28. Mirror, mirror on the wall

Hi friends,

Welcome to the twenty-eighth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

Thank you to everyone who answered our feedback poll! The results are in and the winning new format for this newsletter is a weekly 3 minute read. 

For the month of July, we’re reading Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by neurologist Dr, Matthew Lieberman, Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Director at UCLA.

One of his key discoveries is how we comprehend and perceive the actions and thoughts of others. 

He writes, “Psychologists have referred to this ability to understand that other people have thoughts that drive their behavior as having a Theory of Mind, and when people apply this ability, it is called mentalizing (that is, we mentalize when we think about the mental states of others).” (Lieberman, pg 108 - Kindle). 

Mentalizing allows us to consider each other, but we’re not very good at it. It takes quite a bit of effort, and as humans, we are notorious for developing shortcuts to avoid effort. These mental shortcuts are called heuristics, and they allow us to make decisions quickly, but not necessarily efficiently. 

Our mentalizing heuristic assumes what we believe, see, or like about the world, others also believe, see, and like. If I love anime, obviously so do you. 

Chair of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Dr. Daniel Lieberman believes many American academics play into a national mentalizing heuristic. Because most research is conducted in America and on Americans, we may assume a distinctly American behavior is indicative of human behavior, when more global analysis would prove otherwise.

Is this the case here? It’s still too early in this field to tell. Last week, I wrote about Dr. Renee Linklater’s work sharing indigenous paradigms of health that focus on restoring balance to the self through a relationship with others and the environment. 

This paradigm aligns itself with community health models that leverage community health workers, which are both known to increase health outcomes (community health models are particularly efficacious after disasters). 

As with most promising things, community health models are dependent on state and philanthropic funders, whose interests and priorities are ever-changing. This makes it difficult to implement programs long-term.

Personally, I believe there is immense collaborative potential between community health practitioners and technology providers like break*through to deliver holistic care to all.

With gratitude,