Our guest today is Oliver Burkeman. Oliver is a British journalist and author renowned for his insightful exploration of psychology and philosophy. He wrote the popular Guardian column “This Column Will Change Your Life” and is the bestselling author of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” His latest book, “Meditations for Mortals,” offers a practical philosophy of imperfectionism, encouraging readers to embrace life’s limits and focus on what actually matters. An approach very much in accordance with the Middle Way and this is going to be the topic of our discussion today.
Category Archives: Psychology
‘How Minds Change’ by David McRaney
How Minds Change: The New Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion by David McRaney (Oneworld, 2022)
Review by Robert M. Ellis
‘How minds change’ is rather a big topic: effectively the topic of judgement. How do we end up making a judgement about what to believe that is different from what we judged before? This 2022 book by David McRaney (previously the author of two popular critical thinking books) actually focuses mainly on how minds change for the better, rather than how they slip into dogma. That’s because it correctly detects that improving mind changing depends on having more options, the expansion of the mind rather than the maintenance of a narrow set of assumptions. We do not ‘change our minds’ in this sense by just switching from one set of assumptions to another, much as the narrow-minded may prefer to portray things in that way so as to close down the options.
So, the topic of ‘changing your mind’ has a large overlap with that of the Middle Way, particularly with the principle of provisionality as a key aspect of the Middle Way. However, the Middle Way has many interdependent elements, and includes the longer-term development of conditions that will enable us to ‘change our minds’. We can change our minds, in my view, because of access to options that avoid the limitations of absolutization. In absolutization there are only two options: our current absolute beliefs and their unacceptable negation. To ‘change our minds’ avoiding absolutization, wider options can be enabled by a variety of kinds of contextualization: embodied, meaning-based, or belief-based. This book, however, focuses only on the immediate conditions for changes of belief in the context of dialogue – not at all on the effects of any embodied practice, or of the use of the imagination, or even on the role of individual reflection in changing belief. However, within the limitations of that focus, it tackles the changing of minds rather well and very readably, drawing in the process on some engaging examples (flat-earthers, anti-abortionists, anti-gay Baptists, and so on), and on some helpful psychology, neuroscience and sociology. Its subtitle, ‘The new science of belief, opinion and persuasion’ accurately conveys that focus.
The most central point of this book is about the compassionate focus needed in effective persuasion. You can only succeed in persuading someone of anything through argument (that is, by giving them reasons to believe otherwise) if they are capable of contextualizing those reasons within the terms of their own feelings and commitments, what they find most meaningful. Argument may thus work (often only within a particular sphere) with those trained to value the usefulness of argument itself in justifying a position: usually by academic or professional training of some kind. With most people, however, persuasion can only occur by changing the context in which they think of the issue, which one may be able to do by asking friendly questions that widen and personalize the scope of the discussion. McRaney discusses ‘Deep Canvassing’ and ‘Street Epistemology’ as approaches that have successfully done this. For instance, in one memorable interview, an elderly lady was gradually enabled to reconsider her conservative view on abortion by recalling a friend from earlier life who had needed and had one. There a question like ‘Do you know anyone who has been personally affected by this issue?’ can evidently be a game-changer, because it induces people to switch from the absolutized abstraction through which they have been approaching the topic to a more contextualized view. That more contextualized view may be offered by the recollection of past experiences, of sympathy with other individuals, or of wider moral commitments.
To be able to do this, of course, one needs to be able to by-pass any kind of stress response, which can be triggered by any kind of expression of disagreement without a reassuring context. In the interviewing techniques investigated by McRaney, this was done just by a friendly approach, reassuring the interlocutor that the interviewer was not there to make them look silly or to pressurize them, and by asking questions of a kind that people often like to be asked – that is, about the experiences that have led them into their views. What McRaney does not note here are the wider possible ways of avoiding stress responses and triggering wider options that are already widely used in other contexts, such as the use of mindfulness, of imaginative re-creation and/or embodiment, of mediation techniques, of psychotherapeutic techniques, of familiarization with the background and different arguments through education, or of a deliberate programme of reflection for an individual (as in journalling). Many of these could probably not be used in the kinds of specific situations discussed by McRaney (such as interviewing a stranger on the street), but they are central to his wider topic of how minds change.
Another way of avoiding perhaps habitual absolutized responses is the use of incrementality, which is an aspect of many of the approaches to helpful canvassing and interviewing discussed by McRaney. Typically this involves asking an interlocutor to place their opinion on a scale of 1 to 10, or 1 to 100. This can often force people to consider whether their opinion really is as absolute as their initial expression of it may have suggested. For instance, are they 100% anti-abortion, or only 90%? If they say only 90%, it’s then fairly unthreatening to ask what the basis of the 10% of openness to the other approach might be. After a friendly conversation that opens up new options, they may be asked again if their point on the scale has moved at all – and quite often it has. This is not a dramatic conversion threatening the place of the person in the group they may identify with at one end of the debate, but a humanizing and individualizing process that helps people engage with more of the complexity of what they’re thinking and feeling.
Social conversions are in any case probably best avoided, not only because in some circumstances they may threaten our social (and thus possibly our economic or political) position, but because they often mark flips in which one absolute position is merely replaced by its opposite. The techniques discussed by McRaney don’t seek to convert anyone, but rather to help them autonomously consider more options and thus develop a greater understanding of uncertainty. When applied to judgement, this kind of understanding is much more likely to result in decisions that address the complexity of conditions. However, there are obviously some situations where we do have to come down on one side or the other – as when voting, or when deciding on any other kind of political commitment, such as joining a party. Here, McRaney rightly observes that what proves important to people in making those choices wisely is whether or not they have passed a particular tipping point in which the need to address wider feelings or conditions trumps the ‘conformity threshold’ (p.277).
McRaney also recognizes the negative effects of social media or other online interaction on raising the conformity threshold (which I would see as the point where other options become available beyond the absolutes maintained by a group that is influential on an individual). Although the internet can make us more widely aware of new options, it often has the reverse effect, because it reinforces social conformity without the relatively emollient effects of face-to-face contact. The stakes seem higher online, because we often have to explicitly agree with the group’s line to maintain our membership of the group (unless it is an unusually liberal or academic group that prioritizes provisionality in certain respects as part of its culture). When we are face-to-face, we instead have all sorts of other reassuring unconscious links with other members of the group, and become less solely dependent on taking a conforming position on hot-button issues to maintain bonding.
McRaney also helpfully recognizes the relationship between absolutizing a belief and absolutizing its source. If we have justified a given belief (say, that the earth was created in seven days), from a particular source whose authority is then taken to be absolute and unambiguous (say, the Bible), then, of course, questioning the belief means that we then become more open to questioning the source, and also questioning other beliefs that we have justified from that source (p.149). This could, of course, lead us on into further observations about the cultural role of metaphysical belief systems claiming authority and their interdependence with absolute positions taken by individuals – but this is not an area McRaney explores. In the larger perspective, though, I don’t think we can understand how minds change without fully acknowledging the cultural entrenchment of the forces that prevent them from changing.
The same goes, in more positive terms, for our understanding of confidence: how we can maintain the embodied and experiential basis for full-heartedly but provisionally justifying our beliefs. McRaney observes that “subjects who got a chance to affirm they were good people were much more likely to compromise… than people who felt their reputations were at stake” (176). The recognition of uncertainty in our beliefs does not mean we need to be apologetic about them, or to undermine our basic sense of security that we are ‘good people’. McRaney emphasises the social aspects of that – that we don’t help by being confrontational – but I felt he could also say much more about the prior psychological conditions for that sense of security. In individual experience, this may go back to secure attachment in childhood, but it also owes a good deal to our general physical state, level of mental awareness, and ability to draw on a rich base of cultural support that maintains our sense of meaning and offers sources of inspiration.
Overall, then, I felt that McRaney’s book was a very useful presentation of the effects and implications of some recent research on interviewing techniques and their effectiveness, along with some interesting examples of encounters between more and less dogmatic groups (Westboro Baptist Church and LGBTQ campaigners, flat earthers and the rest, 9/11 ‘truthers’ and their detractors). It lives up to its subtitle, but is, however, a rather narrow interpretation of its title. There is a lot about how minds change that is not even mentioned or remotely recognized, because of the intense focus on a certain area of research and application (plus an apparent ignorance of areas like mindfulness and the arts, which can have a big input to this topic).
The narrowness of the focus was also reflected in certain assumptions and striking omissions even within the field of science. There is no mention at all of brain lateralization, despite its well-evidenced relevance to precisely the processes of ‘accommodation’ (reinforcing feedback loops maintaining a fixed belief) and ‘assimilation’ (balancing feedback loops adapting to new information) that he takes from Piaget. These two processes are overwhelmingly the business of the left and right hemispheres respectively – as detailed not only in the work of Iain McGilchrist and all the evidence from medical and neuroscientific research that he draws on, but also from studies of animals going as far back down the evolutionary tree as early fish. Much further light is shed on our difficulties in changing our minds by the over-dominance of left hemisphere processes, imposing abstract, conceptually defined beliefs associated with goals on our more open right hemisphere awareness of the products of the senses and imagination.
There is also a lot of dependence on evolutionary psychology in McRaney’s account of human development (e.g. p.179). This tends to see human learning quite narrowly as motivated only by survival and reproduction, which have then shaped our genetic heritage, whereas the wider picture is that much of our psychological and neural heritage is epigenetic, and that our motives are also shaped by more subtle goals higher up the hierarchy of needs: social connection, self-expression, and even what Maslow calls ‘self-actualization’ have emerged as motivators for human development that may at times contradict the evolutionary dictates of survival and reproduction. McRaney also (presumably following his sources) tends to use quite mechanistic language about human learning, referring to us as ‘learning machines’ (p.179), as though learning was linear rather than a matter of the interdependence of complex systems. These kinds of assumptions are scientistic rather than scientific, and may reflect the narrow philosophical assumptions of academics in certain fields.
This topic also requires the use of a lot of philosophical language that is often used equivocally, so in my opinion it’s thus hard to write about well without a good deal of rigorous consideration. Prime amongst this language is the use of the term ‘truth’, where McRaney continues the common equivocal use, as illustrated by the titles of two of his chapters: ‘post-truth’ and ‘the truth is tribal’. ‘Post-truth’ means that there is no longer an absolute truth, but if truth is tribal, it is merely the set of beliefs that people take to be ‘true’ in their tribe. Constant equivocal switching between these two senses of ‘truth’ (absolute and relative) has already caused mass confusion, and it’s disappointing that McRaney does not query or note it. In my view we need to be extremely rigorous about this if we are to make any impression on the confusion: the truth is not tribal. Beliefs are tribal; basic assumptions are tribal; delusions are tribal. The truth, on the other hand, is something we simply don’t have access to, so we can use the concept as a source of inspiration, but should never claim to have it. Similar points apply to the widespread equivocal use of terms like ‘knowledge’ and ‘meaning’.
To develop a broader vision of how human minds change, then, I would very much recommend reading McRaney’s book, but not taking it as a complete account of the subject, even in outline. Those involved in political campaigning may particularly find his information about canvassing and interviewing techniques helpful, and his overall message of the need for compassion in communication can be an inspiring one. However, this account needs to take its place in a wider view: one that begins with an appreciation of basic uncertainty, is prepared to question all dogmatic assumptions (even those of social and neuro scientists), and offers a full appreciation of the ways minds need to change through individual practice that cultivates awareness and imagination – not merely through socio-political discourse, however important that may be in certain contexts.
Whole Brain Living by Jill Bolte Taylor
Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive our Life, by Jill Bolte Taylor (Hay House, 2021). Review by Robert M. Ellis
‘Whole Brain Living’ is a new practically-oriented book on how to work with the ‘Four Characters’ Jill Bolte Taylor finds inside herself and inside every person. The ‘Four Characters’ put together two kinds of established divisions of the brain: brain lateralization (left v right hemisphere) and frontal versus back (or human versus reptilian). Bolte Taylor initially become well known for her TED talk on ‘My Stroke of Insight’, the stroke that disabled her left hemisphere and left her, a neuroscientist, with direct experience of brain lateralization and its importance. This book, however, is an account of the personal practice of working with her model of four parts of her brain – a model that she has developed since her stroke and long eight-year recovery from it.
The book begins with a general review of her own experience, as discussed in ‘My Stroke of Insight’, and of the way that neuroanatomy relates to our experience of judgement and of inner conflict. Most of the book, however, is given to describing the ‘Four Characters’, the different ways these characters appear in different circumstances, and the ways they can helpfully be brought to work together in a ‘Brain Huddle’. The first character is the left front or ‘rational’ brain: linguistic, orderly and goal-oriented. The second is the left back brain, to which she ascribes a reactive emotional function with a protective value – so it is the ‘Character 2’ who is anxious and defensive. The third character is the right back brain, which she describes as concerned with sensual enjoyment, aesthetics and fun – the positive emotional self. Character 4, finally, is the right front brain, to which she ascribes an undifferentiated openness and love that is also God.
The book is in my view a flawed masterpiece. A masterpiece because it does new things that badly needed to be done and in which she blazes a trail – that is, the creation of a readable, practically-oriented book that combines the alternative models hitherto offered by brain lateralization (as discussed by Iain McGilchrist) and the ‘three systems’ account of the brain applied practically by such writers as Paul Gilbert (the goal-driven system, the protective system and the ‘soothing’ system). Many people may be able to engage with ‘Whole Brain Living’ who have found McGilchrist too daunting. The book is also flawed, however, because there are nevertheless some major assumptions that interfere seriously with its practical purpose and make it less helpful to people than it might be – more on this below.
Unlike the reaction I would expect from many academics (though I have not yet read any other reviews), I am not going to criticize this book for being a practical, popular book rather than an academic book. The four characters are very obviously a simplification of the very complex neuroscience. However, the precise relationship of those four characters to parts of the brain is far less important, in practice, than whether they correspond to universal aspects of everyone’s psychological experience. The neuroscientific evidence is obviously likely to be interpreted in the light of this experience, but the key thing in a book of this kind is not that they should be entirely beyond criticism, but that they should be provisional as well as compatible with a credible interpretation of our observations of the brain. I do have some reservations, which I will elaborate below, on how provisional some aspects of Bolte Taylor’s account really are, because I think there are some unquestioned assumptions in her approach that undermine her provisionality. However, the four characters surely correspond closely enough to most people’s experience for the book at least to be eye-opening and informative to many people, especially those not already familiar with both brain lateralization and the three systems model.
Bolte Taylor’s scheme manages to convey what brain lateralization means in practice – that is, the ways that we can get stuck in either of the two related aspects of the left hemisphere function – both in protective reactions and in ‘rational’ models of a situation that both serve us ill when we over-depend on them alone. She also shows much of the ways that right hemisphere awareness can help to liberate us from these constraints by providing wider awareness beyond narrow left hemisphere assumptions. Her model of the ‘Brain Huddle’, enabled by a process with the initial letters of ‘BRAIN’ – breath, recognize, appreciate, inquire and navigate – also provides a potentially fruitful model for putting the wider awareness of the right hemisphere in touch with the left. This core practical process is supplemented by a number of other practical tips that can surely help many people in the process of integration.
Bolte Taylor also relates four Jungian archetypal functions to each of her characters – the persona (or hero) for the front left character 1, the shadow for back left character 2, the anima/animus for back right character 3, and the God or Self archetype for the front right character 4. This is in some ways in harmony with the similar approach I take myself in my forthcoming book ‘Archetypes in Religion and Beyond’, so I see it as promising, but it is very briefly done and hardly explained at all. There is simply a great deal more to be said about this.
However, I have a whole list of caveats to qualify this very broad approval of the book. I will need to give more attention to these caveats than I have to my initial praise, in order to explain them adequately. They are also worth explaining, because they are perhaps likely to be missed by more uncritical readers, as well as evidently by the author herself, and perhaps even by those who I expect to respond with narrowly-focused disapproval directed solely at the precision of the neuroscience. I criticize here, instead, not for its own sake or to defend academic territory, but because I think the issues criticized have practical implications, and I do so not from the position of a specialized neuroscientist, but from that of a sympathetic generalist and synthetic philosopher.
There are problems here, firstly, with the possible practical effects of the way the characters are divided from each other. There is also a lack of a clear model of the conflict that is being overcome, which seems in turn to be traceable to a different interpretation of the neuroscience of temporal experience from that used by McGilchrist. There are major problems with the ways in which ‘Character 4’ is presented, which fail to avoid (or see any problem with) metaphysical claims: these in turn depend on a lack of awareness of the distinction between belief and meaning, and an apparently naïve relativism about religious traditions. Overall, too, there is a very unsatisfactory approach to the whole project of writing a popular and practical book that is nevertheless based on evidence, not because simplification is wrong, but because issues of authority need to be addressed for practical reasons.
There are obvious cons as well as advantages to the way that Bolte Taylor has divided each of the ‘characters’ within each hemisphere from the other, and especially from the way she categorizes this division as ‘thinking’ versus ‘feeling’. For we cannot think without feeling or feel without thinking: every thought has to be motivated and every emotional response rationalized. In Bolte Taylor’s division of the left hemisphere, for instance, character 1 represents the ‘rational’ responses of the left pre-frontal cortex, whereas character 2 represents our rapid protective responses dependent on association with past or anticipated threats, particularly associated with the left amygdala. However, these responses are not separate. Rather they depend on each other in a closed, reinforcing feedback loop in which our beliefs shape our protective drives and our protective drives shape our beliefs. Seeing them as separate characters may help us to reflect on the ways they each contribute to our overall judgement, but they are conjoined twins. Bolte Taylor seems to miss the ways in which even highly rationalized dogmatic rigidity continues to depend on anxiety and group conformity, whilst even the most ‘emotional’ protective reactions may have elaborate rationalizations attached to them. Similarly in the right hemisphere, Bolte Taylor wants to separate our aesthetic responses and positive emotions from our overall base awareness – but these things are inseparable in a way that hemispheric differences are not. Religious experiences, for instance, are constantly accompanied by aesthetic ones, because both are rooted in our bodily and sensual awareness.
The scheme of four characters does not take into account the ways in which two of the relationships between them are those of conjoined twins. This carries obvious dangers that people will over-estimate the divisions between ‘rational’ and emotional’ – which is something most people do already, so it scarcely needs any encouragement. If the scheme is actually going to help people recognize interdependency between all four characters, it cannot present them as equally independent from each other to begin with.
This leads me to the second problem in Bolte Taylor’s scheme: the lack of a clear model of conflict. If our process of integration is based only on bringing the four characters together, this implicitly assumes that our conflicts are conflicts between the characters – an assumption that Bolte Taylor seems to constantly reinforce. But seeing brain conflicts as conflicts between ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ parts of the same hemisphere is like seeing a football match as a competition between members of the same team, whilst seeing it as a conflict between left and right hemispheres is like seeing it as a conflict between the players and the referee. No, examine any conflict whatsoever and you will find that it consists in rigid absolutized beliefs, motivated by our reactions, yes, and in conflict with each other. The left hemisphere is not in conflict with the right hemisphere, but with the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere offers the mediating context in which such conflict can be resolved.
To understand the nature of the left hemisphere’s conflict with itself, we thus need to introduce the temporal perspective whereby we can see that left hemisphere representations (and their motives) vary over time. Because left hemisphere representations absolutize, however, they maintain no awareness of this variation, and are accompanied by the assumption that each set of beliefs at a given time is a complete and final set of beliefs. It is the awareness over time offered by the right hemisphere, however, that offers the potential for unifying these divided left hemisphere beliefs. Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and his Emissary, makes the neuroscientific basis for this clear and cites the evidence for it: only the right hemisphere is aware of the passing of time, whilst all the left can do is put things in conceptual sequences. Bolte Taylor, however, on the contrary presents the left hemisphere as aware of time (solely because of its awareness of sequence) and the right as timeless. Since, unlike McGilchrist, she gives no references, it is impossible to tell on what basis she does so. The effect, however, is evidently that she does not really understand the relationship between psychological conflict and the hemispheres. Although she wants us to bring our left and right hemispheres into greater mutual awareness, there is no explanation of the way that the contextualization of the right hemisphere over time is responsible for conflicts between left hemisphere motives at different times.
Related to this problem may well be the difficulty of differentiating the right hemisphere’s own activity from appropriations of the right hemisphere perspective by the left. When in some respect there appears to be a right-left conflict, this is only made possible because at one point in time the left hemisphere has represented to itself what it assumes the right hemisphere perspective to be, and turned it into represented beliefs about how things ultimately are. We could see this in an aesthetic quarrel for instance, or in a dispute between a utilitarian perspective and an artistic one – we might assume the artistic perspective to be ‘right hemisphere’, but it is actually a left hemisphere perspective appealing to a right hemisphere experience for its justification. If it was not left hemisphere based we could not argue it. However, this point seems to escape Bolte Taylor as she constantly presents the right hemisphere characters 3 and 4 as having rationalized perspectives.
The biggest difficulty created by this failure to recognize left hemisphere appropriation is evident when Bolte Taylor assumes that metaphysical beliefs are acceptable, treating them as genuine expressions of the left hemisphere character 4. For example, she claims that “Our character 4 is the all-knowing intelligence from which we came, and it is how we incarnate the consciousness of the universe” (p.125). She later urges us to “use whatever language is comfortable for your belief system” (p.131), suggesting that because the right hemisphere is associated with undifferentiated meaning, this must necessarily be turned into beliefs about the whole universe – a completely unfounded though traditional dogma. If Bolte Taylor turned to embodied meaning theory in cognitive linguistics, to the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson for instance, she would see how it is entirely possible to recognize the undifferentiated meaning of infancy in the right hemisphere perspective without quote unnecessarily associating that meaning with speculative metaphysical beliefs. Our undifferentiated experience does not tell us about the whole universe or about beings who rule the whole universe, but rather it is precisely just that – undifferentiated meaning. The importance of getting in touch with our awareness of undifferentiated meaning as a source of contextual awareness and inspiration is very great, as shown in Bolte Taylor’s discussion of character 4, but to turn it into metaphysics betrays the right hemisphere perspective entirely and turns it into the absolutizations of the left, thinking it has the whole picture when processing experiences of the right, but shutting itself off from the perspective of the right in the interpretation it makes (with further support from tradition and group pressure).
To suggest that we should “use whatever language is comfortable for your belief system” entirely misses the point that absolute belief systems are incompatible with a genuine unappropriated character 4 perspeective. It leaves us, in fact, with relativism, in the sense of the incoherent dogma that all beliefs are absolute and thus as good as each other, so you may as well follow some trivial preference when choosing from the smorgasbord of religious traditions. On the contrary, to be able to interact with religious traditions helpfully we need to integrate the left hemisphere’s critical perspective with a full appreciation of the inspirational value of right hemisphere experience, allowing that critical perspective to be brought to bear in all issues of belief as opposed to meaning. Moreover, since the distinction between meaning and belief is merely one of the strength of associative neural links in response to stimuli, there is a plausible neuroscientific basis for the distinction as well as a vital practical one.
Finally, then, there are unavoidable issues with the whole way Bolte Taylor has gone about writing this book. It is a book built on many assertions both about neuroscience, about psychology, and about helpful practice. She undoubtedly has an in-depth understanding of all these things, but her approach to sharing this is just to tell us, without offering any of the equipment that would be needed to follow it up or think about it for ourselves –something that is essential for this type of material if Bolte Taylor doesn’t want to become yet another guru whose word is accepted unconditionally by her followers. There are about 3 references in a book that clearly demands hundreds of them. There is no bibliography, no suggestions for further reading. If she does not want to be interpreted as merely appealing to her own authority, and encouraging cycles of unhealthy dependence on that authority, it is vital for her to give people that equipment and encouragement to their own research and thinking, and help them compare her insights with those of others.
It is easy to become a guru, but much harder to adopt that role responsibly by aiming to make oneself redundant. There is a delicate line to tread between adopting unnecessary and off-putting academic conventions that would not be relevant, and maintaining those that have much practical value in what she is setting out to do. But she clearly has not struck the right balance here. Please share your practical insights with us, Jill, but do so by putting your own work in a wider context in which it can shine all the more brightly. Do not patronise your readers or encourage them to over-depend on you, but be circumspect in way you offer them the advice that could be so helpful to them. It is a weighty responsibility.
New Review of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’
This book provides lots of insights about the causes of political polarization and absolutization in the US in recent years, and recommends some approaches to resolving it highly compatible with the Middle Way. Please see this page for a full review.
Absolutisation in a Nutshell
Understanding absolutisation and why it is a problem is a central issue of Middle Way theory and practice. I’ve tried to distill the key points in this chart (click to enlarge). Feel free to download it, print it, or use it for any other personal (non-commercial) use.