Coda
179 Coda • Theory of mind evolved to track mental states involved in real-life social interactions. • On some level, however, our theory-of-mind adaptations do not distinguish between the mental states of real people and of fictional characters. • Cultural representations, such as novels, drama, movies, paintings , and reality shows, indulge our greedy theory of mind, giving us carefully crafted, emotionally and aesthetically compelling social contexts shot through with mind-reading opportunities. • Hence the pleasure afforded by following minds on page, screen, stage, and canvas is to a significant degree a social pleasure. It’s an illusory but satisfying confirmation that we remain competent players in the social game that is our life. • One of numerous strategies used by cultural representations to intensify this pleasure is to present our mind-reading adaptations with fantasies of embodied transparency, that is, with complex social contexts in which people’s bodies seem to provide direct access to their minds. 180 GETTING INSIDE YOUR HEAD • Embodied transparency of this kind is rare in real life, in which our perception of direct access to a person’s mind is usually inversely related to the complexity of the social situation at hand. • Although there is no predicting what forms the fantasy of embodied transparency may take at a specific cultural moment, certain patterns—such as transience, contrasts, and restraint—seem to recur in its representation. These patterns hold more sway in some genres than in others; for instance, transience is more important for novels and paintings, restraint for movies. • As soon as a culture becomes aware of an established niche for representing embodied transparency, this niche is vulnerable to subversion and parody. Hence writers, artists, and, more recently, film directors and television producers are always on the lookout for new convincing ways to portray bodies as providing direct access to minds. ...
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