How The Mind Works

Throughout Pinker’s discussion of how the mind works, we see that the human mind works on a rule system but is also flexible. The rules about how the smallest homunculi work appear rigid and simple, and yet the human mind can adapt to the current environment, generate new connections, learn new things, and change how the smallest homunculi respond to stimuli. The mind isn’t too flexible or we would entertain too many options with each decision or not have enough consistency to develop foundations from which to learn new things and respond to new environments. Instead, the mind has appropriate flexibility—the right balance of the ability to change and consistency in its operations.

In Chapter 2, we see this idea of appropriate flexibility in the way we can learn a new word for an object we know, and we quickly apply everything we know about the object to the new word. In Chapter 4, we see that the visual system only allows us to process information up to three dimensions, but the mind allows us to categorize an object on an almost infinite number of dimensions. The same mind, developed with the same tools, places an appropriate constraint on vision but not on conceptual information. We would not want visual information to be processed along thousands of dimensions that don’t exist or that aren’t relevant for our day-to-day existence. We also would not want conceptual information to be limited to three categories. Pinker does not directly address how we arrive at his appropriate flexibility, but as the mind developed, constraints were selected where appropriate and not selected when not appropriate.

This appropriate flexibility comes through even in larger concepts like emotion and relationships. Emotions serve multiple functions, and they can be signals of many possible situations based on the other contextual information. Each emotion, such as disgust and fear, is flexible in different ways. Disgust is ingrained in us early and difficult to change even when we learn there is nothing disgusting about an item. We learn to avoid “disgusting” foods that others will readily eat because in our history, that item may have been potentially deadly. Once learned, such feelings are difficult to change. We may work up the courage to try something considered disgusting, but it’s usually a one-time attempt or occurs out of necessity. These items were linked to poor survival in our past, and that link should be difficult to remove.

Fear, on the other hand, is more flexible. Some fears seen across cultures, like spiders and snakes, are linked to our ancestors’ survival and still seen today even though they are less relevant in our environment. However, fear can also be trained. The ability to adapt fear makes sense as we need to learn to fear things that are dangerous in a new environment. If we maintained all our fears from living in the jungle to living on the savannah and never learned what was dangerous in the new environment, we would not have lasted long. Again, the mind has evolved appropriate flexibility for processing information to maximize survival and adaptability.