The Reflective Eclectic
Helping Brains Talk to One Another
Here’s something that’ll surprise you. Other people know you better than you know yourself.
It surprised you, didn’t it? That just goes to show that people can predict how you’ll feel.
Upon that counterintuitive claim rests David Schnarch’s book, Brain Talk: How Mind Mapping Brain Science Can Change Your Life & Everyone in It. Shaky ground, if you ask me. We all have our blind spots; but, there’s no way anyone, even your best bud, knows you like you do.
Schnarch went through considerable pains to say that introspection, observing your own thoughts and behaviors, is rife with errors. True enough; but knowing the mind of others would be rife with those same errors.
The ability to know other people’s minds is normally called having a theory of mind. It’s called having a theory for a reason; but Schnarch likes to call it Mind Mapping. There’s a big difference between calling something a map and calling it a theory. Having a map is much more authoritative than having a theory; it shows Schnarch’s confidence in the accuracy of extrospection.
Schnarch, who died recently, was a moderately well-known psychologist and author of Passionate Marriage and Intimacy & Desire, as well as his long-standing war against attachment theory…
