David Brooks: Social Animal

Three insights:
1. While the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the  work.

2. Emotions are at the center of our thinking. Emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value. Learning and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom. It is the central organizing process of the way we think. It tells us what to imprint. The brain is the record of the feelings of a life.

情感与理智并不是相悖的。情感是理智的基础，因为情感让我们知道什么值得我们去珍视。

3. We're not primarily self-contained individuals. We're social animals, not rational animals. We emerge out of relationships, and we are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. And so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds.


We are now children of the French Enlightenment. We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties. But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume, Adam Smith, actually had a better handle on who we are -- that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong, and our sentiments are often trustworthy. And this work corrects that bias in our culture, that dehumanizing bias. It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life. When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily. What it really takes to do well, to lead a meaningful life, are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for.


The first gift, or talent, is mind-sight -- the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer. This is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another.

A second skill is equal poise, the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. Some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence. They have epistemological modesty. They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity. They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence. They are curious. And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ.

The third trait is metis, what we might call street smarts -- it's a Greek word. It's a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment -- derive a gist. The third is what you might call sympathy, the ability to work within groups. And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals. And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal. And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation. Then you could talk about a trait like blending.

And then the final thing I'll mention is something you might call limerence. And this is not an ability; it's a drive and a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige.The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence, when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task -- when a craftsman feels lost in his craft, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels at one with God's love.That is what the unconscious mind hungers for. And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused.