I reviewed Bruce Hood’s SuperSense in New Scientist this week . It’s a great book, really fascinating. The central theme, really, is why we’re all naturally superstitious – and that includes people who think they’re entirely rational.
One upshot of this is that we think of minds and bodies as separate entities, which is where we get our notion of the soul, and our difficulties with death.
Children just assume that death is not the end. Adults, certainly those raised in a rational, secular environment, have to conclude that it is. But this doesn’t always sit well with the way our minds work.
I’ve been wrestling with a related issue this week. Friends of friends had a stillborn baby, which was incredibly sad. They took the baby home from the hospital for a few days, which I thought really strange.
But thinking about it and talking about it with family, it does occur to me that we dismiss the notion of such ritual at our peril. Some things are inherent to our psyche and the way our brains work (which is what SuperSense is all about).
While the modern, rationalist view might be that “these things happen”, and that we have to move on, perhaps it is more important to linger with these things for a while. A rational, clinical approach is not always the way to good mental health: thanks to the evolutionary history of our brains, a little bit of irrationality can be a good thing.
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