Inside Someone Else’s Head

I want to talk about what’s going on in there. Other people. Not you. What you think they’re thinking.

Isn’t that just about the main thing we talk about these days? People aren’t behaving the way I do. How come? What are they thinking?

How can people look out at the same world and take in the same information that I do and come up with completely different interpretations and ways of behaving?

The whole idea that other people have something going on in there (mental states), kind of like we do, is something we gradually figure out. We don’t come out intuitively understanding this — it is an ability that develops.

It seems to develop differently in different cultures. Social environments around the world today shape how we look at our own and others’ inner experience. The cultures of earlier humans also must have influenced how we looked at each other in ways that would seem like a science fiction novel to us now.

In fact, there is a fully developed theory by the former Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes that until the end of the Bronze Age, about 3500 years ago, we didn’t even think that presence inside of us was Us. We thought it was God. Or, The Gods.

Jaynes’ famous book, first published in 1976, has the cool title, ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of…