Orientation to Racing Minds from Julie Carlson and Sowon Park

"‘Racing Minds’ considers two issues as they relate to the study of mind/brain: (1) ‘Racing’ as the socio-cultural classification of peoples into distinct groups and the process by which individuals take up, inhabit, perform, and/or resist their race-categorical assignment; and (2) ‘Racing’ as indicating various mental practices and disorders characterized by fast moving and often repetitive thought patterns (e.g., bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and PTSD). ‘Racing’ can also extend to research on and experiences of ‘thinking fast and slow,’ ‘deep-‘ and ‘hyper-attention,’ snap judgments and second guessing.

Both are complex and important topics that require examining in relation to the other. The impetus for this joint investigation arose from interacting with a wide array of students in our classrooms whose background traditions of cognitive value, epistemic principles and evaluative norms were not served by a narrow model of mind that is assumed to be universalist and/or objective. Finding it imperative to respond adequately to the differing traditions represented, the project starts off by recognizing that pedagogic damage occurs when the type of ‘self,’ ‘mind,’ and ‘intelligence’ that the normative models generally conceptualize and value are unquestioned.

I. Race and Mind

We divide the question of how research in neuro-cognition normalizes distortions about race and racialization into two broad inquiries – on research methods and research findings.

The first inquiry, on the issues of race in research protocols and preconditions, is well documented by Joseph Henrich and his team in their 2010 article, ‘The weirdest people in the world?’. The article explains that broad, and often universalist, claims about human cognitive processes and behavior are based on research conducted on a small fraction of the world’s population—those who are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—and that these subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species. In fact, they are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. A corresponding WEIRDness characterizes the field’s gatekeepers. Steven O. Robert’s 2019 analysis of more than 26,000 empirical articles published between 1974 and 2018 in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology found that of the 60 editors-in-chief of these journals, 83% were white, 5% were BIPOC, and 12% were unidentifiable, and no editors of the journals studied that were devoted to cognitive psychology were BIPOC. Of the publications with research that highlighted race, 87% were edited by whites; when editors were BIPOC, the journals were three times more likely to publish articles related to race. Those ‘handful of studies’ showed that cognitive processes, ‘such as auditory processing, categorization and memorization, do indeed vary as a function of racialized experiences.’ Roberts concludes: ‘To not acknowledge this, or to only study human thinking with white participants, is a disservice to science.’

The second larger body of research concerns findings relevant to understanding racial differences, racism, and the effects of racialization. These involve discussions of the neurological mechanisms that contribute to the perception and evaluation of racial difference-- what Jennifer Kubota and colleagues term ‘the neuroscience of race.’ Such studies focus on the role of the amygdala or on perceptual versus differentiating networks in studies of facial recognition; networks that affect stereotyping and discriminatory behavior and those related to implicit biases; and the socio-cognitive and social neurocomputational implications of these findings.

Given the WEIRDness of the mind/brains that have produced these findings as well as the biases that inhere in western conceptions of thought, Literature and Mind is committed to investigating cognitive and affective dimensions of racialization from the avowed perspective that thought is rarely neutral. Thus our aim is to probe some of the grounding assumptions and terms--like ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-regulating’--that themselves bespeak a white-identified and white-serving environment.

Questions include:

What does the ‘self,’ posited routinely as unified, bounded, self-conscious, self-determining, and sexually dimorphic, exclude?

Are non-conscious aspects of the mind/brain opposed to understandings of or belief in a dynamic unconscious?

Is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness blind to ‘double consciousness’ that is a core feature of racialization and trauma?

What implicit biases undergird research on and training in implicit bias?

Are ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ privileged over intuitive, affective and motoric ways of learning and knowing?

What goals do brain-based and/or cognitive ‘truths’ (especially regarding IQ, hereditability, epigenesis) serve or wish to serve?

Without attention to these dynamics, we believe that generalizations on mind/brain operations are not only suspect but also prone to intensify race-based differences in cognition and creativity as well as in psychological and physiological wellbeing. Not to mention their role in perpetuating racial hierarchies and eugenics (Yakushko).

II. Racing Thoughts

The second component on ‘racing minds’ places the emphasis on mental disorders in general and their effects on creativity in particular. We are interested in two broad treatments of the topic that are not overtly racialized: neuro-cognitive accounts of ‘inspiration,’ the aha moment in creativity, and their activation of association cortices and the default mode network; the relation of these accounts to the so-called ‘genius’ and ‘madness’ debate because of the strong correlation between certain disorders (especially the manic phase of bipolar disorder) and highly creative writers, artists, and inventors. Useful in disentangling this nexus is Shelley Carson’s 2014 article, “Leveraging the ‘mad genius’ debate: why we need a neuroscience of creativity and psychopathology” (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience), in which the relevant question is not whether creatives are at greater risk for madness than the general population but whether creativity and the creative process are different in the disordered brain than in the non-disordered brain. Carson posits a ‘shared vulnerability model,’ which recognizes that both creatives and people with certain kinds of psychopathology manifest cognitive disinhibition, enhanced novelty salience, emotional lability, and hyperconnectivity, but that in creatives those traits are combined with ‘protective features’ such as working memory skills and cognitive flexibility which tend to be absent in those with psychopathology (who have deficits in working memory and are prone to perseveration).

In our experience, literature students have an intuitive-historicist sense of the ‘troubled’ minds of many of the writers that we study and of the often-disturbing correlation between depth of anguish and heights of expressivity. We view attention to this connection as an under-appreciated advantage of literary training in that as readers (not necessarily as writers or persons) we encounter the fruits of extraordinary creativity in ways that can help us to name, contain, and begin to allay or transform some of the mental disorders that may assail us. Here we construe ‘disorder’ both loosely (as in messy, overly-schematic, rigid, or scattered thinking) and precisely (as resulting from anxiety, hyperactivity, hypo/mania, trauma). And we view cognitive-affective disorder as at once distinguishable and inseparable from sociological dis/order, as experienced especially in one’s family and immediate institutional settings.

In this context—and affirmed as our context here at the university—the two angles of ‘racing minds’ converge, given that racism structures and deforms institutions and given the disproportionate levels of stress, anxiety, imposter syndrome, and trauma to which BIPOC students are susceptible. Thus we are developing two projects that seek to intervene into this deeply intertwined socio-neurocognitive arena. One is a Working Group on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy that acknowledges the university ‘learning environment’ as often traumatizing because it is structurally racist and that recognizes how many of our students are dealing with sexual, racial, and anthropocenic forms of trauma—not to mention a global pandemic—when they enter the classroom and are supposed to be able to focus their minds. A second is a Research Practicum on Somatic Reading that combines reader response theory with somatic experiencing techniques in order to address traumatic symptoms where they actually occur, in non-conscious dimensions of embodied experience. Our hope is that these projects are focused precisely enough to engage neurocognitive researchers and findings but without endorsing a concept of mind that, when necessarily delimited, is unrecognizable to literary practices and racialized experiences.

III. Plan of Action

We see this topic extending over at least two years and culminating in the publication of an edited volume. The first year places the emphasis on ‘Race, Racialization, and Mind/Brain Processing’ and the second year on ‘Racing Thoughts,’ especially as relates to creativity and certain kinds of psychopathology, but these are not rigid demarcations. For example, our allied Working Group on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy draws on both angles of this research topic. It posits that racialization and trauma are linked because complex trauma snowballs when there is no social recognition of the injustices that cause damage to the individual and when the cause of trauma is internalized and remains unprocessed. Our plan is to develop pedagogical practices that make learning more possible and bearable for an array of students by concretely acknowledging this situation.