The Indian mind is shaped both by biology and by society. Nothing about human biology makes it specifically Indian but without those capacities there wouldn’t be a mind to be turned Indian in the first place. But the mind doesn’t stick to the brain; it extends out into the world. Our collective being is made possible by two innovations in the evolution of the human brain:
1. Our brains evolved for toolmaking, i.e., from fire to spears and other tools, we need ever bigger brains to handle the complexities of tool use.
2. Our brains evolved to make sense of others, i.e., as primates living in increasingly more complex social relationships, we need bigger brains to keep track of who is talking to whom and what they are conspiring to do behind our backs.
Both toolmaking and social minding can be subsumed around an even bigger idea of the ‘extended mind’, which says that the human mind goes beyond the brain to include our bodies and aspects of the external environment including other people.
If, like me, you wear glasses, you are experiencing the extended mind in action right now. The first time you wear glasses after an eye exam shows you need one, it feels like you’re seeing a misshaped world; your perspective feels mediated, as if watching the world on the other side of a screen. But that doesn’t last long. Soon, it feels like you’re simply seeing the world as it is. It’s the same with writing with a pen, which, to a practised writer, feels like expressing one’s thoughts. The technology disappears and is replaced by an extended mental act.
Influential technologies combine toolmaking with social networking. Of those, one of the most important is sitting in your wallet. Money is both a tool and an enabler of social interactions. It’s a measure of value, telling us how much bananas cost, and it is also a medium of exchange, helping you buy that banana from a fruit seller. Money transforms how we think about the world; it doesn’t make sense to ask how many bananas make a mango, but it’s perfectly natural to say that a mango costs three times as much as a banana. The objects themselves can’t be compared, but their monetary representation can, which explains the spread of money over time. Two thousand years ago, most transactions weren’t monetary—you could buy a diamond, but not ten minutes of my time. Today you can do both. The history of money shares cognitive characteristics with the history of writing. Both money and writing started with concrete representations and became more and more abstract with time. Writing started with pictograms and progressively dropped any iconicity, turning into orthographically represented words that stand for objects and action. The word ‘dog’ doesn’t look or sound like dogs. Similarly, precious metals like gold and silver or baser ones like copper became the first tokens of money, but today, all money is stored as zeros and ones. Abstraction is a powerful tool for extending the mind.
About the Book:
India is both an ancient culture and a young society, with all the benefits and burdens of a long history. Despite belonging to an extremely diverse range of castes, tribes, classes, and religions, Indians are bound by a sense of shared reality, of collective experience. We are all part of a greater whole—an intricate network of thoughts and ideas that has acquired a high level of cohesiveness in a world permeated by information technology. More than ever before, we have the opportunity to have a greater awareness of what it means to be Indian. However, it’s all too easy to believe we know everything that’s to be known about India and Indianness just by virtue of being Indian. This often results in a very simplistic view of our country and our fellow citizens. So how do we go beyond stereotypes, and how do those of us who are part of this extraordinarily diverse culture and society get a better understanding of ourselves, both as individuals and in relation to others? This book attempts to provide a nuanced answer to the question of just who we are by probing the collective Indian mind, which is at the heart of the experience of being Indian.
About the Author:
Rajesh Kasturirangan, a cognitive scientist, uses an original multidisciplinary approach, drawn from the cognitive sciences in particular, to understand the Indian mind and, through this understanding, grasp who we are as a nation in the twenty-first century.
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