Iris Berent author of "The Blind Storyteller" (BS 182)

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This month's episode of Brain Science features Iris Berent, PhD, author of "The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature." We explore how our deeply entrenched biases toward dualism and essentialism impact our attitudes toward neuroscience and toward problems like mental illness.

Dualism reflects our intuition that Mind is something non-physical and gives us a bias against the possibility of innate ideas, while Essentialism reflects the opposite intuition that living things possess a special innate physical essence.

One consequence of these opposing intuitions is that we see innate qualities as being physical or part of the body, while mental qualities are seen as ethereal and non-physical, and therefore NOT innate. Thus we can easily accept the possibility of innate emotions (physical) but not innate ideas.

This makes it difficult for people to accept the evidence from neuroscience, such as the evidence that babies may be born with an innate sense of numbers and basic physics. More importantly, it affects peoples attitudes toward mental illness and problems like dyslexia.

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