Maps with No Territories
Maps without Territories
In his Your Most Enchanted Listener (Johnson, 1956b), Wendell Johnson explores the special kind of talking we do with ourselves. He called this "inner speech" and observed that, "The worlds we manage to get inside our heads are mostly worlds of words."
As we have emphasized throughout this first module, we can evaluate our language behaviors in the way we can judge the effectiveness of a map - do our behaviors properly and appropriately reflect the 'territories' of our lived experiences?
Johnson's observation begs the question, what happens when all we put into our heads are words? When those words/maps have no corresponding experience/territory, what then?
The examples on this page illustrate that we are prone to certain kinds of evaluations and behaviors in the absence of any "out there" stimuli.
1. Higher levels of abstracting
From the PBS Series "The Human Spark" Links to an external site. (Lipworth & Chedd, 2010) narrated by Alan Alda featuring Daniel Povinelli discussing differences between humans and chips to evaluate highly-abstract thoughts and concepts ... like "heavy" and "light."
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2. Inventing the unobservable
From the same documentary, Povinelli discusses one difference between humans and chimps that may not always be productive. Can you think of some examples?
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3. Attention hijacking
Daniel Goleman, in a radio interview with Diane Rehm Links to an external site. on National Public Radio, describes one example of how we can let the words in our heads, in partnership with our brain's older structures, create worlds of their own.
from the online transcript Links to an external site.:
GOLEMAN: Well, here's the problem. The way the brain was designed worked very well in ancient days when we lived in jungles, and we, you know, there was a Saber-tooth tiger and we had to have this radar for threats called the amygdala on watch all the time because you never know when that rustle in the leaves is going to mean you better run if you're going to survive. Today that same brain mechanism is looking for threat constantly, and it reacts to symbolic threats as though they were real biological ones.
REHM: Give me an example.
GOLEMAN: For example, someone doesn't answer your email. You're expecting something right away and you start obsessing about it, and in fact you start to review everything that's happened in the relationship for the last week and what you may have done wrong that made them mad at you. In other words, you make the assumption that there's an emotional emergency and what happens is the amygdala can hijack your attention so that you're thinking about that instead of, you know, the work you're supposed to be doing or the person you're with, whatever it is. But that's the way our brain is wired.
Questions to ponder:
- Is there a difference between Goleman saying "the way the brain was designed," as opposed to him saying, "the way the brain has evolved"?
- What are the limitations of using the metaphor that our brains are "wired"?
- Can you think of examples that illustrate this ability to create highly abstract evaluations can reflect both the best, and the worst, of human thinking?
- Do the above comments of Daniel Goleman support or refute the sentiments in the clips from This Emotional Life Links to an external site. that you saw on the Language(s) as Map(s) page? (re-posted below)
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