These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?
Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn’t have to be. When people’s choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one’s own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions. [...]
It’s unlikely that these results arise from underlying genetic differences shared by parents and children—that is, that parents talk more about mental states because they themselves have better mentalizing abilities, which their children in turn are likely to inherit. Evidence for a direct role of language comes from psychologists Jennie Pyers and Ann Senghas, who studied deaf adults exposed to Nicaraguan Sign Language, a language that recently emerged when the Nicaraguan government began educating deaf children together in one national school.2 What began as a simple gesturing system has flowered into an elaborate and complex language, allowing researchers to study the birth and development of an entirely new language and its community.
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