Incognito

I'm about a third of the way through a fascinating book that has a lot to teach us about why mindset mismatch between cultures is such a pervasive — and pernicious — fact of life. It's called Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, and it's by David M. Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine. The book is a tour through the mountains of psychological evidence of how utterly detached our subjective realities are from anything approaching an "objective" reality. It could strike one as nihilistic, and it is at times quite jarring, but to me the message is extremely empowering, because it gives us a realistic lay of the land in coming to terms with the magnitude of the challenge of communicating effectively between and among any human beings, let alone people from different cultural groups.

In an earlier post I reviewed some shocking findings from the rod-and-frame test, showing that Chinese and Americans actually see the world differently. As I make my way through Eagleman's book, those findings seem less and less shocking. Despite our intuitions to the contrary, there is not a fixed, perceivable "reality" that is "out there" for us to perceive. What we perceive as "reality" is completely constructed by our brains from the outset. Eagleman writes that "You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you." (Ch. 2)

Eagleman introduces a distinction first made in 1909 by Baltic German biologist by the (excellent) name of Jakob von Uexküll, between umwelt and umgebung. The umwelt is the part of the environment any given organism can perceive; the sum total of what is perceivable (if there is such a thing) is the umgebung (Ch. 4).

What first crossed my mind upon learning of this distinction was the contrast, also discussed elsewhere in this blog, between low-context and high-context cultures. The subtle cues of high-context cultures, such as Chinese culture, are lost on untrained low-contexters like Americans, because these cues lie outside of Americans' umwelt. They are not perceptible to us without a great deal of learning over time, and even then are often lost on us — thus the "nervous laugh" indicating discomfort gets mistaken for a regular old, mirth-induced laugh; a promise to "look into it" — clearly a "no" to a native — is misinterpreted as an actual promise to do further research; and so on.

Just scratching the surface here. There's sure to be more on this book in later posts. Meanwhile go get it on Amazon or iBooks.