Theory of Mina

A couple of weeks ago, I was surfing around on www.aldaily.com, and ran across Salon.com's article on how to win the New Yorker's cartoon captioning contest.

It turned out to be one of those sleeper aHA! moments...

Among other things, one of the points the author made was: the New Yorker editors love humor involving Theory of Mind. Put simply, Theory of Mind (ToM) describes imagining someone's else's point of view, especially when it's different from yours. Walking a mile in their shoes. Being empathetic is closely related, but to be empathetic, you still need to imagine life as the person you want to empathize with.

Feeling impatient with someone? Try getting into their head. Doctors dismissing patients' complaints? ToM is what they're most likely missing.

Most able people find it hard, or at least scary and off-putting, to imagine how it might be live with dementia. Not me. Well to be honest, it's still scary, but fairly easy, for me to imagine my Mom's state: her dementia experience is a long term version of what a bad migraine does to me: I can't think, I can't see clearly, I can't make sense of my thoughts, and I can't read. My motor coordination is off, things sound strange.

Come to think of it, a lot of these same conditions tend to happen to users of psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin - but that's another story...

I had not heard of ToM before the Salon article - but since then, I notice it everywhere, online, in advertising... it can make it much easier to understand and sympathize with people who do not think like ourselves.

Such a potentially powerful tool would seem like catnip - and people do seem happy to wield it when there's a benefit to be had for themselves... but not so much when empathy and sacrifice might be called for.

Mina's last crusade was for what she called "more civility" in society, a call for kinder treatment to each other. ToM seems key to that end. It's ironic, when it seems that people are increasingly socializing in like-minded cliques, thinking in more and more extreme and opposing ways.

Theory of Mind... Theory of Mina.

I can see this is what I have been doing for some time, to stay focused and engaged in my Mom's help. I imagine her early life, I google social culture in her time, imagine living in her skin, imagine what it's like to age as she did, alone for 25 years, almost totally abandoned. That's something that happens a lot to women, in this country and elsewhere.

Something worth practicing - Theory of Mind...