This was one of the best podcasts aired in a few months, because Sam managed to find an expert who actually had stuff to say that was a revelation, not just some political opinion.
"Culture as operating system" isn't a particularly ground-breaking insight (and I'm not even sure how accurate the analogy is) but it lays out more clearly a critical fact: we are not freely independent hardware units, able to crunch any problem and always come up with the best possible solution. We are products of our native culture.
The "myth of the triune brain" which Lisa discusses is also interesting: I learned that the model of three separate evolutionary structures of the brain--the reptilian, or amygdala; the limbic, or emotional center; and the cerebral cortex, or hominid brain--has been discarded as inaccurate. These structures may well be identifiably different, but they aren't stages of evolution. All creatures with brains have these three structures. Ours are just differently proportioned.
Lisa says that the most important role of your brain is the regulation of your body's functions. Humans' brains have simply evolved to do more than that. Our brains all their time also analyzing current inputs (visual, smell, sound) to make a predictive model of what is going to happen next. It helped hominids survive in the Great Rift Valley, and it helps their descendants write blogs.
There's an amusing moment when Sam starts to say that something like "disgust may be a universal state of mind," and Lisa tries diplomatically to contradict that. "We have to be careful saying that," she repeats about 20 times. "Nausea is ontological, but maybe disgust isn't." Or words to that effect.
I wish I could test the concept with something like a Venn diagram of the cognitive states of people from every culture when confronted with a video of this scene which I witnessed 35 years ago as a freshman in college: I was sitting on the steps of the main quad, eating lunch with a couple of friends, and watching the daily parade of people. A large black dog stopped right in front of us and took a huge dump. To make matters worse, the poop was covered with a bright green slime. But the absolute topper--the detail which pegged out our disgust-o-meter--was when the dog turned around and proceeded to eat the entire Log 'O Green Feces right there in front of us. I confess that we expressed our revulsion in the most raucous and unequivocal way you can imagine eighteen-year-old American males would.
But maybe Lisa is right, and in Finland they would merely applaud politely. I don't know.
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