves in another person’s shoes, what we often call empathy, actually fails when we try to make sense of the consciousness of people who are very different from us. Can you imagine what it’s like to be Attila or someone suffering from paranoid schizophrenia or a monkey?” (2, p. 47)
On the subject of language, “much remains to be said about it; the extent to which languages enable our uniquely human faculties for numerical and social thought is still debated, but what is not debatable is how much language has transformed human life. Without it we would not have culture, religion, science, government, or much else.” (6, p. 169)
From “The World in Your Head”: “It’s been quite a journey, from sensation to perception to memory. We’ve learned a lot. We don’t just absorb sensory data or store what we perceive. Rather, our perception and memory are shaped and informed by intelligent guesses based on how things ought to be (…) Because our interpretations are based on probability, we sometimes make mistakes, and our errors are exposed when we encounter a visual illusion or a false story about our past. (…) Almost all of these processes are hidden from conscious awareness. As psychologists, we can study how shadows influence the way we perceive light (…) but in our daily lives we see what we see and remember what we remember. We carry the world around in our heads, efficiently and unconsciously.” (7, p. 201)
From “The Rational Animal”: “But humans are social animals. Although one of the goals our brains have evolved toward has been to seek the truth—to see things as they are, to remember them as they happened, to make reasonable inferences from the limited information we have—it is not the only one. We also want to be liked and accepted, and one way to do that is to share the prejudices and animosities of others.” (8, p. 223)
From “Are We All a Little Racist?”: “But our essentialist thinking can take us too far. We are too quick to assume that the racial categories in our societies reflect deep differences, reflecting a transcendental reality. We are too quick to think of categories called ‘races’ as corresponding to distinct genetic groups. We fail to appreciate the role that social forces play in creating those categories.” (…) “This makes us too nativist; these differences are often better understood through history and sociology than through neuroscience or evolutionary biology. It would be absurd to explain the great inequality between white and black people in the United States, for example, without reference to the legacy of slavery and the subsequent segregation and racial discrimination. To make matters worse, in the world, as in the laboratory, distinctions that start out arbitrary can become real if enough people believe them to be so. That is why social differences are so hard to eradicate: they are self-perpetuating. If the world were to start discriminating against those born under the sign of Capricorn, they would soon differentiate themselves from everyone else.” (12, p. 307-308)
He ends with “The Good Life,” pointing out that, when we have finished reading the book, with answers and doubts, understanding that there is always a process of advancing knowledge, but not of absolute certainties, he can affirm that “the more one observes the mind and its functioning from a rigorous scientific point of view, the better one appreciates its complexity, its uniqueness and its beauty.” (15, p. 411)
It is certainly a book that will broaden our horizons and ways of understanding the environment in which we live alongside others. It is very well written (and translated), it explains complex phenomena in an understandable language that is always close to everyday life, to contexts, to the similar and diverse human experience as part of our long evolutionary, social, and cultural history. I think that reading it opens many doors and always stimulating challenges; also, discovering more about why we are the way we are (or believe we are).
Datasheet:
PSYCHO. The Story of the Human Mind, by Paul Bloom
PAPF Book Center, SLU, 2024
Planeta Chilena SA Publishing House, 2024
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