Dec 11, 2025 07:48 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...ry/684959/
EXCERPTS: The idea of “experiential relativity,” as Rob Boddice calls it—a recent paper also referred to his approach as “historical neurodiversity”—might seem squishy and postmodern. It’s a kind of thinking that questions whether anything is real—the sort of speculation that might emerge from a dorm room late at night. The reaction is understandable. But Boddice is interested in some very real things: the brain and the body, and the way they interact with culture to produce experience.
His approach reminded me of the philosopher William James, who also didn’t believe that human emotions are “sacramental or eternally fixed,” as he wrote in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology. Whereas the prevailing thought was that an internal feeling generates outward response—I’m sad, therefore I cry—James thought the causality was all wrong.
In his schema, what happens first is an external stimulus. This triggers a bodily response, and only then does an internal process of interpretation assign meaning to that response. I might see a sunset and find tears springing to my eyes, and then my mind will interpret this as missing my father, with whom I last witnessed a sunset. Because of this variability of response and interpretation, James wrote, “there is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely.”
[...] Boddice makes his claim with the gusto and certainty of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur: “What we propose is a disruption of what it is and means to be human.” This is the kind of provocative statement to which Boddice is prone, and his work can induce a sense of vertigo. To unmoor people from any sense of common humanity means undermining most of the political philosophies and laws that govern our world. If we abandon our sense of shared humanness with people who lived in the past, what does that mean for other people who live in different cultural contexts today—in a village in China, or just on the other side of the same city?
And yet the notion that the same inputs may create divergent experiences has some gut-level validity to it—think of how the feeling of being an American changes today whether you are wearing blue or red lenses. And then there are the dizzying advances in AI, which make Boddice’s question—what does it even mean to be human?—one that we all face as never before.
[...] The brain, Barrett told me, is trapped in the skull, “a dark, silent box,” so it has to make predictions by drawing on those concepts and categories, which are “very, very different by culture—even the concept of what an emotion is varies by culture.” This helps the brain predict and hone its perceptions, and these are very much related to concepts tied to a time and place.
The process all leads to what the behavioral neurologist Marsel Mesulam has called our “highly edited subjective version of the world.” In other words, there is no spot in our heads where a Platonic (or emoji) version of sadness or happiness resides. Feelings are not determined; they are created. And this is true for even something as seemingly universal as pain... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: The idea of “experiential relativity,” as Rob Boddice calls it—a recent paper also referred to his approach as “historical neurodiversity”—might seem squishy and postmodern. It’s a kind of thinking that questions whether anything is real—the sort of speculation that might emerge from a dorm room late at night. The reaction is understandable. But Boddice is interested in some very real things: the brain and the body, and the way they interact with culture to produce experience.
His approach reminded me of the philosopher William James, who also didn’t believe that human emotions are “sacramental or eternally fixed,” as he wrote in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology. Whereas the prevailing thought was that an internal feeling generates outward response—I’m sad, therefore I cry—James thought the causality was all wrong.
In his schema, what happens first is an external stimulus. This triggers a bodily response, and only then does an internal process of interpretation assign meaning to that response. I might see a sunset and find tears springing to my eyes, and then my mind will interpret this as missing my father, with whom I last witnessed a sunset. Because of this variability of response and interpretation, James wrote, “there is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely.”
[...] Boddice makes his claim with the gusto and certainty of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur: “What we propose is a disruption of what it is and means to be human.” This is the kind of provocative statement to which Boddice is prone, and his work can induce a sense of vertigo. To unmoor people from any sense of common humanity means undermining most of the political philosophies and laws that govern our world. If we abandon our sense of shared humanness with people who lived in the past, what does that mean for other people who live in different cultural contexts today—in a village in China, or just on the other side of the same city?
And yet the notion that the same inputs may create divergent experiences has some gut-level validity to it—think of how the feeling of being an American changes today whether you are wearing blue or red lenses. And then there are the dizzying advances in AI, which make Boddice’s question—what does it even mean to be human?—one that we all face as never before.
[...] The brain, Barrett told me, is trapped in the skull, “a dark, silent box,” so it has to make predictions by drawing on those concepts and categories, which are “very, very different by culture—even the concept of what an emotion is varies by culture.” This helps the brain predict and hone its perceptions, and these are very much related to concepts tied to a time and place.
The process all leads to what the behavioral neurologist Marsel Mesulam has called our “highly edited subjective version of the world.” In other words, there is no spot in our heads where a Platonic (or emoji) version of sadness or happiness resides. Feelings are not determined; they are created. And this is true for even something as seemingly universal as pain... (MORE - details)
