WHAT NEXT?
So far, the proposal on the table is that the origins of supernatural beliefs can be traced to children’s misconceptions about nature. However, this picture is missing a very important piece of the puzzle. No man is an island. We are social animals adrift in an ocean of people. Modern humans have the scientific name Homo sapiens, or ‘thinking hominid’, but as Nick Humphrey has pointed out, the label for modern humans is more appropriately Homo psychologicus.58 Most of our brainpower and the skills that separate us from other animals derive from our capacity to be psychological – to assume that others have minds and reason. This is why we are social animals. We have evolved to coexist in groups, to predict others, to communicate, and to share ideas. All of these skills require a mind sophisticated enough to recognize that others have minds too.
Children’s misconceptions may be intuitive and not taught, but they feed into a cultural context to become folklore, the paranormal, and religion. We know that social environments are important in providing these frameworks of belief, but they only exist in the first place because of the supersense. As children discover more about the true nature of the world, they increasingly understand that many of their intuitions are wrong and would only be possible if the supernatural were real. But when others share the same sorts of misconceptions, such beliefs become socially acceptable, despite the lack of evidence or what rational science might say.
In the next chapter, I examine how the supernatural becomes increasingly plausible when we enter the social domain. As Homo psychologicus, our social nature depends on our ability to be mind-readers. Each of us is capable of understanding and predicting what others will think and do because we have an intuitive theory of mind. We understand that other people have minds that motivate what they do and what they believe. In the same way that we have intuitive theories of the physical world, humans also have an intuitive theory of the mental one. However, unlike the physical world, where science can objectively verify our beliefs, the mental world is still one of the greatest mysteries that we all take for granted on a daily basis. What is the human mind? How does it work? How does something that is not physical control a physical body? We rarely stop to ask these questions because the mind is so common. Our minds are who we are. It’s only when we lose them or they become disturbed that we become acutely aware of how mysterious the mind really is. That mystery is fertile ground for a supersense.
CHAPTER FIVE
MIND READING FOR BEGINNERS
ONE OF THE supernatural powers that I have often thought would be handy is the ability to read other people’s minds. Imagine what fun you could have knowing what people really thought about each other. You would know who fancied you (if anyone) or which two people were having an illicit affair in the office. It could make you the most insightful judge or considerate seducer. All the secrets that we try to hide from each other would be out in the open. There again, maybe ignorance is bliss and it is better not to know what others think, especially if those thoughts of others are less flattering about ourselves than we would wish.
We can all mind-read to some extent. Not telepathy or Vulcan mind-melding. That’s the stuff of fiction. Rather, we instinctively try to figure out what’s on each other’s minds. Whether it’s winning an argument, negotiating a deal, or serving a customer, all of us recruit our mind-reading skills on a daily basis to infer what others are thinking. We consider what their beliefs might be and guess at which emotions they are experiencing. We want to know ‘where they’re coming from’. In this way, we anticipate and manipulate others through mind-reading even though we never have direct access to their private thoughts or feelings.
Strangers can read each other’s minds when no word has been spoken. As we watch people go about their business in public places, we automatically attribute hidden purpose to their movements. They seem to have intentions and goals. We imbue them with rich mental lives. That’s because we think they are like us. They too must experience the same anxieties, disappointments, frustrations, elations, and the whole varied tapestry of human concerns that we do. However, our mind-reading is not foolproof. We often misjudge. Nevertheless, it is easier to understand others as beings motivated by minds rather than the unsavoury alternative: mindless beings, sophisticated robots, or well-dressed zombies.
Some of us are better at mind-reading than others. The Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has proposed that women are more accomplished at it than men.1 Mind-reading – or social empathizing, to be more accurate – is a female skill resulting from a brain designed to be social. Men, on the other hand, are poor empathizers, but really good at cataloguing CD collections. According to the theory, women are good at empathizing, whereas men are better at systemizing. It’s a controversial idea and deeply ‘un-PC’, but it does seem to fit with much common sense.
Our mind-reading is intuitive. No one teaches us, and we start using it before we can even speak. Like language, it’s one of the things that make us human. This is because understanding other minds is so critical to the way we get on with each other. Homo sapiens may have evolved to think, but most of those thoughts are about other people. In this chapter, we examine the emergence of mind-reading in our first important relationship with our parents, and in particular our mothers. During these formative years, babies and adults engage in increasingly complex social exchanges. Are you hungry? Do you need your nappy changed? What’s she doing? What does he mean? Second-guessing each other is the art of mind-reading, and babies become expert over the early years, better than any other animal.2 They do this by understanding that bodies are motivated by minds. This understanding equips them for the more challenging role of understanding the social world of others outside the family circle. However, in becoming sociable mind-readers, children start to think about how minds are separate from bodies. That thinking prepares the ground for some very strong supernatural beliefs about the body, the mind, and the soul.
LET’S FACE IT
Our mind-reading starts with the face, and reading the eyes in particular. What do supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, Japanese Manga cartoon characters, and babies all have in common? My, what big eyes they have. One of the reasons we find supermodels and Manga characters so cute is that they remind us of babies. This quality is called ‘babyness’. It’s simply the large size of eyes relative to big heads on small bodies.3 Biologists noticed that the young offspring of many mammals share this babyness feature. Puppies, bunny rabbits, and Chihuahuas are all good examples of animals that excel at babyness. It is particularly noticeable in apes because of their large heads, which are needed to accommodate their big brains. However, babyness is more than just a quirk of physical dimensions. For example, if you ask children who have not yet reached puberty to rate faces for attractiveness, they prefer adult faces to baby faces.4 However, when they hit puberty, girls, in contrast to boys, show a marked reversal by preferring babies to adults. In this way, nature is beginning to pull the strings that shape our reproductive behaviour.