The head or the space between us?  – An evolutionary perspective on the Ecologies of the Mind

By Emily Jeffries ~

The Layton Dialogue is an annual event in the Durham Anthropology Department where the medical, evolutionary, and social disciplines of anthropology come together in honour of Emeritus Professor Robert Layton, whose life’s work encompassed uniting the anthropological disciplines as one. This year, Professor Tanya Luhrmann and Professor Daniel Nettle talked about Gregory Bateson’s phrase, “Ecologies of the mind”.  

Luhrmann began by speaking about the cognitive capacities of the mind, an ‘awareness of awareness’. She spoke of how we refer in everyday speech to how the mind is expressed. Luhrmann looked to narrative for examples of such cognition, from unforgivable curses in Harry Potter (“You have got to really feel it”) to how poetry ‘comes to you’. She expanded on this within the concept of the mind after death and how people refer to loved ones as still having an active mind. Twins are often characterised as being able to read minds.  Luhrmann’s talk coincidentally followed closely with ideas surrounding the 4Es of cognition, whereby cognition is comprised of 4 facets, embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (See further reading).

Furthering such understandings of the place and space held by the mind, Prof. Nettle questioned whether depression was primarily a disease of the brain. He used Gregory Bateson’s quote of an ‘individual in its environment’. He comments on the idea of depression as ‘a disorder of the brain’ that revolutionised Western understandings without correlating other social factors of depression. He situated this idea as being led partially by capitalistic pharmaceutical intent, in that research on serotonin does not prove the aid of SSRIs or Prozac on depression acutely.  It feels that even in Nettle’s dismissal of depression as a disease of the brain, medical anthropology still seems desperate to place depression into the Cartesian Duality; this refers to Descartes’s theory of the mind as separate and devoid of the body. This has arguably contributed to mental health and physical health being segregated in the West in their understanding and care. In this talk, however, a new conflict exists. First, the physical mind: hormonal pathways of serotonin, and the social mind; which are affected by socioeconomic factors, traumatic incidences, etc are still divided, this time segregated by ‘the skin barrier’. This idea of the division between how we see the mind was almost repeated by one of the discussants,  Professor Robert Barton, who told of Gregory Bateson’s answer when asked where his mind was; his colleague pointed to the head, while Bateson pointed to the space between them.  

Both talks engaged with the complexities that categorising mental health can create. Luhrmann explored the contradictory experiences of people with schizophrenia across different societies. This compared with Nettle’s rebuttal of the medicalisationof depression. Looking past the so-called ‘disorder of the mind’ and instead harkening to Bateson’s definition of disease as polymorphic.

“Schizophrenia is as much a ‘disease’ of the brain as it is a ‘disease’ of the family, if De Steven will concede that humour, religion, art and poetry are ‘diseases’ of the brain, of the family or both.”  – Gregory Bateson

Both utilised the role of art, with Luhrmann drawing from the fictitious for where to place the ‘ecology of the mind’; from children’s books to poetry. Where does a thought come from? And how does it arrive? Nettle’s use of a quote from a letter from Gregory Bateson above almost mirrors this, as Bateson comments on art and poetry as ‘diseases’ of the brain, if they are to be conceptualised in the same vein as mental health conditions. This use of culture to explain cognition seemingly reinforces the idea of cognition being enacted, extended and embodied within the environment that thought dwells in. As James Carney states in his review of 4E, “the 4E’s constitute a form of dynamic coupling, where the brain-body-world interaction links the three parts into an autonomous, self-regulating system”. In this, the ecology of mental illness is extended, embodied and enacted as well.

Both these perspectives hold such similarities to how one perceives mental ecology. Professor Robert Barton commented that maybe it is here where we move away from such ideas of being social anthropologists or to evolutionary anthropologists and instead become simply, anthropologists. The Layton dialogue ends with a call to what should be at the heart of anthropological discourse, to be curious to all. Without binary categories within mental health, such as what determines the voices heard by individuals with schizophrenia, instead noting the cultural ecology exacted behind each person that is hearing something within their mental ecology. Likewise, the reinforcement of biological understandings of mental health also categorises, creating barriers as Nettle exemplified when he comments on the blood-brain barrier and the skin barrier.  This simultaneously prevents from seeing the social surroundings and reinforces this dichotomy of the segregated mental as linked to such Cartesian theory. Thus, it seems that to fully understand the ecology of the mind, anthropologists must call on the ecology outside the mind as inherent in the ecologies of the body, and society – the entity of the brain-body-world.  A call to understand mental ecology is to understand the ecology of Homo itself. This, after all, should be what anthropology is all about.

Emily Jeffries is a 2^nd year PhD student at Durham focusing on the cultural evolution of storytelling and cooperation. With a background in both human evolution and socio-cultural anthropology, she is interested in consilience between evolutionary and social anthropological approaches

Further reading

Bateson, G., 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago press.

Carney, J., 2020. Thinking avant la lettre: A Review of 4E Cognition. Evolutionary studies in imaginative culture, 4(1), pp.77-90.

Luhrmann, T.M., Padmavati, R., Tharoor, H. and Osei, A., 2015. Hearing voices in different cultures: A social kindling hypothesis. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7(4), pp.646-663.

Newen, A., De Bruin, L. and Gallagher, S. eds., 2018. The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford University Press.