Interesting analysis Via Todd Ian Stark at Brain Cafe: The concept Im trying to fit onto this is that brains evolved to selectively learn things in particular kinds of domains in particular ways because that greatly facilitates prediction of specific kinds. This would be a head start advantage over the hypothetical blank slate by taking advantage of some of our most crucial experience as a species with our environment. The data for this line of thinking comes from work where we look closely at how people categorize things and at how we make inferences, especially very early in life. There are a number of overlapping lines that promote work within this line of thinking, they have names like cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology and some of cognitive evolutionary psychology. Some of the most ingenious of this work, which I will use as a representative example, is from Scott Atran. His early work focused heavily on how we naturally think in a special way about living things, a concept known as folk biology. His later work reflects the broadening of the research line to overlap more with other areas of interest such as folk physics, and folk psychology which deal in how we have minds naturally prepared for thinking about people and thinking about mechanical causation. There is now a lot of neurological study of these different patterns of inference which joins the psychological and linguistic study, so I consider it a very rich and productive research tradition. Scott Atran pioneering work on folk biology: pubs.cogs.indiana.edu/pubspdf/18601/18601_todd.behavandbrain.1998.pdf Scott Atrans book In Gods We Trust is a masterful application of some of these ideas to trying to explain the nature of religion. Here is David Livingstone Smiths review of Atrans book: human-nature/nibbs/03/satran.html So although I havent defended the thesis here, the application of this thinking to biomedical vs empathetic tilts in treatment should hopefully be at least faintly plausible given distinct folk domains of mechanical thinking and social thinking. The biomedical model strongly builds on mechanical kinds of analysis of physiology and pathology, whereas the humanistic model builds more on the way our brain deals with people and intentions and motivation and emotion, things that mostly are in play in the social domain. This provides at least a starting point for trying to think about how these folk domains might interfere or compete under some conditions as well.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 07:32:52 +0000
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