NONFICTION - Jan. 31, 1993

HUMAN MINDS: An Exploration by Margaret Donaldson (Viking: $25; 308 pp.). A HISTORY OF THE MIND by Nicholas Humphrey (Simon & Schuster: $22; 232 pp.). “Can we refuse to know what we do not want to know?” asks developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson. “What is it like to be a bat?” wonders research psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. To aficionados of psychology, the grandly ambitious and abstract nature of these questions will be enough to identify the inquirers as British. While American psychology continues to direct its best light on tangible questions such as “How do we perceive color?” British psychologists, led by Celtic behaviorists such as John Bowlby and Paul Gilbert, are now riding a billowing wave of grand theorizing. When Americans shucked such theorizing aside in the ‘70s, they did so for good reason. The ‘60s had produced a bevy of dubiously scientific theories that read like Great Chains of Being: They tended to place a Homer Simpson-like ne’er-do-well at the bottom of their tables; at the top stood an “enlightened” (or “integrated” or “self-realized”) personality who bore an uncanny resemblance to the author’s self-description.

These two lucid and lively books caution, however, that we cannot fully understand even basic phenomena like sensation without reference to complex phenomena like consciousness. Arguing sentio ergo sum --”I feel, therefore I am”--Humphrey subscribes to his friend Daniel Dennett’s notion that consciousness is a fluid process, a Joycean stream wherein one set of neurons, recognizing a particular pattern, responds by activating another group of neurons, thus creating the silent narratives we call feelings and ideas. In contrast, Donaldson posits four separate modes of thinking, with sensation at the bottom and abstraction at the top. Unlike the ‘60s thinkers, though, she acknowledges that sensation can often be “holier” than thought. She also reminds us that her theoretical tools should not be mistaken for truths, quoting Wordsworth’s observation that science is only a “false secondary power / by which we multiply distinctions, then / Deem that our puny boundaries are things / That we perceive, and not that we have made.”