The Brain as an Analogy Machine: How Neuroscience Could Change the Humanities

Is as we develop more understanding of how the brain works, we're gonna radically change our view of how people work, and that's gonna change the humanities.

We saw that once about 100 years ago with the development of psychoanalysis, even though there was a lot of nonsense combined with some real insights, um, that changed the way people thought about people.

We accepted that we have all sorts of unconscious motivations.

We accepted that we use all sorts of analogies to do things rather than just reasoning.

We basically accepted we were much less rational than we thought.

Um, this is an even bigger change that's gonna happen because up until now, most people, in, including in the humanities, have thought that we sort of reason using something like logic.

We're rational beings. Um, we're not. We're great, big analogy machines.

We work by seeing analogies, analogies not just with one thing, but with lots of things.

And so that changes what you think of as the nature of a person, where analogy machines rather than-